The most important practice happens when nobody’s watching.
This sounds like a motivational poster. But I mean it literally. The behaviors that separate naturals from non-naturals don’t manifest in performances or lessons or group settings where social dynamics influence behavior. They manifest in the solitary hours — the hotel room sessions, the empty practice spaces, the moments when there’s no audience, no teacher, no peer pressure. Just the practitioner and the work.
That’s where the real divergence happens. And it’s almost impossible to observe unless you’re invited in.
I was lucky enough to see fragments of it. At conventions, in hotel lobbies, in the margins of social gatherings where skilled performers pulled out their cards during downtime. These weren’t performances. They were glimpses of private practice happening semi-publicly. And what I saw confirmed everything “Art of Practice” described about how naturals structure their solitary work.
The Deep End
The book called it “Deep End Practice,” and once you understand the concept, you can’t unsee it.
The standard approach to practice — the one that feels natural, the one that everyone teaches, the one I followed for my first eighteen months — is what you might call the shallow end approach. You start easy. You wade in gradually. You build from the fundamentals upward, adding difficulty in careful increments. By the time you reach the challenging material, you’ve been at it for a while.
Deep End Practice flips this entirely. You start at the deep end. Your first action in a practice session is to engage with whatever is newest, hardest, most challenging. The material that pushes the boundaries of what you can currently do. The technique that fails more often than it succeeds.
This is where naturals spend their best minutes. Not their last minutes. Their best minutes.
I watched a performer at a convention in Germany do exactly this. He sat down, pulled out his deck, and went straight to a sequence that was clearly giving him trouble. No preamble. No warm-up routine. He started cold with the thing he couldn’t do yet.
When I asked him about it later — trying not to sound like I was interrogating him — he just shrugged. “I don’t know. I just want to get to the good stuff.” He didn’t call it “Deep End Practice.” He didn’t have a name for it at all. It was just what he did. Instinct, not strategy.
That’s the hallmark of a natural. The right behavior without the right explanation.
The Energy Model
“Art of Practice” gave me a framework for understanding why Deep End Practice works, and it clicked immediately because it mapped so precisely to what I’d observed.
The book described an energy model that divided every practice session into three phases.
The first third is high-value energy. This is when your focus is sharpest, your willpower is strongest, your cognitive resources are at their peak. Everything you attempt during this phase gets your absolute best.
The middle third is good-value energy. You’re still productive, but declining. The edge has come off your concentration. You can still do quality work, but it requires more effort to maintain the same standard.
The final third is low-value energy. This is the phase I knew intimately, because I’d been spending most of my practice time in it. Passive, unfocused, running on habit rather than intention. Going through the motions because you’re “supposed to” practice for a certain amount of time, not because you’re still engaged.
The non-natural’s approach creates a devastating mismatch: you use your high-value energy on easy material that doesn’t need it, your good-value energy on moderate material, and your low-value energy on the hardest material that needs your absolute best. It’s exactly backwards.
Naturals — whether they know it or not — keep difficulty and energy in sync. Hard material gets high energy. Moderate material gets good energy. Easy material gets whatever’s left. The match is intuitive for them, designed for the rest of us.
When I restructured my practice sessions around this model, the effect was immediate and dramatic. Not because I was practicing more. Because every minute of practice was being spent more effectively.
The Fast Warm-Up
One of the subtlest differences I observed was how naturals handled warm-ups.
I had been spending the first fifteen to twenty minutes of every session on warm-up material. Comfortable moves, familiar sequences, a gradual ramp-up to higher difficulty. It felt disciplined. It felt like I was protecting my hands from injury and my mind from being overwhelmed.
The naturals I watched barely warmed up at all. Some of them went from zero to full difficulty in under three minutes. A quick shuffle, a few basic movements to get the hands loose, and then straight into the deep end. Their warm-up was functional, not ceremonial — just enough to prevent physical strain, not enough to consume any significant portion of their high-value energy.
“Art of Practice” explained this directly: naturals build a fast warm-up road to get to the deep end as quickly as possible. They don’t use warm-up as a buffer between them and the hard stuff. They don’t use it as a psychological comfort zone. They get through it like driving through a town on the way to the highway — you have to pass through, but you don’t stop for sightseeing.
This was a hard habit to change. My extended warm-ups felt responsible and safe. Shortening them felt reckless. But when I forced myself to cut my warm-up to five minutes maximum, I gained ten to fifteen minutes of high-value energy that I could redirect to the material that actually needed it.
Those ten to fifteen minutes, shifted from warm-up to deep end practice, produced more progress than the previous hour of gradual build-up had been generating.
When They Stop
Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing I observed about naturals was when they stopped practicing.
I had been trained — by consulting culture, by work ethic, by sheer stubbornness — to practice until the clock told me I was done. Two hours was a good session. Ninety minutes was acceptable. Forty-five minutes was giving up.
The skilled practitioners I observed operated on a completely different metric. They stopped when their focus faded. Not when the clock said to stop. Not when they’d completed a predetermined number of repetitions. When they felt their concentration drop, they put the cards away.
Sometimes this meant stopping after twenty-five minutes. Sometimes after fifty. The duration varied, but the principle was consistent: once they hit the low-value energy phase, they were done.
I remember watching one performer at a convention hotel. He was working on something with extraordinary concentration, his entire attention locked on the cards. Then, maybe fifteen minutes in, he put the deck down, leaned back, and stared out the window. After five or six minutes of doing nothing, he picked the deck back up and resumed with the same intensity.
He did this three or four times in the space of an hour. The total active practice time was probably forty minutes. But those forty minutes were uniformly high-quality — focused, intentional, demanding. There was no low-value phase because he simply didn’t allow one to happen.
My two-hour sessions, by contrast, probably contained forty minutes of quality work buried inside eighty minutes of going through the motions. The natural was getting the same productive practice in half the time — and avoiding the unproductive practice that might actually be reinforcing bad habits.
The Burst Pattern
This led me to understand what I started calling the burst pattern, though “Art of Practice” didn’t use that specific term.
Naturals practice in bursts. Intense, focused periods of work followed by deliberate breaks. Not breaks because they’re tired or lazy — breaks because their intuition tells them that unfocused practice is worse than no practice.
The rhythm I observed was roughly: fifteen to twenty minutes of intense work, five to ten minutes of complete disengagement, then another burst. Some practitioners did two or three bursts per session. Some did more. But the pattern was consistent: intense work followed by genuine rest, not long continuous grinds punctuated by distraction.
This maps directly to what the cognitive science says about sustained attention. The human brain isn’t designed for two-hour stretches of concentrated effort. Attention degrades after roughly twenty to thirty minutes. Forcing concentration beyond that point doesn’t extend the productive period — it just adds time in the diminished state.
Non-naturals push through the degradation because it feels disciplined. Naturals stop because it feels right. And the naturals happen to be biologically correct.
What They Do After the Deep End
The sequence after the initial deep end practice was revealing too.
After spending their highest-quality energy on the hardest material, naturals didn’t just stop working on challenging things and switch to easy material. They worked backward through difficulty — from hardest to easier, matching decreasing difficulty with decreasing energy.
So a typical natural’s session might look like: newest technique first (high-value energy), then the technique they learned last month that’s at about ninety percent (good-value energy), then a run-through of established material (low-value energy, if they had any left).
The non-natural’s session looks like the mirror image: established material first (high-value energy wasted), last month’s technique (good-value energy on something that doesn’t need it), newest technique last (low-value energy on the thing that needs the most).
Same total practice time. Same total effort. Completely different results. Because the allocation of energy to difficulty was reversed.
In consulting, we had a principle: allocate your best resources to your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. Your biggest problems are usually just opportunities you haven’t recognized yet. But the instinct is always to throw your best resources at what’s comfortable and familiar, and deal with the new and challenging with whatever’s left over.
Practice works identically. Your best cognitive resources should go to your biggest growth opportunity — the newest, hardest material. Not to maintenance. Not to comfort. To growth.
The Private Truth
Here’s the thing that struck me most about observing naturals in their private practice: none of it looked impressive.
When you watch a natural perform, it’s stunning. The skills look effortless. The execution looks magical. You walk away thinking, “I could never do that.”
When you watch a natural practice, it looks like struggling. Failing. Stopping and starting. Repeating the same small movement over and over with micro-adjustments. Putting the cards down and staring at nothing. Picking them up again.
There’s nothing glamorous about it. There’s nothing that screams “this is how you become exceptional.” It looks, honestly, a lot like messing around.
But the structure underneath that appearance — the sequence of what they work on, the intensity of their focus, the timing of their breaks, the direction of their difficulty gradient — is precisely engineered by instinct to maximize every minute of practice.
The invisible architecture of their sessions is where the real advantage lives. And it’s invisible precisely because it doesn’t look like what we expect “serious practice” to look like.
We expect serious practice to look like long, grinding sessions. Naturals do short, intense bursts. We expect serious practice to start with fundamentals. Naturals start with the frontier. We expect serious practice to mean pushing through fatigue. Naturals stop when focus fades.
Everything we expect is wrong. Everything naturals do is right. And the gap between those two approaches is the gap between average and exceptional.
I knew what to do now. The harder question was whether I could keep doing it — day after day, in hotel room after hotel room, alone with a deck of cards and the uncomfortable feeling that everything I was doing was exactly backwards from what felt safe.