Direct Practice: The Fastest Path to Mastery

For a person to become better—or even the best—at a particular field, they should practice improving in that field itself. Consider two people attempting to reach the same level of skill: one trains directly in the skill they want to improve, while the other trains in an adjacent or loosely related skill. All else being equal, the person who trains directly should improve faster.

Take climbing as an example. There are many ways to train for climbing. One approach is to go to the gym and train individual muscle groups in isolation. Another is simply to climb while focusing deliberately on the weaknesses that limit performance. While supplementary training may have benefits, direct engagement with the skill provides the most relevant feedback and the most targeted improvement.

This does not mean that blindly repeating a skill leads to improvement. Instead, effective practice involves deliberate attention to the aspects of the skill that are currently weakest or most limiting. The goal is not merely to do the activity, but to refine it.

The same logic applies to other domains. If you want to become a skilled venture capitalist, you should train yourself in venture capital investing. When you identify weaknesses—such as evaluating founders, market sizing, or portfolio construction—you focus practice on those specific areas. Time spent on unrelated skills may help indirectly, but it carries additional baggage that does not directly address the core objective.

Thus, practicing a skill properly means practicing its subcomponents according to two factors:

• Deficiency — how much you currently lack in that area
• Importance — how critical that area is to overall performance

Effective training allocates effort roughly proportional to:

(deficiency in subskill) × (importance of that subskill)

From this perspective, improving a skill means concentrating effort where this product is largest—where weakness and importance overlap most strongly.

A Simple Argument

Consider a proof by contradiction.

Assume that there exists a better method for improving a skill than directly training that skill.

However, by definition, directly training a skill means training exactly those aspects of the skill that an individual is missing. Any alternative method would either:

1. Train the same aspects (making it equivalent), or
2. Train something less relevant (making it worse).

Therefore, no method can outperform direct, targeted training. The assumption leads to a contradiction.

Hence, the best way to improve a skill is to practice that skill itself—deliberately and with attention to the areas that matter most.