Writing as Self-Reinvention: Tyler Cowen on Deliberate Practice for Knowledge Workers

Deliberate practice is essential to improve at any craft.

Deliberate practice refers to a set of activities done intentionally to improve performance. For athletes, this means doing drills until movements and plays become muscle memory, not just playing a scrimmage or a game. For musicians, this means working on a challenging piece, measure by measure for hours, until they can run through it flawlessly, versus playing a piece of music that they’ve already committed to memory.

But if you’re reading this, then chances are, you’re not a professional athlete or musician. You’re like me: you’re a knowledge worker who wants to grow in their job, or a creative person who wants to improve their craft. How do we implement deliberate practice as knowledge workers?

In other words, how do we employ deliberate practice to become more creative and get better at thinking and at creativity?

Today, we’re looking at how Tyler Cowen, one of the internet’s most influential economists, hones his thinking and develops his ideas.

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes about society, culture, arts, and ethnic food. In his weekly podcast Conversations with Tyler, he “engages today’s deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.” Since 2003, his popular blog Marginal Revolution has offered insights and intellectual fodder for the internet’s most curious minds.

How does someone like him — who’s already arguably in the top 1% of his field — continue to get better at his job?

In his post entitled “How I Practice What I Do”, Cowen answers this question. He writes:

Let’s break that down.

I. Clear writing is clear thinking

Cowen publishes primarily on his blog Marginal Revolution (MR). Along with his co-author Alex Tabarrok, he often posts multiple times a day. For example, here’s what he published on a single day in January 2023 ...

• His comments on an article from The New York Times

• Some tips on using ChatGPT

• A collection of links he found interesting

• A call for questions to ask the owner of Comedy Cellar

• An RIP on the passing of a game theorist and fellow economist

Cowen uses writing as a way to document and share what he’s learned — particularly, if he reads a noteworthy article, stumbles on an interesting idea, or discovers a new line of thinking. Marginal Revolution is less of an evergreen resource (think, Stratechery) and more of a way to collect interesting scrap from the internet and to document his intellectual journey (think, Tumblr).

This brings us to the second intellectual practice strategy he employs.

II. Summarize other people’s ideas to hone your thinking

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack Up, he writes:

Similarly, in Cowen’s quest to understand economics better, he seeks to deeply understand other people’s ideas. He writes:

Specifically he does this through “cracking culture codes”. He explains:

One example of attempting to understand what makes a culture tick is Cowen’s blog about ethnic restaurants in the Washington, DC area and his ethnic food guide. Connecting the dots between economics, culture, and food, he says:

Along the lines of cracking cultural codes, Cowen launched his biweekly podcast. In contrast to all the reasons most people start podcasts, Conversations with Tyler is primarily for intellectual sparring practice with people he finds interesting. Preparing to interview these guests forces Cowen to dive into unexplored topics or to reexamine old ones with fresh eyes.

Which brings us to the last strategy he employs.

III. Read books that challenge you

Like a pianist laboring through a piece from Liszt instead of an old favorite like Für Elise or Claire de Lune, part of Cowen’s deliberate practice plan is reading about a topic that he knows very little about. He writes:

But unlike a musician playing tunes that they’ve already mastered, in the case of books, there is value in rereading old favorites. In Cowen’s reading list for the first half of 2023, alongside a list of new books and topics (“[I read] what is recommended to me by credible others”), there’s also a handful of rereads (“the New Testament”) and reviews of familiar authors (“Jonathan Swift’s work”) and topics (“British history”). Rereading a handful of “quake books – books for one reason or another shook up our view of the world (pun intended) – can serve us just as much as reading a selection of new tomes.

Recommendations

To learn more, here’s the 1993 research paper that coined the term “deliberate practice”. To go deeper, check out Peak by Anders Ericsson — the same academic who spearheaded the study. For more examples on using writing to document learning, here’s Bob Woodward on using blog posts as reporting memos.

If you’d like another example of how publishing online leads to intellectual evolution, check out my curation of author Cal Newport’s earlier work on deep work, focus, and productivity. Some of these were published while he was still a graduate student, almost 10 years before his books So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work came out and yet, you can clearly trace his intellectual curiosity veering in that direction.