Reach the Top 1% of Your Field (Deliberate Practice)

Scott H. Young · 30 Sept 2026

Scott H. Young did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
In real life, deciding what to practice dominates most other considerations about how well you are learning.

Their wordsThus, the question of what you ought to be practicing dominates most real-life considerations about how well you're learning it.
Our reading
Those who rise to the top are generally talented, but because skill is hard to assess, success also depends on career assets that signal skill.

Their wordsThose who rise to the top are, generally, talented. But, since skill is difficult to assess, success is a mixture of not just skills but career assets that signal a person has those hard-to-assess skills.
Our reading
The right way to practice in a field is to make real-world performance function more like practice, not to separate the two.

Their wordsThis suggests that the right way to practice in your field isn't to divorce practice from performance, rather it's to try to augment real-world performance so it functions more like practice.

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