Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Master your craft

9 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Build routines that help master your craft

Summary: Excellence in academic work isn’t about dramatic breakthroughs or unsustainable effort - it’s about consistently practising small skills that compound over time. Just as athletes and musicians improve through deliberate practice, academics can develop their craft by protecting time for focused skill development. The key is breaking down complex work into specific capabilities that can be systematically improved through sustainable daily routines.

Key habits:

  • Schedule daily practice sessions: About 30 minutes for focused skill development, choosing a consistent time that matches your energy levels
  • Create feedback loops: Document your practice attempts and outcomes, and seek regular input from colleagues
  • Build a practice system: Break complex skills into manageable components and develop routines that fit your existing schedule
  • Focus on consistency over intensity: Show up for short sessions every day rather than occasional marathons; progress will feel slow at first so celebrate small improvements

Introduction

Deep work gets you promoted, shallow work prevents you from getting fired. Our days are often consumed by non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, that we can easily perform while distracted. Academics are always busy, but being busy is not the same as creating value. By thinking of your work as a craft, you approach it differently. Instead of just getting through the work, you can approach skills development in the same way that athletes or musicians work to improve their performance. Spending all day in your inbox is not helping develop your craft. Spending all day in meetings is not developing your craft. That’s not to say that these things aren’t important, only that they need to be prioritised in the context of your working paradigm and mission.

Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesised whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.

Daniel Chambliss

Deliberate practice for career development

While athletes and musicians spend hours practising specific skills, systematically analysing performance, and seeking expert feedback, academics rarely apply the same rigorous approach to developing their craft. We don’t dedicate time to improving our writing, refining our thinking processes, or enhancing our research skills through deliberate practice. Instead, we often rely on learning through osmosis or trial and error, hoping that simply doing more work will somehow make us better at it.

Career capital - the rare and valuable skills that make you irreplaceable - is built through deliberate practice, not just accumulated experience. By developing skills that differentiate you from others and create unique value, you gain more control over your academic career and open up opportunities for meaningful work. Yet most academics focus on simply producing more outputs rather than systematically improving the underlying skills that would make those outputs more valuable.

Here’s what building career capital through deliberate practice looks like:

  • Break down complex academic work into specific skills that can be practised independently and systematically improved
  • Create focused practice sessions that target one skill at a time with clear feedback mechanisms
  • Develop daily rituals that prioritise skill development over immediate outputs
  • Seek out regular feedback on your performance from peers and mentors
  • Document your progress and insights to build a personal knowledge base
  • Use evidence from your practice to refine your approach and identify new areas for development

This systematic approach to developing academic craft leads to a compound effect - as your skills improve, you create more valuable work with less effort. Rather than working longer hours or taking on more commitments, you can focus on deliberately improving the skills that matter most. This allows you to build a sustainable and increasingly valuable academic career while maintaining boundaries around your time and energy.

From reacting to deliberate practice

The difference between surviving and thriving in academia often comes down to how we approach our daily work. While many academics find themselves caught in reactive patterns - responding to emails as they arrive, preparing materials the night before class, writing in irregular bursts - we can instead develop sustainable routines for mastering our craft. The following examples contrast typical reactive approaches with deliberate practice routines that help build scholarly excellence through small, consistent actions.

Pause and reflect

We almost always know what we need to do to improve our skills, but the results of deliberate practice can be frustratingly slow to emerge. When progress isn’t immediately visible, it’s tempting to either give up or try to accelerate development through unsustainable bursts of intense activity. However, steady, consistent practice wins over sporadic intensity every time.

Consider the difference between an academic who has occasional bursts of writing productivity during holiday breaks, versus one who writes for 30 minutes each morning. Excellence emerges not from dramatic breakthroughs or heroic effort, but from showing up day after day to do ordinary things well. The key is designing practice routines that you can sustain within your normal working life, remembering that consistency builds stronger foundations than intensity.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Excellence is mundane: Excellence isn’t about extraordinary actions, but rather the consistent execution of small skills and habits performed with care and intention over time. For academics, this means breaking down complex work into manageable daily practices rather than trying to make dramatic changes quickly.

  • Deep work advances careers: Deep, focused work is what advances your career, while shallow administrative tasks merely keep you employed. Being busy with emails and meetings don’t necessarily create value or develop your craft.

  • Practice builds expertise: Progress requires structured, deliberate practice - just like athletes and musicians. Aim to identify specific skills you want to improve and create systematic plans to develop them through regular, focused practice sessions that fit into your existing schedules.

Resources

  • Chambliss, D. (1989). The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 70.
  • Dawson, R. (2012). Value polarisation and transcending job commoditisation: Expertise, relationships, innovation. Ross Dawson blog.
  • Greene, R. (2013). Mastery. Penguin Books.
  • Newport, C. (2012). So good they can’t ignore you: Why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love. Grand Central Publishing.
  • Todd, B. (2015). To find work you love, don’t follow your passion. TEDxYouth@Tallinn.
  • Young, S. & Clear, J. (2019). Ultralearning: Master hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career. Harper Business.

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