When Deliberate Practice Isn't Enough

Raising genius

Head Start

László Polgár is a startling example of the idea that genius is made, not born. From the very beginning, he had a conviction: proper education would be enough to nurture a greatly skilled human being. Before having kids, he wrote a book called "Bring Up Genius!" where he described his plans for raising experts. He started looking for a wife who would help him fulfill his vision. He married Klara, a Ukrainian teacher.

Then came the question: which domain should they use for their kids-to-be-geniuses? He chose chess. The field is objective. Success is straightforward to measure. Progress is visible.

The execution started. From the very beginning, the lives of Susan, Judit, and Sofia revolved around chess. Their development was spectacular. All three daughters became world-renowned chess players. The success couldn't be denied.

We can find many similar stories of early specialization and a narrow focus that brought extraordinary results. Tiger Woods started "playing" golf before he could walk. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was raised in a musical family and connected to music from birth.

These stories show us something compelling: if you start early enough and enter the positive reinforcement loop, the snowball effect can lead to greatness. It's easy to take the stance that proper training, deliberate practice supported by a knowledgeable mentor, leads to a certain destination.

In many domains and crafts, this is true.

It's easy to believe that all domains work this way—that everything can be mastered through early specialization and pattern recognition. But what if that's not as straightforward as we think?

How Early Specialization Works

In domains where rules are clear, feedback is fast and straightforward, and patterns can be found, getting a head start with deliberate practice is a proven path to success.

This is savant territory.

You've probably heard stories about savants: playing instruments like maestros, performing difficult mathematical calculations in their heads, remembering entire city topologies after seeing a map once. Pattern recognition. Chunking complex information into learnable pieces. Deliberate practice with a close feedback loop.

What's fascinating about savants is the specificity of their abilities. Some were masters in their domain—chess, music, calculation—while in other areas of life, they functioned at the level of toddlers.

But here's a question: have you ever heard about a savant who was great at parenting? Or investing? Or any leadership domain?

Honestly, I don't know of any.

Maybe these domains don't have clear rules. Maybe feedback is deferred or hidden. Maybe patterns don't exist—or aren't stable over time.

Maybe these domains are somehow different. Maybe they're... wicked.

The Other End of the Spectrum

Let me show you a domain that couldn't be more different: parenting.

Your Impact Goes Through Another Person

In parenting, you make decisions, but someone else executes them.

You decide bedtime is 8 pm. Your child decides whether to actually fall asleep. You can't directly control the outcome. Your actions work through another person—someone with their own will, moods, and needs.

And here's the harder part: that person is constantly evolving. What worked last month doesn't work this month. The techniques you learned need constant refinement—or sometimes you need to drop them entirely. Even when you figure something out, the rules change as your child grows.

Your child is crying. Why? Maybe she's hungry. Maybe she's tired. Maybe she's in pain. Maybe she's frustrated or scared or overstimulated. The feedback is noisy, ambiguous, and often misleading.

You make your best guess. Sometimes you're right. Sometimes you're not. And sometimes you won't know which it was.

You Won't Know If You Were Right for Years

You try to introduce rules to raise her properly. Structure and boundaries. Freedom and exploration. But whether these rules are good or bad, you'll only see years later, when you look at who she's becoming.

Were you too strict? Maybe you restricted her freedom and stifled her creativity.

Were you too permissive? Maybe she'll struggle with discipline and direction.

By the time you find out, it's too late to adjust. The experiment is over.

And it's not just your child who's evolving—you are too. Your patience shifts. Your understanding deepens. Your circumstances change—career pressures, health, stress. How you relate to your child changes with all of this.

So even if there were stable patterns to learn, they'd be moving targets on both sides.

And your parenting doesn't happen in isolation—teachers, peers, media, and extended family all influence your child in ways you barely control, creating many unknown unknowns you'll never fully understand.

In chess, you can chunk positions. In golf, you can drill your swing. In music, you can practice scales.

But in parenting? There's no specific narrow skill to master. No pattern to drill. No technique that transfers across all situations.

Being a parent isn't a narrow expertise. It's a multi-skill domain. And your effectiveness—your "meta-skill"—emerges from combining many abilities: empathy, patience, communication, consistency, adaptability, intuition.

This isn't just "harder chess." This is a fundamentally different kind of domain. So what makes some domains work like chess, and others like parenting?"

Domains Differ

The following question has always fascinated me: Does experience actually provide learning?

I've seen research showing that physicians who diagnose patients don't improve over time (they were even worse…). In their profession, they typically make a diagnosis and then don't see the patient again. If the patient recovered, they stayed home. If they got worse, they probably went to another specialist.

The feedback loop was broken.

It seemed weird, but it's true in many domains. When we don't have access to reliable and fast feedback, it's really difficult to progress—even if we spend many hours working. We can work hard, but it's not enough to improve.

Healing patients has another issue too. A doctor can prescribe treatment, but it's the patient's responsibility to implement it. The doctor doesn't have a direct impact on whether it actually happens.

That's characteristic of what researchers call a wicked domain—a concept introduced by Robin Hogarth and popularized by David Epstein in his book Range.

Kind vs. Wicked Domains

Kind domains—exemplified by activities like chess or golf—are high-fidelity feedback systems. In these environments, patterns repeat consistently, and the feedback is rapid, accurate, and direct. This reliable structure allows hyperspecialization to flourish. Repeated practice leads to pattern-matching expertise, enabling instantaneous, accurate intuition.

Wicked domains represent the opposite. These are low-fidelity feedback systems that inhibit the growth of specialized expertise. The critical factor is the fundamental breakdown in the reliability of information available to the learner.

In Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, these wicked domains typically fall into the "complex" or "chaotic" categories—environments where cause and effect are only clear in retrospect, where patterns emerge rather than repeat, and where probing and experimentation replace analysis and best practices.

We can visualize this spectrum by looking at two key factors:

• Impact: Do your actions directly cause outcomes (like hitting a golf ball), or do they work indirectly through others and systems (like leading a team)?

• Feedback & Rules: Are the rules stable and feedback immediate (like chess), or are rules ambiguous and feedback delayed (like parenting)?

• Bottom-left (Direct + Clear): Chess, golf, piano, programming—this is where the Polgár approach works brilliantly.

• Bottom-right (Direct + Unclear): Solo investing, software architecture—you control your decisions, but outcomes are noisy and delayed, so you need to construct feedback artificially.

• Top-left (Indirect + Clear): Team sports, orchestras—your impact goes through others, but at least the rules and feedback are relatively clear, requiring both technical skill and coordination.

• Top-right (Indirect + Unclear): Leadership, entrepreneurship, parenting—maximum complexity where traditional deliberate practice breaks down completely.

The Strategic Implication

The question isn't "How hard is this domain?" It's "What type of domain is this?"

Chess and parenting aren't on the same difficulty scale. They're structurally different. They require fundamentally different approaches to learning.

And the approach that works brilliantly in one domain—early specialization, narrow focus, deliberate practice—can fail in another.

The Reinforcement Loop in Wicked Domains

So if wicked domains break the traditional feedback loop—if deliberate practice doesn't work the same way—does that mean the positive reinforcement loop is dead?

I don't think so. The loop still works. But enjoyment, confidence, progress, and practice need to come from different sources.

Enjoyment: From Curiosity, Meaning and Satisfaction

In kind domains, enjoyment naturally comes from mastery. You get measurably better, and that feels good.

In wicked domains, you can't fully rely on that. Outcomes are too delayed and noisy. So enjoyment may come from meaning, curiosity, and satisfaction instead.

Curiosity about exploring ideas, connecting patterns, and asking "why?" Satisfaction from knowing you approached a problem thoughtfully—even when the outcome is unclear. Meaning from doing something that matters.

Warren Buffett reads 500+ pages a day. Not to drill investment skills, but because he's genuinely curious. That curiosity sustains the loop when outcomes are invisible for years.

Practice: Through Analogies and Exploration

In kind domains, practice means repetition. You drill patterns, correct mistakes, and refine technique.

In wicked domains, patterns don't repeat reliably. What worked last time might not work now.

So progress must come from process quality instead. You can't practice "leadership" the way you practice golf swings. But you can study how systems work in biology, economics, engineering—and apply those insights to human organizations.

This is practice through breadth, not depth. Through vicarious learning, not direct repetition. Through reading, exploring, and connecting ideas across fields.

Progress: From Process Quality, Not Outcomes

In kind domains, progress is obvious. You win more. Your times improve. Performance metrics show you're getting better.

In wicked domains, outcomes don't reveal progress. Your startup succeeded—was it your strategy or timing?

So progress must come from the quality of your thinking process instead. Are you asking better questions than six months ago? Are you catching your own biases faster? Are you building better mental models?

You measure how you think, not whether you won.

Confidence: From Environmental Awareness, Not Wins

In kind domains, confidence comes from performance. You win, you execute cleanly, you know you're competent because results prove it.

In wicked domains, you can't rely on wins to build confidence. Good decisions can have bad outcomes. Bad decisions can get lucky.

So confidence must come from environmental awareness instead. Can you read the situation? Do you recognize when rules have changed? Do you know what you don't know? Can you adapt when conditions shift?

Confidence comes from knowing you can navigate uncertainty—not from believing you have all the answers.

Creating Feedback When It's Not There

When natural feedback is broken or absent, you must construct it artificially.

You create feedback through:

• Writing (forces clarity—if you can't explain it, you don't understand it)

• Teaching (reveals gaps in your thinking)

• Peer review (find people who challenge your thinking)

• Metrics (track progress through insightful metrics)

• Long time horizons (extend your evaluation window to let real patterns emerge through noise)

In wicked domains, you can't wait for the environment to teach you. You have to build the learning system yourself.

The Generalist Approach in Software Development

As we mentioned in the previous section, practice in wicked domains needs to change. In kind domains, we do a wide search to find our domain. In wicked domains, we also need breadth—but not to find the domain, but to support growth within it.

When the Domain Shifted

Programming is a relatively kind domain. You can develop through narrow, deliberate practice. Clear syntax rules. The compiler gives immediate feedback. Patterns repeat. You drill techniques and improve.

Early in my career, this worked. I got better at writing clean code, learning frameworks, and solving algorithmic problems.

But software architecture—or software development as a process of delivering value through technology—is more wicked.

You're not just fulfilling functional requirements anymore. You need to balance quality drivers such as testability, reliability, scalability, and flexibility. Different systems need different tradeoffs. There's no single "right" answer.

And whether you chose correctly? You usually find out several months or even years after the decision. The feedback is not timely.

So you need to construct feedback. You instrument systems with metrics to assess whether they're evolving in the right direction. You cooperate with other people. You document design decisions in ADRs. You analyze the business and look for architectural patterns and business archetypes you can implement.

You need a generalist approach to improve.

My Philosophy "Mistake"

When I started studying philosophy alongside my tech degree—three years in—people were astonished.

"What a stupid thing to waste your tech potential on humanistic stories."

"What vocation can a philosopher even do?"

Philosophy didn't give me a head start in engineering. But it gave me tools that made my progress faster and smoother in later stages: building mental models, understanding that precision in language creates precision in thought, critical thinking for ambiguous problems, and seeing patterns across domains.

Writing forced clarity in my thinking. Reading broadly gave me vicarious experience with how systems and people work. None of these gave immediate results, but they provided exactly the breadth that wicked domains like software architecture demand—even though it looked like "wasted time" to people focused on narrow specialization.

Conclusion

Early specialization works brilliantly in kind domains. The Polgár sisters, Tiger Woods, and memorization experts—they're proof that when feedback is clear and direct, narrow focus pays off.

But here's the problem: we've started treating every domain like a kind domain.

We optimize prematurely.

I think that's part of the problem with the modern world. We treat universities and colleges as vocational schools. They should provide us with a profession—well-paid, of course, and sought by the market.

I've even seen profiling classes in primary schools: medical path, art path, from the very first grade.

We love to over-optimize early.

But a large part of life—especially the interesting parts—happens in wicked domains. Domains where feedback is unclear, impact is indirect, and patterns don't repeat.

And there, breadth isn't a distraction. It's the foundation.

Know your domain. If it's kind, specialize early. If it's wicked—build range.