Increasing your practice surface area

Budapest. Sometime around 1978. It's past 1am and all the lights in a high-rise apartment are out, except for one. A Hungarian girl — not yet 10 years old — sits on the cold bathroom floor balancing a chessboard on her knees.

Her father opens the door and finds her there, crying, "Sofia! Leave the pieces alone!"

The girl looks up at him. "Daddy," she says almost desperately, "they won't leave me alone!"

If you aren't familiar with this story, the girl is Sofia Polgar. In the years following the above scene in the bathroom, she'd go on to achieve one of the highest-performing ratings in chess history, playing for Hungary in four Chess Olympiads and winning two team gold medals, one team silver, three individual golds, and one individual bronze.

A lot has been written about the training regimen that Sofia went through with her two sisters: 5–6 hours of daily chess practice alongside studies in multiple languages and high-level mathematics in an apartment packed with thousands of chess books and detailed filing systems of their opponents' histories.

But not much has been written — how could it be? — about all the hidden reps Sofia got in outside of her official sessions. Like most elite performers, she had dissolved the boundaries of what counts as training and become high in something I call "practice surface area." It means what it sounds like: the total volume of time and space in your life where practice can happen.

The false dilemma of "talent vs training"

Let's say you and a friend decide to learn something new together. Guitar, chess, coding, whatever. You both sign up for the same class, practice for the same scheduled hour each day, watch the same YouTube tutorials.

Six weeks later, they’re proficient and you’re still stuttering through the basics.

We all know the standard explanation: talent. They’ve got it, you don’t. Some people are just wired for certain things. Better to cut your losses and find something that comes naturally to you.

Right?

Maybe! Usually what people mean when they call someone "talented" or a "natural" is that the person is genetically gifted. And genetics is real. But it's also not a very satisfying explanation because it's so nonspecific.

So if I may, I think what's actually taking place in most cases is a difference in practice surface area. You and your friend both officially practiced for the same "3 hours per week," but in reality your friend put in closer to 30. And they weren't even aware they were doing it.

They started hearing music differently. Every song on their commute became a lesson in chord progressions. Their fingers unconsciously worked through scales during meetings. They fell asleep running through the next day's session. They dreamed in tablature.

You began practicing guitar. They began living guitar.

High surface area is the rule, not the exception

I like studying world-class performers, and I can’t think of a single high-level pro who isn’t also high in practice surface area.

Take George Orwell. In his essay Why I Write, he reveals something that should have disqualified him from ever becoming a writer: he had a terrible time actually sitting down to write. The physical act of writing was torture for him. By his own admission, he would avoid it whenever possible.

So how did this writing-avoidant person become one of the most famous prose stylists of the 20th century?

Here’s the secret he buried in that same essay:

For fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous “story” about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind… For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc. etc.

From childhood until age twenty-five, Orwell was practicing descriptive prose every waking moment. He wasn’t "writing," he was just existing lol. But his brain was secretly logging thousands of hours of narrative practice.

This pattern shows up everywhere once you know to look for it.

Richard Feynman didn’t become a legendary teacher by practicing lectures. He became one by explaining physics to imaginary students while walking around campus. He’d work through problems out loud in empty rooms, turning every moment of solitude into a teaching rehearsal.

Bobby Fischer carried a pocket chess set everywhere and would analyze positions using ceiling tiles as boards while lying in bed. Insomnia became chess study. Waiting rooms became tournaments. His opponents thought they were facing someone with supernatural talent. They were actually facing someone who’d turned every idle moment into chess.

In fact I've found so many examples of high practice surface area that I created a companion piece to this essay filled with nothing but examples.

Here it is: The hidden training habits of 21 world-class performers.

How to increase your surface area

It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.

So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"

I've got a few ideas:

1. Find the “minimum viable repetition”

Identify the smallest possible practice unit that requires no equipment, setup, or specific location.

Like Bobby Fischer analyzing chess positions on ceiling tiles while lying in bed, you need a version of practice so minimal it can happen anywhere, requiring zero setup or equipment.

2. Turn idle time into mental rehearsal

Waiting periods and dead time are great opportunities for visualization sessions where you mentally simulate perfect performance.

Michael Phelps would run “mental movies” of perfect races in waiting rooms and before sleep.

3. Embed practice into routine activities

Layer your craft directly onto daily activities.

Maya Angelou composed entire poems while mopping floors. She claims to have used the rhythm of physical work as a metronome for her words.

4. Create background processing systems

Develop automatic mental habits that keep your craft running in the background of consciousness throughout the day.

Eminem can’t turn off the part of his brain that rhymes everything. Every conversation, interview, even argument becomes inadvertent freestyle practice as he generates rhyme patterns for everything he hears.

5. Use environmental constraints as creative parameters

Convert physical limitations and situational constraints into practice parameters that force innovation.

The UFC fighter Anderson Silva would practice his striking combinations disguised as dancing at Brazilian clubs. He'd throw actual combat sequences to the rhythm while everyone thought he was just getting down.