Increasing your practice surface area

Summary

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 peopl...