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The Knowledge Project · 3 min · Oct 27, 2026

Deliberate play can beat deliberate practice

Steven Kotler contrasts structured repetition with improvisational play, arguing that play works better in most fields outside tightly bounded disciplines. He says play prompts more neurochemicals that support learning.

Steven Kotler

Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective.

Founded the Flow Research Collective and wrote bestsellers including The Rise of Superman and Stealing Fire.

  • Shane Parrish, Host · Founder, Farnam Street

    Former intelligence agency employee; wrote the bestseller Clear Thinking.

About this segment

Steven Kotler contrasts structured repetition with improvisational play, arguing that play works better in most fields outside tightly bounded disciplines. He says play prompts more neurochemicals that support learning.

From “No.1 Flow Expert: How to Enter Deep Lock-In Mode”, Oct 27, 2026. Watch the full episode

“If you're outside of a bounded discipline, which is pretty much almost everything else other than like a musical instrument, a couple other things, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice significantly.”
Steven Kotlerat 25:30 · The Knowledge Project25:30

Takeaways

  1. Deliberate practice can work well in structured fields like math or violin.
  2. In less bounded fields, play can outperform repetition with incremental gains.
  3. Kotler recommends being more playful to improve learning.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 9:31A 4% challenge keeps you learning without snapping3:30

  2. 24:07Deliberate play can beat deliberate practice2:34

  3. 53:24Surfing gave Kotler moments of clarity during Lyme diseasePro pick 6:48Up next
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 24:13

    their performance? So we did this work a while ago. It's written about my book, NAR Country, which was really an experiment in longevity. But one of the things that we discovered is, um so i have uh and i knew anders erickson before he passed he was a really nice guy really liked him but flow work challenges his 10 000 hours like right it does because it says you can flow and this is if you go by darpa's uh research defense department looked at learning and flow and they found that you learn 230 percent faster than normal in flow 230 percent fast So the normal is, obviously, if it's going to take you 10,000 hours, which we all know is a fantasy number, and that was Malcolm and not Anders Ericsson.

  2. 24:55

    It's 10,000 iterations. And even that, it depends on what domain you're trying to learn, right? So what we discovered, among many other things, is not just flow. We compared deliberate practice, which is Anders Ericsson, which is doing repetition with incremental improvement against deliberate play. which is repetition with improvisation, and as learning tools, and you will actually learn better in very tight domains like mathematics and violins, the stuff that Anders was studying, deliberate practice is great because they're very structured and bounded disciplines.

  3. 25:34

    And if you're inside one of those, deliberate practice is effective. If you're outside of a bounded discipline, which is pretty much almost everything else other than like a musical instrument, a couple other things, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice significantly. And the simple reason is how does learning work? Quick shorthand for learning and memory is the more neurochemicals that show up during the experience, the better chance that experience will move from short-term holding to long-term storage. It's what neurochemicals do. They do a lot of different things, but one of the things they do is tag experience, important save for later. This is why flow. It flows this huge dump of neurochemistry, which is why learning goes through the roof.

  4. 26:16

    But quite simply, when we play versus when we repeat the same thing with incremental improvement, we get way more neurochemicals. So deliberate play will outperform deliberate practice. So you ask for one thing that most people can do to increase learning and peak performance, be more playful. What are the sources of motivation?