The Testing Psychologist Podcast
Sep 24, 2026 · 28 min · 15 segments
Would you rather read the transcript? Click here. In this 600th episode of The Testing Psychologist Podcast, I reflect on nearly nine years of…
Jeremy SharpHost
All right, everybody, we are back with episode number 600 of the Testing Psychologist podcast.

And turns out that's not a bad definition of how anyone actually gets good at anything.

Not to say that I'm good necessarily at podcasting, but I have certainly stuck with it for a long time and I think I've improved.

So there's a common myth that expertise is mostly talent or mostly just time served.

So there's a 2022 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at deliberate practice in clinical reasoning specifically.

So this is structured, feedback-driven, reflective effort aimed explicitly at getting better.

Not just repetition and not just showing up, What they found is that deliberate practice is a stronger predictor of clinical performance than academic aptitude or years on the job.

So you might think, I mean, this makes intuitive sense, right? But I think it's important to articulate this key component.

It's not initial talent, so to speak, but it's just deliberate practice, which is admittedly tough to find in our field.

There aren't very many people who can sit and look over our shoulders and tell us whether we're doing something right.

I mean, we all know, I think you could practice a mistake for 20 years, right? So the framework behind this was reformulated specifically for medical training by Anders Ericsson in academic medicine back in 2015.

So you might recognize Ericsson, you theory of expertise, but it was built around lifelong self-regulated learning.

And I want to flag one thing while we're here, because it comes up every single time this topic does the famous like 10,000 hours idea that I referenced just a second ago.

All right, everybody, we are back with episode number 600 of the Testing Psychologist podcast.

And turns out that's not a bad definition of how anyone actually gets good at anything.

Not to say that I'm good necessarily at podcasting, but I have certainly stuck with it for a long time and I think I've improved.

So there's a common myth that expertise is mostly talent or mostly just time served.

So there's a 2022 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at deliberate practice in clinical reasoning specifically.

So this is structured, feedback-driven, reflective effort aimed explicitly at getting better.

Not just repetition and not just showing up, What they found is that deliberate practice is a stronger predictor of clinical performance than academic aptitude or years on the job.

So you might think, I mean, this makes intuitive sense, right? But I think it's important to articulate this key component.

It's not initial talent, so to speak, but it's just deliberate practice, which is admittedly tough to find in our field.

There aren't very many people who can sit and look over our shoulders and tell us whether we're doing something right.

I mean, we all know, I think you could practice a mistake for 20 years, right? So the framework behind this was reformulated specifically for medical training by Anders Ericsson in academic medicine back in 2015.

So you might recognize Ericsson, you theory of expertise, but it was built around lifelong self-regulated learning.

And I want to flag one thing while we're here, because it comes up every single time this topic does the famous like 10,000 hours idea that I referenced just a second ago.
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