Handout—Standing practice log
Failure Log
The assignment that outlasts the course. Four fields, ninety seconds an entry. The pattern across twenty entries is the calibration — no single entry contains it.
The two disciplines that make this work
Write the expectation before you look at the output. Hindsight silently converts whatever happened into what you “expected,” which turns a calibration instrument into a diary. Re-read the whole log monthly. The recurring failure — the same mistake in different clothes — is only visible across entries.
Before you start
Your first project must satisfy all three criteria from Lesson 14 §14.3. If your candidate fails one, change the candidate rather than the criteria.
| Criterion | Without it |
|---|---|
| You do it repeatedly | Feedback stays anecdotal and never accumulates into a pattern |
| You can tell good from bad instantly | No ground truth, so step 3 of the loop silently stops happening — the toy-problem trap |
| Nothing breaks if it is wrong ten times | You check so heavily that you never find the boundary — the mission-critical trap |
The loop, for reference
1. Pick a task you can verify · 2. Do it with the model · 3. Check the output against ground truth you already hold · 4. Write down where it failed.
Step 4 is the one everyone skips and the one that produces the skill.
My project
Project, and how it satisfies all three criteria:
Entries
Date ______________ Task
What I expected — write this BEFORE looking
What actually happened — include successes
What I will do differently
Date ______________ Task
What I expected — write this BEFORE looking
What actually happened — include successes
What I will do differently
Date ______________ Task
What I expected — write this BEFORE looking
What actually happened — include successes
What I will do differently
Date ______________ Task
What I expected — write this BEFORE looking
What actually happened — include successes
What I will do differently
Monthly review
Read every entry since the last review before answering.
1. Which failure keeps recurring in different clothes?
2. Where was the gap between expectation and outcome largest? What does that tell me about my calibration?
3. What can I now predict reliably that I could not last month?
4. What should I stop delegating? What should I start?
Why this form and not a different one
The four fields reproduce the components the expertise literature identifies as active in deliberate practice: immediate feedback, time for evaluation, and repeated performance to refine behaviour.1 The expectation-before-outcome discipline exists because retrieval and prediction produce durable learning where review does not, and because learners systematically misjudge which of the two is working — the illusion of competence.2
Endnotes
- Primary K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, C. Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363
- Primary H. L. Roediger III and J. D. Karpicke, “Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention,” Psychological Science 17, no. 3 (2006): 249–255; and “The Power of Testing Memory,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, no. 3 (2006): 181–210. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x