After all, getting good at things takes a long time, and only those who are in it for the long haul can expect to reach the pinnacle of their craft.

Given that common association, I found it interesting to hear the opposite perspective from Butch Harmon, Tiger Woods coach during the best years of his golfing career.

Those golfers who insist on being patient and letting the game come to them rarely play up to their potential.

They play well, maybe win a time or two, but they never reach the great heights their talents dictate.

The players who want to learn, get better, and win right now, this second, no waiting, are the ones who exceed in their natural abilities and become the game's great overachievers.

Harmon later goes on to explain why Tiger was one of the least patient people he had ever met.

When Tiger wants to do something with his golf swing, he wants it done now, no phasing it in and no long-term planning.

Once he decides to make a change, he makes it fully and immediately.

Then he works himself ragged until he perfects it, exhibiting little or no patience along the way.

In Harmon's view, patience was often wishful thinking, the hope of future proficiency preventing you from really working today at what you want to improve, the five minutes per day problem and learning hard things.

So Harmon's quote made me think about a phenomenon I've often seen in self-improvement circles.

It is the idea that what matters most is doing a tiny bit of something every day over a very long period of time.

This approach is exemplified by the language learner who plans to become fluent in a language by playing on Duolingo for five minutes a day, the would-be novelist who commits to writing one page a week, or the aspiring photographer who insists on taking one picture a day.

Now, it feels mean to be discouraging of this approach.

After all, most people do nothing toward their aspirations, so doing something, even a little bit, is better than nothing, isn't it?

However, I can't help feel that this approach is akin to the wishful thinking exemplified by Harmon's patient golfers, people who use the slowness of eventual mastery to dodge the demanding work of learning something hard, the logic of minimal habits.

Okay, so at this point it's probably helpful to revisit why this approach is so popular in self-improvement circles.

Atomic Habits, a fantastic bestseller written by my friend James Clear, is one of the most obvious proponents of the start small approach to self-improvement.

The logic of habit building is very compelling.

One, starting is hard.

Two, small habits are easier to commit to.

And three, once you start, it's easier to ramp up and do more.

Thus, the logic goes, the person who insists on doing 10 minutes a day on Duolingo is building momentum for a larger habit of speaking with people.

By lowering the bar for entry, they begin the self-improvement process.

While if they had very high expectations, they may have made it too hard to actually get started.

Now, phrased this way, the logic of minimal habits is undeniable.

I think it's an important behavioral technique for getting started with anything, especially when the thing you're trying to do feels unpleasant.

I have used this approach when trying to get back into exercising that I haven't criticized someone for starting with a smaller enjoyable habit to break into something they find frustrating and unpleasant but just want to get the outcome of.

My concern is with the third point.

So theoretically, it's easy to ramp up and do more once you've started.

But in practice, the minimal habit often becomes the destination, not a warm-up for something bigger.

And I'm skeptical that such patient approaches to practice will reliably result in substantial improvements.

How effective is the patient approach to mastery?

I'm not aware of any research that specifically pits five minutes per day habits against more typical curricula for skills people want to master.

The costs and difficulties of longitudinal studies mean that empirical research is generally somewhat scant over very long time frames.

Now, the spacing effect from psychology would seem to support the slower patient approach.

Memories tend to be more durable when there are longer intervals between reviewing information than when the same review is massed together, such as when cramming for a test.

At the same time, real-world studies of language learning tend to find the opposite, finding that more intensive curricula edge out more stretched out approaches.

So my guess is that which approach is more effective, whether it's five minutes daily or intensive bursts, depends on the exact nature of the skill being learned, the practice activities used, and the knowledge the learner begins with.

So I suspect that more complex skills favor a more intensive approach, whereas broad, knowledge-based subjects often favor a more patient strategy.

However, this analysis is probably beside the point because, in general, the sorts of things people do for learning when they opt for a five-minute daily habit are categorically different from those they would do in a typical classroom setting or as part of a focused learning project.

Here, patient approaches suffer from serious drawbacks.

First, limited time constrains the type of practice you can do.

So, in five minutes per day, you can complete an exercise on Duolingo, but meaningful conversation practice needs more time.

Watching a video of someone doing a painting can be done in five minutes, but actually doing the painting yourself takes more time.

Second, a focus on sustainability means that you're avoiding a lot of necessary effort.

So when you pick activities that are decades, there's a bias against picking anything that's too effortful or hard to do.

This eliminates a lot of the intense, deliberate practice that you need to get good at anything.

Third, long time frames make it harder to tell if you're making progress.

Improvement is evident when you're learning a lot over a few months.

If you're not making progress, you change your approach.

When improvement is something that you expect to occur years in the future, how do you actually know if you're getting better at the underlying skill?

So, for these reasons, I'm somewhat skeptical of many of the proposed plans I've heard from readers to achieve mastery via these minimal long-term habits.

Mastery is slow and impatient.

In his research on deliberate practice, Anders Erikson articulated the view of mastery that most closely corresponds with my own.

He argued that mastery is a slow process, and also an impatient one.

Mastery is slow because it takes a long time.

And no, my book, Ultralearning, is not an exception to this.

I do think it's possible to learn more efficiently, and that effectively designed projects can help people accomplish more than they think is possible.

But genuine mastery, not just relatively quick intermediacy, requires a long time, and nothing I've worked on is an exception to that rule.

Second, mastery is impatient because the work required is deliberate, effortful, and striving.

Deliberate practice was Erikson's to describe the kind of learning efforts put in by elite performers in chess, music, and athletics.

It certainly describes Tiger Woods, Harmon's most famous student.

I believe this is true even if you don't aspire to world-class greatness.

Even getting good enough requires a level of commitment that's difficult to reach with minimal effort.