Mastery of any skill follows a predictable pattern.
There are three essential elements of progressive mastery of any skill.
The first element is effort. It is easily visible to any youth soccer coach. If your players put in 50% effort to skill development in practice, they will progress toward mastery of the core skills of soccer than those who put forth their full effort. Effort, however, is not enough.
The acquisition of mastery depends equally upon focus. Back on the youth soccer practice field, the focus of players during practice is an excellent predictor of their acquisition of the skill in question. If the players are carrying on side conversations while the coach is explaining a drill, they won’t know how to execute the drill and acquire the desired skill. Yet even full focus and effort aren’t enough to attain mastery.
I can have a youth soccer team that is prepared to give full focus and full effort to practice. Yet if I fail to give them clarity of what the drill is and how to perform it well, I hamper their opportunity to gain mastery. This is the clarity coefficient.
The goal of learning is mastery.
Mastery of a discrete skill is the ability to perform an action without full focus. Think of the 9-year-old right-footed kid learning to shoot with her left foot. It will take weeks of practice with full focus and effort with crystal clarity before she will be able to shoot left-footed without having to think about how to do it.