Why does an athlete seem to practice more than an office worker?
The first difference I can think of is the purpose of the work.
The target of an office worker is to generate more revenue for the company by adding more value. On the other hand, an athlete's goal is to win by performing excellently. As long as he wins, everyone on the team benefits.
Unlike an athlete, an employee has more ways to add value. He can improve his skills, spend more time training new members, delegate tasks more effectively, and even improve the company's workflows or culture.
But since improving his skills only contributes a fraction to his overall ability to generate value, companies usually have less incentive to create opportunities for an employee to practice and improve.
The second thing that can contribute to the difference in practice time is the environment.
Suppose you are a chef and you want to make some new dishes at home.
You can make many, but there is a limit to the number of dishes you can make at the same time. You can make 5, 7, or 10 dishes, but you can't make 20. More correctly, you can make 20, but you can't eat 20.
One way to deal with it is to cook for more people, like your family. But the dishes you want to make may not be the dishes your family wants to have. Of course, you can instead make things your family loves, but then those are not the dishes you want to try anymore. Plus, because that's your first try, the result may not be great, so the consequences will also be shared with your whole poor family.
Another way is to make 20 small-portion dishes and eat all of them by yourself. Still, the effort required to find the right conditions to practice when you are a chef is a lot higher compared to other professionals, like a writer. It is easier for a writer to access her writing than for a chef to access his cooking.
The same applies to jobs that interact with people. Training your surgical skills at home is hard. You can't ask your family, "Hey, can I try this new scissor trick on you?". You can use VR to do that, but that's unoptimal. Mostly, what you can improve yourself at being a doctor is to learn. Which can be reading, researching, or going to conferences, … The same applies if you are a salesman or a customer supporter. Although you can learn to improve your communication skills in your free time, practicing these in your spare time is hard because you need a person to sell to, just like you need a customer to support.
But what's wrong with improving yourself by learning instead of practicing? There's nothing wrong with it. But it's an important factor in the decision to choose your job, because:
1) Learning is different from practicing
2) Some people prefer learning to practice, and some prefer practicing to learning
3) Some jobs facilitate practice more than learning, while some do the opposite
Usually, to be better at something, we need both theory and practice. Learning can supplement practice, and practice can do what learning cannot. However, the balance between these two usually skews after we walk on a career path for a while. Some jobs require you to learn more, while others require you to practice more. There will not be an elimination of one of these two things, but because they will differ more and more in time, it is good to pick a job where you will like the learning and practice ratio in the long term.
The first difference between learning and practice is that most learning is about discovering the new, and most practice is about enhancing the existing. For example, we learn how to play a new sport. We do not learn how to play a sport that we already know how to play. For those, we practice.
This also means that if you always like to learn new things, choosing a career that allows you to discover stuffs is a good fit. On the other hand, you may want to grind with training if all you want is to be better.
Discovering something new and introducing it to your company can be great—super great. However, since people are skeptical of new things, what you introduce can be criticized or rejected. So, along with the like for learning new things, being resilient, not afraid of rejection, and having an environment that is kind to innovations are also good supplements.
It is not about whether one thing is bad and another is good; it is just that if you can pick what you are already good at and combine it with even more of your strengths, in a supportive environment, then what you have is some real superpower.
The second difference is although learning is usually more fun than practicing, practice provides more reliable value.
Learning is like an investment. You know it will be good for you, but you do not know exactly when it will be good for you. You have to wait for the right moment to apply them. But only God knows when the right moment is.
I usually see that what a person chooses to learn in his free time is very far from him. It can even be unrelated. One usually doesn't choose to learn something that's so normal unless it's required.
I think it's because the more irrelevant a thing is to us, the more interesting it is. Learning how to build a bike is less interesting than learning how to build spaceships. Watching a daily vlog of a person in a country that's far, far away is more interesting than watching a vlog of someone just like you.
But the cons of learning foreign things are that they can be hard to apply. Learning how to build spaceships is fun, yes, but can that knowledge be practical? Put it another way, they may have low usability.
Can practicing also have low usability? It can, but it's rarer. Learning things far from us may not be apparently absurd, but practicing unrelated things is obviously ridiculous. For example, although one can spend many hours a day learning what astronauts do, it's ridiculous to spend hours every day practicing how to be an astronaut just for fun.
Although learning may have a higher chance of being useless, sometimes, what we learn may bring us life-changing discoveries. They can be the inspiration for your whole new project or can explain why you can't yet make something work.
There is no clear way to compare learning and practicing. But although it's hard to decide which is better, it is much easier to answer which one suits you.
Do you like to practice and focus solely on your personal performance, or do you prefer to learn new things? Do you need the accessibility to practice, or are you someone who needs to not have it so that you can enjoy moments outside your work?
Many people has no desire to learn or practice what they are doing, which is alright. In that case, if a job does not give them many opportunities to practice or learn in their working or free time, that can be a bonus instead of a minus.