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by
Geoff Colvin
This is what researchers call a retrieval structure, which has particular significance that we’ll hear more about later.
Many other studies since SF have confirmed that apparently average people can achieve extraordinary memory ability by developing their own retrieval stru...
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The chess masters did not have incredible memories. What they had was an incredible ability to remember real chess positions.
Expert players have vastly superior abilities to remember real game positions, or in bridge, hands arranged in the usual order. But when the boards or hands are mixed up, the experts’ memories are just ordinary.
Similarly, SF’s incredible memory did not extend beyond the specific task he had practiced.
Remarkable memory ability is apparently available to anyone.
It’s certainly true that McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Google, and other top companies are looking explicitly for brainiacs above all. But it’s striking to notice the companies that don’t put extreme cognitive abilities at the top of the list, or sometimes even on the list.
Southwest Airlines, the only airline in America to have made a profit every year for the past thirty-six years, is famous for seeking a blend of attitudes and personality traits—sense of humor, sense of mission, energy, confidence.
Again, however, he was not so extraordinary that NFL teams were fighting one another to get him. The problem was his speed; while he was fast by the standards of Crawford, and he was fast enough to be a college star, in the NFL his speed was nothing special. In the 1985 draft, fifteen teams passed him over before the San Francisco 49ers finally signed him.
Everyone in the football world seems to agree that Rice was the greatest because he worked harder in practice and in the off-season than anyone else.
The lesson that’s easiest to draw from Jerry Rice’s story is that hard work makes all the difference. Yet we know—from research and from just looking around us—that hard work often doesn’t lead to extraordinary performance. We also know that even after an excellent college career, Rice did not possess outstanding speed, a quality that coaches generally consider mandatory in a great receiver. So there must be something else lurking in Rice’s story.
He spent very little time playing football. Of all the work Rice did to make himself a great player, practically none of it was playing football games. His independent off-season workouts consisted of conditioning, and his team workouts were classroom study, reviewing of game films, conditioning, and lots of work with other players on specific plays.
Of course it’s true that all NFL players devote most of their work-related time to nongame activities, and that fact is significant. These people, doing their work at its highest level and subject to continuous, unsparing evaluation, don’t set up weekday football games for practice; they spend almost all their time on other activities, a fact that we should remember. In the case of Rice, one of the greatest players, the ratio was even more extreme.
Rice didn’t need to do everything well, just certain things. He had to run precise patterns; he had to evade the defenders, sometimes two or three, who were assigned to cover him; he had to outjump them to catch the ball and outmuscle them when they tried to strip it away; then he had to outrun tacklers. So he focused his practice work on exactly those requirements.
He defied the conventional limits of age. The average NFL player leaves the league in his twenties; playing at age thirty-five is an unusual achievement. The widely accepted view is that even if a player avoids injury, deterioration of the body is inevitable, and a player in his late thirties can no longer prevail when facing an opponent fifteen years younger.
By many measures, all three groups of violinists were about the same. They all started studying the violin at around age eight and decided to become musicians at around age fifteen, with no statistically significant differences among the groups. By the time of the study, every subject had been studying the violin for at least a decade.
The two top groups, the best and better violinists, practiced by themselves about twenty-four hours a week on average. The third group, the good violinists, practiced by themselves only nine hours a week.
The difference was that some chose to practice more, and those violinists were a great deal better.
By age eighteen, the violinists in the first group had accumulated 7,410 hours of lifetime practice on average, versus 5,301 hours for violinists in the second group and 3,420 hours for those in the third group. All the differences were statistically significant.
paper—“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”—was Anders Ericsson,
As researchers went further down this road, they noticed something else: Many scientists and authors produce their greatest work only after twenty or more years of devoted effort, which means that in year nineteen they are still getting better.
What the authors called “deliberate practice” makes all the difference. Or as they stated it with stark clarity in their scholarly paper, “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
Occasionally I realize that I should stop to think about why the shot was bad. There seem to be about five thousand things you can do wrong when hitting a golf ball, so I pick one of them and work on it a bit, convincing myself that I can sense improvement, until I hit another bad one, at which point I figure I should probably also work on another one of the five thousand things.
Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it’s almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual’s performance.
While the best methods of development are constantly changing, they’re always built around a central principle: They’re meant to stretch the individual beyond his or her current abilities.
The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.
He labels the inner circle “comfort zone,” the middle one “learning zone,” and the outer one “panic zone.” Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily, while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.
Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities.
Even elite athletes say the factor that limits their practice time is their ability to sustain concentration.
Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.
From the limited, short-term perspective of many employers, this is completely justified. We weren’t hired so we could spend time improving our own abilities; we were hired to produce results.
Rather, it’s more often a result of long hours cranking out what we already know how to do.
Rock designed all those small-club appearances for the sole purpose of making himself better; because he already performs at a very high level, he’s completely qualified to design his own practice.
why do some people put themselves through it while most do not?
The whole notion of deliberate practice has for many people created the notion of a nature-versus-nurture battle, with practice advocates pitted against proponents of the divine-spark hypothesis.
When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.
By contrast, great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested-development stage in their chosen field.
How Deliberate Practice Works
Specifically, it enables them to perceive more, to know more, and to remember more than most people. Eventually the effects go beyond even that. Many years of intensive deliberate practice actually change the body and the brain. There’s a good reason why we see the world’s great performers as being fundamentally different from us, as operating on a completely different plane. It’s because they are and they do.
The problem is that improvements in reaction speed follow what scientists call a power law (because there’s an exponent in the formula) and what the rest of us call the 80-20 rule. That is, nearly all the improvement comes in the first little bit of training. After that, lots more practice yields only a little additional improvement.
Top performers can figure out what’s going to happen sooner than average performers by seeing more in badminton, cricket, field hockey, squash, and volleyball. Beyond sports, we see a similar result in the mundane but instructive field of typing.
Time and again we see the same themes, and so far we have considered just one type of situation in which top performers see more—cases requiring rapid responses. In fact the superior perception of experts shows up in many other ways.
The correct diagnosis required doctors to also see subtler cues, such as hyperinflation of the adjacent lobes. In marking the X-ray films, the experts picked out more specific features that were significant; they saw more clues to help them solve the puzzle of diagnosis. They also discriminated more finely. For example, the film showing tumors had a few hazy spots on it. The residents saw them as “general lung haziness” and figured they indicated fluid in the lungs, a sign of congestive heart failure. The experts saw correctly that each spot was a tumor.
Everyone in these studies is hearing the same things, but through years of practice, some are perceiving more.
They look further ahead. When excellent musicians or typists look further ahead on the page than average performers do, they are literally looking into their own future. Knowing what lies ahead for them, they prepare for it and thus perform better.
Because they had done the exercise, Shell managers could see how events might lead to an embargo, and when it happened, they were much better prepared than their competitors to respond. They had seen this movie already, so they slowed refinery expansion and adapted their refineries to handle many types of crude, while competitors vacillated. The common view in the industry is that Shell came through the oil shock far better than any other major producer.
This ability is essential for success in every real-life domain because we never have as much information as we want. Getting information pushes at the two constraints everyone faces: It takes time and costs money. Making sound decisions fast and at low cost is a competitive advantage everywhere. Top performers, through extensive practice, learn this ability for decisions that are most critical in their field.
They make finer discriminations than average performers.
Knowing More