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November 8 - November 27, 2024
In reading reviews of an instructor, skip over the stuff about how much fun their lessons are and look for specific descriptions of progress the students have made and obstacles they have overcome.
It’s particularly important to query a prospective teacher about practice exercises.
you may need to change teachers as you yourself change.
If you want to improve in chess, you don’t do it by playing chess; you do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games.
How does learning by playing “fast chess” work?
Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
For the amateurs it was a time to express themselves, to sing away their cares, and to feel the pure joy of singing. For the professionals, the lesson was a time to concentrate on such things as vocal technique and breath control in an effort to improve their singing. There was focus but no joy.
whatever you are doing, focus on it.
It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.
The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better.
Much of what a good teacher or coach will do is to develop such exercises for you, designed specifically to help you improve the particular skill you are focused on at the moment. But without a teacher, you must come up with your own exercises.
the Internet offers just about everything except quality control—but
By listening to the same dialogue over and over, they improved their ability to understand English much more quickly than if they’d simply watched a number of different movies. Note that these students weren’t simply doing the same thing over and over again: they were paying attention to what they got wrong each time and correcting it. This is purposeful practice.
To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
And in art, aspiring artists have long developed their skills by copying the paintings and sculptures of the masters. Indeed, in some cases they have done this in a way very similar to the technique Franklin used to improve his writing, that is, by studying a piece of art by a master, attempting to reproduce it from memory, and then comparing the finished product with the original in order to discover the differences and correct them.
Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.
When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid—or at least steady—improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some sort of implacable limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.
true for everyone who faces a plateau: the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way.
Cross-training of any sort is based on the same principle—switch off between different types of exercise so that you are constantly challenging yourself in different ways.
This, then, is what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have failed. First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will
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First, there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general “willpower” that can be applied in any situation.
the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute.
Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact:
once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about:
This sort of circular thinking—“The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing”—is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.
One of the most effective is to set aside a fixed time to practice that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions.
Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted.
Ideally you should wake up by yourself (that is, without an alarm to wake you) and feel refreshed when you do.
Expert performers do two things—both seemingly unrelated to motivation—that can help. The first is general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy. If you’re tired or sick, it’s that much harder to maintain focus and that much easier to slack off.
The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that—and when you’re first starting out, it’s likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.
Similarly, over time musicians and anyone else who practices intensely get to the point where those hours of practice no longer seem as mentally painful as they once were. The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it’s not as hard to keep going.
Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation.
Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed.
Confidence in Ability to Perform Successfully. CAPS! :)
The psychologist Benjamin Bloom once directed a project that examined the childhoods of a number of experts in various fields. One of his findings was that when these future experts were young, their parents would use various strategies to keep them from quitting.
Their parents told them that they could quit if they wished but that first they needed to keep practicing enough to get back to where they were.
practiced for a while and gotten back to where they were, they realized that they could indeed keep getting better and that their setback was just temporary.
set things up so that you are constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement, even if it is not always major improvement.
There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.
This study identified three stages that were common to all of them and that indeed appear to be common to the development of expert performers in every area, not just the six fields that Bloom and his colleagues examined.
In the first stage, children are introduced in a playful way to what will eventually become their field of interest.
In the beginning, a child’s parents play with their child at the child’s level, but gradually they turn the play toward the real purpose of the “toy.”
At this stage, the parents of children who are to become experts play a crucial role in the child’s development. For one thing, the parents give their children a great deal of time, attention, and encouragement. For another, the parents tend to be very achievement-oriented and teach their children such values as self-discipline, hard work, responsibility, and spending one’s time constructively. And once a child becomes interested in a particular field, he or she is expected to approach it with those same attributes—discipline, hard work, achievement.
Bloom and his colleagues found that often the experts in their study had picked up the particular interests of their parents.
Simply by interacting strongly with their children, parents motivate their children to develop similar interests.
many children do manage to come up with activities that are part play, part training.
child who sees an older sibling performing an activity and getting attention and praise from a parent will naturally want to join in and garner some attention and praise as well. For some children, competition with the sibling may itself be motivating, too.
In this case the parents didn’t introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general. They encouraged their children’s curiosity, and reading was a major pastime, with the parents reading to the children early on, and the children reading books themselves later.
Once a future expert performer becomes interested and shows some promise in an area, the typical next step is to take lessons from a coach or teacher.
One way that parents and teachers can provide long-term motivation is to help the children find related activities that they enjoy.
The best teachers didn’t focus on the rules for solving particular problems but rather encouraged their students to think about general patterns and processes—the why more than the how. This was motivating to these children because it sparked an intellectual interest that would drive their studies and, later, their research as mathematicians.
