More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
October 7, 2018
The representations not only guide the surgery, but they also serve to provide a warning when something unexpected and potentially dangerous happens in the surgery. When an actual surgery diverges from the surgeon’s mental representation, he or she knows to slow down, rethink the options, and, if necessary, formulate a new plan in response to the new information.
Relatively few of us climb rocks or perform surgeries, but almost everyone writes, and the process of writing offers us an excellent example of how mental representations can be used in planning.
The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.
The key change that occurs in our adaptable brains in response to deliberate practice is the development of better mental representations, which in turn open up new possibilities for improved performance.
This is an example of one way in which expert performers use mental representations to improve their performance: they monitor and evaluate their performance, and, when necessary, they modify their mental representations in order to make them more effective. The more effective the mental representation is, the better the performance will be.
Obviously the mental representation for a book is much larger and more complex than one for a personal letter or a blog post, but the general pattern is the same: to write well, develop a mental representation ahead of time to guide your efforts, then monitor and evaluate your efforts and be ready to modify that representation as necessary.
In general, mental representations aren’t just the result of learning a skill; they can also help us learn.
All of the students had good attitudes and were motivated to improve, so McPherson and Renwick concluded that the differences among the students most likely lay, in large part, in how well the students were able to detect their mistakes—that is, how effective their mental representations of the musical pieces were.
The implication is that they were using their mental representations not only to spot mistakes but also to match appropriate practice techniques with the types of difficulties they were having with the music.
In any area, not just musical performance, the relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practice to hone your skill.
As we’ve just seen from several studies, musicians rely on mental representations to improve both the physical and cognitive aspects of their specialties. And mental representations are essential to activities we see as almost purely physical. Indeed, any expert in any field can be rightly seen as a high-achieving intellectual where that field is concerned.
In these areas too, the virtuous circle rules: honing the skill improves mental representation, and mental representation helps hone the skill.
As you push yourself to do something new—to develop a new skill or sharpen an old one—you are also expanding and sharpening your mental representations, which will in turn make it possible for you to do more than you could before.
As we saw in chapter 1, purposeful practice as done by different people can have very different results. Steve Faloon reached the point where he could remember up to eighty-two digits, while Renée, working just as hard as Steve, was unable to get beyond twenty. The difference lay in the details of the types of practice that Steve and Renée used to improve their memory.
two things were strikingly clear from the study: First, to become an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice. We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And, second, even among these gifted musicians—all of whom had been admitted to the best music academy in Germany—the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were on average more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing.
the best performers are those who have spent the most time in various types of purposeful practice.
The improvement in performance generally has gone hand in hand with the development of teaching methods, and today anyone who wishes to become an expert in these fields will need an instructor’s help.
These activities are generally designed with the student’s current abilities in mind and are intended to push him or her to move just beyond the current skill level. It was these practice activities that my colleagues and I defined as “deliberate practice.”
In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field.
deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.
Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established.
Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.
Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change.
Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.
Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly. Such self-monitoring requires effective mental representations.
Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. Th...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minim...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.
The lesson here is clear: be careful when identifying expert performers. Ideally you want some objective measure of performance with which to compare people’s abilities.
Thus a good rule of thumb is to seek out people who work intimately with many other professionals, such as a nurse who plays a role on several different surgery teams and can compare their performance and identify the best.
Part of the problem is the key role that mental representations play. In many fields it is the quality of mental representations that sets apart the best from the rest, and mental representations are, by their nature, not directly observable.
Fortunately, in some cases you can bypass figuring out what sets experts themselves apart from others and simply figure out what sets their training apart.
Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start. In all of this keep in mind that the idea is to inform your purposeful practice and point it in directions that will be more effective. If you find that something works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, stop. The better you are able to tailor your training to mirror the best performers in your
...more
And finally remember that, whenever possible, the best approach is almost always to work with a good coach or teacher.
A knowledgeable instructor can lead the student to develop a good foundation and then gradually build on that foundation to create the skills expected in that field.
Finally, a good teacher can give you valuable feedback you couldn’t get any other way. Effective feedback is about more than whether you did something right or wrong. A good math teacher, for instance, will look at more than the answer to a problem; he’ll look at exactly how the student got the answer as a way of understanding the mental representations the student was using. If needed, he’ll offer advice on how to think more effectively about the problem.
This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities—usually done alone—that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.
Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.
When we say that it takes ten thousand—or however many—hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. While some may take this as a challenge—as if to say, “All I have to do is spend ten thousand hours working on this, and I’ll be one of the best in the world!”—many will see it as a stop sign: “Why should I even try if it’s going to take me ten thousand hours to get really good?” As Dogbert observed in one Dilbert comic strip, “I would think a willingness to practice the same thing for ten thousand hours is a mental disorder.”
But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement—think of what two hundred hours of practice brought Steve Faloon—but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.
The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world’s best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice.
So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.
One way to think about this is simply as a reflection of the fact that, to date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.
