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January 1 - November 14, 2021
learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones.
Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential.
The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.
while the abilities are extraordinary, there is no mystery at all about how these people developed them. They practiced. A lot.
the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible.
to take into account what works and what doesn’t in driving changes in the body and brain.
“Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row.” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success.
You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
simple, direct feedback after every attempt—correct or incorrect, success or failure.
Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback—either from yourself or from outside observers—you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.
Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”
The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach.
Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles—points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through.
positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.
Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
The volume of the posterior hippocampi had gotten significantly larger in the group of trainees who had continued their training and had become licensed taxi drivers.
When researchers use MRI machines to watch the brains of blind subjects as they read words in Braille, one of the parts of the brain that they see lighting up is the visual cortex. In people with normal sight, the visual cortex would light up in response to input from the eyes, not the fingertips, but in the blind, the visual cortex helps them interpret the fingertip sensations they get from brushing over the groups of raised dots that make up the Braille letters.
If you practice something enough, your brain will repurpose neurons to help with the task even if they already have another job to do.
These studies of brain plasticity in blind subjects—and similar studies in deaf subjects—tell us that the brain’s structure and function are not fixed. They change in response to use. It is possible to shape the brain—your brain, my brain, anybody’s brain—in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate training.
“homeostasis,” which simply refers to the tendency of a system—any sort of system, but most often a living creature or some part of a living creature—to act in a way that maintains its own stability.
This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.
to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.
This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.
The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.
In other words, the most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they are actually increasing your ability to play. With such practice you are modifying the parts of the brain you use when playing music and, in a sense, increasing your own musical “talent.”
developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area.
there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
So everyone has and uses mental representations. What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields—such as the vast number of arrangements of chess pieces that can appear during games. These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than anything else, explains the difference
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As soon as they see the pitcher’s arm come around and the ball leave his hand, they have a very good idea—without having to do any sort of conscious calculations—whether it will be a fastball, slider, or curve and approximately where it’s heading. In essence, they’ve learned to read the pitcher’s delivery, so they have less need to actually see how the ball travels before determining whether and where to swing the bat.
The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.
The best players recognize and respond to the patterns almost instantaneously, taking advantage of weaknesses or openings as soon as they appear.
The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.
rudimentary, tend to associate symptoms with the particular medical conditions that they’re familiar with and jump quickly to conclusions. They fail to generate multiple options.
This is a major advantage of highly developed mental representations: you can assimilate and consider a great deal more information at once.
The key to the successful diagnosis wasn’t merely having the necessary medical knowledge, but having that knowledge organized and accessible in a way that allowed the doctor to come up with possible diagnoses and to zero in on the most likely.
have a whole bunch of ideas and write down till my supply of ideas is exhausted. Then I might try to think of more ideas up to the point where you can’t get any more ideas that are worth putting down on paper and then I would end it.
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.
By putting all of these different elements into an overall map of the piece, Imreh managed to do justice to both the forest and the trees.
the virtuous circle rules: honing the skill improves mental representation, and mental representation helps hone the skill.
Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep—and often an afternoon nap.
there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.
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.
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. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.
it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.
This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can.
In determining who the experts are, the ideal is to use some objective measure to separate the best from the rest.
be careful when identifying expert performers. Ideally you want some objective measure of performance with which to compare people’s abilities. If no such measures exist, get as close as you can.
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.
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.
A study of musical composers by the psychologist John R. Hayes found that it takes an average of twenty years from the time a person starts studying music until he or she composes a truly excellent piece of music, and it is generally never less than ten years.
