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October 1 - November 16, 2020
While we don’t know exactly what exercises Mozart’s father used to train his son, we do know that by the time Mozart was six or seven he had trained far more intensely and for far longer than the two dozen children who developed perfect pitch through Sakakibara’s practice sessions.
This adaptability explains how the development of perfect pitch was possible in Sakakibara’s subjects as well as in Mozart himself: their brains responded to the musical training by developing certain circuits that enabled perfect pitch. We can’t yet identify exactly which circuits those are or say what they look like or exactly what they do, but we know they must be there—and we know that they are the product of the training, not of some inborn genetic programming.
Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing
The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.
Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.
Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.
Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.
This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before.
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.
Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation.
So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: 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.
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. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination.
Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training.
Once these taxi drivers had stopped using their navigational memory every day, the brain changes that had been the result of that work started to disappear.
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.
In pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well developed mental representations.
The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.
Before experienced rock climbers begin a climb, they will look over the entire wall and visualize the path they are going to take, seeing themselves moving from hold to hold. This ability to create a detailed mental representation of a climb before embarking on it is something that only comes with experience.
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.
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.
These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.
We found that the best violin students had, on average, spent significantly more time than the better violin students had spent, and that the top two groups—better and best—had spent much more time on solitary practice than the music-education students.
you generally find that the best performers are those who have spent the most time in various types of purposeful practice.
By now it is safe to conclude from many studies on a wide variety of disciplines that nobody develops extraordinary abilities without putting in tremendous amounts of practice.
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.
Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance.
There is a saying in medicine about learning surgical procedures that can be traced back to William Halsted, a surgical pioneer in the early twentieth century: “See one, do one, teach one.” The idea is that all surgical trainees need in order to be able to carry out a new surgery is to see it done once and, after that, they can figure out how to do it by themselves on succeeding patients. It is the ultimate profession of faith in knowledge versus skill.
Thus, one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.
Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
This is a key to getting the maximum benefit out of any sort of practice, from private or group lessons to solitary practice and even to games or competitions: whatever you are doing, focus on it.
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.
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.
Motivation is quite different from willpower.
I’ve noticed that some people who have difficulty getting started in the morning don’t get enough sleep.
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.
One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors.
This desire to play serves as a child’s initial motivation to try out one thing or another, to see what is interesting and what is not, and to engage in various activities that will help them build their skills.
One thing their parents did do was to emphasize the importance of academic success in general and to make clear their expectations that their children would continue their schooling beyond high school and even beyond college.
research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly
Until Richards came along, no one realized it was possible to be this good, and it forced other Scrabble players to look for ways to increase their own skill levels.
Expert performers develop their extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step by step in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts. Various sorts of practice can be effective, but the most effective of all is deliberate practice.
Paganini’s ability to write and play a beautiful tune on one string of the violin should not be taken lightly. He was a master of the violin, and this was an ability that no other violinist of his time possessed. But the performance was not the magical feat his listeners had believed it to be. It was the product of long, careful practice.
People want to believe that there is magic in life, that not everything has to abide by the staid, boring rules of the real world. And what could be more magical than being born with some incredible ability that doesn’t require hard work or discipline to develop?
But my decades of research in the area of expertise have convinced me that there is no magic.
Perhaps the most intriguing of these efforts is a curriculum called Jump Math, developed by John Mighton, a Canadian mathematician.
People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because, for whatever reasons, they stopped practicing—or
Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills; knowledge should never be an end in itself.
