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June 9 - June 21, 2019
Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.
Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training.
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.
anything in which there is little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance.
With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and practice that is both purposeful and informed.
an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel.
demands near-maximal effort,
well-defined, specific goals
series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change.
feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback.
Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations;
in a professional or business setting, the right question is, How do we improve the relevant skills? rather than, How do we teach the relevant knowledge?
shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster.
We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat—over and over again.
Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first.
Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted.
look for anything that might interfere with your training and find ways to minimize its influence.
if you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.
Perhaps the most important factor here, though, is the social environment itself. Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions—the other members of your orchestra or your baseball team or your chess club—you have a built-in support system. These people understand the effort you’re putting into your practice, they can share training tips with you, and they can appreciate your victories and commiserate with you over your difficulties.
set things up so that you are constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement, even if it is not always major improvement.
There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them.
Korean Go experts found an average IQ of about 93, compared with control groups of non-Go-playing Koreans matched for age and sex, which had an average IQ around 100.
performance on IQ tests—plays a role in how quickly they can learn the game and reach a certain minimal level of competence.
children with higher IQs will play chess more capably in the beginning.
In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.
While people with certain innate characteristics—IQ, in the case of the chess study—may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time, and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining how skilled a person becomes.
there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best.
since we know that practice is the single most important factor in determining a person’s ultimate achievement in a given domain, it makes sense that if genes do play a role, their role would play out through shaping how likely a person is to engage in deliberate practice or how effective that practice is likely to be.
On average, the kids with higher IQs would have an easier time in the beginning learning the moves and would be selected for further training and grooming; the others would not be offered a spot in the program. The end result would be a collection of chess players with much higher than average IQs. But we know that in the real world there are many grandmasters who don’t score particularly well on IQ tests—so we would have missed the contributions of all of those people who could become great chess players.
skills versus knowledge—what you can do versus what you know. Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills;
you don’t build mental representations by thinking about something; you build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over.
When preparing a lesson plan, determining what a student should be able to do is far more effective than determining what that student should know.
understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step. Then give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.
give them models they can replicate and learn from, just as Benjamin Franklin did when he improved his writing by reproducing articles from The Spectator. They need to try and fail—but with ready access to models that show what success looks like.
In most fields we still don’t know exactly what distinguishes experts from everyone else. Nor do we have many details about the experts’ mental representations.
In the future most people will have no choice but to continuously learn new skills, so it will be essential to train students and adults about how to learn efficiently.
It is possible, for example, to videotape real-world experiences of doctors, athletes, and teachers and create libraries and learning centers where students could be trained in such a way that avoids having to learn on the job and risk the welfare of patients, students, and clients.
They will need to see firsthand—through their own experiences of developing abilities they thought were beyond them—that they control their abilities and are not held hostage by some antiquated idea of natural talent.
