Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance,

Many of them also said that getting enough sleep was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep — and often an afternoon nap.

Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve.

In short, 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.

Specifically, the music-education students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they were eighteen, the better violin students had practiced an average of 5,301 hours, and the best violin students had practiced an average of 7,410 hours.

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.

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.

Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.

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.

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.

In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training.

an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements — the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists.

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.”28

Indeed, once a pilot had won twenty dogfights or so, he had almost a 100 percent chance of winning the next one and the one after that. The catch was, of course, that the cost of that sort of on-the-job training was unacceptably high.

my basic advice is to look for one that follows the principles of deliberate practice: Does it push people to get outside their comfort zones and attempt to do things that are not easy for them? Does it offer immediate feedback on the performance and on what can be done to improve it? Have those who developed the approach identified the best performers in that particular area and determined what sets them apart from everyone else? Is the practice designed to develop the particular skills that experts in the field possess?

One of the implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know,

If years of practice make physicians better, then the quality of care they give should increase as they amass more experience. But just the opposite was true.

continuing medical education can improve doctors’ performance, but the effect is small, and the effects on patient outcomes are even smaller.

In general, professional schools focus on knowledge rather than skills because it is much easier to teach knowledge and then create tests for it.

the right question is, How do we improve the relevant skills? rather than, How do we teach the relevant knowledge?

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.

You want a teacher who will guide you as much as possible for these sessions, not only telling you what to practice on but what particular aspects you should be paying attention to,

one final lesson about instruction: you may need to change teachers as you yourself change.

the researcher Daniel Chambliss concluded that the key to excellence in swimming lay in maintaining close attention to every detail of performance, “each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.”

so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster.

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.

Real life — our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies — seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities.

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.

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.

Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts,

Typing teachers use a well-established method to get past such a plateau.17 Most typists can increase their typing speed by 10–20 percent simply by focusing and pushing themselves to type faster.

when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back.

Instead, what distinguished the most successful spellers was their superior ability to remain committed to studying despite the boredom and the pull of other, more appealing activities.

In fact, if anything, 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:

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.

As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration.

to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.

There are various ways to weaken the reasons to quit. One of the most effective is to set aside a fixed time to practice that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions.

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.

The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour.

As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.

Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed.

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. And this did the trick.

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.

His life goals, he wrote me, are “wisdom and vitality.”

put together a group of people all interested in the same thing — or join an existing group — and use the group’s camaraderie and shared goals as extra motivation in reaching your own goals.