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illustrates a key insight from the study of effective practice: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.
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.
by increasing the number of digits each time he got a string right, and decreasing the number when he got it wrong, I kept the number of digits right around what he was capable of doing while always pushing him to remember just one more digit.
The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “practice” during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.
It turns out that most of what doctors do in their day-to-day practice does nothing to improve or even maintain their abilities;
Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”
Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.
A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed.
This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
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 way to understand exactly what these mental representations are and how they work is, fittingly enough, to develop a good mental representation of the concept mental representation.
This ability to create a detailed mental representation of a climb before embarking on it is something that only comes with experience.
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 virtuous circle rules: honing the skill improves mental representation, and mental representation helps hone the skill.
Pretty much 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.
Contrary to expectations, experience doesn’t lead to improved performance among many types of doctors and nurses.
Even psychology researchers are only now just beginning to explore the role of mental representations in understanding why some people perform so much better than others, and there are very few areas in which we can say with certainty,
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.
In short, this sort of training with immediate feedback — either from a mentor or even a carefully designed computer program — can be an incredibly powerful way to improve performance.
When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills.
In almost every one of the five dozen studies included in the review, doctors’ performance grew worse over time or, at best, stayed about the same. The older doctors knew less and did worse in terms of providing appropriate care than doctors with far fewer years of experience, and researchers concluded that it was likely the older doctors’ patients fared worse because of
In short, doctors are clearly serious about keeping their skills sharp. Unfortunately, the way they have been doing it just isn’t working.
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.
the importance of engaging in purposeful practice instead of mindless repetition without any clear plan for getting better.
Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
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.”
Researchers who have studied long-distance runners have found that amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running,14 while elite long-distance runners remain attuned to their bodies so that they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race.
Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, 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.
To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it.
Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.
the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way.
To figure that out, you need to find a way to push yourself a little — not a lot — harder than usual. This will often help you figure out where your sticking points are.
The power of this technique is that it targets those specific problem areas that are holding you back rather than trying this and that and hoping that something works. This technique is not widely recognized, even among experienced teachers, even though it might seem obvious as described here and is a remarkably effective way to rise above plateaus.
Thus, 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.
Very important to remind myself all the time
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.
the best students were much better at estimating how much time they spent on leisure,
So at twenty-one he recruited eleven of the most intellectually interesting people in Philadelphia to form a mutual improvement club,21 which he named “the Junto.” The club’s members, who met each Friday night, would encourage each other’s various intellectual pursuits. Every member was expected to bring at least one interesting topic of conversation — on morals, politics, or science — to each meeting.
The general lesson is that we can certainly acquire new skills as we age, but the specific way in which we acquire those skills changes as we get older.
They found that the autistic savants are much more likely than the nonsavants to be very detail-oriented and prone to repetitive behaviors.18 When something captures their attention, they will focus on it to the exclusion of everything else around them, retreating into their own worlds.
Perhaps the most intriguing of these efforts is a curriculum called Jump Math,29 developed by John Mighton, a Canadian mathematician. The program uses the same basic principles found in deliberate practice: breaking learning down into a series of well-specified skills, designing exercises to teach each of those skills in the correct order, and using feedback to monitor progress.
after five months the students in the Jump classes showed more than twice as much progress as the others in understanding mathematical concepts as measured by standardized tests.
all of the evidence says that higher intelligence is not correlated with better chess playing among adults.
Two separate studies of 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.
The amount of chess practice that the children had done was the biggest factor in explaining how well they played chess, with more practice being correlated with better scores on the various measures of chess skill.
Among these twenty-three elite players the amount of practice was still the major factor determining their chess skills, but intelligence played no noticeable role. While
Thus, by the time one becomes a grandmaster or even an accomplished twelve-year-old tournament player, the abilities measured by IQ tests are far less important than the mental representations one has developed through practice. This explains, I believe, why we see no relationship between IQ and chess ability when we look at accomplished players.
As we discussed in chapter 5, a major difference between the deliberate-practice approach and the traditional approach to learning lies with the emphasis placed on 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; knowledge should never be an end in itself. Nonetheless, deliberate practice results in students picking up quite a lot of knowledge along the way.
if this information is assimilated as part of building mental representations aimed at doing something, the individual pieces become part of an interconnected pattern that provides context and meaning to the information, making it easier to work with.
