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January 12 - January 28, 2023
The really crucial insight of Ericsson’s research, though, is not that experts log more hours of practice. Rather, it’s that experts practice differently. Unlike most of us, experts are logging thousands upon thousands of hours of what Ericsson calls deliberate practice.
“Ah,” he purred. “I think I understand. You aren’t improving because you’re not doing deliberate practice.”
First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance.
Basketball great Kevin Durant has said, “I probably spend 70 percent of my time by myself, working on my game, just trying to fine-tune every single piece of my game.”
Likewise, the amount of time musicians devote to practicing alone is a much better predictor of how quickly they develop than time spent practicing with other musicians.
Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless. Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.
Deliberate practice was first studied in chess players and then in musicians and athletes. If you’re not a chess player, musician, or athlete, you might be wondering whether the general principles of deliberate practice apply to you.
management guru Peter Drucker said after a lifetime of advising CEOs. Effective management “demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things. It consists of a small number of practices. . . .”
“As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic, whether I’m holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It’s practice, it’s training, and it’s”—he sobs—“experimenting”—he sobs again—“while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that’s what magic is to me. . . .”
On average, spellers rated deliberate practice as significantly more effortful, and significantly less enjoyable, than anything else they did to prepare for competition. In contrast, spellers experienced reading books for pleasure and playing word games like Scrabble as effortless and as enjoyable as “eating your favorite food.”
Martha Graham:
“Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.”
As evidence that working at the far edge of our skills with complete concentration is exhausting, he points out that even world-class performers at the peak of their careers can only handle a maximum of one hour of deliberate practice before needing a break, and in total, can only do about three to five hours of deliberate practice per day.
But nonathletes say much the same about their most intense exertions, suggesting that it is the mental work, as much as the physical stresses, that makes deliberate practice so strenuous.
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiII
Flow is performing at high levels of challenge and yet feeling “effortless,” like “you don’t have to think about it, you’re just doing it.”
Because deliberate practice is carefully planned, and flow is spontaneous. Because deliberate practice requires working where challenges exceed skill, and flow is most commonly experienced when challenge and skill are in balance. And, most important, because deliberate practice is exceptionally effortful, and flow is, by definition, effortless.
First, deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience.
You’re concentrating one hundred percent, and you’ve deliberately set the level of challenge to exceed your current level of skill. You’re in “problem solving” mode, analyzing everything you do to bring it closer to the ideal—the goal you set at the beginning of the practice session. You’re getting feedback, and a lot of that feedback is about what you’re doing wrong, and you’re using that feedback to make adjustments and try again.
The flow state is intrinsically pleasurable. You don’t care whether you’re improving some narrow aspect of your skill set. And though you’re concentrating one hundred percent, you’re not at all in “problem solving” mode. You’re not analyzing what you’re doing; you’re just doing. You’re getting feedback, but because the level of challenge just meets your current level of skill, that feedback is telling you that you’re doing a lot right. You feel like you’re in complete control, because you are. You’re floating. You lose track of time. No matter how fast you’re running or how intensely you’re
...more
“I swam around the world,” he told me with a soft laugh, “for a race that lasted forty-nine seconds.”
“It’s very simple,” Rowdy said. “It’s because I loved swimming. . . . I had a passion for competing, for the result of training, for the feeling of being in shape, for winning, for traveling, for meeting friends. I hated practice, but I had an overall passion for swimming.”
Mads Rasmussen
“It’s about hard work. When it’s not fun, you do what you need to do anyway. Because when you achieve results, it’s incredibly fun. You get to enjoy the ‘Aha’ at the end, and...
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The idea of years of challenge-exceeding-skill practice leading to moments of challenge-meeting-skill flow explains why elite performance can...
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“To be honest, it felt pretty easy,” she said afterward. “I was so relaxed.” But it’s not flow to which Ledecky credits her speed: “Breaking that record is testament to the work I have put in and the shape I am in right now.”
“One thing in terms of swimming that people don’t really know,” she later said, “is that the work you put in [during] practice shows off in the meet.”
Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.
As we’ll learn in chapter 11, there’s solid scientific evidence that the subjective experience of effort—what it feels like to work hard—can and does change when, for example, effort is rewarded in some way.
there are different kinds of positive experience: the thrill of getting better is one, and the ecstasy of performing at your best is another.
Noa Kageyama,
We let students know that hidden behind every effortless performance on YouTube are hours and hours of unrecorded, invisible-to-outsiders, challenging, effortful, mistake-ridden practice.
routines are a godsend when it comes to doing something hard.
A mountain of research studies, including a few of my own, show that when you have a habit of practicing at the same time and in the same place every day, you hardly have to think about getting started. You just do.
“What do these creators have in common?” you’ll find the answer right in the title: daily rituals. In their own particular way, all the experts in this book consistently put in hours and hours of solitary deliberate practice. They follow routines. They’re creatures of habit.
Eventually, if you keep practicing in the same time and place, what once took conscious thought to initiate becomes automatic. “There is no more miserable human being,” observed William James, than the one for whom “the beginning of every bit of work” must be decided anew each day.
Interest is one source of passion. Purpose—the intention to contribute to the well-being of others—is another. The mature passions of gritty people depend on both.
Alex Scott.
neuroblastoma
But most people first become attracted to things they enjoy and only later appreciate how these personal interests might also benefit others.
Benjamin Bloom
At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.
succinctly,
“the intention to contribute to the well-being of others.”
On one hand, human beings seek pleasure because, by and large, the things that bring us pleasure are those that increase our chances of survival.
“pleasure principle.”
To some extent, we’re all hardwired to pursue both hedonic and eudaimonic happiness. But the relative weight we give these two kinds of pursuits can vary. Some of us care about purpose much more than we care about pleasure, and vice versa.
demagogues
My guess is that, if you take a moment to reflect on the times in your life when you’ve really been at your best—when you’ve risen to the challenges before you, finding strength to do what might have seemed impossible—you’ll realize that the goals you achieved were connected in some way, shape, or form to the benefit of other people.
imbues
