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by
Daniel Coyle
Read between
May 18 - June 16, 2015
Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.
The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.
“It's all about finding the sweet spot,” Bjork said. “There's an optimal gap between what you know and what you're trying to do. When you find that sweet spot, learning takes off.”*
The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid—namely, mistakes—and turns them into skills.
Link's trainer permitted pilots to practice more deeply, to stop, struggle, make errors, and learn from them.
“Journalists fly here, go to the beach, they take pictures and write stories. But great players don't come from the beach. They come from the futsal court.
Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600 percent more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game
The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.
Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin.
Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.
Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent? A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it, you'll never work hard enough to be great.
When a coach uses the phrase “muscle memory,” he is actually talking about circuits; by themselves, our muscles are as useful as a puppet without strings. As Dr. Fields puts it, our skills are all in our wires.
The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we're aware that we're using it.
a skill, once gained, feels utterly natural, as if it's something we've always possessed.
When a nerve fiber fires, the oligo senses it, grabs hold, and starts wrapping.
it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.
Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break.
the myelin model shows that certain hotbeds succeed not only because people there are trying harder but also because they are trying harder in the right way—practicing more deeply and earning more skill.
Ericsson called this process “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses.
Florence. In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present-day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known. A solitary genius is easy to understand, but dozens of them, in the space of two generations? How could it happen?
This system created a chain of mentoring: da Vinci studied under Verrocchio, Verrocchio studied under Donatello, Donatello studied under Ghiberti; Michelangelo studied under Ghirlandaio, Ghirlandaio studied under Baldovinetti, and so on, all of them frequently visiting one another's studios in a cooperative-competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking.*3
“The apprenticeship system, with its long period of study, early acquaintance with varied materials, copying, and collaborative work, somehow allowed boys who were probably quite ordinary in every respect to be turned into men possessing a high degree of artistic skill,” wrote Bruce Cole in The Renaissance Artist at Work.
But they had one thing in common: they all spent thousands of hours inside a deep-practice hothouse, firing and optimizing circuits, correcting errors, competing, and improving skills. They each took part in the greatest work of art anyone can construct: the architecture of their own talent.
“Why is wisdom most often found in older people? Because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly available to them; they can do very complicated processing on many levels, which is really what wisdom is.
Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals
although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might ever presume to guess.
Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.
Your skill at reading, at its essence, is the skill of packing and unpacking chunks—or to put it in myelin terms, of firing patterns of circuits—at lightning speed.
The fluency happens when the gymnast repeats the movements often enough that he knows how to process those chunks as one big chunk,
In the talent hotbeds I visited, the chunking takes place in three dimensions. First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture.
“We're prewired to imitate,” Anders Ericsson says. “When you put yourself in the same situation as an outstanding person and attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on your skill.
going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything.
Second, going slow helps the practicer to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill's internal blueprints—the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.
learning that goes on when people observe, judge, and strategize their own performance—when they, in essence, coach themselves. Zimmerman's interest in this type of learning, known as self-regulation
Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading, imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit.
Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.
feeling of reaching, falling short, and reaching again.
Robert Bjork's idea of the sweet spot: that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp. Deep
According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state.
The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.
“We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It's all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.
What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.
Future belonging is a primal cue: a simple, direct signal that activates our built-in motivational triggers, funneling our energy and attention toward a goal.
same universal principles that govern all of us: (1) talent requires deep practice; (2) deep practice requires vast amounts of energy; (3) primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy.
talented not only because they were born that way but also because at some mysterious point they caught on to a powerful idea, an idea that originated in the flow of images and signals around them, those tiny sparks that set them alight.
ignited by primal cues of scarcity and belonging.
Engblom pauses, thinks deeply, and issues his wisdom. “Here's the deal. You've got to give kids credit at a younger age for feeling stuff more acutely. When you say something to a kid, you've got to know what you're saying to them. The stuff you say to a kid starting out—you got to be supercareful, unowaime? What skill-building really is, is confidence-building. First they got to earn it, then they got it. And once it gets lit, it stays lit pretty good.
“When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote, “we tell them that's the name of the game: look smart, don't risk making mistakes.
praise was not constant but was given only when it was earned—a finding that dovetails with the research of Dweck, who notes that motivation does not increase with increased levels of praise but often dips.
the message from Dweck and the hotbeds is clear: high motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle.
