Deliberate Practice

Talent is the possession of a repeatable skill. A talented individual can perform a skill in a specific domain over and over and over again flawlessly. How does one become talented? Is it an innate gift grown in certain individuals? Or is it built from the ground up? Talent is acquired through the concept of deliberate practice. Anyone can become talented if they put in the practice time. Not just any kind of practice but deliberate practice.

Role of Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice means pursuing a well-defined task, appropriate for the individual's level, allowing for opportunities of errors, error correction, and informative feedback. Contrast deliberate practice with playful interaction, where individuals seek simply to enjoy an activity. Deliberate practice involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback, and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. The key word is "designed." Practice is well designed when it's specific & technique-oriented with high-repetition paired with immediate feedback.

The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they're improved; then it's on to the next aspect.

The top performers practice hard, in a really specific way. Nobody makes the list of true greats effortlessly. Accomplished people devote hours upon hours to deliberate practice. This isn't just poking around on the piano because it is fun; it is consistently practicing to reach specific objectives say, to be able to play a new piece that is just beyond your reach.

Deliberate practice is repeated a lot. High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts. Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn't especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. The other is the amount of repetition.

The top performers practice consistently. K. Anders Ericsson, author of a landmark study on this topic, says "elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."

Engaging in a designed learning experience just once or twice doesn't cut it. It has to be done over and over and over again until it's automatic. That takes hours of repetition. The norm is about four hours of practice per day every day! Anders Ericsson also adds that during repetition you need to pay as much attention to the methodology as to the goal. Sloppy execution is not acceptable to top performers.

Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion - repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician - that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair pulling and fist pounding.

Here's a great way to think of it. Many people, when they want to learn how to play a guitar, pick it up and try to bang out some awful rendition of Stairway to Heaven. They'll practice at that song some, trying it over and over again, and they might eventually figure out how to make it passable, but playing anything else is going to be rather difficult and the person (unless they have obscene natural talent) will never get good enough to play in front of others and earn a positive reaction. On the other hand, if you sit down for an hour and just work on a single chord, then spend another hour just working on one other cord, then spend two or three hours alternating between the two, you'll begin to master the basics of how to actually play a lot of things. Add a third chord to that and you can play most of Tom Petty's songbook. Add a couple more and you can play virtually every well-known pop and rock song of the last sixty years.

The difference between the two approaches is that the latter one focuses solely on technique and has specific technique-oriented goals associated with it. This technique won't directly teach you how to play Stairway to Heaven, but it will teach you how to intimately know a particular chord and how to switch back and forth with other ones almost intimately, and that skill can be used to play Stairway to Heaven and any other song you might think of.

Feedback on results is continuously available. Obvious, yet not nearly as simple as it might seem, especially when results require interpretation. In many important situations, a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback. Great performance comes mostly from deliberate practice but also from another activity: regularly obtaining accurate feedback.

Every learner needs feedback. It's the only way you know whether or not you're getting close to your goal and whether or not you're executing properly. While there may come a time when you're accomplished enough to assess your own performance, you'll need a coach, mentor or some other third party to help you analyze how you did. "The development of expertise," writes Anders Ericsson and colleagues, "requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful, feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated students who seek out such feedback."

Going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls is definitely not deliberate practice. It may be fun, and you may get a bit better, but it's not the route to becoming the best you can be. There is a methodology and there is a very clear goal. More often than not a coach or teacher selects the goal and the method.

Experts are not casual about their domain. They build their lives around deliberate practice and practice every day, including weekends. But experts also report sleep and rest as critical elements of their results, and they avoid overtraining or overexertion.

Self-Regulating Deliberate Practice

Before the work. Self-regulation begins with setting goals - not big, life-directing goals, but more immediate goals for what you're going to be doing today. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome. With a goal set, the next step is planning how to reach it. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They're thinking exactly, not vaguely, of how to get where they're going.

In the research, the poorest performers don't set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.

During the work. The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers in every field use during their work is self-observation. Even in purely mental work, the best performers observe themselves closely. They are able to monitor what is happening in their own minds and ask how it's going. Researchers call this metacognition - knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it's an established part of their routine. Metacognition is important because situations change as they play out. Apart from its role in finding opportunities for practice, it plays a valuable part in helping top performers adapt to changing conditions.

After the work. Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. These must be self-evaluations; since the practice activities took place in our own minds, only we can know fully what we were attempting or judge how it turned out. Excellent performers judge themselves differently than most people do. They're more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. By contrast, the best performers judge themselves against a standard that's relevant for what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare it with the performance of competitors they're facing or expect to face; sometimes they compare it with the best known performance by anyone in the field. Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms that too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.

Characteristics of Deliberate Practice

The most cited condition concerns the subjects' motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance. In addition, the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction. The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

When these conditions are met, practice improves accuracy and speed of performance on cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks.

In the absence of adequate feedback, efficient learning is impossible and improvement only minimal even for highly motivated subjects. Hence mere repetition of an activity will not automatically lead to improvement in, especially, accuracy of performance.

To assure effective learning, subjects ideally should be given explicit instructions about the best method and be supervised by a teacher to allow individualized diagnosis of errors, informative feedback, and remedial part training. The instructor has to organize the sequence of appropriate training tasks and monitor improvement to decide when transitions to more complex and challenging tasks are appropriate. Although it is possible to generate curricula and use group instruction, it is generally recognized that individualized supervision by a teacher is superior.

Throughout development toward expert performance, the teachers and coaches instruct the individuals to engage in practice activities that maximize improvement. Given the cost of individualized instruction, the teacher designs practice activities that the individual can engage in between meetings with the teacher. We call these practice activities deliberate practice and distinguish them from other activities, such as playful interaction, paid work, and observation of others, that individuals can pursue in the domain.

Deliberate Practice Requires Commitment

As it turns out, expertise requires about ten years, or ten to twenty thousand hours of deliberate practice. This has led scholars of elite performance to speak of a 10-year rule: it seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused work to master something and bring greatness within reach. Experts-in-training allocate about four hours a day to deliberate practice.

The top performers gain experience over the long haul. Most successful people average ten years of practice and experience before becoming truly accomplished. Even child prodigies generally work at it for a decade or more. Bobby Fischer became a chess grandmaster at 16 years old, but he'd been studying since he was 7. Tiger Woods had been working on his golf game for 15 years when he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship.

Some expert domains are predominantly physical (sports and typing) while others are cognitive (chess and mental calculations). Intriguingly, the time required to become an expert is remarkably consistent across domains. Little evidence exists for expert performance before ten years of practice. The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance.

The framework explains expert performance as the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to an assessed amount of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.

Research on the effects of the time of day shows that simple perceptual-motor performance is enhanced in the afternoon and early evening, whereas intellectually demanding activities are enhanced in the morning. Systematic studies confirm that performance of elite athletes is reliably higher in the afternoon and evening than in the morning.

Deliberate Practice Grows from Environment and Encouragement

Great performers have been shown to believe that their persistent effort will lead to success; researchers call this self-efficacy. Parents and teachers can build self-efficacy in kids by giving them effective encouragement (vs. empty praise), by helping them find effective strategies for mastering an activity, and by helping kids model their practices on the behavior of others who have succeeded.

Big performers often don't display the most "talent" when they're starting out. What they do display is self-regulation, an ever-growing base of knowledge, and powerful mental models for organizing, accessing, and using that knowledge.

It helps to start young. The world's top performers more than likely started when they were children. Because it takes years of continuous deliberate practice to become world-class, it makes sense that if you want to make the Olympics at eighteen you have to start when you are six. That doesn't mean we are doomed to being average if we don't start until we are in our twenties. But it does mean that we can't expect to perform at an expert level until we're in our thirties, assuming we practice every day. It takes practice, and practice takes time.

Study so intense requires resources - time and space to work, teachers to mentor - like most elite performers, almost invariably enjoyed plentiful support in their formative years. In fact, it came to be seen that great talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement.

It helps to have support. Studies of top performers strongly suggest that you have to have a supportive environment in order to develop expertise. A supportive family is very common in the stories of world-class performers. Coaches, mentors, and teachers, while tough and demanding, are also important sources of support.

Finally, most retrospective studies have found that almost all high achievers were blessed with at least one crucial mentor as they neared maturity.

Deliberate Practice Requires a Certain Mindset

The most contentious claim made by Dr. Ericsson is that practice alone, not natural talent, makes for a record-breaking performance. "Innate capacities have very little to do with becoming a champion," said his colleague, Dr. Charness. "What's key is motivation and temperament, not a skill specific to performance. It's unlikely you can get just any child to apply themselves this rigorously for so long."

But it isn't magic, and it isn't born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery. "These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort."

Take intelligence. No accepted measure of innate or basic intelligence, whether IQ or other metrics, reliably predicts that a person will develop extraordinary ability. In other words, the IQs of the great would not predict their level of accomplishments, nor would their accomplishments predict their IQs. Studies of chess masters and highly successful artists, scientists and musicians usually find their IQs to be above average, typically in the 115 to 130 range, where some 14 per cent of the population reside - impressive enough, but hardly as rarefied as their achievements and abilities.

Focusing Your Practice. For superior performers, the goal isn't just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That's why they don't find practice boring. Each practice session, they are working on doing something better than they did the last time. By improving one specific technique at a time, you gradually improve your overall ability over time.

In fielding practice Alex Rodriguez would ask for grounders to his right and to his left, and he would ask for fielders at second for a double play and at first for throws across the diamond. In batting practice, he would focus on specific disciplines - grounders the other way, liners to the gaps, and so on.

It's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job; you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Practice can build new thought patterns-and can also reinforce existing thought patterns. By doing something over and over or repeatedly thinking about something in a specific way, you actually change the way your mind works. Remember that the goal of practice is to stretch yourself and to increase your control over your performance.

During deliberate practice experts work on their weaknesses and not just on their strengths. These days we hear a lot how we should ignore our weaknesses or find someone else who's good at what we aren't. That message is not consistent with what those who study expertise have found. To quote Anders Ericsson: "Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well-or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can't do that you turn into the expert you want to become."

Deliberate Practice is Mentally Demanding

It's highly demanding mentally. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one's hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone's mental abilities.

It's hard. This follows inescapably from the other characteristics of deliberate practice, which could be described as a recipe for not having fun. Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we're good at, we insistently seek out what we're not good at.

While we should absolutely love what we do, deliberate practice is not designed to be fun. What keeps the top performers going during the often-grueling practice sessions is not the fun that they are having, but the knowledge that they are improving and getting closer to their dream of superior performance.

It requires intense concentration and focus. Even when the type of activity requires intense physical effort - as in athletic sports - the limiting factor is often more mental than physical. It seems that we are more likely to tire from mental strain than physical strain. That's why deliberate practice sessions are often only about two to four hours.

What you want - really, deeply want - is fundamental because deliberate practice is an investment: The costs come now, the benefits later. The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort until the payoff starts to arrive. But if you're pursuing something that you don't truly want and are competing against others whose desire is deep, you can guess the outcome.

What do you really believe? Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work, and do it with intense focus for years on end, your performance will eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there's a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance. But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, then there's no chance at all that you will do the work. What you really believe about the source of great performance thus becomes the foundation of all you will ever achieve.

Deliberate Practice Improves the Mind in its Domain

Whenever you get the chance, try to work on your cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities allow us to process the sensory information we collect, giving us the ability to analyze, evaluate, retain information, recall experiences, make comparisons, and determine action. By practicing to increase your cognitive ability, you'll be better prepared for all the other tasks you perform.

Current theories propose that initial performance is mediated by sequential processes, which with additional practice are transformed into a single direct (automatic) retrieval of the correct response from memory.

Evidence suggests that performance during the initial, middle, and final phase of skill acquisition is correlated with different types of abilities in each phase, initial performance being correlated with general cognitive abilities and final performance with perceptual-motor abilities.

It is plausible that after extended practice, the ultimate reaction time on a simple task depends on the speed of the neural and motor components of the response process in a simple reaction.

The important implication is that experts can circumvent any basic limits on the serial motor processes constraining a novice by using advance cues to prepare movements. What distinguishes expert performers is mostly more and better-organized knowledge, which had to have been acquired. Most important, expertise shows that experts can acquire cognitive skills enabling them to circumvent the limits of short-term memory capacity and serial reaction time.

So what do elite performers attain through all that deliberate practice and sensitive mentoring? What makes a genius? The crème de la crème appear to develop several important cognitive skills. The first, called "chunking", is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns.

Apart from chunking, the elite also learn to identify quickly which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory. This lets them create a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practiced, allowing them to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships.

Its models agree nicely with what neuroscience has discovered about how we learn. Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for discovering much of the neural basis of memory and learning, has shown that both the number and strength of the nerve connections associated with a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often and how emphatically the lesson is repeated. So focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise. Genetics may allow one person to build synapses faster than another, but either way the lesson must still be learnt. Genius must be built.

This ability to place information into patterns, or chunks, vastly improves memory skills. By practicing in this way, performers delay the automation process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.