Deliberate Practice, the most effective means of improving performance, is characterized by the following general principles:
- Identify experts who consistently perform better than their peers
- Understand as much as possible about the skills, particularly mental representations (*), that these experts use; focus on what this person does differently from others that could explain their superior performance
- Establish a plan for which skills to build in which order
- Break every expert skill into a series of steps to master. Pursue each skill with practice activities designed by a teacher or coach. Ensure each activity has specific, measurable goals.
- Get in plenty of repetitions with frequent, immediate feedback from a coach to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.
- Practice for at least an hour each day. However, restrict practice sessions to one-hour, taking breaks in between if you do more.
- Stay highly-focused and outside of your comfort zone, constantly challenged but not too much. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period.
(*) Mental representations look different in different domains. For example,
- Chess: Sequences employed by grandmasters
- Music: A “feel” for what a piece should sound like
- Competitive number memorization: Associating numbers with more efficient structured already encoded in long term memory. For instance, a competitive runner participating in a memory contest might encode the sequence 4-1-5 as “a very good mile time of 4:15.”
- Dance: Visualization/“mental run-through” of the performance
Additional Insights:
- There is no such thing a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable and training can create skills — such as perfect pitch — that did not exist before.
- There is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces.
- There is no evidence that any otherwise normal people are born without the innate talent to sing or do math or perform any other skill.
- Trying hard isn’t enough. Pushing yourself to your limits isn’t enough.
- Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training.
- As with the violinists, the only significant factor determining an individual ballet dancer’s ultimate skill level was the total number of hours devoted to practice.
- The most effective interventions, Davis found, were those that had some interactive component — role-play, discussion groups, case solving, hands-on training, and the like. Attending lectures, minicourses, and the like offers little or no feedback and little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, correct the mistakes, and gradually develop a new skill.
- Training should focus on doing rather than on knowing. And when referring to improving performance in a professional or business setting, the right question is, How do we improve the relevant skills? rather than, How do we teach the relevant knowledge?
- Generally speaking, teachers will only be able to guide you to the level that they or their previous students have attained. If you’re a flat-out beginner, any reasonably skilled teacher will do, but once you’ve been training for a few years, you’ll need a teacher who is more advanced. A good teacher should also have some skill and experience in teaching in that field. It’s particularly important to query a prospective teacher about practice exercises. No matter how many sessions a week you have with an instructor, most of your effort will be spent practicing by yourself, doing exercises that your teacher has assigned.
- 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.
- 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. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that — and when you’re first starting out, it’s likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.
- Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn’t introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general.
- Creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool