#anders ericsson

Consider this: Most people live lives that are not particularly physically challenging. They sit at a desk, or if they move around, it’s not a lot. They aren’t running and jumping, they aren’t lifting heavy objects or throwing things long distances, and they aren’t performing manoeuvres that require tremendous balance and coordination. Thus they settle into a low level of physical capabilities - enough for day-to-day activities and maybe even hiking or biking or playing golf or tennis on the weekends, but far from the level of physical capabilities that a highly trained athlete possesses. These “normal” people cannot run a mile in under five minutes or ten miles in under an hour; they cannot throw a baseball three hundred feet or hit a golf ball three hundred yards; they cannot do triple gainers off the high board or triple axels on ice skates or triple backflips in a gymnastics floor routine. These are the sorts of things that require far more practice than most people are willing to devote, but - and this is important - they are also the sorts of abilities that can be developed because the human body is so adaptable and responsive to training. The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in, from writing a report to driving a car, from teaching a class to running an organisation, from selling houses to performing brain surgery. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or white matter or to rewire entire sections in the way that an aspiring London taxi driver or violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

“But the clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of “gifted” people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.”

Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don’t feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and - particularly for people shooting to become expert performers - that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality. One of Sweden’s most famous athletes, the middle-distance runner Gunder Hägg, who broke fifteen world records in the early 1940s, grew up with his father, a lumberjack, in an isolated part of northern Sweden. In his early teen years Gunder loved running in the woods, and he and his father became curious about how fast he could run. They found a route that has about fifteen hundred meters long, and Gunder ran that course while his father measured his time with an alarm clock. When Gunder was done, his father told him that he finished the distance in 4 minutes, 50 seconds - a remarkably good time for that distance in the woods. As he would later recall in his autobiography, Gunder was inspired by his performance to believe he had a bright future as a runner, so he started training more seriously, and indeed he did go on to become one of the world’s premier runners. It was only many years later that his father confessed to him that the actual time on that day was 5 minutes, 50 seconds and that he had exaggerated Gunder’s speed because he was worried that Gunder had lost some of his passion for running and needed to be encouraged.     […] Belief is important. You may not be lucky enough to have someone do for you what Hägg’s father did for him, but you can certainly take a lesson from the expert performers that [Benjamin] Bloom studied: if you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quiet. You probably won’t.

How do you keep going? That is perhaps the biggest question that anyone engaged in purposeful or deliberate practice will eventually face. Getting started is easy, as anyone who has visited a gym after New Year’s knows. You decide that you want to get in shape or learn to play the guitar or pick up a new language, and so you jump right in. It’s exciting. It’s energising. You can imagine how good it will feel to be twenty pounds lighter or to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Then after a while reality hits. It’s hard to find the time to work out or practice as much as you should, so you start missing sessions. You’re not improving as fast as you thought you would. It stops being fun, and your resolve to reach your goal weakens. Eventually you stop altogether, and you don’t start up again. Call it “the New Year’s resolution effect” - it’s why gyms that were crowded in January are only half full in July and why so many slightly used guitars are available on Craigslist. So that’s the problem in a nutshell: purposeful practice is hard work. It’s hard to keep going, and even if you keep up your training - you go to the gym regularly, or you practice the guitar for a certain number of hours every week - it’s hard to maintain focus and effort, so you may eventually stop pushing yourself and stop improving. The question is, What can you do about it? […] Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. It may seem natural to assume that these people who maintain intense practice schedules for years have some rare gift of willpower or “grit” or “stick-to-itiveness” that the rest of us just lack, but that would be a mistake for two very compelling reasons. First, there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general “willpower” that can be applied in any situation. […] But there is a bigger, second problem with the concept of willpower, one related to the myth of natural talent. Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact: Jason is an incredible tennis player, so he must have been born with this natural talent. Jackie practiced the violin for years, several hours each day, so she must have incredible willpower. In neither case can we make this determination ahead of time with any likelihood of being right, and in neither case has anyone ever identified any genes that underlie these supposed innate characteristics, so there is no more scientific evidence for the existence of individual genes that determine willpower than is for the existence of genes that are necessary for succeeding in chess or piano-playing. Furthermore, once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about: If you don’t have innate musical talent, forget about ever being a good musician. If you don’t have enough willpower, forget about ever being a good musician. If you don’t have enough willpower, forget about ever taking on something that will require a great deal of hard work. This sort of circular thinking - “The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing” - is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try. It is much more useful, I believe, to talk about motivation. Motivation is quite different from willpower. We all have various motivations - some stronger, some weaker - at various times and in various situations. The most important question to answer then becomes, What factors shape motivation? By asking such a question, we can home in on the factors that might boost the motivation of our employees, children, students, and ourselves. […] As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to involve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration. Maintaining the motivation that enables such a regimen has two parts: reasons to keep going and reasons to stop. When you quit something that you had initially wanted to do, it’s because the reasons to stop eventually came to outweigh the reasons to continue. 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.

To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components the you can do repeatedly and analyse effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them. […] Despite the first word in the term “mental representation”, pure mental analysis is not nearly enough. We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat - over and over again. 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.