#robert pool

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.

But it was actually not until 2008, with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, that our results attracted much attention from outside the scientific community. In his discussion of what it takes to become a top performer in a given field, Gladwell offered a catchy phrase: “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” According to this rule, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields. We had indeed mentioned this figure in our report as the average number of hours that the best violinists had spent on solitary practice by the time they were twenty. Gladwell himself estimated that the Beatles had put in about ten thousand hours of practice while playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s and the Bill Gates put in roughly ten thousand hours of programming to develop his skills to a degree that allowed him to found and develop Microsoft. In general, Gladwell suggested, the same thing is true in essentially every field of human endeavour - people don’t become expert at something until they’ve put in about ten thousand hours of practice. The rule is irresistibly appealing. It’s easy to remember, for one thing. It would’ve been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours or practice at anything, you will become a master. Unfortunately this rule - which is the only thing that many people today know about the effects of practice - is wrong in several ways. (It is also correct in one important way, which I will get to shortly.) First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen - approximately seventy-four hundred hours - but he chose to refer to the total practice time they have accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go when I studied them. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they’re around thirty years old, and thus they’ve probably put in about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path. […] Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn’t actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours. Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.” […] This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualised training activities - usually done alone - that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance. The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. […] Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

But I see the core message as something else altogether: in pretty much any area of human endeavour, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you. […] There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work. One way to think about this is simply as a reflection of the fact that, to date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavour are constantly findings ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.

This, then, is what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have failed. First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else. The power in this technique is that it targets those specific problem areas that are holding you back rather than trying this and that and hoping that something works. This technique is not widely recognised, even among experienced teachers, even though it might seem obvious as described here and is a remarkably effective way to rise above plateaus.