Deliberate practice in a nutshell.
One of these days I’ll review Talent Is Overrated at length. (You may recall that it’s been on my desk for a while.) Meanwhile, here’s a short distillation of the core ideas on “deliberate practice” that Geoff Colvin captures in that book — and that Prof. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues laid out in their research.
Talent isn’t the issue — well-designed practice IS. Practice is well-designed when it’s:
- specific & technique-oriented
- high-repetition
- paired with immediate feedback.
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
- powerful mental models for organizing / accessing / using that knowledge.
That’s it. Don’t worry about how much talent you have for whatever-it-is you’re passionate about. Just start practicing better.
Fellow deliberate practice buffs: have I captured the key ideas here?
~
Related posts:
- Deliberate practice in the working world. (Big omnibus post, lots of links to other reading.)
- The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
- This is how you get better: deliberate practice.
~
Image by Vincent Liu, used under a Creative Commons license.
Category: Productivity, The business brainIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
18 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
“Fellow deliberate practice buffs: have I captured the key ideas here?”
No, but keep at it. You’re getting closer ;)
Just kidding. Great post, as always.
[...] and from Tim Walker: DP in a nutshell [...]
[...] the devotion that Gladwell and I share for Anders Ericsson’s work on “deliberate practice” and the enormous effort it requires, I’m all in favor of praising effort at every turn. Too [...]
My review “Talent is Overrated is overrated and overpriced” is at http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/01/16/book-review-talent-is-overrated-is-overrated-and-overpriced.aspx
[...] by Geoff Colvin. It’s a good book, albeit with flaws, that has lots of important ideas about “deliberate practice.” But the review I have in mind would probably rival my Russian-novel-esque treatment of Edward [...]
[...] (If you’re new to the topic of “deliberate practice,” you might want to start here.) [...]
One addendum I’d make is the principle of progressive practice (if you’ll pardon the alliteration). That is, mastering skills not only from easiest to most difficult (seems like basic sense, but many practice in an erratic order, sort of similar to one’s eyes being too big for one’s stomach), but practicing skills first that naturally precede others. For example, when learning a wind instrument, you practice tone before rhythm; it’s not necessarily “easier”, per se, but tone is foundational. And you practice 8th notes before 16th notes, double-tonguing before triple-tonguing, etc.
[...] to Dave Livingston — who shares my interest in “deliberate practice” – for the tip on [...]
[...] and if you detect a connection to my many discussions of deliberate practice . . . you’re [...]
I would have to agree, no matter what ones talent is one has to work on it to make it better to achieve ones full potential.
You need a love for the craft and motivation to engage in long term arduous sometimes boring repetitious practice to develop and that’s why not every one can do it.
Having said that
You can train 3 hours a day for ten years your voice will never be like Whitney’s
On another note
Michael Schumacher and Ralf Schumacher must have had the same or similar number of hours and possibly followed the path laid by Michael but hmm.. Michael was just a better racer
Still hard work will make you an expert don’t know whether it makes you talented though
WHY do people persist in the kind of comments that mmapundit (no offense intended, it’s a very often posted opinion in discussions of these matters) makes in discussions of this finding? (That is, with respect to ~10,000 hours of deliberate practice leading to greatness.) “Yeah, but you’ll never be a ______.” The ENTIRE POINT of the research is that YES you would be a _______ if you could figure out how to do those 10,000 hours! There’s nothing straight-forward about that proposition, but there is some sort of hero-worship that people get into with their favorite “great talent” that makes it impossible for them to consider the idea. Or else, the certainty that the result is wrong comes from having seen others or tried themselves to master something and watched as someone else seemed to effortlessly excel.
I think we are coming to WRONG conclusions about skill and talent *all the time* in our day-to-day lives. The way we understand “talent” has some cultural currency, it elevates those said to have it, and it excuses our not really wanting to practice (as when we are put in a situation where practice is called upon that does not motivate us). And, **there** is another key question that often gets left out: motivation to practice. The most talented piano player I know — a successful, fulltime concert career with multiple CD’s — describes the joy he felt in his earliest memories of access to a piano. He *wanted* badly to play with the thing and probably put in his first 10,000 hours before he could read and write.
I think the true story of talent probably goes something more like this: those of us that are lucky are exposed to something that captures our interest and motivates us especially while we are very young and can approach it with simplicity and near zero expectations. If the opportunity exists in our local environment for us to continue to practice that thing and if there is a path toward more and more sophisticated deliberate practice as our skills improve, we become extremely talented in that area. Most of us are not so lucky – that’s quite a stack of circumstances that have to align. By the time we are older and taking our cues more from witnessing accomplished, skilled performers than from our first-hand, simple interaction with media and tools, our chances of finding the opportunity to repeat this process (low expectations at the outset, time and support for nearly obsessive practice going forward) become much less. Plus it’s not just that we don’t have the time and freedom, it’s also that we get our heads filled with garbage narrative explanations of what this or that “takes” and how if you’re not “a natural” you might as well not try, etc. It becomes very hard to find ones way back to a simple joyful interaction and natural progression of skill.
I wonder if we can change that? It seems to me the piece most missing in these discussions is the discovery phase — how to find out what intrinsically motivates you in its primitive state and how to get on a path of progressive deliberate practice of exactly that. Please post if you know of any research or popular-press books that approach these issues from this angle — otherwise, I think I may have just outlined my next book (publishers take note, I’m always open to contract discussions).
Interesting comment, tallison.
Everything I’ve read & seen suggests that there are *some* things for which natural talent is a must. E.g. you’ll never play on an NFL offensive line if you’re 5′6″ — no matter how hard you work.
BUT, these instances are actually pretty few — fewer than we’re prone to think — and they’re usually arbitrary. (E.g. what makes a good O-lineman is a very, very tightly limited set of parameters that are arbitrary in the grand scheme of life.)
The 5′6″ guy still might play in the NFL — he’ll just need to play a different position, and he’ll have to compensate for a lack of height in other ways.
For the mainstream activities that many of us pursue (business, relationships, fitness, music, etc.), the sky’s the limit, and deliberate practice is the vehicle to take us there.
But, Tim, who *ever* called being tall “a talent”? Sure, you probably have to have your legs to be a world class ballet dancer, but, again, that is seldom the sort of thing people are talking about by “talent” (having your legs, not skill at ballet ;)). There may even be some anatomical subtleties that contribute to greatness in certain domains (long arms giving leverage to a quarterback to throw especially far, tremendous hand span giving a pianist a boost, etc) – but I would say in most ativities its clear that a wide range of “body types” can be successful — even successful at a world class level.
Aside from absolute physical barriers (vision for playing baseball, for example) – many of which are being overcome all the time, I think the research is pretty conclusive that this thing we – for some reason – like to attribute to the mysterious attribute called “talent”, really is just the result of a tremendous amount of the right kind of practice.
I suspect that what lies behind most stories of “natural talent” lies in the arena of the stuff we just don’t know about other people. If we all show up on the playing field at the same time and most of us are at a certain skill level, but one guy is light-years ahead, we have this convenient narrative of “inborn talent” to explain the difference. We DON’T tend to look into it much and try to figure out how it is that he or she was encouraged from a very early age to do this thing and/or loved doing some part of it and has had 1,000’s of hours more deliberate practice than everybody else.
I wish I understood why the “talent” story is so much more appealing… The research would appear to pretty clearly contradict it in the domains so far examined.
I think you nailed it with “convenient narrative.”
BTW, it is common, in my experience and many others’, to hear things like height mentioned in terms of talent — or, at least, invoked in the negative. E.g., “I could never be a great [basketball player, pianist, ballerina] because I lack the [height, handspan, frame] for it.”
The problem is, there *are* certain things for which you either have the genetic predisposition or you don’t — e.g. the tiny frame size that is an absolute requirement for a ballerina, or the huge frame size that is an absolute requirement for being an NFL lineman. BUT, despite the prominence of examples like these — especially when they translate to success in professional sports — they are in fact edge cases when we consider the whole realm of talent. Ballet arbitrarily favors tiny frame sizes for ballerinas, football arbitrarily favors huge frame sizes for lineman, basketball arbitrarily favors very tall frames for frontcourt positions, etc. But in the rest of life — that is, MOST of life — there’s a much wider range of possibilities in play.
Keep this in mind, too: you and I (and Malcolm Gladwell, Geoff Colvin, Carol Dweck, Anders Ericsson, et al.) take these observations to be obvious. But we’re running counter to *millennia* of history during which the prevailing narrative has said that some people are “touched by God,” favored by genetics, etc. to perform at the highest levels. It will take a while to erode that way of thinking.
Tim has expressed my thoughts with much more detail.What I stated was not meant to be a diminish the importance of deliberate right practice but to point out that if you bring to people to a situation where they both undergo thr right kind of deliberate practice for the right length of time they may both become experts or world class performers.But the one with the natural genetic disposition (as Tim put it) for the activity will consistently come out on top in competition.
I was deliberate in picking Ralf and Michael Schumacher for my example since they are both from the same family in the same sport and have had the right kind of deliberate practice and hence both become World Class performers at their sport ie Formula One motor racing and yet Michaels results have been far better than Ralf’s.
Perhaps if they had both gone into golf or some other sport,for want of a better example,Ralfs results may have been better,cause he may have had the better disposition–just example.
Trust me I am a strong believer in the 10 year finding.In fact I observed it without knowing years ago when I realized that most of the world tennis champions started winning majors aroun 19 and 20 after having started playing seriously around 9 or 10.
Any way great discussion
Doug Flutie never should have been a quarterback. He was much too short.
Good point, Jason!