How the Best get Better

One of my special interests is reading research on mastery and improving personal competence. There is a lot of literature out there and one book by K. Anders Ericsson explains the importance of deliberate practice. He claims that talent is overrated and each of us determine our potential, in other words, potential is not set in stone. If we keep working, our “potential” gets greater.

Purposeful, deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.

The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

Increase in the amount of time devoted to training, combined with a growing sophistication of training techniques leads to improved results.

Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “experience” don’t lead to improvement. Automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. You have to push yourself to get better.

 Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call naïve practice, which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.

 Purposeful practice is much more deliberate, thoughtful and focused. It has the following characteristics:

- Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement.  It knows where it is going and how to get there. Developing a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change is the key.

- Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. For instance, “Play the piece (or section) all the way through at the proper speed without a single mistake three times in a row” if you are a pianist; “Learn to type at 75 words per minute with no mistakes.”.

Without such a goal, there is no way to judge whether the practice session has been a success. A well-defined, specific goal, broken down into baby steps if necessary, plus a plan: What exactly do you need to do to … (play at performance tempo/play three time without a mistake, place the golf drive 5 times to the right…) What exactly will you do to get there? You will need to figure out what is preventing you from reaching this goal.

The key thing is to take that general goal – get better – and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

- Purposeful practice is focused. You seldom improve much (if at all) without giving the task your full attention with conscious actions. You must concentrate on the specific goal for the practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.

 - You need feedback from someone – yourself, your teacher, your friend, a recording, a colleague or a parent. You have to 1) know when you are doing “it” right and, 2) you need help to find out how to do “it” correctly if you are wrong. Simple, direct feedback after every attempt – correct or incorrect, success or failure is important. “How many times did you play/type/do it correctly?”

- Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of deliberate practice. Most students show no signs of ever pushing themselves beyond what is familiar, comfortable and relatively easy. Actually, most adults don’t either!

This approach just doesn’t work.

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. Playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may accumulate many “practice” hours, but will never lead to mastery and unconscious excellence. Hitting a few balls is fun but won’t help you improve. Typing with two fingers may “work” but your typing takes much longer.

That’s a recipe for stagnation, not improvement.

Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. It means constantly trying things that are just beyond current abilities. It demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. Finding ways around barriers is one of the keys to purposeful practice.  It is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance.

People more often just give up and stop trying to improve. It’s comfortable this way.

Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is hard work, and it is generally not fun. Some people are able to motivate themselves anyway. Most don’t and never reach their full potential. 

But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

The goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis – getting out of your comfort zone -  and forcing your brain and your body to adapt.

This is how the Best get Better: goal-oriented hard work that doesn’t stop. Michael Phelps wrote in his book that he NEVER missed his workouts at the pool unless he was injured. Even then he rode the stationary bicycle, the most boring activity in the world according to him. Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh writes in “Delivering Happiness” about passionate engagement and customer oriented company culture.

Most people think that successful people were lucky or that opportunities just fell into their laps. What they don’t know is the bone-breaking work put into being a success, however you define it.

I’ve been using my personal Kanban board to improve my organization skills and get procrastinated tasks DONE. It’s fun working with the board yet the tasks remain unattractive. That’s when I can really test my ability to leave my comfort zone and use the technique of breaking obnoxious tasks into smaller chunks.