How to Get Really Good at What You Do
How can we build our skills to achieve expert performance?
Bill has been practicing chess since he was 20 when he learned the game at University. Now in his 30’s, he enjoys playing with friends and can achieve a few victories even. However, his performance is not exceptional by any standards.
In the initial months, he practiced with his room-mate, a regional champion, and saw rapid progress in learning the game.
Yet, he reached a plateau eventually and got stuck ever since.
In the last couple of years, he has tried to up his game. He signed up on the website chess.com to play online games with people all over the world and has spent quite a few evenings playing online. He enjoys playing the game a lot. However, the additional time spent playing the game has not lead to almost any growth.
How can we help Bill improve his chess game?
The science of Deliberate Practice
In the study of expert performance, the most significant questions are:
How do experts get exceptional at what they do?
What is the best approach to achieve continuous improvement at any skill?
The science of how we can improve at a skill has been studied exhaustively. The late professor Anders Ericsson was a pioneer in the field of research in the development of expertise. He suggested that when trying to get better at a skill, the type of practice you do matters a lot.
Three types of practice
Let’s compare the three types of practice:
1. Playing the game
First, there is playing the game. When you play, there is no real target for improvement, besides trying to win.
As Bill is playing a game of chess, if he makes a mistake — say wrongly attacking with the queen during the opening sequence, and he does not correct this, he will likely make the same error again the next day if given the chance. He is not improving.
2. Purposeful practice
The second type of practice is purposeful practice. Here, you pick a target, which is something you want to improve and find activities that help you improve that target.
Seeing no results with just playing chess games, Bill has decided he wants to improve his skills in chess. To do this, he has made a list of related youtube videos to watch and even signed up for one of Garry Kasparov’s masterclasses, to gain a better overview and various strategies he can use.
Although purposeful practice is much better than just playing the game, this is still not the optimal improvement strategy.
3. Deliberate practice
According to Anders Ericsson, the best way to improve a skill is Deliberate practice.
A)
The main differentiator with purposeful practice is that deliberate practice requires the guidance of a teacher that has experience helping people reach very high levels of performance.
Effectively, you are asking someone who has already figured out what skills need to be improved and how to improve them, to supervise you and guide you with effective training strategies.
This is, for example, why music performance has improved so dramatically in the last 80–100 years, as students are taught by teachers who follow highly structured methods such as the Suzuki Method for teaching music.
B)
Furthermore, deliberate practice requires well defined, specific goals that aim to improve a specific target of the skill you are trying to improve.
This is a common mistake people make. They say that they want to improve something in general, instead of picking a specific aspect of the skill they want to develop and working on that.
To get accurate feedback, the goal of what you are trying to improve must have specific success criteria — which is why you need to focus on a specific skill
C)
Deliberate practice also requires the student to try and push themselves outside their comfort zone and try things that are outside their current abilities.
If you are always doing things that are comfortable, then the body will not adapt to the new level of what you are trying to achieve. It will remain on autopilot.
Now that Bill has learned about deliberate practice, he finally decided to work with a chess coach at the local chess club.
They agreed to meet weekly and initially to focus on improving Bill’s openings, that is the first few moves once a new game starts. The coach gave Bill some instructional materials and also asked him to send recordings of his games, which he is playing online, to study and give him feedback.
Amount of work — the 10.000 hours rule
There is a second element in Anders Ericsson’s Deliberate Practice theory.
It says that reaching an expert level often requires a lot of deliberate practice.
You may have heard of this as the rule of 10.000 hours, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”.
When Anders Ericsson studied expert performers, such as expert violinists at an elite music school in Germany, he often found that the best performers had accumulated more than 10.000 hours of practice by the age of 20.
But not any kind of practice is sufficient. If you are practicing mindlessly for 10.000 hours while making the same mistakes, you will not improve.
You need to engage in Deliberate Practice — that is, practice in full concentration that aims to improve your skill incrementally by pushing your limits, performed under the supervision of a teacher or mentor.
Summary
In summary, Anders Ericsson says that:
Experts are made, not born.
The secret to truly superior performance, therefore, is:
1) Practicing for a long time, often more than 10.000 hours, to reach expert status
2) The quality of practice.
You need to engage in Deliberate practice, that is practice that:
- Has well defined, specific goals and often aims to improve specific aspects of the target performance (not “overall improvement”)
- Pushes you outside your comfort zone and continuously try tasks that are beyond your abilities
- Keeps you practicing with full attention and without any distractions — what Cal Newport calls Deep Work mode
- Having a teacher or coach who can recommend the appropriate practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
- Receiving timely feedback to improve incrementally
- Through this process, building new mental models. These allow you to reach new and higher levels of expert performance
Bill now knows how he can improve his chess game and has the support and guidance of his chess teacher. It is now up to him to put in the right kind of effort — start logging in his 10.000 hours to achieve his goal.
Question:
- What is one area of your life that you would like to implement the theory of Deliberate Practice, to improve?
- What is one skill that you can practice using this framework? How can you get expert guidance from a teacher?
You can also enjoy a narrated and animated version of this article:
