Table of Contents
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour rule that states that by practicing for roughly that amount of time on any skill, you will become an expert. The original researcher Gladwell drew his conclusions from the author of Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson. Ericsson describes what it really takes to become an expert.
There are many ways in which the 10,000-hour rule was taken out of context. 10,000 hours is an obscene amount of time to spend perfecting any craft and doesn’t generalize across disciplines – becoming an expert in coding requires a lot more time than become an expert in digit memorization. 10,000 hours is only an average number, and it only applied to half of the people who Ericsson studied. In addition, it was an arbitrarily formed number. Gladwell could have just as easily used another number, but by choosing to focus on the average number of hours top performers spent practicing their craft by the age of 20, he was able to arrive at the nice, round number of 10,000. Finally, it isn’t simply practice that leads to expert level performance – but rather, deliberate practice.
Deliberate Practice
The typical pattern in learning any skill involves learning the basics first. Most people learn the basics and then, after becoming “good enough”, no longer push themselves to become better. What separates the good from the best, is that the latter are constantly engaged in activities that will push them to the next level. But that can only be achieved through deliberate practice.
A central idea of deliberate practice involves creating better mental representations of what you are doing. Top performers have a better holistic idea of what they should expect for best results. A professional soccer player, for example, can more correctly anticipate the right decisions a player should make on the field at any given moment. This allows him to set a useful standard by which to measure his own performance. An amateur soccer player is not thinking that far ahead – he is not as discerning as the professional, because he has settled for the “good enough” standard and is not pushing himself beyond it. As a result, his mental representations do not develop much further.
What allows you to develop more sophisticated mental representations is feedback and goal setting. When you implement a certain behavior, and it doesn’t yield the expected results, you are forced to change your behavior. When you receive little or infrequent feedback, your mental representations do not develop as quickly, and you are likely to stagnate or even get worse after a certain period. Hobbyists and amateurs rarely set these kinds of goals for themselves, and therefore, even if they do receive feedback – it won’t count for anything.
Doctors (but not surgeons) who spend decades on the job suffer from a similar problem that amateurs do. Because they aren’t receiving direct feedback a lot of the time to specific goals, they are unable to make the appropriate adjustments to their mental representations when they perform badly. Wine critics suffer from the same problem.
When you engage in deliberate practice, there is a specific, measurable goal you are aiming towards. And since you will receive feedback for your work, you will be able to better adjust your behavior in the future. To become better at deliberate practice, there are a few things you can do – whether you are a writer, athlete, computer programmer, or musician.
Experts and Teachers
One thing is finding an expert and studying how they perform their craft at every step. This means finding out what they are thinking about, and what they are going to do next at every point in the process.
The advantage of having a teacher is that they will give you immediate feedback and will help you improve much quicker. But there are other ways of engaging in deliberate practice. These involve finding ways of giving feedback to yourself.
Benjamin Franklin became a prolific writer by inventing ingenious ways of improving different aspects of his writing skill. For example, he tried to rewrite articles he had liked by rewriting them into a poem. This expanded his vocabulary since he had to push himself to find words to fit the rhyming scheme. By doing this, he was forced to go outside of his comfort zone and improve his vocabulary since he had to meet his end goal (finding appropriate rhyming words).
The idea is to isolate specific exercises, train yourself, and give yourself feedback – instead of writing while in a comfortable, stress free state of mind.
The Willpower Myth
Willpower doesn’t generalize across disciplines. It’s subject dependent. In other words, it’s not that some people have a lot of willpower while others don’t. It’s that people have will-power for different things. If you love reading and writing, you might have enough will power to spend hours on these activities every single day, but not enough will power to solve a single maths problem.
The Limitations of IQ
IQ only counts for initial learning period. You will learn faster if you have a higher IQ but learning consistently for a long period of time is what is required to become an expert. And a high IQ doesn’t guarantee that. In fact, it’s often a disadvantage since people with lower IQ’s are aware of their handicap and are thus willing to stick to the same problems for longer.
The message of the book is that talent is not magical. Prodigies and geniuses weren’t born with superhuman skills and we only think so because their stories are often not told accurately (Mozart). However, it’s not just practice that will get you there as Gladwell outlined in his book, Outliers. It’s deliberate practice. It requires pain, feedback, and consistency. And there’s no guarantee that putting in the time will turn you into an expert. Such a statement would require an experiment of its own. However, the book does offer a hopeful message for anyone who wants to become better at their craft in that it’s possible and very much within your reach if you are willing to commit to a plan.
Prescriptions
- It’s better to focus 100 percent for less time, than 70 percent for more time.
- Don’t just practice, deliberately practice.
- Find experts and mentors you can learn from.
- Find ways to give yourself feedback through isolated exercises.
- Keep pushing yourself to the next limit when you reach a plateau.
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I didn’t like the way the book was organized. I think people who read this book are likely to be performers of some kind who want to get better. I would have liked to see different sections for each craft. For example, a section for musicians with historical examples, experiments, and practical advice would have been much more useful than scattering these ideas across the entire book.
Peak is required reading for anyone who is serious about their craft. It does a great job at demystifying what it takes to become an expert – not by waving hopeful, feel-good, over-simplified slogans, but by prescribing solid, practical, tested advice that will push you to become better at what you do.