Talent Is Overrated (10 page)

Occasionally I realize that I should stop to think about why the shot was bad. There seem to be about five thousand things you can do wrong when hitting a golf ball, so I pick one of them and work on it a bit, convincing myself that I can sense improvement, until I hit another bad one, at which point I figure I should probably also work on another one of the five thousand things. Not long thereafter the two buckets of balls are gone and I head back to the clubhouse, very much looking forward to playing an actual game of golf, and feeling virtuous for having practiced.

But in truth I have no justification for feeling virtuous. Whatever it was I was doing out on the range, and regardless of whether I call it practice, it hasn't accomplished a thing.

The concept of deliberate practice, advanced by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues and since investigated by many other researchers, is quite specific. It isn't work and isn't play, but is something entirely unto itself. We commonly use the term “practice” when talking about two domains, sports and music, but that habit can lead us astray. As already suggested, what we think of as practice frequently isn't what the researchers mean by deliberate practice. Just as important, our habitual use of the term in sports and music may stop us from thinking of how deliberate practice can be applied in other domains, such as business or science, in which we almost never think about practicing. Examples from sports and music are highly instructional because they're familiar, but I'll explain in chapters 7, 8, and 9 how the same principles can be much more widely applied. Since this activity is the essence of great performance, we have much to gain by banishing preconceptions and opening our minds to what it really is.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it's highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn't much fun.

Let's consider each of those attributes of deliberate practice and what it implies.

 
The key word in this attribute is
designed.
In the example of my pathetic routine on the driving range, I was designing my own practice activity, even though it's clear that I'm completely unqualified to do so. The mechanics of hitting golf balls have been studied for decades and are extremely well understood by those who have made it their profession, but I have virtually none of their knowledge. It's the same in almost every field: Decades or centuries of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge. At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it's almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual's performance. In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, science, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they've outgrown the benefits of a teacher's help should at least question that view. There's a reason why the world's best golfers still go to teachers.

One of those reasons goes beyond the teacher's knowledge. It's his or her ability to see you in ways that you cannot see yourself. In sports the observation is literal; I cannot see myself hitting the golf ball and would benefit greatly from someone else's perspective. In other fields the observation may be metaphorical. A chess teacher is looking at the same boards as the student but can see that the student is consistently overlooking an important threat. A business coach is looking at the same situations as a manager but can see, for example, that the manager systematically fails to communicate his intentions clearly.

It's apparent why becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going. Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject's performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible; for reasons that may be simply physical (as in sports) or deeply psychological, very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance. Even if we could, we could not design the best practice activity for that moment in our development—the type of practice that would put us on the road to achieving at the highest levels—unless we had extensive knowledge of the latest and best methods for developing people in our chosen field. Most of us don't have that knowledge.

While the best methods of development are constantly changing, they're always built around a central principle: They're meant to stretch the individual beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we've done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.

By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Examples are everywhere. The great soprano Joan Sutherland devoted countless hours to practicing her trill—and not just the basic trill, but the many different types (whole-tone, semitone, baroque). Tiger Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie. The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it's on to the next aspect.

Choosing these aspects of performance is itself an important skill. Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business school and former chief of General Electric's famous Crotonville management development center, illustrates the point by drawing three concentric circles. He labels the inner circle “comfort zone,” the middle one “learning zone,” and the outer one “panic zone.” Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That's the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily, while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don't even know how to approach them.

Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder—these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.

 
It can be repeated a lot.

 
High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts. Tiger Woods may face that buried lie in the sand only two or three times in a season, and if those were his only opportunities to work on hitting that shot, he certainly wouldn't be able to hit it very well.

Repeating a specific activity over and over is what most of us mean by practice, yet for most of us it isn't especially effective. After all, I was repeating something—hitting golf balls—on the driving range. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity in the learning zone, as discussed. My golf practice certainly failed on that criterion, since I wasn't focused on doing anything in particular. The other is the amount of repetition. Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball's greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than thirty years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night. An extreme and instructive example is the golfer Moe Norman, who played from the 1950s to the 1970s and never amounted to much on the pro tour because, for reasons of his own, he was never very interested in winning tournaments. He was just interested in hitting golf balls consistently well, and at this he may have been the greatest ever. Shot after shot was straight and just like the one before it. His practice routine from age sixteen to age thirty-two involved hitting eight hundred balls a day, five days a week. He was (perhaps obviously) obsessive about this and claimed to have kept count of all the practice balls he ever hit; by the mid-1990s he was up to four million. Top-level pro golf requires much more than just hitting straight shots, but at this particular skill, mind-boggling repetition produced amazing ability.

More generally, the most effective deliberate practice activities are those that can be repeated at high volume.

 
Feedback on results is continuously available.

 
Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs and a highly respected researcher on leadership development, says that practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can work on technique all you like, but if you can't see the effects, two things will happen: You won't get any better, and you'll stop caring.

Getting feedback on most practice activities is easy. Lift the curtain and a bowler knows immediately how he did; in sports generally, seeing the results of practice is no problem. Aspiring chess masters practice by studying chess games played by the greatest players; at each position, the student chooses a move and then gets feedback by seeing what the champion did. Difficulties arise when the results require interpretation. You may believe you played that bar of the Brahms Violin Concerto perfectly, but can you really trust your own judgment? Or you may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn't what counts. These are situations in which a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.

 
It's highly demanding mentally.

Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one's hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone's mental abilities.

The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for very long. A finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to ninety minutes. The best violinists in the Berlin study, for example, practiced about three and a half hours a day, typically in two or three sessions. Many other top-level musicians report four or five hours as their upper limit. Chess champions typically report the same amount of practice. Even elite athletes say the factor that limits their practice time is their ability to sustain concentration.

Nathan Milstein, one of the twentieth century's greatest violinists, was a student of the famous teacher Leopold Auer (the one who pronounced Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto unplayable, though he later became a big fan of it). As the story goes, Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in one and a half hours.”

What Auer didn't add is that it's a good thing one and a half hours are enough, because if you're practicing with your mind, you couldn't possibly keep it up all day.

 
It isn't much fun.

 
This follows inescapably from the other characteristics of deliberate practice, which could be described as a recipe for not having fun. Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we're good at, we insistently seek out what we're not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see—or get others to tell us—exactly what still isn't right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we've just done. We continue that process until we're mentally exhausted.

Ericsson and his colleagues stated it clearly in their article: Deliberate practice “is not inherently enjoyable.”

If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won't do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

That is a brief initial description of deliberate practice, the series of activities that seems to explain great performance most persuasively. If you work in one of the fields in which the concept of practice is most deeply entrenched—sports and music—you're probably thinking that Ericsson and his colleagues have explained and elaborated ideas that many people in your world have understood for a long time. But if you're among the far more numerous people who make a living in business-related fields, you're probably thinking: This is absolutely nothing like work!

In fact, life at most companies seems almost intended to defeat all the principles of deliberate practice.

Most fundamentally, what we generally do at work is directly opposed to the first principle: It isn't designed by anyone to make us better at anything. Usually it isn't designed at all; we're just given an objective that's necessary to meeting the employer's goals and are expected to get on with it. From the limited, short-term perspective of many employers, this is completely justified. We weren't hired so we could spend time improving our own abilities; we were hired to produce results.