Introduction: The Gift (Location 56)
Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential. (Location 191)
Want to improve your tennis game? Deliberate practice. Your writing? Deliberate practice. (Location 234)
1 (Location 242)
The Power of Purposeful Practice (Location 243)
But before we delve into the details of deliberate practice, it will be best if we spend a little time understanding some more basic types of practice—the sorts of practice that most people have already experienced in one way or another. (Location 386)
THE USUAL APPROACH (Location 389)
We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic. And there’s nothing wrong with that. (Location 413)
But there is one very important thing to understand here: once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving. (Location 417)
Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call “naive practice,” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance. (Location 437)
Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Our hypothetical music student would have been much more successful with a practice goal something like this: “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row.” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success. (Location 458)
Purposeful practice is focused. (Location 472)
Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong. (Location 487)
Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice. (Location 498)
pianist playing the same songs the same way for thirty years. That is a recipe for stagnation, not improvement. (Location 525)
THE LIMITS OF PURPOSEFUL PRACTICE (Location 580)
2 Harnessing Adaptability (Location 629)
This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination. But there is a catch: once the compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the physical activity that had previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving. (Location 842)
Could it be that people like Einstein are simply born with beefier-than-usual inferior parietal lobules and thus have some innate capacity to be good at mathematical thinking? You might think so, but the researchers who carried out the study on the size of that part of the brain in mathematicians and nonmathematicians found that the longer someone had worked as a mathematician, the more gray matter he or she had in the right inferior parietal lobule—which would suggest that the increased size was a product of extended mathematical thinking, not something the person was born with. (Location 905)
The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” (Location 961)
MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS (Location 1110)
A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting in their minds; (Location 1111)
Any relatively complicated activity requires holding more information in our heads than short-term memory allows, so we are always building mental representations of one sort or another without even being aware of it. Indeed, without mental representations we couldn’t walk (Location 1157)
The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties. (Location 1175)
RECOGNIZING AND RESPONDING TO PATTERNS (Location 1181)
MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS IN LEARNING (Location 1386)
4 The Gold Standard (Location 1486)
This is part of a general pattern. In every area, some approaches to training are more effective than others. In this chapter we’ll explore the most effective method of all: deliberate practice. It is the gold standard, the ideal to which anyone learning a skill should aspire. (Location 1497)
A HIGHLY DEVELOPED FIELD (Location 1500)
We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And, second, even among these gifted musicians—all of whom had been admitted to the best music academy in Germany—the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were on average more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing. (Location 1644)
THE PRINCIPLES OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE (Location 1679)
benefited from many decades or even centuries of steady improvement, with each generation passing on the lessons and skills it has learned to the next—the approach to individualized practice is amazingly uniform. No matter where you look—musical performance, ballet, or sports such as figure skating or gymnastics—you will find that training follows a very similar set of principles. That study of the Berlin violin students introduced me to this sort of practice, which I named “deliberate practice,” and I have since studied it in many other fields. When my colleagues and I published our results on the violin students, we described deliberate practice as follows. We began by noting that the levels of performance in such areas as musical performance and sports activities have increased greatly over time, and that as individuals have developed greater and more complex skills and performance, teachers and coaches have developed various methods to teach these skills. The improvement in performance generally has gone hand in hand with the development of teaching methods, and today anyone who wishes to become an expert in these fields will need an instructor’s help. Because few students can afford a full-time teacher, the standard pattern is to have a lesson once or a few times in a week, with the teachers assigning practice activities the student is expected to perform between lessons. These (Location 1680)
In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. (Location 1692)
Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others. (Location 1700)
Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there. (Location 1705)
In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. (Location 1802)
Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start. (Location 1845)
NO, THE TEN-THOUSAND-HOUR RULE ISN’T REALLY A RULE (Location 1862)
5 Principles of Deliberate Practice on the Job (Location 1944)
We know now from studies of deliberate practice that the pilots learned best when they were pushed out of their comfort zones. (Location 2012)
What I do mean is that if you follow the principles of deliberate practice you can develop ways to identify the top performers in a field and train other, lesser performers and bring them up closer to that top level. And by doing that it is possible to raise the performance level of an entire organization or profession. (Location 2015)
6 Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life (Location 2394)
Deliberate practice is for everyone who dreams. It’s for anyone who wants to learn how to draw, to write computer code, to juggle, to play the saxophone, to pen “the Great American Novel.” It’s for everyone who wants to improve their poker game, their softball skills, their salesmanship, their singing. It’s for all those people who want to take control of their lives and create their own potential and not buy into the idea that this right here, right now, is as good as it gets. This chapter is for them. (Location 2414)
FIRST, FIND A GOOD TEACHER (Location 2418)
Per was taking just such a class, so I suggested he get some personal sessions with a coach who could give advice tailored to Per’s performance. (Location 2430)
Just because they themselves can do it doesn’t mean they can teach others how to do it. (Location 2450)
Remember: one of the most important things a teacher can do is to help you develop your own mental representations so that you can monitor and correct your own performance. (Location 2463)
ENGAGEMENT (Location 2471)
This goes back to the basic principle we talked about in the first chapter—the importance of engaging in purposeful practice instead of mindless repetition without any clear plan for getting better. (Location 2477)
whatever you are doing, focus on it. (Location 2494)
Instead of letting her mind wander, she could be focusing on her technique, trying to make each stroke as close to perfect as possible. (Location 2512)
Franklin decided that he would like to write that well, but he had no one to teach him how. What could he do? (Location 2548)
Note: Frnkin te hes hself to.wrtiye ce bck to hereeeeee
The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better. (Location 2576)
What we learned from Steve’s experience holds true for everyone who faces a plateau: the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way. Bodybuilders, for instance, will change the types of exercises they are doing, increase or decrease the weight they’re lifting or the number of repetitions, and switch up their weekly routine. (Location 2665)
There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door. (Location 2922)
7 The Road to Extraordinary (Location 2924)
throwing a ball, swinging a racket, organizing marbles (Location 2993)
but it now appears that at least some adults can develop perfect pitch. (Location 3269)
8 But What About Natural Talent? (Location 3331)
As we discussed in chapter 5, a major difference between the deliberate-practice approach and the traditional approach to learning lies with the emphasis placed on skills versus knowledge—what you can do versus what you know. Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills; knowledge should never be an end in itself. Nonetheless, deliberate practice results in students picking up quite a lot of knowledge along the way. (Location 3981)
When preparing a lesson plan, determining what a student should be able to do is far more effective than determining what that student should know. It then turns out that the knowing part comes along for the ride. (Location 3993)
Again, this is a classic deliberate-practice approach: when teaching a skill, break the lesson into a series of steps that the student can master one at a time, building from one to the next to reach the ultimate objective. While this sounds very similar to the scaffolding approach used in traditional education, it differs crucially in its focus on understanding the necessary mental representations at each step of the way and making sure that the student has developed the appropriate representations before moving to the next step. (Location 3996)
The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job. (Location 4120)