Deliberate Practice: Learn Like an Expert

Inside the system that successful people use to accelerate learning and achieve more

By Janie Kliever, https://medium.com/@janie.k/deliberate-practice-learn-like-an-expert-cc3114b8a10e

In Part 1, explore the science behind why some people are really good at what they do.

10,000 hours is a long time. You’ve probably heard this number described as the amount of time needed to achieve “greatness” in a given skill or area of expertise.

It comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s popular 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, where he cites 10,000 hours as the “magic number” of practice time required to achieve true mastery in a given domain. He gives examples of people like Bill Gates and the Beatles, who spent large amounts of time honing their craft before achieving the great successes we know them for.

Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, whose research Gladwell used to devise his 10,000-hour rule, isn’t convinced. He called Gladwell’s interpretation “a popularised but simplistic view of our work … which suggests that anyone who has accumulated sufficient number of hours of practice in a given domain will automatically become an expert and a champion.”

Ericsson is a psychologist who has pioneered the study of expert performance — the science behind why some people are really good at what they do. He argues that the problem with Gladwell’s analysis is that he focused on the quantity of practice time rather than the quality. Practice is indeed an important stepping stone toward expertise, but not just any kind of practice will do.

Deliberate practice: the secret of high achievers

“In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.” — Anders Ericsson

Pick any field or area of skill and look through its history, and you’ll find that top performers seem to be getting more and more talented.

Gymnast Simone Biles, winner of the individual all-around competition in the 2016 Summer Olympics, developed a gravity-defying flip dubbed “The Biles,” a mid-air move whose physics are near impossible. Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, considered by the best violinists of his day to be too difficult to play, is now standard fare (even a nine-year-old can learn it). The world record set at the 1908 Olympic marathon would barely qualify for entrance into the Boston Marathon today.

It’s not that we’ve had a steady upswing of births of people with a gift for gymnastics or music or running in the last several decades. So something else must be at play. Why have standards of excellence risen so sharply?

Some psychologists and researchers would argue that we’ve learned how to learn — we’ve emphasized focused practice, developed more sophisticated training techniques, and gained a better understanding of how the human brain and body work.

Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, is one of those people. He coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe the type of focused, consistent, goal-oriented training that exceptionally talented people across many different fields (whom researchers term “expert performers”) engage in to improve their skills.

He has also identified certain habits and features of this technique that anyone could potentially use to more effectively pick up or improve a skill. One of the most striking characteristics of deliberate practice is the brief (but intense) amount of time that many experts spend learning or practicing their skills.

Why practice trumps talent: introducing the 5-hour rule

In his groundbreaking research in the field of expert performance, Ericsson debunked the common assumption that exceptionally talented people are “born that way.” He argues that genetics play a much smaller role in the development of talent and expertise than previously thought, claiming that “with the right kind of training, any individual will be able to acquire abilities that were previously viewed as only attainable if you had the right kind of genetic talent.”

For example, consider Mozart, a figure almost anyone would label a musical genius. Ericsson has a different perspective:

“If you compare the kind of music pieces that Mozart [could] play at various ages to today’s Suzuki-trained children, he is not exceptional. If anything, he’s relatively average.”

He suggests that Mozart achieved greatness not necessarily due to any innate ability, or at least not innate ability alone, but rather because he started young and practiced long and hard. In other words, talent is overrated.

In his research paper “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” published in the journal Psychological Review, Ericsson looked at the habits of top performers in fields like sports, music, mathematics, and chess, and noticed an interesting pattern: They engage in focused, intense practice sessions, but usually only for an hour or two at a time.

Even though they may not have had a name for it, smart, successful people have been practicing a similar habit for centuries. In an informal study of the daily routines of highly accomplished people, past and present, 

Michael Simmons

 (author, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Empact) discovered a common denominator that ties in with Ericsson’s research: at least one hour each weekday spent reading, learning, or practicing a skill with intense focus.

There’s Benjamin Franklin, who kept a strict daily schedule to maximize his productivity and set aside time for focused learning and reflection—including an hour a day for reading, plus time in the morning and before bedtime to consider his goals and track his progress.

It clearly must have worked for him. Franklin was an author, publisher, diplomat, scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and even a long-distance swimmer (one of his inventions was a pair of wooden swimming flippers) who was posthumously inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1968. Not to mention he helped draft both the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Similarly, as a student at Harvard, future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt devoted a couple hours each day to focused studying — which was considerably less than his peers — but still received honors in the majority his classes. He continued his habit of daily study into his presidency and would often read one or more books each day.

Or take Elon Musk, who founded four multibillion-dollar companies in four different industries (software, energy, transportation, and aerospace) by his mid-40s. His deep commitment to learning (he started reading two books a day in his teens) and constant pursuit of improvement and feedback are both building blocks of deliberate practice.

Simmons calls this tendency to set aside time each weekday for focused learning the “five-hour rule” — which sounds much more manageable than the 10,000-hour rule, doesn’t it?

Defining “practice”

But whether you call it deliberate practice, the five-hour rule, or lifelong learning, it’s important to note that this form of focused learning isn’t about simple repetition of a task or skill, accumulating a lot of hours of training, or just “trying harder.” It’s structured, sustained, consistent, purposeful hard work directed at specific goals for improvement. It takes time and requires constantly getting outside your comfort zone and pushing the limits of your abilities.

So if you’re looking for a shortcut for achieving expertise, deliberate practice isn’t the answer. Stephen Dubner, host of 

Freakonomics

 Radio, gets to the core of the technique in a conversation with Ericsson for the episode “How to Become Great at Just About Anything”:

“So, Anders, when we began this conversation and you said that deliberate practice is the key to expert performance, it kind of sounds like magic, but it’s not at all, is it? I mean, deliberate practice sounds like a very organized, canonized, or codified, way of working really, really hard.”

Ericsson’s answer? “I think that’s exactly right.”

But while it may not make you an instant expert, a regimen of deliberate practice — with the explicit goal of improving your performance, skill, or knowledge in a given area — will produce results, as we’ll see in the next section.

The exciting potential of deliberate practice is that there’s no limit to how far you can take it. As Ericsson writes in an article adapted from his book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,

In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement … You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you. . . . There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement.

Ericsson has distilled his research on deliberate practice and expert performance into several practical steps that anyone can apply to learn more, improve a skill, or be more productive.

In Part 2 of my deep dive into deliberate practice, we’ll look at six practical steps you can use to tap into this powerful learning technique.

Deliberate practice in action

In the 1970s, Ericsson was teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. He and an undergraduate student were working on an experiment to test the limits of short-term memory, which would become the impetus for Ericsson’s research on expert performance.

The experiment was simple: The student, Steve, would work on memorizing strings of numbers and see how far he could go with consistent practice. Steve and Ericsson would meet several times a week for one-hour practice sessions. Ericsson would read off a random series of numbers, and Steve would try to repeat them correctly.

During the first week, Steve seemed to reach a roadblock: He couldn’t get past eight or nine digits. This matched up with the scientific research of the time that indicated that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory — typically about seven items.

However, Ericsson was convinced the psychological research of the time might be faulty. He had stumbled across an obscure study describing a similar experiment where students had, with practice, worked up to memorizing around 10 to 15 digits. If these students had broken past what was considered the natural limit of short-term memory, could someone go even further?

So the two kept at it, and on the Friday of that first week of practice, Steve had a breakthrough: he reached nine, then 10, then 11 digits. Steve’s performance kept improving from there.

After 60 practice sessions, he was up to 20 digits, had reached 40 digits around the 100th session, and had broken 80 digits by the 200th session.

Steve’s all-time record was 82 digits. Here’s what that looks like:

Steve’s all-time record was 82 digits. Here’s what that looks like:

Source: Nautilus

This involved listening to 82 digits read out loud, one per second, and immediately repeating them back correctly. To put this accomplishment in perspective, 40 digits was more than even professional mnemonists had been able to achieve in terms of short-term recall at the time.

Steve achieved record-breaking short-term memory performance in about 200 hours of regular practice over the two years of the experiment, just by constantly pushing the limits of his abilities (with the help of Ericsson’s coaching and a healthy dose of personal determination).

If such dramatic improvement is possible for a mundane task like memorizing random numbers, imagine what you could achieve using this approach for a skill that you care about and are motivated to improve.

Let’s look at a couple more examples:

From psychologist to recording artist

Danish psychologist Susanne Bargmann was studying the lack of progress in the field of psychotherapy when she stumbled across Ericsson’s research about deliberate practice. She was intrigued.

So Bargmann formed a plan to explore the idea: she would apply the abstract concepts she was reading about in research literature to something concrete and observable — and personal. She would test the limits of deliberate practice on her lifelong dream of becoming a better singer.

In her 40s at the time and busy with a career in psychology, Bargmann had always loved singing, but was convinced she didn’t have the talent to pursue it professionally. This would be a genuine experiment in the power of deliberate practice to build competence, since she wasn’t starting out with any particular vocal ability or experience beyond singing in choirs as a child.

In fact, Bargmann’s first practice sessions (which she recorded to have evidence of her progress) were self-admittedly “horrible,” so much so that she initially had trouble convincing a professional vocal instructor to work with her due to her lack of skill.

To see if deliberate practice could really help her improve, Bargmann started a regimen of one hour of focused practice daily, supplemented by training with a vocal coach. Though she felt progress was slow at times, she kept at it and started seeing real improvement in the quality of her singing. She began performing in public, training with other singers, and even trying her hand at songwriting.

Finally, Bargmann felt that the next step in her progress would be to record her own music. She connected with a producer and released an album, which received a lot of radio play in Denmark; she called the reception of her music “phenomenal.”

So what started out as an unachievable dream, through deliberate practice over about two years (and counting), became a great personal and professional success. Bargmann’s experiment is a testament to the effectiveness of deliberate practice (you can hear her before-and-after results on the Freakonomics Radio episode “How to Become Great at Just About Anything”), and she hopes her experience will encourage others to try the technique:

“I really believe that it can inspire people to, instead of limiting themselves to what they think they can, to actually choose something they dream of or they have a passion for, and then experience how they can improve.”

From soil scientist to basketball phenom

One of the best free-throw shooters in the world isn’t a pro basketball player or an up-and-coming young athlete. It’s a 59-year-old soil conservation technician from Kansas named Bob Fisher.

In fact, Fisher currently holds 14 Guinness world records for free-throw shooting. A 2012 New York Times profile on Fisher reported:

“In the past 26 months. . . . He has made 33 [free throws] in 30 seconds, 50 in a minute, 92 in two minutes, 448 in 10 minutes. He made 2,371 in an hour — nearly 40 a minute — which he called ‘pretty close to a superhuman feat.’”

How did Fisher become so good at shooting free throws? He credits the principles of deliberate practice.

An average basketball player, Fisher had done some high-school coaching for a number of years without ever leading any of the teams to a winning record. His main job was with the Department of Agriculture as a soil conservation technician.

Fisher clearly wasn’t starting out with any exceptional basketball skills when he began his quest to master free-throw shooting in 2009. He set his first record, 50 free throws in one minute, in 2010. He broke eight more records by the end of that year.

On one occasion, he set six world records in the span of an hour. Fisher’s response: “I’ve gotten better, and I haven’t reached my potential yet.”

His domination of this specific skill boils down to one of the key components of deliberate practice: not letting your skills plateau. Fisher described how he applied Ericsson’s research to his training regimen:

What he [Ericsson] said was that people who continue to get better never allow themselves to go on automatic pilot; they’re continually breaking down the element they are trying to do and working on pieces and then putting it back together — which is nothing new. But I made a concerted effort to do that, and I think that was a large part, a reason of my success.

Instead of just practicing, you are focused; you’re engaged; it’s like a rubber band. You are constantly stretching the rubber band, and you don’t want to stretch it to the point that it breaks, but you want it to have continual pressure. In other words, you want to try and do things that you are not able to do at the present time.

These examples make it pretty clear that deliberate practice works. It’s not quick or easy; it’s not a magic formula; but it is an effective technique for significant skills development.

So the question is, how can you use the principles of deliberate practice to meet your goals? Maybe you want to pursue some professional development — learning a new programming language, or becoming a better writer or public speaker. Or perhaps you have a personal ambition like learning a musical instrument.

Deliberate practice may sound intense, even intimidating, but it can be broken down into components that make learning or improving any skill a structured, achievable process. Ready to get started?

Don’t miss Part 2, where you’ll learn how elements like motivation, goal-setting, and feedback combine to make deliberate practice a powerhouse skills development technique—and how you can put them to work.

In Part 2, learn how to apply the research-backed principles of deliberate practice to your goals.

Have you ever wondered why some people are really good at what they do?

The science behind why some people have extraordinary abilities — an area of research known as expert performance — seeks to answer that question. And psychologist K. Anders Ericsson is one of its leading scholars.

Ericsson and his fellow researchers have studied top performers across many fields, from music to medical surgery, sports to software design. Data from decades of studies and their own laboratory experiments revealed a striking discovery: the best of the best tend to follow similar techniques for improving their abilities.

In an excerpt from his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Ericsson writes,

Imagine what might be possible if we applied the techniques that have proved to be so effective in sports and music and chess to all the different types of learning that people do, from the education of schoolchildren to the training of doctors, engineers, pilots, businesspeople, and workers of every sort. I believe that the dramatic improvements we have seen in those few fields over the past hundred years are achievable in pretty much every field if we apply the lessons that can be learned from studying the principles of effective practice.

What are these principles? A learning model Ericsson calls the “gold standard”: deliberate practice.     

Get an in-depth introduction to deliberate practice, dig into Ericsson’s research, and hear from people who have put this technique to the test in Part 1 of this series, Deliberate Practice: Learn Like an Expert.

The problem with traditional practice

We’ve all had to practice a skill at some point — piano lessons, school sports teams, on-the-job training. You might associate the word “practice” with rote, never-ending repetition — piano scales, sports drills — and the frustration of not making much progress. There’s a reason so many people give up on learning a new skill or only reach a middling level of competence: inevitably, improvement stalls.

You see, just repeating a skill or task, even over a period of many years, doesn’t build expertise. That’s because once you reach a reasonable level of competence and are able to do what you need to do, the skill becomes automatic. At best, you’re maintaining your abilities, but not improving them.

For many day-to-day tasks — driving, typing, cooking — this baseline, “good enough to get by” level of skill is fine. But if there’s something you really want to excel at, you have to push past that comfortable stage and challenge yourself.

Here, we’ll look at six components of deliberate practice that you can use to get better at anything. These steps are based on Ericsson’s research about how people who are the best of the best in their fields learn and approach skills development. They’re principles that you can tap into to learn more quickly and meet more goals.

Deliberate practice in 6 steps

1. Get motivated

Like most worthwhile pursuits, developing proficiency in any skill — whether sewing, software design, or surfing — isn’t easy. If you want to push past the hard parts of skills growth — the frustration, the failures, the periods of slow progress — you’re going to need to be motivated.

We saw in the introduction to this series how one of Ericsson’s first experiments in deliberate practice hinged on motivation. Ericsson was working with an undergraduate student to test the effect of practice on short-term memory. The student, Steve, began to improve with practice until he hit a wall — he had reached the natural ceiling of his abilities and was convinced he couldn’t go any farther. It was Steve’s competitive nature and determination to improve that motivated him to keep trying, helping him break through to reach record-breaking performance in short-term memory exercises.

Without the motivation to push past obstacles, when improvement stalls, the natural inclination will be to give up. So if you’re picking a skill to improve with deliberate practice, make sure it’s something you care about and are willing to devote considerable time and effort to.

2. Set specific, realistic goals

Motivation also requires keeping your eyes on the prize. And vague aspirations like “getting better” at a certain skill aren’t going to cut it. Generic goals for improvement don’t give you any motivation to excel past your current abilities or help you measure your progress.

Deliberate practice relies on small, achievable, well-defined steps that help you work your way towards meaningful improvement. These steps should take into account your current knowledge and skill level and push those boundaries little by little, consistently expanding your abilities.

In Peak, Ericsson demonstrates the kind of specificity required with the example of someone who wants to improve their golf game:

If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well-defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway. That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that? An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. 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.

With deliberate practice, goal-setting isn’t like making a New Year’s resolution and hoping you’ll stick with it. It involves thoughtful planning, identifying areas for improvement and creating a specific game plan for building on top of your current abilities.

3. Break out of your comfort zone

“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”

― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

For goals to spur improvement, they need to constantly challenge your current abilities. Simply repeating skills you already know how to do — an unproductive cycle that’s easy to get stuck in with traditional approaches to practice — won’t actually enhance your skill level or improve performance.

Stretching yourself is the key to growth. But Ericsson emphasizes that when it comes to skills development, breaking out of your comfort zone isn’t about “trying harder,” but about “trying differently.” Your goals should teeter on the edge of what you are and aren’t capable of doing. If you can’t move forward with one technique or approach, try another and keep experimenting until you break through the barrier that’s blocking your path to improvement.

4. Be consistent and persistent

This kind of prolonged effort will be frustrating and uncomfortable at times. But pushing through those tough spots often leads to significant improvement. One of the foundational aspects of deliberate practice — what makes it so effective — is its regularity.

In the research paper “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Ericsson and his colleagues share their discovery that top performers, no matter their area of expertise, kept a similar practice regimen: brief (but intense), daily or semi-weekly solo practice sessions.

One of Ericsson’s studies tracked adult violinists studying at elite music academies and found that the musicians averaged one to one-and-a-half hours a day of high-intensity solo practice. The study found that the accumulated amount of this regular, focused practice had a direct impact on the musicians’ level of performance.

These consistent, intense bursts of effort are key to maintaining momentum in building expertise.

5. Seek feedback

“Without feedback,” Ericsson says, “either from yourself or from outside observers — you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.”

Feedback is essential for identifying areas for improvement and gaining a realistic view of your progress. Whether one-on-one coaching with a teacher, mentor, or peer, or some form of self-assessment, you need a means of pinpointing your strengths and weaknesses. This is the only way to identify and work through trouble spots and advance from “just ok” to true mastery of a skill.

6. Take time to recover

Because deliberate practice requires your full attention, with maximal mental and/or physical effort, it can only be sustained for a short period of time. Laboratory studies of extended practice have capped the optimal time at one hour per day, three to five days a week, and real-life studies have seen reduced benefits when practice sessions exceed two hours.

This level of intensity and concentration makes recovery time important. Ericsson has observed that many of the top performers he studied benefited from napping. Whatever type of leisure activity or relaxation you choose, it’s important to offset the intense effort of deliberate practice to avoid mental or physical fatigue.

Summing Up

Deliberate practice is a long-term investment in improving yourself and your capabilities. While we may not all have the makings of a professional athlete, elite musician, or business mogul, we can follow in the experts’ footsteps to learn more effectively, work smarter, and build or improve our skills.

As Ericsson told The New York Times, “a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.”

So no matter your pre-existing skill level, if you put in the time and effort to tap into the proven principles of deliberate practice, you’re sure to see some progress. Like Susanne Bargmann and Bob Fisher — who put deliberate practice to the test and achieved some extraordinary results — you may even surprise yourself with what you’re capable of.

Missed Part 1? Read the stories of Susanne Bargmann and Bob Fisher, who followed the path of deliberate practice to remarkable accomplishments, and explore the research behind their success.