Tag Archives: Anders Ericsson

media, self-development

Distractions from seeking excellence

To become really good at something, you need to practise. But how can you focus when there are so many distractions?

Would you like to become highly knowledgeable about an important social issue? Pick a problem that interests you, such as homelessness, suicide or genocide. Set aside an hour or two every day to read about it. Find the most authoritative sources. Find a mentor to be your guide. Write about what you’re learning. Get involved in an action group. In a year or two, you will be highly informed. Keep at it and you’ll become one of the most knowledgeable in the country.

                  If you need credentials, you might want to get  a research degree. But that’s more for credibility and status.

                  How do I know this? This advice is based on research about “expert performance,” which is performance that can be measured fairly objectively, like in sports. Anders Ericsson, the world’s leading researcher in the field, started off studying students in a Berlin violin academy. Those who were judged by their teachers to be best had practised much longer over their lifetimes. From this and other studies, Ericsson concluded that the key to expert performance is lots of practice, and not just any sort of practice, but a particular sort, called “deliberate practice.” It means pushing yourself at the edge of your ability, under the guidance of an experienced teacher.

                  Let’s say you’re a teacher. Doing years of teaching in the classroom doesn’t count as deliberate practice. What you need to do is repeatedly practise actions that are especially challenging, whether it is presenting a concept or dealing with a student. Yet few teachers, after their initial training, spend time practising their skills. Instead, they just use them: they teach using the skills they have already acquired.

                  The same applies to typing. If you spend hours texting friends, it doesn’t count as deliberate practice. But if you drill yourself, for example by sending the same message over and over, trying to improve your speed or accuracy, that’s how you can improve.

                  The same thing applies to every sort of skill. In some fields, such as therapy, finance and doctors in general practice, the criteria for expert performance are not so clear-cut. Still, the basic approach is the same.


Anders Ericsson

                  The work of Ericsson and other expert-performance researchers has been popularised in books such as David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, Matthew Syed’s Bounce, Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code. As well, Ericsson and co-author Robert Pool wrote Peak, an engaging treatment of the research. Ericsson’s provocative claim is that, with some exceptions, there’s no such thing as natural talent. No one starts off with special aptitude for sports, music or nuclear physics. Some people are more intelligent, in the sense that they can learn faster, but after thousands of hours of practice, this initial advantage becomes less important, as different mental processes take over. More important than intelligence is the capacity to persist in practising over time, which is often driven by interest and goals.

                  This research has been around for years, but to me it’s surprising how little attention is paid to it. In my classes, I used to tell students that they could become really good at a chosen area, something that interested them, but I could tell they were sceptical. It’s an unusual person who sets out to practise skills in an occupational area where doing this is not standard. In sports and classical music, coaches and teachers know what it takes. In other areas, traditional approaches persist.

Focus

A key to deliberate practice is focus, namely committing full attention to the task at hand. Doing something while your mind is wandering won’t help you much to get better. You need to concentrate on what you’re doing.

                  Most people, when they learn to ride a bicycle or drive a car, are focused on the task. On a bicycle, you need to focus, otherwise you might fall over; driving a car, you might crash. However, once you’re good enough to ride or drive, the need to strive declines. It’s easier just to rely on your acquired ability and not push yourself. Only if you seek something more, like racing, is greater focus needed.

                  The difference in focus may help to explain why some performers do better than others who practise just as much.

                  In our high-output writing programme, we help each other to try to write nearly every day, overcoming the common habit of procrastination and bingeing. What gets in the way of daily writing? Distractions. Social media is a potent distraction. Many of us report that it’s a disaster to check Facebook or email first thing in the morning, because before long the day is well advanced and the window of opportunity to focus on writing is lost. For most, it’s far more effective to write first thing, and to eliminate distractions. Turn off notifications, put your phone in another room, close the door, close open books, do everything so it’s just you and a screen or piece of paper.

                  Another distraction is your own thoughts, including a little voice in your head that says it would be so much better to wait until tomorrow, or that what you’re writing is crap and you’ll never get published. In some ways it doesn’t matter too much what the voice is saying, because it’s distracting you from the task at hand, taking up mental space you need for best performance. It’s better to be in something like a meditative state, switching off or pushing away intruding thoughts, so you can focus on what you’re writing, or whatever else you might be doing.

                  One thing I’ve learned from years of coordinating the writing group is that only some people are able to follow the programme. You might think it would be attractive, given the research backing it up and the testimonials of participants. One explanation is that habits of procrastination and bingeing are deeply entrenched. Another factor: there is no accountability for undertaking daily writing. Yet another: most academics resist seeking help to improve their writing and teaching. They think they need to do it on their own, without assistance, and without practising and without expert guidance. In a sense, scholarly writing is like athletics a century ago, when athletes would train when they felt like it, before coaches began insisting on daily training, carefully supervised. Then there’s AI, yet another discouragement from working hard to become a better writer.

Dealing with distractions

There’s another problem: distraction merchants have become more sophisticated. For instance, social media algorithms are designed by clever psychologists to hook users. Many authors have delved into this problem and written about behavioural addictions (see below for some books). Many of these studies focus on the problem itself. The challenge: how do we break the habit?

                  With this background, I saw a book titled The Attention Recovery Plan. It addresses this very issue. When your attention is being hijacked, you do need a plan, and that’s exactly what the author, David Gillespie, provides. The book is a self-help guide to breaking behavioural addictions and achieving focus, in order to be successful. It is simply written and practical. It is filled with action plans on how to regain focus. It also has a simple, useful account of how the brain is captured by behavioural addictions.

                  Everything Gillespie says seems plausible to me. Whether his approach is effective is hard to know, because he doesn’t cite any studies about testing it. It’s more an inspirational guide than a tested programme.

                  Gillespie has chapters on each of five “weapons of mass distraction”: social media, gambling, gaming, dating and pornography. For each one, Gillespie describes the challenge and then offers a toolkit of rules for breaking free. These are pretty much the same. For example, when it comes to social media, you need to detox by getting off of all of them. Not easy! But at least it’s a plan. But maybe you need to use social media for work or social connections. Gillespie understands. He says, after detoxing, have a plan when you rejoin, for example turning off notifications, keeping your phone in another room except for designated times, and putting strict limits on your use. Again, not easy!

                  When I sit on the bus and observe the passengers, most are on their phones. Seldom do I see anyone reading a book, like me. How likely are any of them to read Gillespie’s The Attention Recovery Plan? Would they even have the attention span needed to read chapters from his book, and how would they have the incentive and willpower to follow his advice, no matter how good it might be?

                  Gillespie has more to say. He advises developing mindfulness (meditation is one form), getting plenty of exercise and sleep, and having a support network. All good advice for doing just about anything. For most people, having a support network is crucial, because breaking an addiction on your own is so difficult. That’s true of chemical dependency: without the environmental cues of cigarettes and familiar smoking routines, it’s easier to kick the habit, and likewise for alcohol and other drugs. But this isn’t going to be easy with behavioural addictions, which seem to have conquered swathes of the population, especially young people.

                  It’s useful to remember that, decades ago, up to half of adults smoked, including in offices, cinemas and aeroplanes. It took decades of campaigning and media attention for smoking to be stigmatised and banned in many places, thereby making it easier to break the habit. Perhaps this will be true of social media, with the advent of phone-free zones. Just don’t expect the companies benefiting from behavioural addictions to back away from their attempts to control your attention.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

For valuable comments, thanks to Paula Arvela, Marina Granato, Olga Kuchinskaya and Lynne Li.

See also

Adam Alter, Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching (my commentary)
Nir Eyal with Julie Li, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life 
Anders Hansen, The Attention Fix: How to Focus in a World that Wants to Distract You

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (my commentary)

Some choice quotes from The Attention Recovery Plan

 “We have created an environment that damages our brain’s ability to focus, and now we are mass-medicating the symptoms.” (p. 20)

“Superfocus is the hard work.” (p. 23)

“Chronic stress degrades your dopamine system, which in turn makes your brain crave more intense rewards.” (p. 41)

“These platforms may be marketed as benign digital town squares, but they are in fact meticulously engineered psychological traps, designed by behavioural engineers to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible.” (p. 51)

Tristan Harris “recognised that the goal of the attention economy, to maximise time on screen, is fundamentally hostile to human flourishing. The endless notifications, the variable rewards, the algorithm-driven outrage are core features of a machine built to mine human attention for profit.” (p. 56)


David Gillespie

“In the attention economy, two classes of people are emerging: those who have learned to defend their focus, and those whose attention is the product being sold.” (p. 61)

“These [dating] platforms are meticulously engineered to hijack your most powerful cognitive state — focus. They turn the search for connection into a gamified loop of swipes and unpredictable rewards. They create a paradox of choice that leads to paralysis and dissatisfaction, and use an algorithm’s gaze to trap you in a feedback loop, limiting your options while creating the illusion of infinite possibility. The entire system is designed to transform you from a person seeking a partner into a user generating engagements.” (p. 106)

self-development

Natural talent and beyond

A lot of people believe in natural talent. They believe that some individuals have a genetic advantage, enabling them to perform far better than others. For example, Mozart is assumed to have a natural talent for music and Einstein for physics, and there are numerous star athletes whose performance seems so fantastic that they must be genetic freaks.

Researcher Anders Ericsson challenged this belief. With two colleagues, he studied violinists at a violin academy in Berlin. They divided the students into three groups: the most highly accomplished, those least accomplished and those in between. They then asked students how much violin practice they had undertaken in their lives.

If some of the violin students had natural talent, you would think that they could be in the most highly accomplished group with far less practice than others. But no, all of the top performers had put in large amounts of practice. Although the correlation between practice and performance was far from perfect, nonetheless none of the students seemed to be able to reach the highest level without thousands of hours of practice.

Furthermore, the practice needed to be of a particular type, involving students intensely concentrating on performance challenges at the edge of their abilities, under the guidance of experienced teachers. Ericsson called this “deliberate practice.” Just playing through the same easy pieces didn’t enable improvement. Deliberate practice did.

Ericsson went on to further investigate what is called “expert performance,” which refers to high-level performance in a domain where there are well-established and relatively objective criteria. Such domains include classical music, chess and competitive sports. In art, law or business, for example, measuring performance is more subjective.


Practice is essential for success in classical ballet

            Although practice may be essential for outstanding performance, lots of practice does not guarantee such performance. It is difficult to determine the quality of an individual’s practice, given that this involves the level of focus interacting with the suitability of the challenge for one’s development. One person’s ability and willingness to focus may differ quite a bit from another’s. There is still much to learn about deliberate practice.

The strong interpretation of research on expert performance is that there is no such thing as natural talent. In some sports, like basketball, inherited physical attributes such as height make a difference but, other than this, the key to high-level performance is practice.

When you learned to drive a car, you had to practise. However, most people, after they can drive competently, stop practising. After you obtained your licence, you had no need to continue to improve. You can gain experience by driving a lot, but this does not do much for your skills. If you want to learn to drive a bus or a race car, this requires additional training.

In most domains, people practise until they are competent but then use their skills without additional focused practice. This applies in sales, carpentry, nursing and indeed most occupations.

Not everyone accepts the research on expert performance: belief in natural talent is deep-seated. I’ve often heard people say, “I’m no good at maths.” Underlying such statements is an assumption that they lack natural talent and hence can never hope to achieve even a modest competence. Additionally, some researchers contest claims made by Ericsson and others who study expert performance.

In 2008, science writer Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers was published. Gladwell popularised expert performance research, including the “10,000 hour rule,” the idea that to become a world-class performer in any field, it’s necessary to devote 10,000 hours to deliberate practice. Gladwell gave the example of the Beatles, who spent long hours performing in German night clubs before their breakthrough into stardom. Unfortunately, Gladwell’s account of expert performance research was flawed.

            Ericsson, in collaboration with writer Robert Pool, wrote the book Peak, published in 2016. I reviewed it at the time. Peak provides an accessible treatment of research on expert performance and its implications for a variety of endeavours. Along the way, Ericsson and Pool address Gladwell’s example of the Beatles.

They say that Gladwell had one important point right, namely that developing high-level skills requires a great amount of practice. However, contrary to Gladwell, 10,000 hours is not a special number for attaining world-class status, nor is any “rule” involved. The Beatles did indeed spend many hours performing in German nightclubs, but this was performance, not practice, and would contribute little to their skills. In any case, the Beatles never became great performers. Their most significant contribution was in song-writing, especially by Lennon and McCartney, so attention should be on the amount and quality of time that Lennon and McCartney spent becoming better song-writers.


Lennon and McCartney at work songwriting

            David Epstein is another popular writer who has addressed expert performance. In his 2013 book The Sports Gene, he explored the role of genetics in sporting eminence. It is a fascinating book, with many examples. Epstein gives an account of research on expert performance, arguing that genetic factors play a much greater role. As a counter-example to the requirement for extensive practice, Epstein describes the case of a basketball player named Donald Thomas who jumped an impressive height at his first attempt at the high jump and before long won the world championship.

Ericsson has made a special project of studying claims of elite performance without much prior practice and found all of them wanting. In Peak, Ericsson and Pool point out that Thomas had competed in the high jump in high school. Subsequently, as a basketball player, he prided himself on dunking the ball, something that involves many of the same jumping muscles and skills as the high jump. So actually he could not be considered as lacking practice relevant to high jumping.


Donald Thomas

            Having read The Sports Gene, I saw Epstein’s new book Range, and read it hoping to see how he would respond to Ericsson’s analysis. Range is an engaging account of what it takes to succeed in a variety of fields. Epstein argues that early specialisation and training may not be the best option. Instead, it is worthwhile to explore a range of activities until you find the one that best matches your interests. Range gives many revealing examples of individuals who have sampled diverse careers before finding one at which they excelled. Epstein also tells of how non-specialists can sometimes solve difficult problems that stump specialists.

Range in some ways seems to be a reply to Peak. Indeed, Epstein at various points argues that the 10,000-hour rule is relevant only for a narrow group of individuals and activities. As I read through Range, I found many valuable insights about what it takes to succeed, but also an unfortunate dismissal of insights about expert performance. It makes sense to try out different activities and then to pursue one that appeals to you. But once you’ve obtained what Epstein calls “match quality,” namely matching your interests to an endeavour, then it’s time to put in lots of practice. However, Epstein hardly mentions the effort required after finding your ideal match.

            By my reading, deliberate practice is a necessary counterpart to finding the activity you want to pursue. I asked myself, why didn’t Epstein give due acknowledge to the role of practice? Why didn’t he take on board the arguments in Peak? I can’t answer these questions, but I did make a more detailed analysis of the arguments in Range in the light of expert performance research. This has been useful for my own understanding.

To become a best-selling author, like Gladwell and Epstein, perhaps it helps to make striking and memorable claims. Few scholars are good at this: to be published in academic journals, it’s usually necessary to write in scholarly style, with citations of previous work, exhaustive details about methods and results, and commonly in indigestible prose. When scholars seek to write in a more accessible way, often they are assisted by co-authors or editors, indeed as with Ericsson and Pool’s Peak. Some popularisations are true to the underlying research but others may have misrepresentations. How can you tell the difference? There’s no easy answer. All I can suggest is that if a topic is important to you, it is worthwhile exploring some of the underlying research papers yourself, reading reviews, and looking for contrary points of view. Along the way, you’re developing your own understanding. After a few thousand hours of this exploration, you might become really good at it!

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

self-development

Practise, and keep practising

Do you want to become really good at a skill? The world’s greatest authority on expert performance, Anders Ericsson, tells how.

anders-ericsson
Anders Ericsson

Pick a skill you’d like to improve, say chess, golf, piano, writing, Mandarin or mathematics. You need to find a good teacher, someone who understands the skill and will assign you tasks just beyond your current ability. You start practising, putting your full concentration into doing the tasks and overcoming shortcomings. And you keep practising, with your teacher’s guidance, tackling ever harder challenges.

For decades, Ericsson has been studying what it takes to become a top performer. Here’s the surprise. Natural talent doesn’t seem to make much difference. Think of geniuses like Mozart or Einstein. Natural talent for music or physics? No. Their supreme achievements can be explained by intensive practice from a young age. Ericsson has now written a popular account of his research, titled Peak, co-authored by science writer Robert Pool. It is clearly written, filled with examples and addresses the most common criticisms.

peak

            Ericsson is often credited with the so-called 10,000-hour rule, which loosely stated says that 10,000 hours of practice is what it takes to become a world-class performer. The rule was popularised by science writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, but Gladwell got lots of things wrong. There’s no magic number for the number of hours of practice, nor does any old practice suffice. Gladwell said the Beatles obtained 10,000 hours of practice performing in Hamburg from 1960 to 1964. Ericsson cites a Beatles biography saying the figure was probably closer to 1000, and anyway the Beatles weren’t practising to play other groups’ songs to a high standard. Their fame rests on original compositions by Lennon and McCartney, so the key to the Beatles’ success is the time these two spent practising composition.

The one thing Gladwell got right was that becoming a great performer requires a lot of practice, usually thousands of hours.

“By now it is safe to conclude from many studies on a wide variety of disciplines that nobody develops extraordinary abilities without putting in tremendous amounts of practice.” (p. 96)

There’s also hope for those of us with lesser ambitions, who just want to become a lot better than we are. The key is the right sort of practice.

dilbert_rev1

            Most people, when learning a new skill like driving a car, practise enough to acquire a basic competence. After that, deploying the skill becomes automatic, and there’s little further improvement. We are using the skill, not practising to improve. If you want to improve as a driver, you need new challenges, such as racing.

The same pattern holds for most people in most fields. After obtaining their medical degrees and beginning their regular work, doctors acquire some new skills through exposure to patients and procedures, but then level off. Ericsson cites evidence suggesting that for many purposes, doctors with decades of experience are no better than those who graduated a few years ago. Indeed, recent graduates might be better because they have learned the latest techniques.

In fields such as teaching, business and law, practitioners may be skilled, but few keep improving. Just doing the job won’t make you better. You need to practise.

To learn how to keep improving, it’s valuable to look at areas where excellence can be judged with little ambiguity, for example chess (where rankings reflect tournament success), sport (especially individual sports like tennis), and performing arts like ballet and classical music (where judges of performance generally agree). In all these areas, there has been a lot of research into the sort of practice that enables ongoing improvement.

Deliberate practice

Only a particular sort of practice will make much difference. Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice.” It requires intense concentration on attempting to improve at the limits of your capacity. Consider reading, a skill that nearly everyone develops at a basic level and some take to advanced levels. Children can find learning to read both fun and challenging; by trying to read gradually more difficult writing, reading skills are developed.

Most adult readers stop pushing themselves and settle into a steady diet at the same level, reading novels, newspapers or text messages, or perhaps poetry or scientific papers. If you want to continue to improve as a reader, you need to find pieces of writing that challenge you, and you need to concentrate intently on understanding them. If you’ve read lots of crime novels, reading another one won’t be deliberate practice, but picking one that is especially difficult could be.

In classical music, good teachers know what it takes to become an outstanding performer: using the right technique and practising intently on ever more difficult music. But in most fields, practitioners stop improving because they seldom engage in deliberate practice.

piano teacher

            To improve requires lots of deliberate practice, usually under the guidance of a good teacher, using the most advanced methods, and in situations where there is prompt feedback. Few people have the advantage of a personal teacher or trainer who can give immediate feedback throughout practice every day. (Wolfgang Mozart’s father Leopold provided this sort of personal guidance.) In music, the next best option is having weekly private lessons, in which the teacher assigns music to be practised, monitors improvement and assigns new music of ever increasing difficulty. For this sort of teaching to work, the music student has to practise. To the chagrin of many a music teacher, quite a few young pupils don’t improve, and invariably it’s because they don’t practise. So having or developing the self-discipline to practise is crucial. Supportive parents often make the difference, providing encouragement and structure for practising in early years, until the child becomes self-motivated.

According to Ericsson, hardly anyone finds this sort of practising fun. Deliberate practice is hard work. Elite professional musicians may practise several hours per day throughout their careers, but never find it relaxing.

 benedetti-violin-large

Implications

Not everyone aspires to become a chess grandmaster or a violin virtuoso. Even for lesser achievements, though, the methods of developing expert performance can be applied, sometimes with dramatic effect. Ericsson reports on an application of expert performance principles to the teaching of physics — students in groups engaged with the material and received rapid feedback — that gave an astounding improvement. The promise is that applying the principles to a range of areas can speed learning.

For those who want to improve their swimming, application of the principles can accelerate learning and gains, even if world-beating performance is not a goal. High levels of fitness can become more achievable with less effort.

Ericsson says deliberate practice can revolutionise the way we think about human potential. Rather than being limited by innate talent, the implication is that nearly everyone can become really good in any of a wide range of skills. When people say “I’m no good at maths,” they assume some sort of genetic limitation. Instead, the assumption should be that anyone, with the right sort of training and motivation, can become good at maths, and about anything else you can name. In some fields, early training is essential for world-class achievements, but even that can be factored into education in the future. There are potential applications in education, business, health, science and other fields, as described in Peak and previous books presenting research findings in the field for a general audience.

Obstacles

For the revolution of improvement to occur, much more investigation is needed. Ericsson notes that in lots of fields, little is known about how to measure expert performance or about the mental representations used by top performers.

There will also be another obstacle: many top figures in a range of fields have a stake in the present system. Consider education. A transformation could occur, and it involves changing from a priority on learning knowledge to a priority on learning skills. The problem is that this would shake up educational hierarchies, in which teachers are in charge of dispensing knowledge, administrators run the systems and there is little scope for individualised training programmes. Perhaps the most promising area for uptake is in home schooling, with informed parents applying the principles and recruiting specialist teachers as appropriate. Just as private tutoring is the basis for expert performance in music, so it may become more common in a range of learning areas.

education

            The long-term implication might be that educational bureaucracies will become obsolete, replaced by networks of individualised learning embedded in the community. This is reminiscent of the ideas of Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society. It would be wishful thinking to imagine this will happen quickly, if at all.

The idea that anyone, with the right sort of teaching and support and lots of deliberate practice, can become very good at something is potentially threatening to power-holders in all sorts of areas, including corporate management and politics. Governments and corporations operate on the principle that their leaders know best, either individually or via experts on tap. If anyone can develop high-level expertise, present power systems may be threatened. Deliberate practice promises to democratise human capacities. The implications are potentially profound, so those with the most power will use it to keep changes under control.

Reservations

Expert performance: who could be against it? Everyone wants surgeons to be highly skilled when undertaking operations. But there is a wider set of considerations: expertise needs to be deployed for worthy causes. For surgeons to be more highly skilled is fine, but the wider question is the level of effort put into preventive health measures, now minimal compared to medical interventions against ill health. What is also needed is expertise in promoting exercise, good diet, a clean environment and mental calm, and these areas are poorly funded and less well developed than medical specialities such as surgery.

shooter

            Then there are areas where expert performance is undesirable. Torture is an example: militaries experiment with torture techniques, and some practitioners become very good at them. It might also be argued that improvements in military performance are undesirable, and that efforts should instead be put into improving performance in conflict resolution, nonviolent action, and promotion of social justice. Initiatives to improve human performance need to be linked to worthwhile social goals. So it should be a priority to learn about expertise in promoting freedom and equality, so more people can apply deliberate practice to methods for making the world a better place.

If you want to become a lot better at some skill, Peak should be on your reading list. It is systematic yet accessible, with lots of examples. On its own, reading it won’t make you better, but deliberate practice will.

“Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.” (p. 179)

Robert Pool
Robert Pool, co-author of Peak

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au