Likewise, in her interviews with “mega successful” people, journalist Hester Lacey has noticed that all of them demonstrate a striking desire to excel beyond their already remarkable level of expertise: “An actor might say, ‘I may never play a role perfectly, but I want to do it as well as I possibly can. And in every role, I want to bring something new. I want to develop.’ A writer might say, ‘I want every book I do to be better than the last.’
“It’s a persistent desire to do better,” Hester explained. “It’s the opposite of being complacent. But it’s a positive state of mind, not a negative one. It’s not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.”
* * *
My interview research made me wonder whether grit is not just about quantity of time devoted to interests, but also quality of time. Not just more time on task, but also better time on task.
I started reading everything I could about how skills develop.
Soon enough, this led me to the doorstep of cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson. Ericsson has spent his career studying how experts acquire world-class skills. He’s studied Olympic athletes, chess grandmasters, renowned concert pianists, prima ballerinas, PGA golfers, Scrabble champions, and expert radiologists. The list goes on.
Put it this way: Ericsson is the world expert on world experts.
Below, I’ve drawn a graph that summarizes what Ericsson’s learned. If you track the development of internationally renowned performers, you invariably find that their skill improves gradually over years. As they get better, their rate of improvement slows. This turns out to be true for all of us. The more you know about your field, the slighter will be your improvement from one day to the next.
That there’s a learning curve for skill development isn’t surprising. But the timescale on which that development happens is. In one of Ericsson’s studies, the very best violinists at a German music academy accumulated about ten thousand hours of practice over ten years before achieving elite levels of expertise. By comparison, less accomplished students accumulated about half as much practice over the same period.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, the dancer Martha Graham declared, “It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer.” More than a century ago, psychologists studying telegraph operators observed that reaching complete fluency in Morse code was rare because of the “many years of hard apprenticeship” required. How many years? “Our evidence,” the researchers concluded, “is that it requires ten years to make a thoroughly seasoned press dispatcher.”
If you’ve read Ericsson’s original research, you know that ten thousand hours of practice spread over ten years is just a rough average. Some of the musicians he studied reached the high-water mark of expertise before that, and some after. But there’s a good reason why “the ten-thousand-hour rule” and “the ten-year-rule” have gone viral. They give you a visceral sense of the scale of the required investment. Not a few hours, not dozens, not scores, not hundreds. Thousands and thousands of hours of practice over years and years and years.
* * *
The really crucial insight of Ericsson’s research, though, is not that experts log more hours of practice. Rather, it’s that experts practice differently. Unlike most of us, experts are logging thousands upon thousands of hours of what Ericsson calls deliberate practice.
I suspected Ericsson could provide answers as to why, if practice is so important, experience doesn’t always lead to excellence. So I decided to ask him about it, using myself as a prime example.
“Look, Professor Ericsson, I’ve been jogging about an hour a day, several days a week, since I was eighteen. And I’m not a second faster than I ever was. I’ve run for thousands of hours, and it doesn’t look like I’m anywhere close to making the Olympics.”
“That’s interesting,” he replied. “May I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure.”
“Do you have a specific goal for your training?”
“To be healthy? To fit into my jeans?”
“Ah, yes. But when you go for a run, do you have a target in terms of the pace you’d like to keep? Or a distance goal? In other words, is there a specific aspect of your running you’re trying to improve?”
“Um, no. I guess not.”
Then he asked what I thought about while I was running.
“Oh, you know, I listen to NPR. Sometimes I think about the things I need to get done that day. I might plan what to make for dinner.”
Then he verified that I wasn’t keeping track of my runs in any systematic way. No diary of my pace, or my distance, or the routes I took, my ending heart rate, or how many intervals I’d sprinted instead of jogged. Why would I need to do that? There was no variety to my routine. Every run was like the last.
“I assume you don’t have a coach?”
I laughed.
“Ah,” he purred. “I think I understand. You aren’t improving because you’re not doing deliberate practice.”
* * *
This is how experts practice:
First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance. Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet. Olympic gold medal swimmer Rowdy Gaines, for example, said, “At every practice, I would try to beat myself. If my coach gave me ten 100s one day and asked me to hold 1:15, then the next day when he gave me ten 100s, I’d try to hold 1:14.”I Virtuoso violist Roberto Díaz describes “working to find your Achilles’ heel—the specific aspect of the music that needs problem solving.”
Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal. Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody’s watching. Basketball great Kevin Durant has said, “I probably spend 70 percent of my time by myself, working on my game, just trying to fine-tune every single piece of my game.” Likewise, the amount of time musicians devote to practicing alone is a much better predictor of how quickly they develop than time spent practicing with other musicians.
As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong—so they can fix it—than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.
Here’s how Ulrik Christensen learned this lesson. Christensen is a physician-turned-entrepreneur whose adaptive learning software is designed around the principles of deliberate practice. One of his early projects was a virtual reality game that teaches doctors the proper handling of urgent, complex cardiac conditions such as strokes and heart attacks. During one training session, he found himself alone with a physician who seemed unable to finish.
“I couldn’t figure it out,” Christensen told me. “This guy wasn’t stupid, but after hours of detailed feedback on what he’d done wrong, he still wasn’t getting the right answers. Everyone else had gone home, and there we were, stuck.” Exasperated, Christensen stopped him just before he got the next round of feedback. “Time-out,” Christensen said. “What you just did, treating this patient, is there anything you did just now where you were in doubt? Anything where you weren’t sure it met the new guidelines?”
The doctor thought a moment and then listed decisions he’d been certain about; then he named a few choices about which he was less sure. In other words, he reflected for a moment on what he knew and what he didn’t.
Christensen nodded, listening, and when the doctor was finished, he let him see the computer screen with the same feedback that had been displayed a dozen times before. On the next trial, the doctor executed the procedure correctly.
And after feedback, then what?
Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless. Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.