I puzzled over these observations for a while, and then I decided to look back at the diary data that Ericsson and I had collected from the National Spelling Bee finalists. While I knew that spellers rated deliberate practice as especially effortful and unenjoyable, I also recalled that there was quite a spread around these averages. In other words, not all spellers had the same exact experience.
I looked to see how grittier competitors experienced deliberate practice. Compared to their less passionate, less persevering competitors, grittier spellers not only logged more hours of deliberate practice, they rated it as both more enjoyable and more effortful. That’s right. Grittier kids reported working harder than other kids when doing deliberate practice but, at the same time, said they enjoyed it more than other kids, too.
It’s hard to know for sure what to make of this finding. One possibility is that grittier kids spend more time doing deliberate practice, and that, over the years, they develop a taste for hard work as they experience the rewards of their labor. This is the “learn to love the burn” story. Alternatively, it could be that grittier kids enjoy the hard work more, and that gets them to do more of it. This is the “some people enjoy a challenge” story.
I can’t tell you which of these accounts is accurate, and if I had to guess, I’d say there’s some truth to both. As we’ll learn in chapter 11, there’s solid scientific evidence that the subjective experience of effort—what it feels like to work hard—can and does change when, for example, effort is rewarded in some way. I’ve watched my own daughters learn to enjoy working hard more than they used to, and I can say the same for myself.
On the other hand, Katie Ledecky’s coach, Bruce Gemmell, says she’s always relished a tough challenge.
“There’s a little video clip that Katie’s parents have of one of her first swim meets,” Bruce told me. “It’s just one lap. She’s six years old. She swims a few strokes and then grabs on to the lane line. She swims a few more strokes and grabs on to the lane line again. Finally, she gets to the end of the pool and gets out of the water. Dad’s filming it, and he asks, ‘Tell me about your first race. How was it?’ She goes, ‘Great!’ A few seconds later, she adds, ‘That was hard!’ And she’s beaming—a smile from ear to ear. That says it all right there. She has that attitude with everything we do.”
In the same conversation, Bruce told me that Katie willingly does more deliberate practice than anyone he’s ever met. “We’ll try a drill that she’s horrible at—something where she’ll start off in the poorest third of the group doing it. Then I’ll catch her sneaking practice time to get better at it, so within some period of time, she’s one of the best in the group. Some other swimmers, well, they try and they fail at it, and I have to cajole and beg them to try it again.”
If deliberate practice can be “awesome,” can it ever feel like effortless flow?
When I asked spelling champ Kerry Close if she’d ever experienced the state of flow during deliberate practice, she said, “No, the only time I could say that I was in flow was when I wasn’t being challenged.” At the same time, she described deliberate practice as gratifying in its own way: “Some of my most rewarding studying,” she told me, “was on my own, forcing myself to break down a big task into multiple parts and getting it done.”
As of now, there isn’t enough research to say whether deliberate practice can be experienced as effortless flow. My guess is that deliberate practice can be deeply gratifying, but in a different way than flow. In other words, there are different kinds of positive experience: the thrill of getting better is one, and the ecstasy of performing at your best is another.
* * *
Other than getting yourself a terrific coach, mentor, or teacher, how can you get the most out of deliberate practice and—because you’ve earned it—experience more flow?
First, know the science.
Each of the basic requirements of deliberate practice is unremarkable:
? A clearly defined stretch goal
? Full concentration and effort
? Immediate and informative feedback
? Repetition with reflection and refinement
But how many hours of practice do most people accomplish that checks all four of these boxes? My guess is that many people are cruising through life doing precisely zero hours of daily deliberate practice.
Even supermotivated people who’re working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice. For instance, when a Japanese rowing team invited Olympic gold medalist Mads Rasmussen to come visit, he was shocked at how many hours of practice their athletes were logging. It’s not hours of brute-force exhaustion you’re after, he told them. It’s high-quality, thoughtful training goals pursued, just as Ericsson’s research has shown, for just a few hours a day, tops.
Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, says he’s been playing the violin since he was two but didn’t really start practicing deliberately until he was twenty-two. Why not? There was no lack of motivation—at one point, young Noa was taking lessons with four different teachers and, literally, commuting to three different cities to work with them all. Really, the problem was just that Noa didn’t know better. Once he discovered there was an actual science of practice—an approach that would improve his skills more efficiently—both the quality of his practice and his satisfaction with his progress skyrocketed. He’s now devoted himself to sharing that knowledge with other musicians.
A few years ago, my graduate student Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and I decided to teach kids about deliberate practice. We put together self-guided lessons, complete with cartoons and stories, illustrating key differences between deliberate practice and less effective ways of studying. We explained that no matter their initial talent, great performers in every domain improve through deliberate practice. We let students know that hidden behind every effortless performance on YouTube are hours and hours of unrecorded, invisible-to-outsiders, challenging, effortful, mistake-ridden practice. We told them that trying to do things they can’t yet do, failing, and learning what they need to do differently is exactly the way experts practice. We helped them understand that feelings of frustration aren’t necessarily a sign they’re on the wrong track. On the contrary, we told them that wishing they did things better is extremely common during learning. We then tested this intervention against different kinds of placebo control activities.
What we found is that students can change the way they think about practice and achievement. For instance, asked what advice they’d give to another student on how to succeed in school, students who learned about deliberate practice were more likely to recommend “focus on your weaknesses” and “concentrate one hundred percent.” Given the choice between doing deliberate practice in math versus entertaining themselves with social media and gaming websites, they elected to do more deliberate practice. And, finally, in the case of those who’d been performing at a below-average level in class, learning about deliberate practice increased their report card grades.
Which leads to my second suggestion for getting the most out of deliberate practice: Make it a habit.