It isn't just hard work, either. Deliberate practice is a specific and unique kind of activity, neither work nor play. It's characterized by several elements that together form a powerful whole. The greatest performers have consistently combined these elements, sometimes just by luck. But now that researchers have decoded the pattern, the path to top performance is becoming much more accessible.
The elements of deliberate practice are each worth examining:. The key word is "designed. That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we've done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.
By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Tiger Woods - intensely applying this principle, which is no secret among pro golfers - has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie.
The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they're improved; then it's on to the next aspect. In most fields, years of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge.
At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it's almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual's performance. It's striking how many great performers had fathers who started designing their practice activities at early ages; Tiger, Picasso, and Mozart are perfect examples. Archie was always ready with instruction for Eli and for his brother Peyton, Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts.
Eli always seemed clear that intense practice was key. In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, science, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice.
But anyone who thinks he's outgrown the benefits of a teacher's help should at least question that view. There's a reason the world's best golfers still go to teachers. High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.
Tiger Woods may face that buried lie in the sand only two or three times in a season, and if those were his only opportunities to work on that shot, he'd blow it just as you and I do. Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn't especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities.
The other is the amount of repetition. Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball's greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than 30 years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night. Obvious, yet not nearly as simple as it might seem, especially when results require interpretation.
You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn't what counts. Or you may believe you played that bar of the Brahms violin concerto perfectly, but can you really trust your own judgment?
In many important situations, a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one's hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone's mental abilities.
Email Print Type Size. Their assignment is to sell Duncan Hines brownie mix, but they spend a lot of their time just rewriting memos. What does distinguish them from many of the young go-getters the company takes on each year is that neither man is particularly filled with ambition. Neither has any kind of career plan. Every afternoon they play waste-bin basketball with wadded-up memos. One of them later recalls, "We were voted the two guys probably least likely to succeed.
Contrary to what any reasonable person would have expected when they were new recruits, they reached the apex of corporate achievement. The obvious question is how. Was it talent? If so, it was a strange kind of talent that hadn't revealed itself in the first 22 years of their lives. The two were sharp but had shown no evidence of being sharper than thousands of classmates or colleagues. Was it mountains of hard work? Certainly not up to that point. And yet something carried them to the heights of the business world.
Which leads to perhaps the most puzzling question, one that applies not just to Immelt and Ballmer but also to everyone: If that certain special something turns out not to be any of the things we usually think of, then what is it? If we're all wrong about high achievement, that's a big problem. In particular, if we believe that people without a particular natural talent for some activity will never be competitive with those who possess that talent - meaning an inborn ability to do that specific thing easily and well - then we'll direct them away from that activity.
We'll steer our kids away from art, tennis, economics, or Chinese because we think we've seen that they have no talent in those realms. In business, managers often redirect people's careers based on slender evidence of what they've "got.
A number of researchers now argue that talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. A few contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence. In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training.
Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians, and others. Such findings do not prove that talent doesn't exist. But they do suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.
The concept of specific talents is especially troublesome in business.
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