Tiger Woods

Life seems a lot bet­ter for the tal­ented. They’ve got more options, have more suc­cess and in Tiger Woods’ case, they get to live in beau­ti­ful houses. But don’t despair if you weren’t born bril­liantly tal­ented. Two recently-released best­selling books are here to help. Out­liers (by Mal­colm Glad­well) and Tal­ent is Over­rated (by Geoff Colvin) show us that it doesn’t mat­ter what you’re born with; out­stand­ing suc­cess is avail­able to any­one who will fol­low a few sim­ple tips, the ones you’ll find below.

But first, the oblig­a­tory sports example

Jerry Rice was the best receiver in NFL his­tory and in my opin­ion the best in any posi­tion. His records for total recep­tions, total touch­down recep­tions and total receiv­ing yards all beat out the sec­ond place totals not by 10% or even 20%, but by a stag­ger­ing 50%! No one else has even come close. How did he do it?In a word: prac­tice. (In two words: delib­er­ate prac­tice, but we’ll get to that).

He would typ­i­cally con­tinue prac­tic­ing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remark­able were his six-days-a-week off-season work­outs, which he con­ducted entirely on his own. Morn­ings were devoted to car­dio­vas­cu­lar work, run­ning a hilly five-mile trail; he would report­edly run ten forty-meter wind sprints up the steep­est part. In the after­noons he did equally stren­u­ous weight train­ing. These work­outs became leg­endary as the most demand­ing in the league… (Tal­ent is Over­rated, p. 53)

But don’t be dis­tracted by how hard he worked. (Hard work is just part of the answer). It’s that he worked hard in the right ways.

• He ignored enjoy­ment. Rice worked mostly on his own, spend­ing less than 1% of his football-related work actu­ally play­ing games.  Forc­ing him­self to do the activ­i­ties that would help him improve, rather than the ones he enjoyed the most.
• He designed his prac­tice to work on his improve­ment needs. While most receivers focused on speed, he focused on accel­er­a­tion and endurance. Speed was actu­ally a big weak­ness for him, but he real­ized he could over­come this by being out­stand­ing in other ways.

Draw­ing on these types of insights, researcher Anders Eric­s­son has iden­ti­fied the types of prac­tice that result in expert per­for­mance. It’s called Delib­er­ate Prac­tice.

How to Apply Delib­er­ate Practice

1. Design your activ­ity to improve your per­for­mance. Care­fully choose the spe­cific aspects you need to be great at and stretch your abil­i­ties in those areas. Find a way to mea­sure where you are now and make sure that you are actu­ally improv­ing. And even if you are, keep your mind open to other ways to get a bet­ter return on your prac­tice time.
2. Look for repeat­able tasks. Top per­form­ers put the time in to ensure con­sis­tent per­for­mance in any repeat­able area (i.e. shoot­ing free throws) and then they prac­tice these like a maniac.
3. Make sure that feed­back is con­tin­u­ously avail­able. You need to see how you’re doing, what you’re doing wrong. With free throws it’s easy, but if your activ­ity requires inter­pre­ta­tion (i.e. get­ting bet­ter at job inter­views) you’ll need expert feed­back, the more the better.
4. It’s men­tally demand­ing. If your practice-activity is some­thing you can do mind­lessly, it’s not delib­er­ate prac­tice. You need to keep your mind involved. In fact mind­less prac­tice can actu­ally reduce per­for­mance over time, which accounts for some very-experienced pro­fes­sion­als per­form­ing below novices. You have to keep your mind in the game.
5. It isn’t much fun. (Sorry). Geoff Colvin says, “Doing what things we know how to do well is enjoy­able, and that’s exactly the oppo­site of what delib­er­ate prac­tice demands.” Maybe you don’t need to hate prac­tic­ing, but it’s cer­tainly more hard work than play (remem­ber Jerry Rice). This is pre­cisely why most peo­ple avoid delib­er­ate prac­tice: the unpleasantness-barrier.

Both books also note the “10,000 hours” rule, the time it seems to take to become an expert per­former. That’s roughly how long it took for Tiger Woods and Mozart (being trained by their dads), for the Bea­t­les (mostly play­ing in Ger­many), Bill Gates (mess­ing around on his high school com­puter) and for all the other geniuses you’d think were born uniquely tal­ented. They deliberate-practiced for about 10,000 hours before they made any out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to their field. On the bright side, this sug­gests that such great­ness is more widely avail­able than we’d think. The dark side of this insight of course is that find­ing the time is prob­a­bly the biggest obsta­cle. This is why get­ting started young is such an advan­tage; kids have a lot more free time.

This is why Glad­well writes that “It is not the bright­est who suc­ceed.  Nor is suc­cess sim­ply the sum of the deci­sions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Out­liers are those who have been given oppor­tu­ni­ties — and who have had the strength and pres­ence of mind to seize them.” It’s talk like this that makes Glad­well the apol­o­gist of the mediocre per­former, so read Out­liers if you’re look­ing to blame mom and dad for not forc­ing you to prac­tice the piano after school. Colvin, on the other hand, is a bet­ter read if you are look­ing for prac­ti­cal, action­able tips and more of an opti­mistic outlook.

If you’re inter­ested in learn­ing more, you might enjoy some of these other resources:

• Stum­ble Blog post on Delib­er­ate Practice
• An Open Edu­ca­tion Arti­cle on Delib­er­ate Practice
• Or, for more of an aca­d­e­mic read­ing, try Anders Ericsson’s arti­cle The Role of Delib­er­ate Prac­tice in the Acqui­si­tion of Expert Performance

Thanks for reading.

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Update: A stu­dent just sent me this Micheal Jor­don com­mer­cial, which relates well to all of this.

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