The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
by James Somers, February 9, 2010
I have just finished reading a famous paper by Ericsson, Krample, and Tesch-Romer called "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (1993, Psychological Review).
The paper's key claim is that performance—be it in chess, or swimming, or violin—is a monotonic function of accumulated deliberate practice. More deliberate practice equals better performance.
So what is "deliberate" practice, and how is it different from the regular kind?
The most cited condition concerns the subjects' motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance. In addition, the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction. The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.
So there should be an "active search for methods to improve performance," immediate informative feedback, structure, supervision from an expert, and "close attention to every detail of performance 'each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.'" Deliberate practice is demanding and can be quickly exhausting. It's usually not enjoyable in its own right.
Here's an example from chess:
In informal interviews, chess masters report spending around 4 hr a day analyzing published chess games of master-level players. Selecting the next moves in such games provides an informative learning situation in which players compare their own moves against those selected in an actual game. A failure to select the move made by the chess masters forces the chess players to analyze the chess position more carefully to uncover the reasons for that move selection. There exists also a large body of chess literature in which world-class chess players explicitly comment on their games and encyclopedias documenting the accumulated wisdom on various types of chess openings and middle-game tactics and strategies. An examination of biographies of world-class chess players... shows, contrary to the common belief that chess players have developed their chess skills independently, that these elite players have worked closely with individuals... who explicitly taught them about chess and introduced them to the literature.
Now that youngsters have access to cheap and super-powerful chess software, in which every position can be meticulously analyzed and moves can be compared across vast historical databases, it's no wonder that grandmasters are getting better faster. Structured deliberate practice is now easier to come by.
(As it is in poker. All these kids playing online can not only play many orders of magnitude more hands than their veteran predecessors, but they also—like chess players—have continuous access to analytics and hand histories which make perfect fodder for intense study. They can play at a dozen tables simultaneously and work hard on various techniques, situations, and methods, all the while collecting data and keeping track of metrics like percentage of limp-ins, % of hands played off the small blind, % flops seen, etc., for themselves and everyone else at the table.)
Anyway, that 4-hour figure cited above is actually quite common. In fact, the profile of top performers in every field the paper surveyed is remarkably consistent:
- They start practicing seriously at around 8 years old (sometimes younger), usually after showing unusual "promise" or interest.
- They seek out and work individually with a handful of mentors or teachers.
...it is generally recognized that individualized supervision by a teacher is superior. Research in education reviewed by Bloom (1984) shows that when students are randomly assigned to instruction by a tutor or to conventional teaching, tutoring yields better performance by two standard deviations.
- In addition to coaches / trainers / tutors, they regularly compete on a local or regional level. Doing well in these competitions validates their and their parents' expense (of time, money for transportation / travel, etc.). So intense practice continues.
- The duration and frequency of practice sessions gradually increases. (If you immediately started training at an expert's pace, you'd burn out.) Top performers practice about 4 hours per day in 80-120 minute sessions. There are decreasing marginal returns after the first hour and a half of a session.
- Athletes work most intensely in the mid-afternoon. Scientists and novelists almost uniformly prefer the morning. These choices make sense from a biophysical perspective.
- Experts are totally immersed. In addition to practice, they spend 50-60 hours per week on domain-related activities, like lessons, competitions, study, group practice / performance, individual play / performance, etc.
- Before producing their best work, they need to have completed about 10 years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
It's hard to overstate the importance of an early start. It's simply not possible for late bloomers to catch up, since they won't even be able to practice as much as the elites who started early:
...it is impossible for an individual with less accumulated practice at some age to catch up with the best individuals, who have started earlier and maintain maximal levels of deliberate practice not leading to exhaustion. As noted earlier, the amount of possible practice appears to slowly increase with accumulated practice and skill. Hence, individuals intent on catching up may suddently increase the amount of deliberate practice... Within months these individuals are likely to encounter overuse injuries and exhaustion... Furthermore, the difference in accumulated deliberate practice in late adolescence for the good and best violinists [the two groups in one study, the latter of whom started earlier] is remarkably large and to eliminate this difference the good violinists would have to practice an additional 5 h per week beyond their current optimal level of weekly practice for more than 8 full years.
There are some exceptions. Scientists in particular don't start intense research until their late teens or early twenties, which is why they often produce their best work in their mid-thirties. The key for them is to write:
In support of the importance of writing as an activity, Simonton (1988) found that eminent scientists produce a much larger number of publications than other scientists. It is clear from biographies of famous scientists that the time the individual spends thinking, mostly in the context of writing papers and books, appears to be the most relevant as well as demanding activity. Biographies report that famous scientists [like Darwin, Pavlov, and Skinner] adhered to a rigid daily schedule where the first major activity of each morning involved writing for a couple of hours.
Why is writing so useful? Writing is hard, structured, and it clarifies thinking. It's also one of the most effective ways for scientists to get feedback. This is part of the reason why consistent academic blogging can be so effective, especially if the blogger has a decently large audience. (And it makes one yearn for the writerly equivalent of chess or poker software, like a program that spat out a quality metric for each of your sentences as you typed.)
Anyway, the overall picture that emerges from this (quite long) paper is that innate talent counts for very little—even things like lung capacity, heart size, capillary density, dexterity, etc., that we might take to be genetically endowed, turn out to change considerably with years of deliberate practice. Or to take another example, excellent pianists don't have faster reaction times than amateurs; they only outperform the amateurs on tests specifically related to training on the piano. Nor is there a clean relationship between chess ability and IQ. And so on.
Which is why the authors are right to instruct us to think of "expert performers not simply as domain-specific experts but as experts in maintaining high levels of practice and improving performance." These are people who have what Sir Francis Galton called "an adequate power of doing a great deal of very laborious work."
So you want to become good at something? Use the Archimedean method:
Archimedes taught us that a small quantity added to itself often enough becomes a large quantity (or, in proverbial terms, every little bit helps). When it comes to accomplishing the bulk of the world's work, and, in particular, when it comes to writing a book, I believe that the converse of Archimedes' teaching is also true: the only way to write a large book is to keep writing a small bit of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday.- Paul R. Halmos, I Want to Be a Mathematician
Great post. A few thoughts:
1) Your post reminds me of how easy it is to forget the (perhaps increasing) marginal returns to consistency. That is, there’s a large difference between my saying, “I’m going to write for an hour everyday!” and “I’m going to write for an hour everyday, at 9 AM everyday.” Namely, in the latter case I’m much more likely to follow through. It’s funny how aiming for higher rigidity actually makes it more likely you’ll be rigid at all.
2) “Anyway, the overall picture that emerges from this (quite long) paper is that innate talent counts for very little.”
I’m not so sure we should be so quick to make this kind of claim, as I think the influence of innate talent can still manifest itself in subtle ways. Namely, even in the cases in which deliberate practice seems to account for nearly everything, it’s possible that those who have more innate talent find it much easier (i.e. much less painful) to engage in deliberate practice. For instance, if, as an 8-year old, a much higher percentage of the feedback I receive during my four hours of violin practice is positive, I’m much more likely continue practicing. The assumption here, of course, is that those with innate talent are more likely to receive positive (encouraging) feedback, especially early on. So yes, it appears that those who are less talented can compensate by engaging in more deliberate practice, but unfortunately, it may be true that the less talented find it much harder to practice deliberately. On this view, innate talent may have nearly as tight a strangehold on performance (as it does under the standard, “geniuses are born” view); it just exerts its force indirectly, by determining the painfulness of deliberate practice.
3) “(And it makes one yearn for the writerly equivalent of chess or poker software, like a program that spat out a quality metric for each of your sentences as you typed.)”
God, if only such software existed. Even with the ease of information transfer today, how many students train their writing skills under a mentor who reads their work on a daily basis? Granted, I don’t know the world of writing so well, but I would assume that work is reviewed at most every week or two, and such work is in the form of well-honed drafts. If writing is like chess in this way (and I don’t know why it would be different), it would be much more helpful, as you say, to have writing reviewed after every chapter, page, or paragraph even.
Here’s an idea: perhaps we can start a “writing circle,” in which 5+ people agree to edit the other members’ writing, on demand, with a <24 hour turnaround. When person A finishes a piece of writing he would like reviewed, he can post it to a communal pool, from which others can download the piece, edit it, and re-post it. A specific person must edit A’s piece (i.e. he is assigned as A’s official editor this time around), while the other people can edit it if they so choose. Alternatively, editing can always be “optional,” so to speak, but the more pages (or words) you edit, the more pages (or words) of your own you can have edited (you can call these points). So if everyone starts off with 10,000 points in the bank, and if one person receives edits on 10,000 words but does no editing of his own, he’ll be barred from posting any more words to the pool until he does some editing. There are, of course, many considerations in designing such a writing circle. You want:
a) High quality writers/editors (writers should meet some criteria for admittance) b) Timely responses to editing requests c) High quality edits d) Willingness to offer and receive sharp criticism, with nothing “taken personally”
Anyway, I think such a circle provides a structure for the deliberate practice of writing when no such structure seems to exist today. As I said, I presume that the best that students can do today is send their essays to mentors with whom they had to put in much effort to establish a relationship (the effort necessary explains why so few students have such mentors); moreover, this mentor is just one person (and thus, the student receives just one point of view), and one mentor will not likely be able or want to read essays on any frequency higher than once every >3 days.
So to sum up, a high-quality writing circle provides a writer more diverse, more frequent feedback. This feedback, in turn, encourages him to write more often and enables him to write better.
What do you think man? Want to whip up a writing circle program? I’m serious.
I’m with you on point #1. See my reply to Sharon regarding #2. As for #3, I don’t think I’m willing to put in the time for something like that right now. But if you ever need anything edited, looked at, whatever, I’m your man.
James,
I haven’t read the paper and perhaps I should. But I wanted to voice a similar point to Jimmy’s about innate ability not being worth much. I am wondering how they corrected for the self-selection and other selection mechanisms that would come about in this paper?
To be more explicit about these selection mechanisms:
How do we know that the youngsters who began to play violin at a young age simply weren’t the most talented to begin with?
How do we know that those youngsters who practice deliberately are not precisely the ones who are the best naturally? Couldn’t we assume that those youngsters who never saw measured improvement from deliberate practice would have simply quit? I think there comes a point where most of us see our limits and so choose to quit trying to do something we never can.
Preemptively: It seems like the way they broke apart #1 + #2 was by asking talented individuals to perform tests for skills that were related to their craft, but were not the craft itself. E.g., pianists were asked to perform tests of reaction time and they fared no better than normal individuals. This seems fair but I’m wondering how they defend the use of this against the counter claim that a battery of tests for parts of an action is not the same as testing that action.
E.g., perhaps our pianist does not have faster reaction time when hitting a button, and perhaps he doesn’t have a better feel for rhythm than any other music aficionado, and finally perhaps an IQ test reveals that his mean analytical abilities are no higher than anyone else’s. BUT, perhaps when he needs to do some weird balance of these things, he does them better. And perhaps he did them better at age 7, before his father bought him a piano. And perhaps by age 9 he was still doing better than the other boys, and as they dropped out of piano school only him and fellow precocious 9 year olds were playing. And so by 10 years of age it’s just a bunch of super gifted pianist
Selection biases like these are a staple in the social sciences, so I’m sure they were dealt with. I guess I’m asking you to enlighten us so I don’t have to read an entire paper to find something that is probably mentioned casually as a caveat somewhere in the Methodology Section.
~Sharon
The authors do try to dismiss selection biases explicitly by, for example, pointing to cases of people with “negative talent.” Example: “The gold medal winner at Melbourne in hammer throwing was born with a paralyzed left arm and devised new training techniques to overcome the disadvantage of his disability (Jokl, 1958)” (398). They give more in the paper.
They don’t entirely oppose the idea that innate talent is what initially attracts people to an activity. But their point is that the amount of accumulated deliberate practice is so good at explaining differing abilities—on its own—that differences in initial ability are quickly overtaken by differences in practice quality, frequency, etc.
So one of their predictions—and this you could test—is that a parent need only pretend that their kid is coming along well as a violinist (or whatever), regardless of his actual ability, and as long as this encouragement causes the kid to practice deliberately and with a coach, etc., he might as well have been genuinely promising.
The trouble with a lot of the historical examples of such behavior is that in most cases, the parents who sort of blindly encourage their kids to go into discipline X were themselves great Xers, so it’s hard to tease out the genetic factor. But anecdotally, I think exposure to good coaches/tutors, lots of easily available reading materials, and an early habit of deliberate practice account for most of the “father’s son” type of career paths. Example: what’s more likely, that there is a “lawyer gene,” or that a judge’s son becomes a good lawyer because he is groomed as one?
And finally, they do make a big point of the fact that domain-specific abilities really boil down to one general ability, that is, the ability to endure lots of deliberate practice. This they are willing to accept as innate.
It’s like what Paul Graham says about entrepreneurs: the best predictor of success is determination. Smarts, ideas, hacking ability, etc., take a backseat to grit. He has lots of evidence to substantiate that claim. Which makes sense in the deliberate practice framework, especially since “entrepreneurship” is such an obviously acquired ability (unlike, say, piano playing, which seems like it might depend more on genetic factors—though again, the authors handily dismiss a lot of this genetic talk).
That’s enough for now.
P.S.
I love that your comments section knows to treat my enumerations as numbered lists. That is
(a) Awesome. (b) Useful. (c) Aesthetically pleasing.
The question is whether or not it recognizes different enumeration styles.
[…] this setup is interesting in its own right—if only as an example of equipment that augments deliberate practice—I have a feeling that all the data it collects could be useful in a variety of other contexts. […]
The unfortunate thing about playing poker is that it DOESN’T meet all the criteria for deliberate practice.
“The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance.”
In poker you receive immediate feedback (win/lose the hand), but it’s not necessarily informative. Just because you won a hand or your opponent folded their hand does not mean you played your hand CORRECTLY — I’ve won plenty of hands that I played incorrectly. The lack of complete information (not knowing what someone had when they folded), in addition to the variability of outcomes (you can win with the worst hand sometimes) makes it hard to determine if you played a hand correctly.
“The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.”
It’s extremely rare that you will play a hand the exact same way in poker. When you take into account the variability of the cards, your position on the table and the players you’re playing against, the number of different situations is insanely high. Contrast playing poker to something like playing a piece of sheet music over and over again until you master it. With music, it’s very easy to repeatedly perform the same task over and over again.
The tricky thing with poker is you need to abstract these unique, individual situations into more general situations. But if you abstract incorrectly, you’ll end up misapplying logic to the wrong situations and losing. This, in my opinion, is what makes improving your skill at poker so challenging.
[…] About a month or so after it “launched,” a friend of mine who was slated to appear on the real live version of Jeopardy! asked if I had something he could use to study. I thought the version I had up at that point was adequate, but that it would be nice if there were something geared a little more toward deliberate practice. […]
Without reading the full paper, I benefited from your interpretation. I wonder if this paper is the inspiration for Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers”.
Something I feel that I can add to this is that kids are able to put in time (practice) without it feeling like it’s work. Their brains are very malleable. I think adults excel more at concepts, which requires deeper, more focused, thinking.
[…] mention many details here (for a more concise summary than those books provide, please refer to this post from my friend James Somers’s blog). What I’d like to do here is play the part of the […]
[…] Ericsson’s work on practice: Fortune/ CNN.Money: “What It Takes To Be Great”and j.somers blog: “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”…. Related posts: Should I Take the SAT, the ACT, or BOTH?, What Is Important to Colleges? Top Ten […]
[…] JiuJitsu a common approach is the idea of deliberate practice, focusing on one isolated movement or technique at a time and drilling it with constant repetitions […]
[…] Ericsson’s work on practice: Fortune/ CNN.Money: “What It Takes To Be Great”and j.somers blog: “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”…. Related posts: Should I Take the SAT, the ACT, or BOTH?, What Is Important to Colleges? Top Ten […]