How to master new skills with ‘deliberate practice’ about:reader?url=http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190318-how-to-ma...

bbc.com

How to master new skills with

‘deliberate practice’
William Park
10-12 minutos

The amount of time you spend working on something does not

equal the quality of the output. Jogging the same routes, for
instance, clocking up similar times every weekend will never
transform you into a world-class athlete no matter how long you
keep at it. Some of us strive to excel, but for most the thought of
committing to even more training is daunting.

So what if self-improvement did not require such a huge investment

of time? Are there special qualities that people who strive for the
top possess that allow them to rise above the rest? BBC Capital
asked a gold-medal winning Olympic coach, a record-holding
football manager and a super learner.

Stop repeating mistakes

Sixty minutes spent doing ‘the right thing’ is better than any amount
of time spent learning in an unfocussed way, according to professor
Anders Ericsson of Florida State University. Identifying areas that
need work then devising a purposeful plan to correct them is
crucial. Ericsson calls this process ‘deliberate practice’.

Ericsson has spent the best part of three decades analysing how

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elite performers from musicians to surgeons reach the very top of

their field. Developing the right mindset, he says, is more important
than raw talent. “There was always this discussion that in order to
be good you had to be born with the attributes because it was
difficult to produce high-level performers, which is wrong,” he says.

Practitioners of deliberate practice often criticise the way we are

taught at school. Music teachers, for example, start pupils off with
the basic elements; the notes, the keys, how to read music. If you
need to grade students against each other you need to compare
them on simple, objective measures. Teaching like this makes
grading easier, but it might also turn off beginners who cannot
imagine reaching their end goal of playing the music they enjoy
because they are doing tasks that have no meaning to them.

Start with the goal, then create a plan to get there and stick to it

“I think the right way to learn is the reverse,” says Max Deutsch, 26,
who has taken rapid learning to the extreme. In 2016, San
Francisco-based Deutsch set himself the target of learning 12
ambitious new skills to a very high standard, one each month. The
first was memorising a deck of cards in two minutes without a
mistake. Accomplishing this task is considered the threshold for a
grandmaster of memory. The last was to teach himself how to play
chess, from the beginning, and to beat grandmaster Magnus
Carlsen in a game.

“Start with the goal,” says Deutsch. “What is it that I would have to
know, or be able to do, to get to my goal? Then create a plan to get
there and stick to it. On day one I declared ‘This is what I’m going
to be doing each day’. I predefined every task for every single day.

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This meant I didn’t think ‘Do I have the energy or should I put this
off?’ because I had predefined it. It became a non-negotiable part of
the day.”

Deutsch says he was able to take on this challenge while holding

down a full-time job, commuting for an hour a day and ensuring he
had eight hours’ sleep. Forty-five to 60 minutes each day for 30
days was enough to complete each challenge. “The structure did
80% of the hard work,” he says.

If deliberate practice sounds familiar to you, it formed the basis of

the 10,000-hour rule popularised by Malcolm Gladwell. One of
Ericsson’s first papers on deliberate practice suggested that elite
performers spend 10,000 hours, or approximately 10 years, training
in this focused way before they reach the top of their field. But it is
misleading to think that anyone who spends 10,000 hours doing
anything will somehow become world-class. “You need to be
practising with purpose, and it takes a certain type of person,
psychologically, to do that,” says Ericsson.

“It’s not about the total time spent practising, it needs to be matched
with the commitment of the student,” he says. “Are they correcting,
are they changing what they do. It’s not clear why some people
think that doing more of making the same mistakes will make you
better.”

‘Focus on mastery’

The sporting world has adopted many of Ericsson’s lessons. “It’s

the players who do the work. They have to be very determined to
be a player who reaches the top,” says Roger Gustafsson. A former
footballer-turned-coach, Gustafsson managed IFK Goteborg to five
league titles in the 1990s – more than any other manager in

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Swedish league history. Now in his 60s, Gustafsson is still involved

in the youth system at the club.

“We tried to teach 12-year-olds [in the IFK Goteborg youth system]
the Barcelona passing triangle through deliberate practice and they
developed incredibly [fast] in five weeks. They reached a point
where they were doing the same number of triangle passes as
Barcelona in competitive games. It’s not quite like saying they were
as good as Barcelona, of course, but it was incredible how quickly
they could learn.”

Five tips for deliberate practice

1. Start with your goal. What are you trying to achieve: to be the
best in the world, or something else? Without knowing where you
want to get to, you cannot plan.

2. Work backwards from your goal, what do you need to do to get

there? Eliminate things from your training that are unnecessary for
meeting your goal.

3. Break up your plan into smaller steps. Set yourself deadlines.

This way you will know if you are starting to fall behind or have
plateaued.

4. Ask for feedback from someone experienced, or film yourself at

your task. If you want to be a good public speaker, film yourself
presenting and compare it to other videos of speakers.

5. If you plateau you might need to work backwards. What do other

people do that you do not? Getting worse before you get better is a
real possibility.

Video has become an essential tool for providing immediate

feedback. “If you only tell the player, they might not get the same

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picture that you have,” says Gustafsson. “They have to see

themselves and compare with a player that did it differently. Young
players are very comfortable with video feedback. They are used to
filming themselves and each other. As a coach it’s difficult to give
everyone feedback because you have 20 players in a squad.
Deliberate practice is about empowering people to give themselves
feedback.”

Gustafsson emphasises that the more immediate the coach can

make their feedback, the more value it has. By correcting mistakes
in training, less time is wasted doing things wrong.

“The most important part of this is the intention of the athlete, they
have to want to learn,” says Hugh McCutcheon, head coach of
volleyball at the University of Minnesota. “The athlete has to feel
like they are in a safe space to make it worse. They might get
worse to get better. This might turn off casual learners, but technical
mastery is hard. It’s the same across any sport; what separates the
very best is technical mastery and that requires a big commitment.”

Talent is not rare. What is rare is talent and motivation and focus on
mastery – Hugh McCutcheon

McCutcheon was head coach of the USA men’s volleyball team

who won gold at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, 20 years after
their previous gold medal. He then took over the women’s team and
led them to silver at the London 2012 games. “We have a
responsibility to teach and they have a responsibility to learn,” says
McCutcheon. “This isn’t an input-output thing. The plateau is real,
you will struggle. The people who get through are the ones who
commit to working on their faults. You don’t have transformative
days where you go from being a hack to an expert. There’s a lot of

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talented people. Talent is not rare. What is rare is talent and

motivation and focus on mastery.”

Why structure matters

For some of the tasks Deutsch took on, there was already a heavily
predefined method of learning, like memorising a deck of cards,
where he says 90% of the method is well-established. Deutsch
wanted to apply deliberate practice to a more abstract challenge
that would require developing his own strategy; solving a Saturday
New York Times crossword puzzle. He says these crosswords were
seen as too complex to be solved in a systematic way, but he
thought that he could apply the techniques he learned in previous
challenges to solving them.

“If I know the 6,000 most common clues, how close would that get
me to solving a puzzle? On an easier puzzle it helps to get you a
significant way to solving it,” says Deutsch. “On a Saturday puzzle,
it doesn’t get you that far, but it is a big leg-up. So that’s what I did; I
scraped a website to get the data and based on how I learned a
language in a previous challenge I used a programme to memorise
them. Over one week I learned those 6,000 answers.”

With enough exposure to the answers, he was able to learn all

these common clues. Next, Deutsch looked at how the puzzles
were constructed. Some letter combinations are more likely to
follow others, so if part of the grid is complete, he could narrow
down the possibilities for the remaining spaces by ruling out
unlikely words. Expanding his vocabulary was the final part to going
from crossword novice to master.

“Typically, we underestimate what we can accomplish in a small

amount of time and overestimate what it will take to do a thing,”

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says Deutsch, who succeeded in 11 of his 12 tasks (the chess win

eluded him). “By creating a structure, you remove the mental noise.
Deliberating practising things for an hour for a month is not a lot of
time but when was the last time you spent 30 hours deliberately
working on one specific thing?”

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