5/4/22, 3:42 PM Joshua Foer on Deliberate Practice — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

When people first learn to use a keyboard, they improve very quickly from sloppy single-finger pecking to
careful two-handed typing, until eventually the fingers move so effortlessly across the keys that the whole
process becomes unconscious and the fingers seem to take on a mind of their own. At this point, most
people’s typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau. If you think about it, it’s a strange
phenomenon. After all, we’ve always been told that practice makes perfect, and many people sit behind a
keyboard for at least several hours a day in essence practicing their typing. Why don’t they just keep getting
better and better. 

In the 1960’s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by
describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase,
known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to
accomplish it more proficiently. During the second, “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making
fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the
“autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re
basically running on autopilot….

What separates the experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused
routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many
different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They
develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three
things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on
their performance. 

Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros
are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice
skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work
more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard….

The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually
practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task
that you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. Benjamin
Franklin was apparently an early practitioner  of this technique. In his autobiography, he describes how he
used to read essays by the great thinkers and try to reconstruct the the author’s arguments according to
Franklin’s own logic. He’d then open up the essay and compare his reconstruction to the original words to
see how his own chain of thinking stacked up against the master’s. The best chess players follow a similar
strategy. They will often spend several hours a day replaying the games of grand masters one move at a time,
trying to understand the expert’s thinking at each step. Indeed, the single best predictor of an individual’s
chess skill is not the amount of chess he’s played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he’s spent
sitting alone working through old games.

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5/4/22, 3:42 PM Joshua Foer on Deliberate Practice — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing–to
force oneself to stay out of autopilot. With typing, it’s relatively easy to get past the OK plateau.
Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type faster than feels
comfortable, and to allow yourself to make mistakes. In one noted experiment, typists were repeatedly
flashed words 10 to 15 percent faster than their fingers were able to translate them onto the keyboard. At first
they weren’t able to keep up, but over a period of days they figured out the obstacles that were slowing them
down, and overcame them, and then continued to type at the faster speed. By bringing typing out of the
autonomous stage and back under their conscious control, they had conquered the OK plateau….

This, more than anything, is what differentiates the top memorizers from the second tier: they approach
memorization like a science. They develop hypotheses about their limitations; they conduct experiments and
track data. “It’s like you’re developing a piece of technology, or working on a scientific theory,” the two-time
world champ Andi Bell once told me. “You have to analyze what you’re doing." 

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