deliberate practice

Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise
by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Published 4 Apr 2016

I offer specific advice about putting deliberate practice to work in professional organizations in order to improve the performance of employees, about how individuals can apply deliberate practice to get better in their areas of interest, and even about how schools can put deliberate practice to work in the classroom. While the principles of deliberate practice were discovered by studying expert performers, the principles themselves can be used by anyone who wants to improve at anything, even if just a little bit. Want to improve your tennis game? Deliberate practice. Your writing? Deliberate practice. Your sales skills? Deliberate practice. Because deliberate practice was developed specifically to help people become among the best in the world at what they do and not merely to become “good enough,” it is the most powerful approach to learning that has yet been discovered.

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Some genetic factors may influence a person’s ability to engage in sustained deliberate practice—for instance, by limiting a person’s capability to focus for long periods of time every day. Conversely, engaging in extended practice may influence how genes are turned on and off in the body. The last part of the book takes everything we have learned about deliberate practice by studying expert performers and explains what it means for the rest of us. I offer specific advice about putting deliberate practice to work in professional organizations in order to improve the performance of employees, about how individuals can apply deliberate practice to get better in their areas of interest, and even about how schools can put deliberate practice to work in the classroom.

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There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named “deliberate practice” back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area. We will devote most of the rest of this book to exploring what deliberate practice is, why it is so effective, and how best to apply it in various situations. But before we delve into the details of deliberate practice, it will be best if we spend a little time understanding some more basic types of practice—the sorts of practice that most people have already experienced in one way or another.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
by Cal Newport
Published 17 Sep 2012

Step 4: Stretch and Destroy Returning to Geoff Colvin, in the article cited above he gives the following warning about deliberate practice: Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. 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. If you show up and do what you’re told, you will, as Anders Ericsson explained earlier in this chapter, reach an “acceptable level” of ability before plateauing. The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.

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Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you. To successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, therefore, we have to approach our jobs in the same way that Jordan approaches his guitar playing or Garry Kasparov his chess training—with a dedication to deliberate practice. How to accomplish this feat is the goal of the remainder of this chapter.

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Step 3: Define “Good” It’s at this point, once you’ve identified exactly what skill to build, that you can, for guidance, begin to draw from the research on deliberate practice. The first thing this literature tells us is that you need clear goals. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action. Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune magazine who wrote a book on deliberate practice,7 put it this way in an article that appeared in Fotune: “[Deliberate practice] requires good goals.”8 When you ask a musician like Jordan Tice, for example, there’s little ambiguity about what getting “good” means to him at that moment.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 14 Jul 2012

What distinguishes elite performers, or experts, from the rest of us is that they advance beyond their natural plateaus through deliberate practice. Unlike routine and playful performance, deliberate practice pushes people to attempt what is beyond the limits of their performance. It involves hours of concentrated and dedicated repetition. Deliberate practice also requires timely and accurate feedback, usually from a coach or teacher, in order to detect and correct errors. Deliberate practice is laborious, time-consuming, and not much fun, which is why so few people become true experts or true champions.18 In activities where luck plays a larger role, skill boils down to a process of making decisions.

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But if we were that good, we'd probably be pretty frustrated driving in traffic. But for some activities, deliberate practice is called for if we want to reach for success. Deliberate practice requires individuals to work just beyond their true ability. Deliberate practice also requires lots of timely and accurate feedback. It is hard work. It is tedious. The fact is that few of us are surrounded by coaches who can deliver a proper program with feedback, and we are not generally motivated to commit thousands of hours to mastering a given skill. Still, we need to keep the notion of deliberate practice in mind, whether we're coaching our child's sports team or training corporate executives.

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But as economists studying the issue have found, those causes don't really have any significance. They just make good copy.9 Because cause and effect are not linear in markets, there's no reliable way to train your System 1 to anticipate prices. Deliberate practice is powerful in domains where it applies, including chess, music, and sports. But acknowledging its limits is crucial. A number of the popular books that celebrate deliberate practice fail to distinguish between when it works and when it doesn't.10 Deliberate practice begins with a coach or teacher who designs the curriculum specifically to improve performance.11 A teacher can identify the skills that are essential for a particular pursuit, allowing the student to concentrate on mastering those skills in order to improve performance.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
by Kevlin Henney
Published 5 Feb 2010

Improve Code by Removing It, Improve Code by Removing It, Improve Code by Removing It, Improve Code by Removing It You Gotta Care About the Code, You Gotta Care About the Code, You Gotta Care About the Code, You Gotta Care About the Code Google, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Make the Invisible More Visible Gregory, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate Guest, Learn to Say, "Hello, World" Learn to Say, Learn to Say, "Hello, World" guru myth, The Guru Myth, The Guru Myth, The Guru Myth H hard work, Hard Work Does Not Pay Off, Hard Work Does Not Pay Off, Hard Work Does Not Pay Off Henney, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Test for Required Behavior, Not Incidental Behavior, Test Precisely and Concretely, Test Precisely and Concretely, Test Precisely and Concretely Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say Test for Required Behavior, Test for Required Behavior, Not Incidental Behavior Test Precisely and Concretely, Test Precisely and Concretely, Test Precisely and Concretely, Test Precisely and Concretely Hohpe, Convenience Is Not an -ility, Convenience Is Not an -ility, Convenience Is Not an -ility Convenience Is Not an -ility, Convenience Is Not an -ility, Convenience Is Not an -ility, Convenience Is Not an -ility Holmes, You Gotta Care About the Code Hopper, Don't Rely on "Magic Happens Here" Horstmann, Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate Step Back and Automate, Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate Hufnagel, News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends, News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends, News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends, Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard, Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard, Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends, News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends, News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends, News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard, Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard, Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard, Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard Hunt, Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture, Don't Repeat Yourself I IDEs, Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate, The Unix Tools Are Your Friends automation, Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate Unix tools, The Unix Tools Are Your Friends IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), Know How to Use Command-Line Tools, Know Your IDE IEEE floating-point numbers, Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real, Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real, Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real incremental changes, Before You Refactor installation process, Deploy Early and Often, Deploy Early and Often, Deploy Early and Often installing software, Install Me, Install Me, Install Me interfaces, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly interim solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions internal DSLs, Domain-Specific Languages interprocess communication, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time invisibility, Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible J Jackson, Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say, Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say, Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say, Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say, Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say, Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say Jagger, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible, Make the Invisible More Visible Java, Distinguish Business Exceptions from Technical, Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State, The Golden Rule of API Design, Know Your IDE, Test for Required Behavior, Not Incidental Behavior, Write Small Functions Using Examples K Karlsson, Code Reviews, Code Reviews, Code Reviews Code Reviews, Code Reviews, Code Reviews, Code Reviews keeping a sustainable pace, Hard Work Does Not Pay Off, Hard Work Does Not Pay Off, Hard Work Does Not Pay Off Kelly, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others, Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) Klumpp, Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) L Landre, Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State Encapsulate Behavior, Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State languages, Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture, Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture, Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture layout of code, Code Layout Matters, Code Layout Matters, Code Layout Matters learning, Continuous Learning Lee, Learn to Say, "Hello, World" Lewis, Don't Be Afraid to Break Things, Don't Be Afraid to Break Things, Don't Be Afraid to Break Things Don't Be Afraid to Break Things, Don't Be Afraid to Break Things, Don't Be Afraid to Break Things, Don't Be Afraid to Break Things libraries, Choose Your Tools with Care Lindner, Let Your Project Speak for Itself, Let Your Project Speak for Itself, Let Your Project Speak for Itself Let Your Project Speak for Itself, Let Your Project Speak for Itself, Let Your Project Speak for Itself, Let Your Project Speak for Itself LISP, Distinguish Business Exceptions from Technical logging, Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep M Marquardt, Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages, The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions, The Longevity of Interim Solutions Martin, The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule, The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer, The Single Responsibility Principle, The Single Responsibility Principle, The Single Responsibility Principle The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule, The Boy Scout Rule The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer The Single Responsibility Principle, The Single Responsibility Principle, The Single Responsibility Principle, The Single Responsibility Principle mentors, Continuous Learning Mercurial, Put Everything Under Version Control Meszaros, Write Tests for People, Write Tests for People, Write Tests for People Write Tests for People, Write Tests for People, Write Tests for People, Write Tests for People Metaphors We Live By, Read the Humanities Meyers, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly, Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly Miller, Start from Yes, Start from Yes, Start from Yes Start from Yes, Start from Yes, Start from Yes, Start from Yes monitoring, Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep, Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep, Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep Monson-Haefel, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source multithreaded problems, Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern, Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern, Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern singletons and, Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern, Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern, Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern MySQL, Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database N Nilsson, Thinking in States, Thinking in States, Thinking in States Thinking in States, Thinking in States, Thinking in States, Thinking in States Norås, Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture Don't Just Learn the Language, Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture North, Code in the Language of the Domain, Code in the Language of the Domain, Code in the Language of the Domain Code in the Language of the Domain, Code in the Language of the Domain, Code in the Language of the Domain, Code in the Language of the Domain Norvig, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice O Ølmheim, Beauty Is in Simplicity, Beauty Is in Simplicity, Beauty Is in Simplicity Beauty Is in Simplicity, Beauty Is in Simplicity, Beauty Is in Simplicity, Beauty Is in Simplicity open source, Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source, Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database, Read Code P pair programming, Pair Program and Feel the Flow, Two Heads Are Often Better Than One parallelism, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems Pascal, Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real, Know Well More Than Two Programming Languages Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time Pepperdine, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks performance, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time management, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time Philosophical Investigations, Read the Humanities Plato, Beauty Is in Simplicity polymorphism, Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism, Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism, Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism Poppendieck, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice PostgreSQL, Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database process bottlenecks, Code Reviews professional programmers, The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer, The Professional Programmer profiling tool, Use the Right Algorithm and Data Structure project management, Learn to Estimate Prolog, Know Well More Than Two Programming Languages R RDBMS systems, Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database, Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database, Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database readability of code, Beauty Is in Simplicity, Convenience Is Not an -ility, Domain-Specific Languages, Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types Reeves, Testing Is the Engineering Rigor of Software Development refactoring code, Before You Refactor reinventing the wheel, Reinvent the Wheel Often removing code, Improve Code by Removing It, Simplicity Comes from Reduction repetition, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Don't Repeat Yourself practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice process, Don't Repeat Yourself repetitive tasks, Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate response time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time return code, Don't Ignore That Error!

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Separating the cases gives clarity and increases the chances that technical exceptions will be handled by some application framework, while the business domain exceptions actually are considered and handled by the client code. Chapter 22. Do Lots of Deliberate Practice Jon Jagger DELIBERATE PRACTICE IS NOT SIMPLY PERFORMING A TASK. If you ask yourself, "Why am I performing this task?" and your answer is, "To complete the task," then you're not doing deliberate practice. You do deliberate practice to improve your ability to perform a task. It's about skill and technique. Deliberate practice means repetition. It means performing the task with the aim of increasing your mastery of one or more aspects of the task.

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(You Are Not the User) Prevent Errors, Prevent Errors, Prevent Errors, Prevent Errors collaboration, Two Heads Are Often Better Than One, Two Heads Are Often Better Than One, Two Heads Are Often Better Than One, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate testers and programmers, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate, When Programmers and Testers Collaborate Colvin, Know Your Limits, Know Your Limits, Know Your Limits Know Your Limits, Know Your Limits, Know Your Limits, Know Your Limits command-line build tools, Know How to Use Command-Line Tools, Know How to Use Command-Line Tools, Know How to Use Command-Line Tools comments, A Comment on Comments, Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say, Only the Code Tells the Truth, Write Code As If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life committing code, Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends) communicating with peers, Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages, Learn Foreign Languages compiler bugs, Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others components, Choose Your Tools with Care concurrency, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems continuous learning, Continuous Learning, Continuous Learning, Continuous Learning contradictions in code, Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix), Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) correctness of code, Coding with Reason, Coding with Reason, Coding with Reason CVS, Put Everything Under Version Control D Dahan, Beware the Share, Beware the Share, Beware the Share Beware the Share, Beware the Share, Beware the Share, Beware the Share data structures, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time using caches, Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time deliberate practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice, Do Lots of Deliberate Practice deployment process, Deploy Early and Often, Deploy Early and Often, Deploy Early and Often design, Code Is Design, Code Is Design, Code Is Design dirty code, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs, The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs Doar, How to Use a Bug Tracker, How to Use a Bug Tracker, How to Use a Bug Tracker How to Use a Bug Tracker, How to Use a Bug Tracker, How to Use a Bug Tracker, How to Use a Bug Tracker domain-specific languages (DSLs), Domain-Specific Languages, Domain-Specific Languages, Domain-Specific Languages domain-specific typing, Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types, Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types, Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), Don't Repeat Yourself, WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks duplication, Don't Repeat Yourself, Own (and Refactor) the Build E encapsulation, Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State, Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State, Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State Erlang, Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems errno, Don't Ignore That Error!

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important The final argument for maintaining a clear endpoint to your workday requires us to return briefly to Anders Ericsson, the inventor of deliberate practice theory. As you might recall from Part 1, deliberate practice is the systematic stretching of your ability for a given skill. It is the activity required to get better at something. Deep work and deliberate practice, as I’ve argued, overlap substantially. For our purposes here we can use deliberate practice as a general-purpose stand-in for cognitively demanding efforts. In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work.

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“the development and deepening of the mind”: Ibid., 13. Details about deliberate practice draw heavily on the following seminal survey paper on the topic: Ericsson, K.A., R.T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Römer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review 100.3 (1993): 363–406. “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable”: Ibid., 13. “Men of genius themselves”: from page 95 of Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life. “Diffused attention is almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice”: from page 368 of Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer.

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Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics. * After Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of deliberate practice in his 2008 bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success, it became fashionable within psychology circles (a group suspicious, generally speaking, of all things Gladwellian) to poke holes in the deliberate practice hypothesis. For the most part, however, these studies did not invalidate the necessity of deliberate practice, but instead attempted to identify other components also playing a role in expert performance. In a 2013 journal article, titled “Why Expert Performance Is Special and Cannot Be Extrapolated from Studies of Performance in the General Population: A Response to Criticisms,” and published in the journal Intelligence 45 (2014): 81–103, Ericsson pushed back on many of these studies.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Anders Ericsson has made a career studying the fastest way to get good at something, a model he calls deliberate practice. It works by deliberately putting people in situations at the limit of their abilities, where they are constantly practicing increasingly difficult skills and receiving consistent real-time feedback. As Ericsson noted in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” Deliberate practice is more intensive than what you think of as regular practice.

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Gladwell draws on Ericsson’s work and notes that world-class experts usually required ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve world-class status. Please be aware that Ericsson and others have noted that this is not a hard-and-fast “rule,” in that actual hourly amounts vary depending on the subject you are practicing, how deliberate the practice, how good your coaches are, and the degree of mastery you are seeking. Regardless, it is clear that in any field, deliberate practice is the fastest way to move from being a novice to being an expert. It is difficult to do alone, however, because it relies on continuous specific feedback about what you could be doing better.

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Think of someone like a personal trainer, sports coach, or music teacher. In a professional setting, this person could be a manager or mentor who is helping you take on more and more responsibility, coaching you consistently along the way. Deliberate practice puts you outside your comfort zone. That is both mentally and physically taxing. Trying to impose deliberate practice on someone is therefore a losing battle. It is better to get buy-in from both the mentor and mentee before committing to this model. A related model is the spacing effect, which explains that learning effects are greater when that learning is spaced out over time, rather than when you study the same amount in a compressed amount of time.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

Tiger’s incredible upbringing has been at the heart of a batch of bestselling books on the development of expertise, one of which was a parenting manual written by Tiger’s father, Earl. Tiger was not merely playing golf. He was engaging in “deliberate practice,” the only kind that counts in the now-ubiquitous ten-thousand-hours rule to expertise. The “rule” represents the idea that the number of accumulated hours of highly specialized training is the sole factor in skill development, no matter the domain. Deliberate practice, according to the study of thirty violinists that spawned the rule, occurs when learners are “given explicit instructions about the best method,” individually supervised by an instructor, supplied with “immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance,” and “repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.”

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Deliberate practice, according to the study of thirty violinists that spawned the rule, occurs when learners are “given explicit instructions about the best method,” individually supervised by an instructor, supplied with “immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance,” and “repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.” Reams of work on expertise development shows that elite athletes spend more time in highly technical, deliberate practice each week than those who plateau at lower levels: Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible. The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it.

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Apparently the idea of an athlete, even one who wants to become elite, following a Roger path and trying different sports is not so absurd. Elite athletes at the peak of their abilities do spend more time on focused, deliberate practice than their near-elite peers. But when scientists examine the entire developmental path of athletes, from early childhood, it looks like this: Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time
by Allen Gannett
Published 11 Jun 2018

Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (3) (July 1993), http://www.nytimes.com/​images/​blogs/​freakonomics/​pdf/​DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf; my interviews with him; Neil Charness, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 19 (2) (March 2005); and Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and the Modifiability of Body and Mind.” the power of purposeful practice: That study is Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Classical Art Online: Find that site here: http://www.classicalartonline.com/. Saul was a London cabbie: Eleanor A.

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Researchers found the importance: Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and the Modifiability of Body and Mind.” One study that looked: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Systems Model of Creativity: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014). This training has origins from: Juliette Aristides, Classical Drawing Atelier (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2006). K. Anders Ericsson: Details relating to Ericsson and “purposeful practice” drawn from K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (3) (July 1993), http://www.nytimes.com/​images/​blogs/​freakonomics/​pdf/​DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf; my interviews with him; Neil Charness, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 19 (2) (March 2005); and Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and the Modifiability of Body and Mind.”

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“Never use more than three melodic parts in a song….Three parts and recycle parts of the verse or part of the song in the chorus so when the chorus comes you already heard the chorus but it’s the beginning of the verse.” Max not only teaches his protégés the constraints and formulas that come together to create a familiar pop song, he also helps them perfect their craft. As I wrote earlier in my section on deliberate practice, learning from an experienced teacher and getting feedback from them is an essential step in developing and honing a creative skill. Bonnie McKee is a lyricist who worked with Martin and many of the people in his group. She’s cowritten the words to songs including “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz, “California Gurls” by Katy Perry, and countless others.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer 1993, pp. 366, 391–92. They also make the stronger claim that deliberate practice is virtually the sole cause of expertise: “We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs-novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice. Furthermore, we can account for stable individual differences in performance among individuals actively involved in deliberate practice with reference to the monotonic relation between accumulated amount of deliberate practice and current level of performance” (p. 392). This research inspires Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “10,000 Hour Rule” (Gladwell 2008).

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Anders Ericsson, the world’s leading expert on expertise, novices improve as long as they are, “1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance.”91 Before long, though, the benefit of mere practice plateaus. To really get good at their jobs, people must advance to deliberate practice. They must exit their comfort zone—raise the bar, struggle to surmount it, repeat. As Ericsson and coauthors explain: You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all.92 Attaining world-class expertise in chess, music, math, tennis, swimming, long-distance running, writing, and science requires many years of deliberate practice.93 Fortunately, the labor market offers plenty of subpinnacle opportunities.

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It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all.92 Attaining world-class expertise in chess, music, math, tennis, swimming, long-distance running, writing, and science requires many years of deliberate practice.93 Fortunately, the labor market offers plenty of subpinnacle opportunities. A few thousand hours of deliberate practice rarely makes you a superstar, but is ample time to get good in most occupations.94 People don’t become skilled workers by dabbling in a dozen different school subjects. They become skilled workers by devoting years to their chosen vocation—by doing their job and striving to do it better.95 Discipline and Socialization “I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.) In iWoz, Wozniak describes his childhood passion for electronics, and unintentionally recounts all the elements of Deliberate Practice that Ericsson emphasizes.

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In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting.

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Smith, e-mail to the author, October 20, 2010. 25. “Why could that boy, whom I had beaten so easily”: See Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009), 48. 26. three groups of expert violinists: K. Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. 27. “Serious study alone”: Neil Charness et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 19 (2005): 151–65. 28. College students who tend to study alone: David Glenn, “New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorsteps,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2001. 29.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Busyness does not equal effectiveness.”11 In his book Talent Is Overrated, Fortune magazine editor Geoff Colvin highlights studies that show that greatness can be developed by any individual, in any field, through the process of what he calls “deliberate practice.”12 It is one of the big ideas from the science on human performance. Deliberate practice is a highly structured activity with the specific goal of improving performance. It requires continuous evaluation, feedback, and a lot of mental effort. Following are some of the key elements of deliberate practice: 1. It’s repeatable. If you’re a writer, you write a lot. If you are a musician, you know the importance of repeating your notes. 2. It receives constant feedback.

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Learning occurs when you get lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions. And deliberate practice constantly refers to results-based feedback. No mistakes go unnoticed. In fact, every error is a crucial piece of information for further improvement. The feedback can come from your observations or from a coach or mentor who notices the things that aren’t always visible to you. 3. It is hard. Deliberate practice takes significant mental effort. 4. It isn’t much fun. Most people don’t enjoy doing activities that they’re not good at. It’s no fun to fail time and time again and to receive criticism about how to improve. Yet deliberate practice is designed to focus specifically on those things you are weak at, and this requires you to practice those skills repeatedly until you master them.

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I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.9 I love this framework because it doesn’t involve a spreadsheet or a business plan. It has more to do with personal fulfillment and life goals. Once we have understood the significant importance of passion and focus in life, how can we harness their power more effectively to achieve excellence in our respective fields? By engaging in the process of deliberate practice. Deliberate Practice Many performance coaches and motivational gurus preach the mantra of “practice makes perfect.” Ten thousand hours of practice, they say, is the key to world-class performance. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea in his bestselling book Outliers: The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise.

Moonwalking With Einstein
by Joshua Foer
Published 3 Mar 2011

I might also mention that this works as an excellent idea-generator and constitutes sound afternoon entertainment.” 171 lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered: J. M. Deakin and S. Cobley (2003), “A Search for Deliberate Practice: An Examination of the Practice Environments in Figureskating and Volleyball,” in Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sport Expertise (edited by J. L. Starkes and K. A. Ericsson). 172 trying to understand the expert’s thinking at each step: K. A. Ericsson, et al. (1993), “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 no. 3, 363-406. 172 working through old games: N. Charness, R.

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They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance. What separates 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.

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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. When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

“Local leagues have been nudged”: Sean Gregory, “How Kid Sports Turned Pro,” Time, August 24, 2017. “deliberate practice”: On Anders Ericsson, see K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363; K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and the Acquisition and Maintenance of Expert Performance in Medicine and Related Domains,” Academic Medicine 79, no. 10 (2004): S70–S81; K. Anders Ericsson, “The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ed.

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Some families spend up to 10 percent of their income on registration fees, travel, camps, and equipment to keep their kids practicing for success on the field or in the gym. But today it’s not enough that kids practice. They have to practice the right way—in a way that conforms to research psychologist Anders Ericsson’s concept of “deliberate practice.” As described by Ericsson, famous for his ten-thousand-hour concept discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 bestselling Outliers, deliberate practice involves the systematic pursuit of personal improvement by focusing on well-defined, specific goals and areas of expertise. Parents who want their child to practice deliberately must hire a teacher or coach who has a demonstrated ability to help others improve the desired area—say chess, ballet, or music—and who can also give continuous feedback.

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Anders Ericsson, “The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ed. K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Roberft R. Hoffman, and Paul J. Feltovich 38 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview,” Academic Emergency Medicine 15, no. 11 (2008): 988–994; K. Anders Ericsson, “Attaining Excellence Through Deliberate Practice: Insights from the Study of Expert Performance,” in Teaching and Learning: The Essential Readings, ed. Charles Deforges and Richard Fox (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008).

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Jan 2008

MOVE FIVE STEPS CLOSER TO MASTERY O ne key to mastery is what Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice a lifelong period of . . . effort to improve performance in a specific domain. Deliberate practice isn't running a few miles each day or banging on the piano for twenty minutes each morning. It's much more purposeful, focused, and, yes, painful. Follow these steps over and over again for a decade and you just might become a master: ¥ Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. People who play tennis once a week for years don't get any better if they do the same thing each time, Ericsson has said. Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time

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Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else BY GEOFF COLVIN What's the difference between those who are pretty good at what they do and those who are masters? Fortune magazine's Colvin scours the evidence and shows that the answer is threefold: practice, practice, practice. But it's not just any practice, he says. The secret is deliberate practice highly repetitive, mentally demanding work that's often unpleasant, but undeniably effective. Type I Insight : If you set a goal of becoming an expert in your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don't do now. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI It's tough to find a better argument for working hard at something you love than Csikszentmihalyi's landmark book on optimal experiences.

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Smart workplaces therefore supplement day-to-day activities with Goldilocks tasks not too hard and not too easy. But mastery also abides by three peculiar rules. Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. And mastery is an asymptote: It's impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring. Chapter 6. Purpose Humans, by their nature, seek purpose a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered purpose ornamental a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn't get in the way of the important things.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
by Matthew Syed
Published 19 Apr 2010

For excellent studies relating to the application of feedback to medicine, see Dawes, House of Cards; and K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and the Acquisition and Maintenance of Expert Performance in Medicine and Related Domains,” Academic Medicine 79 (2004): S70–S81. Think about an amateur golfer: The application of the principles of purposeful practice in golf can be found in K. Anders Ericsson, “The Path to Expert Golf Performance: Insights from the Masters on How to Improve Performance by Deliberate Practice,” in Optimizing Performance in Golf, ed. P. R. Thomas, 1–57 (Brisbane, Australia: Australian Academic Press, 2001).

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But now we are going to dig down into an even more vital facet of expertise, the quality of practice: the specialized learning used by top performers to attain master status and the deep concentration that is needed during each of those ten thousand hours to make them count. Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice,” to distinguish it from what most of the rest of us get up to. I am going to call it purposeful practice. Why? Because the practice sessions of aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one’s mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one’s capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person.

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THE HIDDEN LOGIC OF SUCCESS “I propose to show”: The quotes from Francis Galton are taken from Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (New York: D. Appleton, 1884). In 1991 Anders Ericsson: The study of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin is published in one of the most seminal papers in the study of expertise: K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. “There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’”: This view was based on a wide-ranging study of musical achievement: John A. Sloboda, Jane W. Davidson, Michael J. Howe, and Derek G. Moore, “The Role of Practice in the Development of Performing Musicians,” British Journal of Psychology 87 (1996): 287–309.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

Despite its near-magical connotation, intuition is losing relevance in an increasingly complex world. Let me re-emphasize one point. I suggested that people become experts by using deliberate practice to train their experiential systems. Deliberate practice has a very specific meaning: it includes activities designed to improve performance, has repeatable tasks, incorporates high-quality feedback, and is not much fun. Most people—even alleged experts—do not come close to satisfying the conditions of deliberate practice and, accordingly, do not develop the necessary abilities for reliable intuition.24 How Homogeneity Contributes to the Whims of the Crowd Now that I have extolled the virtues of computers and crowds, let me sound a warning in this chapter’s final mistake: leaning too much on either formula-based approaches or the wisdom of crowds.

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In Kahneman’s model, System 1 uses perception and intuition to generate impressions of objects or problems. These impressions are involuntary, and an individual may not be able to explain them. Kahneman argues that System 2 is involved in all judgments, whether or not the individual makes the decision consciously. So intuition is a judgment that reflects an impression.22 Through substantial, deliberate practice in a particular domain, experts can train and populate their experiential systems. So a chess master can size up the positions on the board very quickly, and an athlete knows what to do in a certain game situation. Effectively, the experts internalize the salient features of the system they are dealing with, freeing attention for higher-level, analytical thinking.

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This is by definition the only part of the process that an individual can control. It is too easy to conflate skill and luck in providing criticism. Get Feedback. One of the best ways to improve decision making is through timely, accurate, and clear feedback. This type of feedback is central to deliberate practice, the essential ingredient in developing expertise. The problem is that the quality of feedback varies widely for different domains. In some realms, like weather forecasting and gambling, the feedback is quick and precise. In other fields, including long-term investing and business strategies, the feedback comes with a lag and is often ambiguous.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

The acrobat, James, recounted how he’d developed the extreme skill required for his job. Friends thought he just happened to be born double-jointed or innately talented, but James stressed that he had no special gene; instead, his ability to perform one-armed handstands stemmed from hours of deliberate practice. James explained how Gladwell had proven that anyone – regardless of genetics or upbringing – can develop any skill, as long as they’re willing to spend 10,000 hours working on it. It was a powerful message and one that I was eager to believe. From an early age, parents, teachers and well-meaning family friends tell kids ‘You can do anything you set your mind to’ and ‘Practice makes perfect.’

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Rather than promising that you will be good if you practice, he warned that ‘you cannot be good . . . unless you practice’. Yet Gladwell is far from blameless either. Stung by this misreading, I realized I needed to scrutinize the Ericsson paper also. True enough, the study was about violinists. Ericsson and his co-authors asked each student to keep a diary of how much time they devoted to deliberate practice. But in contrast to Gladwell’s claim that the best violinists practised more than the good ones, the researchers found no difference – each averaged 24.3 hours per week. Disappointed but undeterred, I read on, biasedly searching for the evidence that would allow me to keep teaching the rule.

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He argues that The Beatles became successful because they were invited to play in Hamburg, where sets lasted up to eight hours, unlike Liverpool which only had sixty-minute gigs – the subtitle to the chapter ‘The 10,000-hour rule’ is ‘In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours’. However, Ericsson’s study focused on solo, deliberate practice guided by a coach and explicitly separated out performing into a different category. A final effect of the rule may be to dishearten, rather than encourage. Ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time – twenty hours a week for ten years. It delivers the black-and-white implication that practice is futile unless you can reach 10,000 hours.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

And one of the best online sources for quick biographical information on each of these men is compiled by researchers James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (blog), http://www.iep.utm.edu/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 38 adventure stories often adhere to a template: The comprehensive text on the hero’s journey is Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton University Press, 1972). 38 Research from Brunel University: There has been much discussion about the role of practice versus talent since Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University showed how “deliberate practice” can produce experts in sports and cognitively complex fields like chess, in spite of (and as a necessary supplement to) natural talent. (Malcolm Gladwell popularized Ericsson’s findings as the “10,000 hour rule” in his excellent 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success.) Further research on chess players, in particular, has showed that in addition to deliberate practice, training with a great coach increases students’ competition performance: Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet, “The Role of Domain-Specific Practice, Handedness and Starting Age in Chess,” Developmental Psychology 41, no. 1 (2007): 159–72.

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He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly. Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy.

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Tice, “Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 5 (2008): 883–98. 164 doubled Apple’s mouse market share: Neil Hughes and Kasper Jade, “Magic Mouse Helps Apple Double Share of Market in 8 Weeks,” Apple Insider (blog), December 29, 2009, http://appleinsider.com/articles/09/12/29/magic_mouse_helps_apple_double_share_of_market_in_8_weeks. 164 “1,000 songs in your pocket”: “Apple Press Info,” Apple, http://www.apple.com/pr/products/ipodhistory/ (accessed February 17, 2014). 167 kids who are tenaciously: Focused kids win spelling bees over kids with higher IQs, according to Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri A. Kirby, Eli Tsukayama, Heather Berstein, and K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2, no. 2 (2010): 174–81. 167 simplicity as “the ultimate sophistication”: This quote is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, though the attribution has never been validated by an original source.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

For him a decade is more or less required not because of the number of information chunks one must encounter but because it takes that long for a motivated learner to log 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice.” In his most cited paper, he and his colleagues sum up the results of their careful analysis: “Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.”5 Are there any shortcuts? A famous quote from computer scientist Alan Kay—“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”—suggests there might be at least one: You could pioneer a new field.

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Let’s assume, then, that you are going to be stepping aside in your own work—letting computers take over easily codified work and doubling down on your noncognitive strengths. First: Avail yourself of whatever training in this realm your company offers—and take the learning process seriously. Beyond that, how will you build such skills for yourself? Mainly in two ways: by learning from mentors, and by engaging in self-reflective, deliberate practice. Ryan McDonough is, today, the general manager of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (although he’s more familiar to us from the decade he spent in the Boston Celtics organization). Basketball, it might surprise you to learn, is one of the hottest areas right now for applying analytics and McDonough is known as an analytics-oriented guy.

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To sum up a tremendous body of work in a few sentences, the emerging practical message of this line of work is that, when we look upon a master in some field, we are not seeing someone of ineffable, innate genius. Rather, we are seeing someone who began with a clear sense of direction and proceeded down that path with extraordinary commitment. Their success is the product of relevant training, deliberate practice, and motivational drive. This was the conclusion of Michael Howe, a cognitive psychologist who devoted his career to the study of exceptional intelligence.4 And it resonates with the famous estimate by Herbert Simon that, on the way to becoming an expert in a substantial topic, a learner engages with roughly 50,000 chunks of information related to it—a mountain of data typically requiring ten years to climb.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

Campbell Trophy, Stanford University, Palo Alto, September 8, 2009; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Dunn. 144. K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and the Acquisition and Maintenance of Expert Performance in Medicine and Related Domains,” Academic Medicine 79, no. 10 (2004): S 70-S 81, http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2004/10001/Deliberate_Practice_and_the_Acquisition_and.22.aspx/. 145. Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri A. Kirby, Eli Tsukayama, Heather Berstein, and K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2, no. 2 (2011): 174–181, http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/2/174.short. 146.

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He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145 approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation. Simple practice, without feedback and experimentation, is insufficient. I was on my high school’s swim team, and among other events competed in the exhausting 200-yard individual medley: fifty yards each of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle.

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Ericsson could have told me right away what my problem was. I showed up to practice twice a day and swam whatever the coach said to swim, but I couldn’t teach myself and was never good enough for the coach to invest even a few minutes in helping me improve my technique. I never experienced deliberate practice. As a result, I got somewhat better, but never had a chance of performing at a high level. In contrast, McKinsey used to send all second-year consultants to their Engagement Leadership Workshop, a one-week session for about fifty people at a time. The seminars ran throughout the year, rotating between Switzerland, Singapore, and the United States.

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How
by Daniel Coyle
Published 27 Apr 2009

Along with his colleagues in this field, Ericsson established a remarkable foundation of work (documented in several books and most recently in the appropriately Bible-size Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance). Its central tenet is a Gibraltar-like statistic: every expert in every field is the result of around ten thousand hours of committed practice. Ericsson called this process “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses. (For practical purposes, we can consider “deliberate practice” and “deep practice” to be basically the same thing—though since he's a psychologist, Ericsson's term refers to the mental state, not to myelin. For the record, he is attracted to the idea. “I find the correlation [between myelin and skill] very interesting,” he told me.)

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Miller, “Intelligence and Brain Myelination: A Hypothesis,” Personality and Individual Differences 17 (1994), 803–32; and B. T Gold et al., “Speed of Lexical Decision Correlates with Diffusion Anisotropy in Left Parietal and Frontal White Matter,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2007), 2439–46. A sampling of Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice can be found in Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), which he coedited with Neil Charness, Paul Feltovich, and Robert Hoffman; Expert Performance in Sports (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 2003), which Ericsson coedited with Janet L.

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Howe, Jane W. Davidson, and John A. Sloboda, “Innate Talents: Reality or Myth,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998), 399–407. Not quite as crucial, but nevertheless entertaining, is the fact that deep practice also works with other species (myelin is myelin, after all). See W. S. Helton, “Deliberate Practice in Dogs: A Canine Model of Expertise,” Journal of General Psychology 134, no. 2 (2007), 247–57. CHAPTER 3: THE BRONTËS, THE Z-BOYS, AND THE RENAISSANCE Juliet Barker's The Brontës (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1994) does an outstanding job of covering the biographical ground. See also Ann Loftus McGreevy, “The Parsonage Children: An Analysis of the Creative Early Years of the Brontës at Haworth,” Gifted Child Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1995), 146–53, as well as the illuminating analysis of the Brontës, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens in Michael J.

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams
by Tommy Baker
Published 18 Feb 2018

This concept of mastering your craft has some crucial components, including: Deliberate practice: Pursuing mastery means you’ll be practicing. Specifically, you’ll embrace deliberate practice. Made famous by Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code (Coyle 2009), this means pushing yourself to the edge of discomfort during practice to the place where you want to give up. It’s easy to practice a skill and do what we’re good at. Can you instead spend the time on what challenges you? Invest thousands of hours: Mastery takes time, there’s no way around it. Expect to invest in thousands of hours to deliberate practice as you sharpen your skills. Whether it’s mastering communication or marketing, there’s no shortcut to get you there.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
Published 15 Oct 2018

However, when you want to maximize your potential and achieve elite levels of performance, you need a more nuanced approach. You can’t repeat the same things blindly and expect to become exceptional. Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice. Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery To become great, certain skills do need to become automatic. Basketball players need to be able to dribble without thinking before they can move on to mastering layups with their nondominant hand. Surgeons need to repeat the first incision so many times that they could do it with their eyes closed, so that they can focus on the hundreds of variables that arise during surgery.

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The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. 9 The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits IN 1965, a Hungarian man named Laszlo Polgar wrote a series of strange letters to a woman named Klara. Laszlo was a firm believer in hard work. In fact, it was all he believed in: he completely rejected the idea of innate talent. He claimed that with deliberate practice and the development of good habits, a child could become a genius in any field. His mantra was “A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.” Laszlo believed in this idea so strongly that he wanted to test it with his own children—and he was writing to Klara because he “needed a wife willing to jump on board.”

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Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote. Chapter Summary The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is that we stop paying attention to little errors. Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time. The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. Conclusion The Secret to Results That Last THERE IS AN ancient Greek parable known as the Sorites Paradox,* which talks about the effect one small action can have when repeated enough times.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving
by Celeste Headlee
Published 10 Mar 2020

One of the most interesting aspects of that study, I think, is the tendency among the best students to balance work hours with equivalent leisure. The study authors believe these young people have time to relax because they engage in what’s called “effortful activities,” or deliberate practice. The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson says deliberate practice means “engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve one’s performance.” This is not the relatively mindless chopping of vegetables or simply playing scales on a musical instrument over and over without cease. Instead, it is focused work in which the student is highly aware of their own performance, what they’re doing wrong, and what they’re doing right.

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“That’s the period of time”: Stephanie Vozza, “This Is How Many Minutes of Breaks You Need Each Day,” FastCompany, October 31, 2017. “treated as sprints for which”: “Desktime for Productivity Tracking,” DraugiemGroup.com, December 2017. experiment conducted at the Berlin Academy of Music: K. Anders Ericsson, RalfTh. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-RÖmer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, July 1993. “We thrive on the feeling”: Tony Crabbe, “A Brief History of Working Time—And Why It’s All About Attention Now,” inews.co.uk, April 18, 2017. In the final tally: American Psychological Association, “Multitasking.” managers couldn’t tell the difference: Erin Reid, “Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks,” Harvard Business Review, April 28, 2015.

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Post, “Altruism, Happiness, and Health: It’s Good to Be Good,” International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 2005. Life-Back Six: Take the Long View “End goals work as ideals to move towards”: Steve Pavlina, “End Goals vs. Means Goals,” StevePavlina.com, August 23, 2005. Conclusion “The fastest time for the marathon”: Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-RÖmer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” “cultivate the creativity and critical thinking”: Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, “Teaching, Assessing, and Learning Creative and Critical Thinking Skills in Education,” Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, oecd.org/education/ceri/assessingprogressionincreativeandcriticalthinkingskillsineducation.htm.

Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do About It
by Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Published 21 Aug 2023

In conversations, several parents brought up Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000-hour rule, a study he details of elite musicians in his book Outliers. The takeaway for parents was that kids needed intense, deliberate practice—ten thousand hours of it—if they were going to be standouts in a field. What didn’t get as much popular press was the other finding in that study: that musicians who were at the top of their field also rested more than their peers. They practiced for eighty minutes at a time and then took a thirty-minute break. They slept a full eight and a half hours, took naps, and prioritized leisure time—three-and-a-half hours of it a day. “Deliberate practice,” the researchers noted, “is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day.”

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“Deliberate practice,” the researchers noted, “is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day.” To be top musicians, the students should “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.” In other words, just like deliberate practice, they must engage in deliberate rest. Like these world-class musicians, teens should be getting eight to ten hours of sleep a night, but fewer than 25 percent of teens today are getting the minimum. In one study of teens, those who got more than eight hours of sleep a night were found to be the most mentally healthy, reporting the lowest levels of moodiness, feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, and depression.

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See also support groups cortisol, 8, 28, 99 Council of Dads, The (Feiler), 213–14 COVID-19 pandemic, 8, 103–4, 146, 205, 209, 217–18, 224 criticism, 49, 56–58, 63, 65, 67–68, 71, 95, 97, 100 Curran, Thomas, 39, 48–49 cynicism, 13, 177, 180 D Damon, William, 181–82, 193, 199–200 Damour, Lisa, 112, 136, 232 on being a “good” student, 239–40 on competition and friendship, 171 on grade expectations, 240 on parental guidance, 130–31 on putting on the brakes, 115–16 day care centers, 26 deliberate practice, 135–36 Denver, Colorado, 45–48 depression alleviating it, xxi, 72, 136, 148, 203 epidemic levels of, xv–xvi talking about it, 190, 201 disabled children, 192–93, 215–16 disadvantaged children, 143–44 disappointment clouds parents’ vision, 68 expressions of, 60–61, 65–66 managing it, 173 signal warmth about, 61, 65–66 subtle messages of, 56–57 discrimination, xv, xx, 6–7, 40, 162–66 diversity, 161–66, 243–44 Doepke, Matthias, 33–37 downtime, 16–17, 72, 110, 116, 132, 135–38, 144, 239.

How Doctors Think
by Jerome Groopman
Published 15 Jan 2007

See "Problems for clinical judgment: Eliciting an insightful history of present illness," Canadian Medical Association Journal 164 (2001), pp. 647–651; "Problems for clinical judgment: Obtaining a reliable past medical history," Canadian Medical Association Journal 164 (2001), pp. 809–813. Studies of expertise have been greatly advanced by K. Anders Ericsson, and the interested reader is directed to "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance," Psychological Review 100 (1993), pp. 363–406; "Deliberate practice and the acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and related domains," Academic Medicine 79 (2004), pp. S70–S81. Geoff Norman is another leader in this area, and he recently reviewed how doctors can improve their skills in Geoff Norman et al., "Expertise in medicine and surgery," in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ed.

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In revisiting the reasons for missing the diagnosis of aspirin toxicity, he pinpointed that he did not define what "a few" meant. Alter is now an expert in emergency medicine, and that level of performance comes from listening to feedback and understanding past mistakes. This is consistent with the studies of Ericsson and Norman referred to previously: K. Anders Ericsson et al., "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance," Psychological Review 100 (1993), pp. 363406; Geoff Norman et al., "Expertise in medicine and surgery," in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ed. K. Anders Ericsson et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 339–353.

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The story about the medical meeting where cardiologists voted is derived from my interview with Dr. James Lock. Lock's perspective on what is needed to achieve a high level of expertise in cardiac catheterization and other procedures is supported by the work of K. Anders Ericsson et al., "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance," Psychological Review 100 (1993), pp. 363406; Geoff Norman et al., "Expertise in medicine and surgery," in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ed. K. Anders Ericsson et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 339–353.

SuperFreakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 19 Oct 2009

Or, put another way, expert performers—whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming—are nearly always made, not born.* And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. The people who become excellent at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seemed to be “gifted” at a young age.

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Levitt, “A Star Is Made,” The New York Times Magazine, May 7, 2006; K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert R. Hoffman, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006); K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993); Werner Helsen, Jan Van Winckel, and A. Mark Williams, “The Relative Age Effect in Youth Soccer Across Europe,” Journal of Sports Sciences 23, no. 6 (June 2005); and Greg Spira, “The Boys of Late Summer,” Slate, April 16, 2008.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

More typically, however, many of the ten thousand hours that eventually become the foundation of expertise are ones people would have been all too delighted to spend doing something else. As Ericsson and his co-authors note, truly effective practice time is actually quite demanding: 148 CHAPTER NINE You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.10 In short, getting really good at something is difficult.

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See Conservation Reserve Program culture, in human behavior, 24 curve, grading on, 11, 23–24, 41–42, 211 Darwin, Charles: economists’ influence on, 16; as intellectual father of economics, 16–17; and market failures based on individual 231 versus group interests, 22–23, 30, 40–45, 85, 138; on population density, 85; on positional versus nonpositional goods, 72–74; on relative performance, 8–9, 21, 23–24; versus Smith, on competition, 7, 17–18, 211–12. See also natural selection data, regulations as, 75–76, 208 decision leverage, of CEOs, 151–52 deficit(s): aversion to, as argument against economic stimulus, 3; misconceptions about, 13; reduction of, through taxes on harmful activities, 14–15 deliberate practice, in development of expertise, 148 Denmark, lack of corruption in, 56 deontologists, 94–97 Digital Research, 144 Director, Aaron, 89 directory assistance, 114–15 Domenici, Pete, 81–82 Dubose, Ronald, 58–59 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 113 economic downturn of 2008, 52–55; consumption in, 53; government role in recovery from, 2–3, 53–55; savings rates in, 78; unemployment in, 2, 53–55 economic efficiency.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

“The computer makes the individualization of instruction easier because it can be programmed to follow each student’s history of learning successes and failures and to use his past performance as a basis for selecting the new problems and new concepts to which he should be exposed next.” Suppes also understood that deliberate practice was integral to education, something that would later become a key part of Ericsson’s theory of expertise. Learning is work, a deliberate process of strengthening neural connections to the point where they operated automatically, creating a framework for understanding new information and freeing up mental capacity for learning more.

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“The magnitude of the problem of evolving curriculum sequences is difficult to overestimate: the number of possible sequences of concepts and subject matter in elementary school mathematics alone is in excess of 10100, a number larger than even generous estimates of the total number of elementary particles in the universe.” He also knew that information technology could help find meaning in that complexity. There is a concept in psychology called “response latency”—the elapsed time between stimulus and response. For certain kinds of activities that have benefited from thousands of hours of deliberate practice, your neural connections are so strong that response latency is almost zero, such as when you see and recognize the word “encyclopedia.” When students answer questions on a computer, the machine can measure response latency down to the millisecond. It can tell whether you understand something automatically or have to devote precious mental energy to figuring it out.

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Rational education will be unforgiving in many ways. The academic standards that emerge from global learning communities will rise to the achievement of the most capable and dedicated students in the world. There won’t be any room to hide or slack off. There is not now and there never will be a substitute for the deliberate practice necessary to gain real expertise. The higher-learning organizations of the future will give students the right kinds of hard work to do, and they will recognize that work by awarding credible evidence of accomplishment. But they won’t do students’ work for them. What parents can do is to help their children build the intellectual and emotional tools they will need for these demanding and rewarding tasks

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries
by Peter Sims
Published 18 Apr 2011

Further Readings and Resources Trade Books Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code. New York: Bantam, 2009. After months of wrestling with questions about the role of deliberate practice, including reviewing a broad swath of research and literature supporting the now-popularized “10,000-hour” rules, I found Daniel Coyle’s book to be surprisingly good. I ultimately decided not to include an additional chapter on the role of deliberate practice, especially given the strength of Carol Dweck’s research on mind-sets. Yet Coyle’s book is extremely well researched and written, and draws extensively upon neuroscience research about the role of myelin, the neural connections that one can develop and strengthen to develop their talents and capacities (like muscles in the brain) for anything from athletics to creative endeavors.

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy
by Michael Barber
Published 12 Mar 2015

Politics is an unforgiving business, and no one seems to think that a PM, a president or a minister needs to learn their way into the job, whereas in fact they are just like everyone else. And when you ask what it takes to become expert in a highly skilled role, the answer is surprisingly clear – it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. This means not just 10,000 hours of doing something, but systematically working on the skills required in a conscious way. The starting point, therefore, is self-knowledge – being able to admit you are not an expert already (which means ruling out those political leaders, no small number, who suffer from hubris).

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The message is clear: in the inevitable hubris following an election victory or an appointment as a minister, remain clear-eyed and humble. Set an agenda (chapter 1), review the current state of the bureaucracy on which you depend to deliver that agenda and establish an organization capable of delivering that agenda (chapter 2). Meanwhile, remember that, unless you already have 10,000 hours of deliberate practice behind you, you have a lot to learn – so make sure you create the circumstances in which you learn fast. As you do, set your strategy, the subject of the next chapter. 3 Strategy Someone in the meeting suggested that the word ‘preference’ would be easier to ‘sell’ to the unions and the Labour Party.

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The Wire had done him no favours, with its portrayal of a shady mayor playing both sides of the street, but O’Malley’s own track record was impressive. Baltimore, a city with multiple challenges, made progress under his stewardship, and in 2006 his success there catapulted him into the governorship and the mansion in Anapolis. He had done his 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and was well prepared to be a successful governor. ‘What’s the difference between a goal and a dream?’ he quips. ‘A deadline.’ Once installed in Anapolis, he combined his Citistat experience with a small delivery unit modelled on our experience in Britain. He says the ‘relentless discipline of delivery’ is the key ingredient of ‘a new way leadership’.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

Wolf, & Clemens Kirschbaum, “Stress on the Dance Floor: The Cortisol Stress Response to Social-Evaluative Threat in Competitive Ballroom Dancers,” Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 33(1), pp. 69–84 (2007) Rohleder, Nicolas, Correspondence with Author Rohleder, Nicolas, Interview with Author Strahler, et al. (2010) supra Expertise and 10,000 Hours: Adler, Amy, Interview with Author (2011) Ericsson, K. Andres, “The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance,” In: K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, & Robert R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ch. 38, pp. 683–703, New York: Cambridge University Press (2006) Ericsson, K. Andres, Ralf Th. Krampe, & Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, vol. 100(3), pp. 363–406 (1993) Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers: The Story of Success, New York: Little, Brown & Co. (2008) Syed, Matthew, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham & The Science of Success, New York: Harper (2010) 3.

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You need to not wilt in the competition. We wanted to know—what makes someone good at that? What the ballroom dancing study tells us is that the stress of competition doesn’t go away with experience. The inescapable conclusion is that years and years of practice are not, automatically, enough. In addition to the deliberate practice, success also depends on how well people compete. It hangs on how well they handle that psychoendocrine stress response, manage it, and even harness it. What we’ll learn later in this book is that everyone has that stress response, but we can interpret it differently, which drastically affects our performance.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush
Published 10 Jan 2021

Even more so are the victims of brain injury whose brains amazingly find ways to rewire themselves so that another part of the brain takes over the functions of a damaged area.13 All animals have software which is modified on a daily basis. Every animal learns. However, most animals don’t try to learn. No creatures besides humans are familiar with any kind of deliberate practice. It is doubtful that a chimpanzee or a dolphin ever determined that there was something wrong with its own mind and attempted to modify it. But humans do. We modify our minds because our software lacks some desired function (speaking Italian), or because it has undesirable functions (speaking with a stutter).

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By becoming intimately aware of the mistakes that we would like to relinquish - by working out the disadvantageous habits and building advantageous ones, we can develop the ability to increasingly determine our own subjective experience. Although humans did not in any way evolve to play any instrument, it has been shown that with enough deliberate practice, we can overcome our incompetence and move closer and closer to mastery. The trained musician can play music in a way that looks and feels so natural that the audience would swear it was what she was made to do. And the biological forces which developed our minds, though our values and well-being were not their concern, have placed no barriers to reprogramming our psychological operating system toward a new purpose.

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction
by Chris Bailey
Published 31 Jul 2018

On a neurological level, the two mental modes are even anticorrelated—when the brain network that supports scatterfocus is activated, activation in your hyperfocus network plummets, and vice versa.* All that said, the two modes of your brain reinforce each other—especially as you enter into each mode with intention. This makes it important to deliberately practice both modes. Practicing hyperfocus—and deliberately managing your attention—provides a host of benefits: expanding your attentional space so you can focus on more tasks simultaneously, improving your memory, and letting you become more aware of the thoughts flying around your head. As it turns out, all three of these are beneficial in scatterfocus mode.

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Illusions stop being magical the moment you discover how they’re done—but learning how they’re done feels like a eureka moment in and of itself, as a set of jumbled puzzle pieces locks into place. Like a magician’s, the methods of a genius are mysterious—until you untangle the web of connections that leads to them. These individuals usually have more experience, have put in more hours of deliberate practice, and, most important, have connected more dots than anyone else. As author Malcolm Gladwell wrote: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Albert Einstein was undoubtedly a genius—he connected more dots, in more unique ways, than almost any other human.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
by Raj Raghunathan
Published 25 Apr 2016

have to master that domain: As made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, researchers agree that, in general, it takes about ten thousand hours (or about ten years) of practice to master a domain; K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100(3) (1993): 363. Note, however, that there are exceptions to this general rule; see B. N. Macnamara, D. Z. Hambrick, and F. L. Oswald, “Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-analysis,” Psychological Science 25(8) (2014): 1608–18. flow doesn’t . . . come at . . . cost of another’s: This reason was mentioned to me in the interview that I did with Professor Csikszentmihalyi, which can be accessed at https://www.coursera.org/learn/happiness/lecture/hMLNh/week-2-video-7-why-flow-en hances-happiness.

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Not only is the myth of “the depressed lonely creative genius” just that—a myth—it turns out that creative people are also more responsible than we typically think they are; see M. Csikszentmihalyi and J. Nakamura, “Creativity and Responsibility,” in The Systems Model of Creativity (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014), 279–92. calls “grit”: A. L. Duckworth et al., “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2(2) (2011): 174–81; A. L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6) (2007): 1087; for related—and very insightful—thoughts, see S.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
by Vishen Lakhiani
Published 14 Sep 2020

This is what painful kensho moments are like. True masters of the art of life create deliberate daily processes to transform and evolve themselves. They dedicate themselves to the continual expansion of their mind, body, and soul. These masters seek satori or awakening on a regular basis. The more you transform through deliberate practices, the less you have to transform through painful kensho moments. And the workplace is the best place for it. Imagine that you design your work so that it becomes an accelerator of transformation, where you unlock the best in yourself and everyone around you. The Transformational Organization At a very young age most people’s goals are implanted in them by whichever company has a bigger marketing budget.

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depriving yourself of ninety minutes: Rath, Tom. Eat, Move, Sleep. Missionday, 2013. it takes 10,000 hours to attain mastery in any field: Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. Little, Brown and Company, 2008. They spent an average of 8 hours and 36 minutes sleeping: Ericsson, Enders K. 1993. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” (Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406). Retrieved from Psychological Review https://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf. Imagine if you could boost your strength by 25 percent: McGuff, Doug. Body by Science.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

These models promote conformity to dogma and reductive criteria that can quickly become the focus instead of actual competence. In order to attain this rank you must know these things. A black belt in karate who has never been in a real fight meets a cage fighter with no formal training. Who is more likely to win? Who is mature? Luckily, it’s easy to abandon the exhausting administration of these models for deliberate practice and knowledge transfer between masters and apprentices. It’s harder work, but we can stop chasing colored sashes and start getting good at what we do. Learn by Doing. The other manifestation of our complicated approach to mastery is training. This is most commonly delivered by a “sage on the stage,” an expert who imparts wisdom to a classroom full of students, but is increasingly done via web-based training modules that are the equivalent of a fancy PowerPoint deck.

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Sometimes we have to change small things now in order to change big things later. Looping is an adventure in uncertainty. You’re going to learn a lot more by doing than I could ever share here. Get as many repetitions under your belt as you can. Think of looping as something you have to master through deliberate practice. Start small. Start local. Be patient. And stick with it. You are starting a chain reaction that will eventually transform your entire way of working. A more human, vital, and adaptive organization is out there, just waiting to be discovered. And once the pattern of continuous participatory change starts, it can be hard to stop.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 1 Jan 2006

We can consider problem types on a continuum.3 One side captures straightforward problems inherent to static, linear, and discrete systems. The opposite side reflects dynamic, non-linear, and continuous problems. Exhibit 6.1 offers additional adjectives for each of the two extremes. While tens of thousands of hours of deliberate practice allows experts to internalize many of their domain’s features, this practice can also lead to reduced cognitive flexibility. Reduced flexibility leads to deteriorating expert performance as problems go from the simple to the complex. Two concepts are useful here. The first is what psychologists call functional fixedness, the idea that when we use or think about something in a particular way we have great difficulty in thinking about it in new ways.

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This flexibility is crucial to success in nonlinear, complex systems. So how do experts ensure they incorporate both types of flexibility? Advocates of cognitive flexibility theory suggest the major determinant in whether or not an expert will have more expansive flexibility is the amount of reductive bias during deliberate practice.4 More reductive bias may improve efficiency but will reduce flexibility. To mitigate reductive bias, the theory prescribes exploring abstractions across diverse cases to capture the significance of context dependence. Experts must also look at actual case studies and see when rules do and don’t work.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

Put differently, deliberate well-structure practice is a rigorous, compliance-based approach to mastery. It means you crawl before you walk. It doesn’t mean Laird Hamilton surfing Pipeline at age four, or Danny Way in the deep end of the pool at the Del Mar Skate Ranch by seven. In broader terms, deliberate practice is also how we train genius these days. It’s factory athletics. It’s Kumon math tutoring, Baby Einstein, Suzuki violin, et al. But it’s also the world McConkey walked away from that naked day at Vail. He turned his back on the factory, yet somehow still went on to become Superman. Finally, the trouble with marshmallows.

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“I’m doing what I love,” explains McConkey. “And if you’re doing what you want to do all the time, then you’re happy. You’re not going to work everyday wishing you were doing something else. I get up and go to work everyday and I’m stoked. That does not suck.” The lesson of the musicians, meanwhile, is that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the only sure way to acquire real expertise. But are we certain? A quick shorthand for learning is the more emotionally powerful an experience, the more chance the details of that experience get moved from short-term storage into long-term memory. Both flow and high-risk situations produce extremely powerful emotional experiences.

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
by Alissa Quart
Published 16 Aug 2006

I feel like you can see this high-culture-low-culture knowledge and general trivia-kid sensibility running through a number of his poems. 4the relationship between talented adults and their youthful “deliberative practice”: Anders Ericsson uses the term expertise for high levels of skill in everything from chess to video-game play. According to Ericsson and some of his colleagues, expertise is thought to require a minimum of ten years of several hours’ focused practice daily. See K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993); and K. A. Ericsson and J. Smith, eds., Toward a General Theory of Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 5A classic longitudinal study: More on this in Joel N. Shurkin, Terman’s Kids (New York: Little, Brown, 1992) and also in the ongoing Terman studies published as Genetic Studies of Genius (Standford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1925–).

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“Caution—Praise Can Be Dangerous.” American Educator 23, no. 1 (1999). Eaton, M. M., and E. M. Pomerantz. “Parental Contingent Self-worth: Implications for Achievement Motivation and Parent’s Use of Control and Mental Health.” Forthcoming, 2006. Ericsson, K. A., R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Romer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review 100(1993). Ericsson, K. A., and J. Smith, eds. Toward a General Theory of Expertise. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ericsson, K. A., and A. C. Lehmann, “Expert and Exceptional Performance: Evidence of Maximal Adaptation to Task,” Annual Review of Psychology 47 (1996).

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 5 Jan 2021

When she lost a game, she would have to analyze, in painstaking detail, why she lost. Importantly, this often took longer than the actual match. In the eyes of the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the man behind the now-familiar, often-misunderstood ten-thousand-hour rule, she was engaging in “deliberate practice.” I, on the other hand, was settling for “mindless repetition,” trying to get better through brute force, without tangible goals. I was trying, in a way, to play like AlphaZero, DeepMind’s celebrated artificial intelligence engine. Given no more than the basic rules of chess, AlphaZero had mastered the game after playing itself forty-four million times.* It learned as it went along the whole way through, without the aid of a coach, becoming the most formidable opponent in the world.

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Oh, and juggling—as much for the thing itself as for the brain research that’s been done around it, which offers a fascinating window onto learning. There were all sorts of tempting things—free diving, improv theater—I put on a possible to-do list for the future. I didn’t think I was going to master any of these things. I didn’t have a spare ten thousand hours—the suggested baseline of deliberate practice required to achieve mastery in a field—for anything; I’d be lucky to have a hundred hours for any one skill. In place of mastery, I was hoping for distributed competence. In trying to bolster my “life résumé,” I was, in some ways, trying to reach back into the past, to try to learn things that had eluded me.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single)
by Richard Newton
Published 11 Apr 2015

. “$5,000, madam,” he says. “But it only took you minutes to draw!” she complains. “Madam,” he says, “It took my whole life.” In other words, you have to do your time. Ten years if you’re an apprentice to Jiro Oro. According to one rule of thumb, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours of hard deliberate practice is what it takes to become world-class in almost any field. And by the end you become so good at things it seems easy. As the golfer Gary Player wryly observed: “The more you practice, the luckier you get.” The 10,000 hour rule applies just to those people who become so elite (and therefore famous) they can be known by just one name.

Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide for Separation, Liberation & Inspiration
by Karen C. L. Anderson
Published 13 Mar 2018

This is pretty much the way I was raised, so of course I didn’t have anything with which to compare it. Through years of trial and error, here’s what I have learned about re-mothering: It’s the ultimate in self-care. It’s not about bubble baths and pedicures (although it can include them); it’s the deliberate practice of acknowledging, honoring, and meeting your needs and preferences (as you define them), or making sure they get met in a healthy, interdependent way, not in a dysfunctional, codependent, enmeshed way. Meaning, it’s your responsibility. And it requires no force, willpower, manipulation, or bargaining with yourself, or with your mother.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do
by Matthew Syed
Published 3 Nov 2015

When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic.

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(Catmull), 207 creativity and innovation, 182–213 as act of synthesis, 199 brainstorming and, 196–97 connectivity and, 199, 204 as context-dependent, 201–2 discipline and, 205–6 dissent and criticize approach to, 197, 200–201, 207, 209 Dyson on creative process, 192–95, 196, 198, 202 education system and, 211–12 environments conducive to, 200–201 and multiples, 201–2 at Pixar, 207–10 as response to problem, 195–200 Crew Resource Management, 30, 39 Criminal Cases Review Commission, UK, 117 criminal justice system, 65–71, 114–21, 282 parole decisions and, 118–19 randomized control trials (RCTs), lack of, 158 reforms and, 115–17, 118–21 Scared Straight program and, 150–54, 159–67 trial by jury and, 118, 119 wrongful convictions (See wrongful convictions) criticism, in creative process, 197, 207, 209 cults, 71–73, 74 culture, 11, 13 aviation and, 20, 25–27, 58 of blame (See blame) health care and, 16, 49–50, 53, 54–55, 57, 58–59, 105–6 of openness, 229–31, 234–35 cumulative selection/adaptation, 128–29, 130, 292 Cuneus, Andreas, 201 cycling, 171–73, 178, 179 Daily Beast, 166 Danziger, Shai, 118–19 Darwin, Charles, 201 data, 37 Dattner, Ben, 233 Dawkins, Richard, 128–29 deception, 87, 88 decision making, 11 Deep Blue, 134 Dekker, Sidney, 13, 227, 239 deliberate practice, 47 denial cognitive dissonance, as response to, 74 failure and, 18, 71 in prosecutorial responses to exonerating DNA evidence, 78–83 Diehl, Alan, 27, 28, 29, 30 Disch, Joanne, 10 discipline, 205–6 disclosure, 16, 25–26, 88–89 disposition effect, 101, 264 dissent and debate, in creative process, 197, 200–201, 207, 209 Divine, Jamie, 184 DNA evidence, 68–71, 77, 79–83, 84, 120 dogmatic tradition, 277, 278 Dorman, R.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest
by Ted Seides
Published 23 Mar 2021

These select people are intellectually honest and willing to change their mind easily when warranted. They are competitive, self-motivated, overachieving, ambitious, and gritty. As individuals, they have a thirst for self-improvement and introspection, take true accountability, and engage in a deliberate practice to learn and grow. As a member of a team, good hires demonstrate high EQ and outstanding interpersonal communication. In their personal lives, they are disciplined risk-takers and show evidence of willpower. When managers find these good people, they invest the time to nurture, develop and protect them like family.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers
by Stefan Fatsis
Published 27 Jul 2001

.)† That knowledge becomes part of the routine cognitive processing that occurs during various activities, from playing chess to Scrabble to badminton to the violin. Charness says I’m building the ability to make expert decisions. I’ve moved beyond “maintenance practice,” or simply playing a lot of Scrabble, which is what hobbyists do (and what I did on my living room floor early on), to “deliberate practice,” what Charness calls the “technical, draining, attention-demanding” work that can only be conducted in short sessions, a maximum of three to four hours a day in the case of writers and musicians. In a pioneering study in 1973, Herbert Simon and William Chase of Carnegie-Mellon University concluded that attaining an international level of expertise in chess requires about ten years of preparation, and they suggested it was no different in other domains.

…

ACAROID (105 lost points), COAGULA, OXIDASE, the chance to turn BLACK into BLACKOUT. I write down SODOMITE, which would have worked when MOODIEST didn’t. EXODOI? A plural of EXODOS (a concluding dramatic scene). Most of the words or racks I botched may never materialize again. But so what? It’s all part of the deliberate practice about which Neil Charness schooled 312 ❑ Word Freak me. WOOPS means to vomit. A RIVIERE is a necklace of precious stones. MONGO is a low-quality wool. There are three bingos in EGIMNPR: IMPREGN, PERMING, and GRIPMEN. The rack EFIPRST contains only one seven, PRESIFT — not PREFITS*, as I’d tried.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides
by Garr Reynolds
Published 29 Jan 2010

Your task is not to feed your anxiety with this type of talk, but to change it into “I can do this. I will follow my rehearsed plans. This is manageable.” 4. Arousal control via diaphragmatic breathing. Calm your brain’s fear center with slow, deliberate breaths with slightly longer exhales. Slower rhythm (rather than deep breathing) is helpful for fear management. 5. Deliberate practice. Practice your beginning, identify challenging concepts, and practice, practice, practice—out loud. These techniques work, and I use them myself as well as with clients. They are powerful and will prove useful in scenarios other than presenting. Chapter 3 Connect with Punch, Presence, and Projection 93 Wow!

The Fast Diet: Revised and Updated: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer
by Mimi Spencer
Published 18 Dec 2014

Once you appreciate this power, it is possible to overcome the cognitive bias that leads to impulsive snacking and compulsive eating – certainly for long enough to get you through a Fast Day. Recognise – before it happens – when your self-control is likely to dissolve. Try to install a behaviour – not for ever, just for that precise moment – which alters your established route. This is called ‘deliberate practice’; it takes grit, determination and a certain amount of self-awareness. If, for instance, you’re always ravenous when you get home from work on a Fast Day, make sure there’s an apple stashed in your bag to eat en route (and include it in your calorie count for that day). Have business lunches in the office or in a park, not in a restaurant where they serve the world’s best tiramisu.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
by Robert H. Frank
Published 31 Mar 2016

Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, New York: Penguin, 2011. 15. Roy Baumeister, quoted by Kirsten Weir, “The Power of Self-Control,” Monitor on Psychology 43.1 (January 2012): 36. 16. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100.3 (1993): 363–406. 17. Attribution theory in psychology attempts to explain how people use information to arrive at causal explanations for events. 18. Bernard Weiner, Achievement Motivation and Attribution Theory, Morris-town, NJ: General Learning Press, 1974. 19.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

Jack Copeland, “Biography of Turing,” AlanTuring.net, July 2000. alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/Bio%20of%20Alan%20Turing.html. 51. Gatsby Charitable Foundation, “Gatsby Computational Neuro-science Unit,” gatsby.org.uk/neuroscience/programmes/gatsby-computational-neuroscience-unit. 52. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, 1993, pages 363–406. projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf. 53. William Hirst et al., “Long-Term Memory for the Terrorist Attack of September 11,” Journal of Experimental Psychology (2009). pdfs.semanticscholar.org/89f4/bbaff6e7c289b7836047fbc8d73e7d012711.pdf. 54.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Published 14 Apr 2014

Rao Laxmi, and Sumantra Chattarji, “Functional Connectivity from the Amygdala to the Hippocampus Grows Stronger after Stress,” Journal of Neuroscience 33, no. 38 (2013), abstract, www.jneurosci.org/content/33/17/7234.abstract. 8. Edward M. Hallowell, Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 125. 9. Ibid., p. 113. 8. SLEEP 1. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf. 2. Charles A. Czeisler, “Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer,” interview by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review, October 2006, http://hbr.org/2006/10/sleep-deficit-the-performance-killer. 3.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want
by Diane Mulcahy
Published 8 Nov 2016

The challenge for each of us is to find the right level of diversification for ourselves. Can We Diversify and Build Expertise? Diversification has connotations of breadth, but it can also be deployed for depth. Malcolm Gladwell asserts in his book Outliers that it takes at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to obtain mastery in a cognitively demanding field.3 But we can stretch out our 10,000 hours over the course of our lives, achieving mastery later in life. Or we can devote any single decade (i.e., our 20s, our 30s) to practice and mastery, which leaves many other decades left to dabble, explore, experiment, and pursue other interests.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2012

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 10,000-HOUR RULE? For those not on the bandwagon, the so-called 10,000-Hour Rule is based on a study by K. Anders Ericsson and was popularized by the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers. It dictates, in simple terms, that becoming world-class at something requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. This number has been correlated with top violinists and aviators, and Malcolm extended this theory to well-known greats like the Beatles and Bill Gates. Accumulating 10,000 hours requires 20 hours a week for 10 years. So how can I claim that becoming “world-class” is attainable within six months?

…

His constant companion all along has been a veterinary guide: Spurgeon’s Color Atlas of Large Animal Anatomy: The Essentials by Thomas O. McCracken (fourhourchef.com/spurgeons). If you want to learn how to disassemble animals, this is the book I’d suggest as your primary reference. Once you have the guide, it’s a matter of deliberate practice. Be willing to push into discomfort. As Chris put it to me: “When you are nervous, uncomfortable, that’s when you’re learning.” Truer words never spoken. FOR FUN: WHAT THE HELL IS A PORTERHOUSE, ANYWAY? The tenderloins32 are muscles that run under and along the spine. They get thicker toward the back.

Marriage and Lasting Relationships With Asperger's Syndrome: Successful Strategies for Couples or Counselors
by Eva A. Mendes
Published 1 Sep 2015

For example, I often suggest that the partner with ASD do something kind that he knows will please his partner even if he’s not feeling especially positive about her at the moment. He might be surprised at how quickly this can bring him out of his negative state of mind. Putting CBT strategies into practice can be challenging at first, but with deliberate practice and continued hard work, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the partner with ASD can become more balanced and positive. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is typically used for individuals who are self-harming, suicidal, or have eating disorders or addictions.

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum
by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
Published 15 Feb 2013

Borst et al., “Understanding the Dorsal and Ventral Systems of the Human Cerebral Cortex: Beyond Dichotomies,” American Psychologist 66, no. 7 (October 2011): 624–32. 8. From the Margins to the Mainstream [>] best-selling book: Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2008). [>] a 1993 study: K. Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. [>] Consider an article: Geoffrey Colvin, “What It Takes to Be Great,” Fortune, October 19, 2006. [>] a 2000 study: Eleanor A. Maguire et al. “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 3 (April 2000): 4398–4400. [>] developed a method: Sara Reardon, “Playing by Ear,” Science 333 (September 2011): 1816–18. [>] Check out the universities: http://theweek.com/article/index/232522/virtual-princeton-a-guide-to-free-online-ivy-league-classes. [>] About fifty thousand people: Gareth Cook, “The Autism Advantage,” New York Times, December 2, 2012. [>] see sidebar: Temple Grandin and Kate Duffy, Developing Talents: Careers for Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism, updated and expanded edition (Overland Park, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Company, 2008). [>] an interview with Steve Jobs: Brent Schlender, “Exclusive: New Wisdom from Steve Jobs on Technology, Hollywood, and How ‘Good Management Is Like the Beatles,’” Fast Company, May 2012. [>] Aspiritech: Carla K.

Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game
by Walker Deibel
Published 19 Oct 2018

Ultimately, it’s the ability to learn from your experiences and not make the same mistakes repeatedly. As a result, all the empirical evidence suggests that people that have cultivated a growth mindset reach ever-increasing levels of achievement. Indeed, Dweck’s research has supported the hypothesis that people who favor and deliberately practice a growth mindset tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset. Having a growth mindset is an enormous psychological advantage for those who have it. The knowledge that things are malleable creates an interest for solving market problems, generating innovative solutions, and implementing ongoing improvement—both for yourself and your work— which is the mark of successful entrepreneur.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

These individuals may have more raw talent than others but lack the ability to realize their talent in contrast to those who are fixated on their work and are relentless in their desire to succeed. There is much written about the so-called 10,000 hour rule.22 It states that mastering an activity requires 10,000 hours of disciplined practice performing that activity. Talent is needed to obtain mastery, but mastery does not come without the necessary hours of deliberate practice. If we apply this rule to a sport such as tennis, this means that a highly talented athlete needs to practice every day for four hours for seven years. The player Andre Agassi said that he did more than that—he estimates he hit at least 2,500 balls a day from the time he was six years old. Close to a million balls a year.

The Eureka Factor
by John Kounios
Published 14 Apr 2015

Just because one hemisphere may be dominant doesn’t mean that the other one is totally submissive. As we’ve seen, the hemispheres contribute to thought by working together seamlessly. One’s genes may influence the size and thickness of brain structures, but intensive use or training—what cognitive psychologists call “deliberate practice”—can modify the brain. Perhaps how people tend to think causes such differences in brain structure. If so, then training could change aspects of hemispheric dominance. In sum, even if cognitive style is determined by one’s brain anatomy and genes, that doesn’t imply that one’s experience and training have no effect.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

The point about stronger incentives for innovation I owe to Alex Tabarrok. On the Emporium model, see Daniel de Vise, “At Virginia Tech, computers help solve a math class problem,” The Washington Post, April 22, 2012. On spelling bees, see Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri A. Kirby, Eli Tsukayama, Heather Berstein, and K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, published online October 4, 2010, doi: 10.1177/1948550610385872. On Jesse Kraai, see Scott Kraft, “Chess Players Making Right Moves at Younger Ages,” the Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2011.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Dreyfus, “Intelligence without Representation—Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002): 367–383. 29.Marcus, Guitar Zero, 103. 30.David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz, “Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (2011): 275–279. 31.K. Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. 32.Nigel Warburton, “Robert Talisse on Pragmatism,” Five Books, September 18, 2013, fivebooks.com/interviews/robert-talisse-on-pragmatism. 33.Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in C.

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 4 May 2015

(SDL) Last spring, I jokingly (okay, maybe half jokingly) wrote about my quest to make the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for people over the age of fifty. In that post, I made reference to the ideas of Anders Ericsson, who argues that with ten thousand hours of the right kind of deliberate practice, more or less anyone can become more or less world class at anything. I’ve spent five thousand hours practicing golf, so if I could just find the time for five thousand more, I should be able to compete with the pros. Or at least that is what the theory says. My scorecards seem to be telling a different story!

The Challenge for Africa
by Wangari Maathai
Published 6 Apr 2009

As in any society, some natives, especially those in trouble with the local establishment, cooperated with the newcomers, sharing the community's secrets and lifestyle. In return for their “generosity,” these collaborators (many of them outcasts) were elevated to the positions of chiefs, scouts, or church elders: positions that they would never have held in the traditional societies. This deliberate practice of ignoring or misunderstanding the complex and subtle existing leadership structures in favor of selecting leaders and imposing them on the population was the cornerstone of the colonial administration. Though they were members of the community, such chiefs and their assistants were de facto agents and information gatherers for the imperial powers.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do
by Jeremy Bailenson
Published 30 Jan 2018

Chess players, for instance, have played so many games they know which parts of the board need their attention and which ones don’t. They can look at a chessboard and in a matter of seconds know what the correct move is. An amateur player will waste a lot of energy visualizing possible moves that an expert can dismiss right away. Ericsson’s research shows that mental representations are honed by deliberate practice, a particularly engaged form of learning that is distinguished by a motivated learner with well-defined goals, who gets feedback from his performance and has ample opportunities for repetition. Palmer’s method for preparation, which involves quizzing himself as he goes through the plays, satisfies all these conditions.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden
Published 20 Sep 2021

For instance, Tough wrote, “The character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success” are not “a result of good luck or good genes.”20 Similarly, Jonah Lehrer (whose work has now been discredited for plagiarism and fabrication) wrote an article for Wired magazine on “the importance of grit” that portrayed grit as a counterweight to the importance of genetic influence: “The intrinsic nature of talent is overrated—our genes don’t confer specific gifts.… Talent is really about deliberate practice.”21 FIGURE 7.3.  Different types of non-cognitive skills. Described in Elliot M. Tucker-Drob et al., “Genetically Mediated Associations between Measures of Childhood Character and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111, no. 5 (2016): 790–815, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000098.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

Making connections: When undergoing that intellectual struggle, students are encouraged to use comparisons and analogies, helping them to see underlying patterns between different concepts. This ensures that the confusion leads to a useful lesson – rather than simply ending in frustration. Deliberate practice: Once the initial concepts have been taught, teachers should ensure that students practise those skills in the most productive way possible. Crucially, this doesn’t involve simply repeating near identical problems ad nauseam, as you might find in the Western maths classroom, but means adding additional variety and challenges – and yet more productive struggle.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

But when we’re on the move in the driverless future, we’ll turn to apps for all the task-specific tweaks we need to inform and organize, enhance and optimize, and simply liven up our travels. Sixth, let down your guard. And then look up. Throughout this book, I’ve ignored drones. The omission is deliberate. Practically speaking, drones are such a complex and speculative topic, it would be difficult to do them justice while also surveying the vast terrain covered by developments in terrestrial AVs. And while drones are already here, in surprisingly large numbers—more than one million are registered in the US alone—they simply aren’t going to factor into the urban equation anytime soon.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

The conclusion that follows, the NYTM notes, is that “when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love—because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t ‘good’ at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.” † The quote is from Wikipedia where, indeed, the other facts are drawn from as well, the idea having been suggested by Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “Mozart and Modularity,” collected in his book Eight Little Piggies. ‡ I’ve always thought that this was the reason kids (or maybe just me) especially disliked history.

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
by William Julius Wilson
Published 1 Jan 1996

“Although we tend to think of social integration as a desirable endpoint,” state Laurence Steinberg and his colleagues, “its desirability depends on the nature of the people that integration brings one into contact with. There are many communities in contemporary America in which it may be more adaptive for parents to be socially isolated than socially integrated. Indeed, some of Frank Furstenberg’s recent work on family life in the inner city of Philadelphia suggest that social isolation is often deliberately practiced as an adaptive strategy by many parents living in dangerous neighborhoods.” A similar finding emerged from ethnographic research in a densely populated housing project in Denver. Concerns on the part of some parents about safety in this housing project affected their degree of involvement or interaction with their neighbors.

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management
by Alexander Elder
Published 28 Sep 2014

That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web…” he writes. To learn a new skill, you need to find the experts and get their materials, create an action plan, and make an absolute commitment to studying and practicing without any distractions. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice, you can go from near zero to performing reasonably well in many fields. Kaufman describes how he took 20 hours to learn several new skills, including windsurfing and programming a website. Even if you take up a more complex activity, such as flying, 20 hours will get you through the ground school and the first few lessons with an instructor.

The Big Book of Words You Should Know: Over 3,000 Words Every Person Should Be Able to Use (And a Few That You Probably Shouldn't)
by David Olsen , Michelle Bevilacqua and Justin Cord Hayes
Published 28 Jan 2009

The competing cliques’ SECTARIAN squabbles captured the interest of the entire school. segregate (SEG-ruh-gate), verb To separate or keep apart from others. As the judge seemed doomed to have to point out for the rest of his life, his order affected only those school districts whose officials deliberately practiced SEGREGATION in violation of law—not SEGREGATION that was purely the result of existing demographic patterns. servile (SUR-vil), adjective Overly eager to serve; slavish. Marion’s uncharacteristically SERVILE demeanor can only mean one thing: He wants a raise. sinister (SIN-uh-ster), adjective Describes or suggests something unfavorable and potentially harmful.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

And in 1979, when Varadkar was born, Ireland retained the laws against acts of ‘gross indecency’ between consenting adult men under which one of its most famous sons, Oscar Wilde, had been prosecuted in 1895. As late as 1983, when Varadkar was four years old, the Irish Supreme Court upheld that repressive law ‘on the ground of the Christian nature of our State and on the grounds that the deliberate practice of homosexuality is morally wrong, that it is damaging to the health both of individuals and the public and, finally, that it is potentially harmful to the institution of marriage’. The law was repealed only in 1993, under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights. Yet in 2015 Ireland became the first country to introduce same-sex marriage by referendum – 62 per cent voted in favor.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
by Brigid Schulte
Published 11 Mar 2014

A few decades later, sleep researchers found those same ninety-minute oscillations from higher to lower states of alertness during the day and dubbed them “ultradian” cycles.12 Schwartz’s thinking was also influenced by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson’s research. Ericsson studied young violinists at the prestigious Academy of Music in Berlin to see what it takes to be the best. Ericsson is widely credited for coming up with the theory that it takes ten thousand hours of deliberate practice in anything to become an expert. “That led to the assumption that the best way to get things done is to just work more hours,” Schwartz said. But that’s only part of it. Ericsson’s study found that not only did the best violinists practice more, they also practiced more deliberately: They practiced first thing in the morning, when they were freshest, they practiced intensely without interruption in typically no more than ninety-minute increments for no more than four hours a day.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Between 2018 and 2020, Zhang flagged dozens of incidents of foreign leaders promoting lies and hate for gain, but was consistently overruled, she has said. When she was fired, she refused a $64,000 non-disparagement severance so that she could release her 7,800-word exit memo chronicling what she saw as a deliberate practice of allowing politicians to misuse the platform, including in countries where the stakes extended to sectarian violence and creeping authoritarianism. “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” she wrote. In 2019, Vietnam’s communist dictatorship privately conveyed a message to Facebook: the platform needed to censor government critics or the Vietnamese government might block it in the country.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

The latest research suggests a prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of how fantastic success is achieved. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. Instead, what really matters is the ability to get better and better gradually over time. As K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University has demonstrated, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously honing their craft. As Ericsson has noted, top performers devote five times more hours to become great than the average performers devote to become competent. John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon studied five hundred masterworks of classical music.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

• Atul Gawande speaks directly to the importance of practice: “There have now been many studies of elite performers— concert violinists, chess grandmasters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth—and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve accumulated. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself…the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person’s willingness to engage in sustained training.” • Online personality testing can be purchased at www.knowyourtype.com. If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp, you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place…learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

The formal descriptions are isolated in stand-alone boxes. It avoids line after line of equations, which overwhelm even the most dedicated readers. The formalism that remains should be engaged and absorbed. Modeling is a craft, mastered through engagement; it is not a spectator sport. It requires deliberate practice. In modeling, mathematics and logic play the role of an expert coach. They correct our flaws. The remainder of the book is organized as follows: Chapters 2 and 3 motivate the many-model approach. Chapter 4 discusses the challenges of modeling people. The next twenty or so chapters cover individual models or classes of models.

Melody Beattie 4 Title Bundle: Codependent No More and 3 Other Best Sellers by Melody Beattie: A Collection of Four Melody Beattie Best Sellers
by Melody Beattie
Published 30 May 2010

When we begin letting go, it may seem almost impossible just to relax and let go. As with anything else, with practice and repetition, we will become more skilled. That doesn’t mean we won’t need to remember to do it. It just means letting go will become easier, in time. If you’ve become highly skilled at worrying, obsessing, or trying to control, deliberately practice relaxing and letting go until you’re good at that, too. God, help me make the discipline of relaxing and letting go a daily part of my life. Teach me to let go with poise, dignity, and ease. January 16 Drop it How do you let go? I just can’t let go? It’s impossible to let go of this. These are thoughts that may run through our minds when we worry, dwell, and obsess.

…

When we’re learning to speak the language of letting go, however, we learn to say thanks for everything in our lives, whether we feel grateful or not. That’s how we turn things around. Make a list of everything in your life that you’re not grateful for. You may not have to make a list; you probably have the things that bother you memorized. Then deliberately practice gratitude for everything on the list. The power of gratitude won’t let you down. Being grateful for whatever we have always turns what we have into more. God, show me the power of gratitude. Help me make it a regular, working tool in my life. August 2 Gratitude is larger than life One day, a friend called me on the phone.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
by Noam Chomsky
Published 24 Oct 2014

In a recent visit, Arens was impressed with the “striking absence of young adult males,” the horrendous condition of the children, with festering sores, distended abdomens and widespread symptoms of the protein-deficiency disease kwashiorkor, and the refusal of medication and medical care as a general and deliberate practice.64 Arens, even on a guided tour, was aghast at the systematic maltreatment and felt himself “engulfed by the collective gloom of a people who had given up on life.”65 The systematic humiliation and ethnocide, Münzel writes, “produces docile Indians who are sometimes taken to Asunción and exhibited to the public.

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

Of course, habits conducive to health would be ingrained. I imagine spiritual exploration and sensitization as well. I think the current focus on discipline would not be entirely eliminated but rather transformed: because I think that focus, attention, concentration, self-control, persistence, and the ability to take pleasure in deliberate practice and in mental and physical exertion would remain important—perhaps more important than today, since there would be less occasion for these habits to be entrained by external demands and hardships. Cultivating curiosity—here I may be projecting my own proclivities, but I think a passion for learning could greatly enhance a life of leisure.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr
Published 8 Jan 2016

By the time of the Enlightenment the practical responsibilities of scientists to engage the needs of industry and agriculture were widely accepted. The bridges between the propositional knowledge created by the savants and the practical needs of industrialists, farmers, and navigators were occupied in large part by engineers, mathematicians, doctors, and chemists or scientists with a strong and deliberate practical bend. The great Leibniz himself was a prolific inventor and tinkerer, working, among others, on propellers, mining machines, pumps, and his famous calculating machine. Leonhard Euler, the most prominent mathematician of the age, was concerned with ship design, lenses, the buckling of beams, and (with his less famous son Johann) contributed a great deal to hydraulics.16 Among the engineers, the aforementioned John T.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

William Hunter, History of British India, I, 109, cited by Masselman, Cradle of Colonialism, p. 218. Masselman writes: “There were many more examples of this kind, all part of a deliberate policy of intimidation to gain control over India.” On this practice of cutting off nose and hands—because it was a deliberate practice—see chapter v (above) on Spanish policy. 2. Cited by Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 297. 3. Lang, Portuguese Brazil, p. 34. 4. Cf. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 59. 5. The words are from The Letter-Book of William Clarke, Merchant in Aleppo, cited in Domenico Sella, “Crisis and Transformation in Venetian Trade,” in Pullan, ed., Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy, p. 97. 6.

The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published 15 Jul 2009

As Norris recalled, the difficulty was not just a legal one, but also ‘a barrier in terms of popular and political prejudice’. When his High Court case was dismissed in 1980, he appealed to the Supreme Court, which also rejected his case, the Chief Justice, Tom O’Higgins, asserting that ‘the deliberate practice of homosexuality is morally wrong, that it is damaging both to the health of individuals and the public and finally, that it is potentially harmful to the institution of marriage. I can find no inconsistency with the Constitution in the laws which make such conduct criminal.’ Norris duly initiated a case under the European Convention on Human Rights.