5/1/2017 Istalentimportant,ordoespracticemakesperfect?

|WorldEconomicForum

Is talent important, or does practice

makes perfect?

Its not how much you practice, but how you do it

Image: REUTERS/Jianan Yu

This article is published in collaboration with

Quartz

13 Mar 2017

Jenny Anderson
Journalist, Quartz - Atlantic Media

K. Anders Ericsson has spent 30 years studying people who are exceptional at what they do,
and trying to figure out how they got to be so good. His conclusion: in most cases, talent
doesnt matterpractice does.

The practice he advocates is not hitting 100,000 golf balls or spending 10,000 hours doing
scales on the cello, even though it was his work that Malcolm Gladwell used to popularize the
10,000-hour benchmark in Outliers (incorrectly, Ericsson argues). Instead, Ericsson, a
psychology professor at Florida State and author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of
Expertise, believes that anyone can get good at anything if they engage in deliberate
practice, a very specific kind of training that, among other things, is really unpleasant.

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Deliberate practice involves the pursuit of personal improvement via well-defined, specific
goals and targeted areas of expertise. It requires a teacher or coach who has demonstrated an
ability to help others improve the desired area of expertisesay chess, ballet, or musicand
who can give continuous feedback. It also requires constantly practicing outside of ones
comfort zone.

In other words, its not how much you practice, but how you do it.

Ericssons formula (pdf) is appealing: practice makes perfect is inherently preferable to

genetic determinism. Its also a Tiger Parents fantasy (paywall): by discarding innate ability for
systematic effort, any kid with enough deliberate practiceand parents with a lot of time and
moneycan become a concert-level pianist or an Olympic figure skater.

The professor has found that serious practice at a young age is associated with elite adult
performance later, with this early engagement shown to change neuronal myelinization of
particular regions of the brain in children and adolescents. Translation: start early, and all that
practice rewires the brain.

Ericsson, who has two kids, argues this is not necessarily the message parents should take
away from Peak, nor his 30 years of research. What parents should glean from the science of
expertise is not the effect of logging thousands of hours, but how to get kids to embrace the
importance and challenge of effective practice.

The goal should not be, if you are not a world champion you are a failure, he says. Its
learning the process of engaging in practice and engaging with teachers, he notes. Being
able to accept feedback and self-assess is key.

Not so fast
Imagine if you could help your child study 1% better. Over his or her lifetime, that
improvement would make a big difference. This is why Ericsson says helping kids to improve
their practice is more important than blindly racking up 10,000 hours on a certain task.

Parents can model good practice habits, but they must eventually delegate the responsibility
of the training, he says. This will make a difference when the child grows up and (probably)
does not become a professional athlete or musician. The self-confidence of mastery and
attributing it to their own doingthat will put them in a good position when they start a
professional career, he adds.

Cognitive scientists bristle at the notion that innate ability does not matter: there is no way that
every kid who loves cello can become Yo Yo Ma, or every kid who loves soccer will become
Mia Hamm.

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Douglas Detterman, a psychology professor at Case Western University, cites a number of

factors that researchers have linked to expert performance, including intelligence, motivation,
and personality. Ericsson denies ability differences and claims that all differences are due to
instructional differences, he says. I find that to be blatantly ridiculous.

Indeed, criticisms of Ericssons work come from all directions, perhaps because of his magical
one-solution approach. After years of raging debate over nature versus nurture, most
scientists agree that both play a role. A major reason for the shortcomings of the deliberate
practice theory is its extreme environmentalist perspective, wrote Frederik Ulln in a paper
that argues expertise stems from many factors, including genes. A 2016 meta-analysis of
sports research suggests that deliberate practice accounts for only 18% of variance in
performance among all athletes, and only 1% among elite-level performers.

Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute at the University of
Pennsylvania, and a fan of Ericssons work, explained it this way in Scientific American:

The development of high achievement involves a complex interaction of many

personal and environmental variables that feed off each other in non-linear, mutually
reinforcing, and nuanced ways, and that the most complete understanding of the
development of elite performance can only be arrived through an integration of
perspectives.

Proof that practice makes perfect

In 1763, a seven-year-old kid named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart embarked on a European
tour. Crowds flocked to see the prodigy. He could play multiple musical instruments with ease.
More impressively, he had absolute or perfect pitch, the ability to identify any note played on
any instrument at any time. Such a talent is incredibly rareit was believed that only one in
every 10,000 people had itand helped to explain the young boys extraordinary talent,
Ericsson writes in Peak.

Today, compared with kids trained in Suzuki piano, a young Mozart would probably be
considered pretty average, Ericsson argues. (The professor studied the Suzuki method for a
chapter in Genius of the the Mind, which addresses what kids play now versus what Mozart
played then.)

More than 250 years after Mozart wowed the world, research shows that perfect pitch is more
common than previously thought, especially among people who speak languages in which
tone is important, like Mandarin and Vietnamese.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, it can be taught.

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In an experiment at a music school in Tokyo, 24 children between the ages of two and six
were taught to recognize chords (composed of major notes) played on a piano. The kids
received four or five short training sessions per day, each just a few minutes, until they could
name 14 targeted chords. Within a year and a half, all could do it.

Mozart had the making of someone engaged in deliberate practice: he started very early,
played a lot, and had a teacherhis fatherwho was dedicated to improving his abilities. (His
sister was also incredibly accomplished, but she was born a girl in 1763, which limited her
opportunities.) By the time Mozart toured Europe, he had dedicated far more time to music
than the year-and-a-half the Japanese children spent learning perfect pitch. According to
Ericsson, Mozart and the Japanese kids had a lot in common: They were all endowed with a
brain so flexible and adaptable that it could, with the right sort of training, develop a capacity
that seems quite magical to those of us who do not possess it.

Ericsson rattles off other examples of how deliberate practice helps rewire the brain. Theres
the famous study of London taxi drivers, who developed larger hippocampi after memorizing
the citys bewildering grid. Or Steve Faloon, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who could
remember seven digits at a time before training and a staggering 82 after; the Polgar sisters
and their extraordinary chess feats; and a Danish psychologist who wanted to sing like
Whitney Houston but can hardly carry a tuneand ends up recording an successful album.

From all this, it seems that with focus, any child can be taught to be a tennis star or chess
champion. The experience of trying to reach that level, too, could help them get into college
and later, land a good job: Goldman Sachs famously recruits athletes for their discipline and
single-minded focus. So why doesnt every parent adopt this approach?

One reason is that a lot of people think Ericsson is wrong.

Enter the doubters

In 2014, an entire issue of the academic journal Intelligence was devoted to articles disputing
Ericssons work, arguing that IQ and other factors like motivation, range of motion, and the
varied timing that some creative talents develop matter just as much as practice.

In the journal, one group of researchers reanalyzed six studies involving chess and eight
involving music to determine how much of the performance variance could be accounted for
by deliberate practice. In both fields, less than half of the variance in performance was down
to deliberate practice, the authors concluded.

Case Westerns Detterman believes that its unfair to tell people they can accomplish anything.
People are limited by their abilities, he says. It is unfair to the less able to claim that with
sufficient hard work they can accomplish what those more gifted achieve. Others say that

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Ericssons work could lead people to waste a significant share of their lives trying to acquire
expertise that will never come.

Zach Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, has found in

numerous studies and meta analyses that deliberate practice plays a role in performance, but
not by as much as Ericsson suggests. His research has shown that practice itself is heritable,
and that deliberate practice cannot explain away all genetic differences (pdf). What we find is
that deliberate practice, however it is measured and operationalized in studies, accounts for a
sizable amount of the variability across people, but it leaves even more of the difference or
variance unexplained, he says.

He believes that a better understanding of what limits peoples abilities will help them decide
how to spend their time and resources more carefully. If working memory is crucial for sight-
reading music, someone with a bad working memory can either deliberately target ways to
improve itor maybe just switch to soccer. This will allow more people to become experts,
he argues.

Some researchers also point out methodological problems with Ericssons work, such as the
fact that when he studies experts, he starts by selecting a group of experts. In other words,
they are not random.

There are other issues, Detterman writes: In most cases, the study of experts concentrates
on areas of expertise where there is no uniform, universal instruction. These areas include
music, chess, art, gambling, memory, and other domains in which not everyone is instructed
in a rigorous and systematic way.

Ericssons rebuttal stems on his very specific definition of expertise: consistently superior
performance on a specified set of representative tasks for a domain. There arent any age
conditions, so if a kid can read exceptionally well at six, but most kids can read at that level at
eight, it doesnt count as expertise. Ericsson also excludes height and body size,
acknowledging that you need to be tall to be successful in basketball and small to succeed in
gymnastics at the highest level.

He says its not that innate talent is unnecessary, only that there is no evidence that it exists
for most fields. He concedes that IQ may play a role early on, but says it isnt the factor that
determines whether someone reaches the highest echelons of performance. His definition of
deliberate practice is also very narrow, and his criticism of the research debunking his work is
often that the practice they reflect is not deliberate practice in its pure form.

Nature versus nurture, over and over

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For most parents, the nature-versus-nurture debate is academic. What matters most is how to
help kids become their best selves. Parents spend a lot of time thinking about how to help
with math or science, reading or soccer, but perhaps they should also devote attention to
thinking about the science of practice.

As kids pick their passions, and hone their own practice routines, parents can borrow from
Ericssons work to help their children learn to set and track goals, be aware of the quality of
their coaching, and consider specific improvements to practice instead of just adding more
hours on the court, in the pool, or with the flashcards. Less is more if practice is intentionally
designed, which is not often the case.

Success at something often begets success at something else. Accomplished surgeons often
cite some other passion they found as a child that they built upon: a love of karate as a kid,
say, led to practicing it endlessly, which in turn led to success and boosted confidence that
manifested itself in the motivation to conquer other fields.

Somewhere in this process, kids learn that passion and hard work create a virtuous cycle that
is particularly fulfilling when it is self-directed. It is up to children to pick their passions and put
in the work, but parents can set them up for success by making them experts in the art of
practice.

An example of normal practice versus deliberate

practice
Practice

Start with a general idea of what the kid wants to do (play tennis).

Find a tennis group or lessons, play with parents, siblings, friends.

Practice until kid reaches an acceptable level.

Get a coach.

Play more.

Continue improving.

Deliberate practice

Start with a general idea of what the kid wants to do (play tennis).

Find a tennis group or lessons, play with parents, siblings, friends.

Practice until kid reaches an acceptable level.

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Get a coach who can set specific targets and tailor practice to improve those areas (improve
forehand, vary rallies).

Develop a way to measure improvement, so if forehands are a weakness, the coach delivers
lots of those strokes, progressively makes them harder to return, and demands that the player
places strokes in a specific spot. Progress is tracked constantly.

Create positive channels for feedback so that modifications are continuous (like learning how
not to reveal intentions to opponent).

Develop a mental representation of excellent performance: what to do in various game

situations; how to respond to certain shots; when to take risks and try new things.

Coach designs developmentally appropriate training sessions to achieve maximum effort and
concentration. Its counter-productive for a parent or teacher to push them longer than they
can, Ericsson says. That creates motivational problems and forces the child to do the best
they can when they dont have 100% concentration. Thats linked to developing bad habits.

Kid learns to self-assess and come up with own mental representations, so they feel in charge
and able to exploit opportunities on the court.

Kid develops own training sessions to elicit maximum effort and concentration,
acknowledging physical and mental limits, and learns to use self-assessment to address
weaknesses.

Written by

Jennifer Anderson, Journalist, Quartz - Atlantic Media

This article is published in collaboration with Quartz.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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