Do You Have The Gift For Peak Performance?
Too often when we see someone at the top of their game, whether it’s sports, music, art or academics, we instantly draw the conclusion that they were born with a gift. These individuals do have gifts, but not for the reasons you think.
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People are born with a gift and that gift is adaptability. We are all born with adaptability in equal measure and the people who achieved the most in life have taped into their ability to improve – to adapt their brains and their bodies in the most extraordinary ways through Practice.
The 10,000 Hour Rule – It’s Not Really A Rule
Malcolm Gladwell popularised the 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers. According to Gladwell, in order for someone to become world class at a skill, they need to put in 10,000 hours of work.
The man responsible for the research behind the 10,000 rule is Anders Ericsson, and in his new book, he writes that this rule, isn’t really a rule. According to Ericsson, it’s not the hours of practice that matters, but how you approach it.
Ericsson says that doctors who practice medicine for 20 years are no better than doctors who have practiced for 5 years, if they feel that they’ve reached a level of acceptable performance. In fact those who believe that their skills are good enough, are actually worse in the absence of deliberate practice.
There are three types of practice:
Naive practice: This is when you do the same kind of work each day, barely pushing yourself to improve your skills.
Purposeful practice: This is when you train yourself through constant feedback and improvement.
Deliberate practice: This is the GOLD STANDARD for attaining peak performance. From its strictest definition, you can only deliberately practice in extremely established fields like chess, music and sports, where you can objectively measure and determine clear steps on how to improve your performance.
To Reach Peak Performance You Need To Do Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is necessary to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and force yourself to come up with what Ericsson calls mental representations.
What sets expert performers apart from the rest is their mental representations. Through years of practice, peak performers develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields.
Masters have achieved mastery because they have come up with effective mental representations that allow them to recreate entire experiences in their mind. Ericsson says that more than anything else mental representations explain the difference in performance between novices and experts.
Did You Know?
Grand master chess players are all able to play entire games of chess blindfolded. In fact in the 1920s, Alexander Alekhine could play 32 games of chess simultaneously blindfolded.
To do this, Alekhine had to hold entire chessboards in his memory, and move pieces around in his mind trying different strategies.
How Can We Do Purposeful Practice?
The best place to learn about purposeful practice is by looking at a study that Ericsson worked on early in his career studying expert performers.
The Experiment
In the late 1970s, William Chase and Anders Ericsson, recruited an undergraduate student from Carnegie Mellon named Steve Faloon.
Steve was hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorising strings of Digits. Each session Ericsson would give Steve a set of digits to recall. If he got that right Ericsson would add another digit, if Steve got it wrong, he would take off two digits.
Hitting The Limit
After about four sessions Steve got to a point where he could reliably recite 7 digits. At that point many studies had shown that the capacity of human short term memory was about seven units of information, so Steve had hit his natural abilities with memorising. At that point Steve tried to improve beyond seven digits.
Breaking Through
Initially Steve struggled to memorise more than 7 digits. One day Steve finally squeaked out 11 digits by the end of the session. Steve progressed slowly, hitting a perceived limit and than having breakthroughs which lead him to memorise more digits.
Over two years of training, Steve slowly but steadily improved his ability to remember strings of digits by grouping the digits in 4s, 6s and so on in his mind to hold more information. By the end he could memorise 82 digits!
The Formula To Purposeful Practice
After conducting this experiment, Ericsson concluded that Steve’s limits during practice was a technique issue and not an issue of effort. Steve managed to hold 82 digits in short term memory (75 more than what normal people can can) by a technique which Anders now calls purposeful practice.
There are four components of purposeful practice and this is how Steve pushed through and developed his abilities:
First: There has to be defined specific goal – Steve had short term targets which were extremely obvious. If Steve was able to recall 8 digits, he knew his next goal was 9.
Second: Practice needs intense focus – Steve worked at memorising through undistracted focus for an hour trying to remember digits.
Third: You should get immediate feedback – After each attempt, Steve got feedback that was immediate and easy to understand. He either got the numbers right or he didn’t.
Fourth: You should experience frequent discomfort : Steve was constantly being pushed outside of his comfort zone by operating just on the edge of his abilities.
How Deliberate Practice Works
After the experiment, Anders started another experiment with student called Dario Donatelli, who was also a student at Steve’s school. During this experiment Anders got Steve to teach Dario his method for encoding digits.
With this head start, Dario was able to improve much quicker than Steve. In just a few short sessions, Dario managed to memorise 20 digits all because he was able to adopt Steve’s mental representations.
Beyond that point Dario didn’t find Steve’s techniques that effective so he came up with some of his own techniques that allowed him to recall 100 digits in his short term memory.
This insight was the start of Ericsson’s research into peak performance and through 3 decades of research Ericsson has finally come up for the formula for peak performance.
With purposeful practice methods and expert coaching, anyone can reach peak performance.
Why You Can Be Greater Than The Greats
In 1908 Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon and set a world record at 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds.
Today, a century later, the world record for a marathon is just 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds. Almost 30 percent faster than Haye’s record. What’s more surprising is that if you’re an 18-34 year old male, you aren’t even allowed to enter the Boston Marathon, which has about 30,000 runners unless you’ve run another marathon in less than 3 hours, 5 minutes.
This means that anyone competent enough to run the Boston Marathon, would have been of olympic standard just a century ago.
In the early 1930s, Alfred Cortot was one of the best-known classical musicians in the world. Today critics like Anthony Tommasini have commented that musical ability has increased so much since Cortot’s time that Cortot would probably not be admitted to Juilliard now.
Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants
The world is full of people with extraordinary abilities—abilities that seemed impossible yesterday. While abilities can be extraordinary, there is no mystery about how these people developed them. They practiced a lot with the help of experts.
Geniuses aren’t born, they are made through incremental progress. Improvements might not always seem obvious every year, but over decades, it starts accumulating. When you stand on the shoulders of giants, you can quickly reach further beyond their limits and reach peak performance.
Now that you’ve read about Anders Ericsson’s work, are you ready to be greater than the greats?
Heres some motivation:
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