Deliberate practice is the high octane fuel of self-directed learning.
When I started researching unschooling and unschoolers, I found the stories about teenagers who did internships, apprenticeships, direct interviews, supervised research, small business startup, and mentorships the most compelling. Those teens, it seemed, were really taking advantage of their liberated time.
When I considered my own most memorable learning experiences—building a light-capture device under the guidance of my favorite college astrophysics professor, tracking down and chatting up my favorite authors, teaching a class on alternative education for other Berkeley undergraduates—they also fell into these categories. Only later did I learn that all these hands-on experiences were different versions of the same learning phenomenon: “deliberate practice”.
Dr. K Anders Ericsson is the rock star of deliberate practice. His 1993 article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” (full article PDF) provided the scientific grounding for the theory, but it was Geoff Colvin’s 2006 article in Fortune and subsequent best-selling book Talent is Overrated that popularized the theory. (Many other books have recently been published on Ericsson’s work, but I found Colvin’s the most accessible.)
Deliberate practice is a specific type of practice that quickly builds competency. Top athletes, chess players, musicians, businesspeople, researchers, artists, and mechanics all use it, albeit in different forms. The key features of deliberate practice (DP) include:
- DP is practice specifically designed to nudge you just past your current level of performance. This typically requires a highly knowledgeable expert, coach, teacher or mentor who can determine your current abilities and design the next appropriate challenge.
- DP is repeatable—you do it over and over again. (This is the grain of truth in the phrase “practice makes perfect”)
- DP involves constant performance feedback (most likely provided by the expert, coach, teacher, or mentor).
- DP is highly mentally demanding; no one can do it for more than 4 or 5 hours a day.
- When you’re doing DP, it’s not much fun. It’s strenuous and painful.
- DP requires that you know exactly what you want to achieve—that’s how you get the specific prescription from your coach/mentor/etc.
(I tire of writing mentor/coach/teacher/expert/etc., so I’m going to use an acronym instead: MAGE. That stands for Mentor—Advisor—Guide—Expert. I like “MAGE” more than “teacher” or “coach” because we associate those people with school and sports, and DP applies to much more than school and sports.)
Here are a few examples of DP:
- A musician practices under the guidance of a tutor, repeating scales over and over again until perfection is achieved.
- A chess student looks at a specific chess problem, hypothesizes about the right move, and gets feedback from his instructor.
- A Harvard Business School student reads a real-life business case study, guesses how the smart businessperson would have acted, and gets feedback on her analysis from the classroom teaching assistant.
- A football player does a specific workout series meant to rapidly condition his sprints, under the instruction of the team’s personal trainer.
- A traveler en route to South America practices his Spanish with a tutor in Buenos Aires over Skype, receiving constant feedback about vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, and doing homework sets between lessons that the tutor specifically designs for him. (I actually did this.)
How do unschoolers and self-directed learners use deliberate practice? They do it by throwing themselves into situations where a MAGE will work with them, one-on-one or in a small group, on their subject of interest. Internships, apprenticeships, interviews, supervised research, small business startup, and mentorships all hold this potential. As long as you (the student) know where you want to go, your MAGE knows where you want to go (and can take you there), there’s constant feedback involved, and you stress and sweat a bit in the process, you’re doing deliberate practice.
Why is this so awesome?
The first liberating message behind deliberate practice is: You can get really good at something without an institution.
Nowhere in the description of DP is “school” or “college” mentioned as a must-have. Obviously, some goals—like becoming a top mathematician—are best served by going to a college or graduate school where your potential MAGEs congregate. But if your goal is simply to learn a limited amount of math, you could equally create deliberate practice by finding a retired math teacher in your area, a knowledgeable college student willing to share her time, or that nerdy friend who’s really into partial derivatives, and go from there. Internships, apprenticeships, tutoring, and mentorships are just a few of the ways in which DP can happen without an institution.
The second liberating message is: Genius is mostly created, not inborn.
Colvin’s book opens with the stories of Mozart and Tiger Woods—two people who we commonly consider to be “geniuses” in the sense that Mozart popped out the womb and instantly started composing music, and Tiger, swinging golf clubs. According to Colvin, however, these stories are far from the truth. Both Mozart and Tiger were exposed to huge amounts of deliberate practice from an extremely young age (three) onward. By the time they reached adolescence, they were unquestionably better than their peers, but they weren’t yet world-class performers. Only in their young adulthood did their biggest achievements appear, after roughly 10 years or 10,000 hours of (mostly) deliberate practice. Their “genius” was in fact large amounts of deliberate practice fueled by parental support (and, some might say, pressuring) from a very young age.
In other words, anyone can become a Mozart or Tiger Woods in their field of interest. Well, mostly.
Colvin (and more popularly, Malcom Gladwell) discuss a “multiplier effect” or “Matthew effect”, a highly common-sensical theory about why certain people get really good at something and others don’t. The multiplier effect suggests that everyone starts out with minor differences in skills. Let’s say that in little league, Matt can swing the bat pretty hard, but Patrick can swing the bat really hard. When parents and teachers see Patrick swing, they call him “special” or “gifted”, and then they say “He’s got real potential. You should get him a coach.” So Patrick starts getting private baseball coaching (i.e. deliberate practice), and he gets much better. He then gets onto a more competitive team, starts going to big tournaments, meets new coaches, and gets many more opportunities for deliberate practice. What happened to Matt, who could swing the bat pretty hard? He’s “normal” so gets limited attention, and the adults surrounding him don’t lavish him with DP opportunities. Fast-forward: Matt now plays baseball at a recreational league, but Patrick is swinging in the big leagues. Patrick, with his tiny advantage in the beginning, benefited from the multiplier effect.
This is why genius is mostly created. There are small initial differences in people’s abilities, and we can’t control our childhood influences. Kids who grow up in the ghetto with absentee parents, poor schools, and drug dealers for MAGEs obviously have less chance to become top performers than those whose parents have the social and financial resources to put them in DP situations.
But the liberating message nonetheless remains: as soon as you control your own life, you can choose to create deliberate practice for yourself, and you can gain skills (if not mastery) in virtually anything.
The third liberating message is: General qualities like “intelligence” and “memory” are much less important than deliberate practice.
Your IQ and memory aren’t as important as you imagine. Building an extensive personal library of knowledge and experience (through DP or otherwise) leads to general-level intelligence and memory—not the other way around. Colvin digs into this in Chapter 3 of Talent is Overrated, and the free National Academies Press book How People Learn (available online for free) confirms it.
And the fourth liberating message is: Positive attitudes do matter.
Deliberate practice is difficult, so lots of people don’t want to do it. Your attitude toward DP therefore makes a huge difference. If you believe that DP can lead to greater performance, you at least have a chance of doing it. If, however, you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of innate gift, or lack of general abilities, then there’s no chance at all you’ll put in the hours and push through the setbacks. Or as Colvin writes: “Those who see the setbacks as evidence that they lack the necessary gift will give up—quite logically, in light of their beliefs.”
Having a “positive attitude” means believing that intelligence, talent, and the potential for achievement are achievable—not that they’re inborn characteristics that some possess and others do not. For further reading, check out Carol Dweck’s book Mindset.
All of these messages lead us to an inevitable conclusion:
The implications for self-directed learning and Zero Tuition College are huge.
When you understand DP, you can see that what college students are largely purchasing is access to college professors, small classes, appropriately challenging homework, and a smart set of peers. All of these are factors for creating deliberate practice. A smart college student greedily values her teachers and their assignments; she goes to office hours to chat up her professors; she hangs out with the graduate students in her field; and she finds the smartest peers with whom to study—all for the reason of doing deliberate practice.
But there’s a good chance you don’t need college to do just these same things! As a non-enrolled student, you can approach those same professors and graduate students and undergraduates, show them how enthusiastic you are to learn, and ask them to give you an assignment and then feedback on it. That’s college-level DP, but it’s free. Yes, some of these people will say they only have time for actually enrolled students. Failures will happen. But humans universally value a curious mind. If you keep asking around, eventually you will find someone willing to work with you. Maybe that person isn’t in college at all: maybe they’re a working professional, or a retired manager, or an author or blogger, or a family friend. Opportunities for high-level DP are everywhere.
If you’re willing to find your MAGE, put in the hours, ask for critical feedback, and practice over and over again, you can build huge competencies without the college price tag.
Top image credit: Agilitrix (CC license)
