Table of Contents
You can achieve excellence in any skill if you give 10,000 hours of practice for that skill. But there is a catch here. Knowing this is very important. Let’s understand it with an example of driving skill. I have been driving my car for the last 12 years, with an average of 2.5 hours daily driving, I have crossed 10,000 hours. But am I a world-class driver? I am a good driver but do not qualify myself as a world-class in driving skills.
Practice in Autopilot
What happens when I drive my car? At the early stage of driving, I was honing my driving skill and learning new things. But later on, it becomes a routine. While driving, my mind got engaged in several other activities like speaking to the person who is with me, listening to the radio, discussing the traffic, and many other things. I am, in effect, driving on autopilot with the help of my subconscious mind.
This may sound like an extreme example, but it applies to a surprising number of us. We do our jobs, but often with our minds absent—partially or wholly—from what we are doing. We go through the motions. This is why (as dozens of studies have shown) length of time in many occupations is only weakly related to performance. Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence.
Of course, some jobs demand deep application. Like firefighters and nurses are constantly challenged to operate at the upper limit of their powers: if they don’t, people die. Wandering along on autopilot is not an option, which is why the number of years in the job is strongly correlated with expertise. Those who have been on the front line for ten years plus are, invariably, world-class in their field.
But in many jobs, and in most sports, it is possible to clock up endless hours without improving at all. Like some of my friends play tennis every Sunday morning. They enjoy the game and later on breakfast in the group. It is fun and sociable, but it has nothing to do with the kind of practice undertaken by aspiring Grand Slam champions. They have not improved in the last five to seven years. Why? Because they have been following a routine on autopilot.
Click Out of Autopilot
Take a look at the anagrams in List A below and try to solve them. Then do the same for List B.
List A : FOOTBLAL, FAHTER, DCOTOR, TEACHRE
List B : LBOFTOAL, HERFAT, RTOCOD, EERTACH
If you solved the anagrams from both lists you will have noticed that they actually refer to precisely the same words: FOOTBALL, FATHER, DOCTOR, TEACHER. The only difference is that in List A, the anagrams were easy, requiring only a single movement of adjacent letters. In List B, however, the letters were completely jumbled up, making the solution far more difficult.
Curious Thing to Know
Here’s the curious thing to know. When researchers had participants work on lists of anagrams like those in List A, they found that, when later questioned, the participants were not very good at remembering the words. Even though they had successfully solved the anagrams, their recall was poor. When participants worked on more difficult anagrams, however, their recall soared.
Why such a dramatic difference? With difficult anagrams, the jumble of letters forces you to do something other than breeze through. You have to stop for a few moments and think; you have to deepen your concentration and engage with the anagram to figure out what it is. In short, you are forced to click out of autopilot. In those few seconds of striving, the word is imprinted on your memory.
This example, taken from the work of psychologist S. W. Tyler, neatly emphasizes the power of practice when it is challenging rather than nice and easy. “When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert 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.”
Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice,” to distinguish it from what most of the rest of us get up to. 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.
Real Story of Deliberate Practice
Matthew Syed (a British journalist, author, broadcaster, and former table tennis player) shared his own experience on deliberate practice “From the age of fifteen to nineteen I practiced for many hours, using the routines conventional in England at that time: regular movement patterns where my opponent would play one shot to my forehand, then one shot to my backhand, and then back again, over and over. It was physically arduous, in its way, but only because of its repetitiveness, rather than by placing special demands on my mind and body.
But a few weeks after I turned nineteen, a quirk of fate occurred. Chen Xinhua of China, one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, married a lovely Yorkshire woman and moved to England. It was rumored that he wanted to retire from table tennis, but after a long conversation, he agreed to coach me. Within minutes of getting together at a small training hall on the outskirts of Reading, it became apparent that his concept of practice bore no relation to anything I had yet seen or imagined.
Instead of playing against each other with a single ball, he took a bucket of a hundred balls (rather like Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, in tennis), placed them beside the table, and then proceeded to fire them at me from different angles, at different speeds, with different spins, but always (and this was the ultimate revelation of his genius for coaching) calibrated so as to be constantly nudging the outer limits of my speed, movement, technique, anticipation, timing, and agility.
My body and mind were forced to leap into a new gear to keep up with this “multi-ball” training, and in response Chen upped the ante, again and again, finally widening the table at my end (adding half a table in width) so that my footwork patterns were now straining to cope with extraordinary demands. Over a period of five years, my movement, speed, and positional awareness were transformed, and my world ranking rocketed.
In a flash, the riddle of why China is so successful at table tennis was solved. For years, their success had been put down to faster reaction speeds, a secret diet, and any number of mysterious factors. Others suggested that it was because they were training longer hours. But they were not training longer; they were training smarter. They were, in effect, training on turbo drive.
And now I was training the same way. It wasn’t that I felt like a changed player; it was that I was a changed player. My body and mind had been transformed through a sustained process of being pushed beyond existing limitations. The world-class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach, but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached. Over time, through constant repetition and deep concentration, the gap will disappear, only for a new target to be created, just out of reach once again.” (Excerpt is inspired from ‘Bounce’ by Matthew Syed)
“If you don’t practice, you don’t deserve to win.” – Andre Agassi
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