Practice

We were all brought up to believe that practice would make us perfect. It’s what carried us through those piano lessons on sunny afternoons; it’s the sage advice that helped us get over the lost game on the baseball diamond or soccer field. But the true benefits of “practice” may be greater than you ever imagined.

Mastery and Practice

The idea that 10,000 hours (about 1 year and 51 day’s total) of practice is what you need to gain expertise in performance-based fields was initially popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Outliers.

There has been much debate around Gladwell’s theory of 10,000 hours which was loosely based on the work of professor of psychology, K. Anders Ericsson. In Ericsson’s 1993 article The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, he and his co-authors first presented the idea of a required amount of preparation time or the 10-year, 10,000-hours, rule, as a magic number in acquiring a level of mastery. But more of their work focuses on how world-class individuals are spending their 10,000 hours. Specifically, it isn’t just about 10,000 hours of doing the activity; it’s 10,000 hours of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” According to the paper, “deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance.”

Focused Mental Practice

Ericcson speaks directly about the nature of deliberate practice another of his articles, The Making of an
Expert.

“To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades.

However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. 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.

Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills.

Practice and Strengths

Although deliberate effort will certainly allow us to improve any capability, when the deliberate effort is applied specifically to our natural abilities the rewards are even more significant. In Tom Rath’s best seller Strengthsfinder 2.0, he describes the science of building strengths. Based on the work of Donald O. Clifton, Rath provides and formula for optimizing strengths. “Building raw talents into strengths requires practice and hard work, much like it does to build physical strengths.”

In the growing field of Positive Psychology, this “identify and use” approach to strengths psychology has continued to grow in clinical circles as scientific research supports the exponential payoffs in personal motivation, engagement and overall satisfaction. Translating raw talents into strengths takes deliberate and focused repetition.

Making Your Practice More Deliberate

• Make time for practicing new skills every day
• Plan how you will approach your practice
• Add experimentation to your practice in order to improve your range of skill
• Set milestones and longer-term goals 
• Reflect and measure your progress

So, whether you are attempting to extend you range of skills or advancing a natural ability, the answer is the same. Be focused and deliberate in your practice! Remember, as Vince Lombardi once said, “Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”

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