9 ms·
Becoming an expert through deliberate practice
- dang 11y agoThis is better than the usual fluff, but obviously we had to change the baity title. If anyone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
- teach 11y agoI agree. The article was much better than would have been indicated by the original title. I'm glad you changed it or I might have skipped right over!
- sdrothrock 11y agoThis reminds me of the phrase "practice makes perfect" and of course, the oft-repeated correction: "perfect practice makes perfect." I can't say I'm a fan of the domain name, though. There are certain connotations you raise in people's minds when you use incredibly common/trite Japanese phrases within a given subculture for a domain names, especially one that sounds like "I'm retarded dur dur."
- Ace17 11y agoPractise doesn't make perfect ; practise makes permanent.
- camillomiller 11y agoWell, actually "practise" makes you... a Brit
- benplumley 11y agoNo, the parent just spelt it wrong. Practice (the noun) is spelt with a C in Britain. Practise is the verb.
- camillomiller 11y agoYeah, but wouldn't that be the british spelling nonetheless?
- sdrothrock 11y agoOh, that's a great rephrasing, too. Is it yours? (Curious about the source, not nitpicking.)
- rorykoehler 11y agoThe one I knew was 'practice makes permanent'.
- unwind 11y agoOf course I had to look after that attack on his choice of domain name. It's explained here: http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=b083212130155b748c7785081&id=8535ebd84f&e=[UNIQID] http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=b083212130155b748c778508..., and kind of seems to make sense, be somewhat funny, and not match your vague accusations of triteness.
- sdrothrock 11y ago"baka" is "baka" -- this is the internationally accepted romaji for the word "idiot." "Baakaa" is "Barker," which can alternatively be romanized as "Ba-ka-" or "Bākā." It's never "Baka," whether written or spoken. The vowel length completely changes the word into a name and either one is recognizable at a glance to someone who knows Japanese. Someone who deliberately chooses "baka" despite knowing some Japanese is also deliberately choosing to play on words that people with a passing familiarity with Japanese or anime will mistake for "idiot." It's not an innocent or clever choice.
- GCA10 11y agoBear in mind that Erickson's original research involved classical musicians. They're competing in a field where high standards were largely defined 150 years ago. Those standards have stayed remarkably similar. If you want to be a great classical pianist, cellist, etc., you need to put in a lot of time to rival the performance levels of prior masters like Heifetz or Rubinstein. And, yes, focusing on the hard stuff (deliberate practice) is crucial. These insights extrapolate to some current-day fields -- but not everything. Not by a long shot. It doesn't take 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to get great at a lot of newer areas where standards are being defined on the fly. Newcomers with boldness and originality can go a lot further in such situations.
- sbov 11y agoI feel like you might be hinting that software is one such field. IMHO software's problem is not that it doesn't take 10,000 hours of practice - it is that it takes much, much more. It can be months (or years!) before you receive feedback on your decisions. Given this, boldness and originality can go far not because it's easy to be an expert, but rather because almost no-one is an expert.
- SCAQTony 11y agoThe trouble with using software as an example is that software is so damn fluid and ever changing whereas notes on saxophone will always be played in the same fashion within the same tonal range. It;s measurable; software is always a work in progress. You can go to a pool and master all four swimming strokes: backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and freestyle in about a year but you would not be a Michael Phelps. However you would be able to swim better than at least 80% of all of humanity and be considered a master. The word master needs to be better defined. You can quickly master many things in a year or less.
- escap 11y agocase in point: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798
- 11y ago
- xyzzy4 11y agoI think the best thing to focus on is how much value and happiness you can bring to others. Not something self-centered such as expertise that perhaps nobody else would even notice because it's meta. Expertise should not the end goal, but instead a facilitator to value creation. For example, if you're making a song, your thinking should be "I can't wait until people hear this song!", not "I can't wait to slightly increase my skill".
- jabagawee 11y agoThis blog has 1058 pages of material. How? Each post has a fairly clickbaity title and seems to summarize someone else's work/research, but is it really all one guy working full time on getting this material together? Is he farming it out to contractors?
- ktRolster 11y ago>This blog has 1058 pages of material. How? He probably spent 10,000 hours at it. I'm just guessing though.
- NeutronBoy 11y agoFirst post is in 2009, 5 blogs per page, so 2 posts per day, every day, for 7 years. Not impossible, but you've got to be very motivated.
- Scarblac 11y agoHe seems to have 1 post per week in recent months though. Slacker.
- olalonde 11y agohttps://www.quora.com/Who-is-Eric-Barker-and-why-has-his-blog-Barking-Up-the-Wrong-Tree-link-Welcome-been-featured-so-much-in-Time-Magazine-articles-lately https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Eric-Barker-and-why-has-his-blo... tl;dr he is a lifestyle blogger (assuming the answer is legit)
- paulpauper 11y agothe traffic, money (from the amazon links) and attention he gets is a great motivator to keep making more posts.
- nefitty 11y agoAwesome. Just listened to Dean Bokhari's interview with Dan Coyle. http://www.meaningfulhq.com/daniel-coyle.html http://www.meaningfulhq.com/daniel-coyle.html
- jfaucett 11y agoFirst "expert" should be defined. If by expert you mean someone better than 90% of all humanity at some task X, then the time to get to this level could be orders of magnitide smaller than a 95%, which itself is orders of magnitude smaller than 99.9% i.e. (pro/olympic athletes, concert pianists, etc). If you don't agree please offer a counter example. Besides all sports, lets consider juggling. Here, 1-2 hours can make you better than about 80% of the population, but becoming a passable street juggler will take months, and a proffesional artists who can innovate as a juggler probably many years. Essentially, my hypothesis is that improvements in a task X decrease exponentially over time.
- nandemo 11y agoSee The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance by Ericsson. The data supports your hypothesis.
- nandemo 11y agoSee The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance by Ericsson. The data supports your hypothesis.
- Jtsummers 11y agoDoes it actually make sense to define an expert as skill relative to others? If I define my own programming language and am the only one that knows it, I'm inherently an expert in it by this definition. I'm better than |world population| - 1 people with this language. However, I may not actually be an expert. I could have created something beyond my ability to truly master (or that I haven't mastered to the level of expert yet).
- struppi 11y agoIt's a great article, well written, and I like the recommendations. Especially "Find a Mentor"! But I still think deliberate practice is overrated (in some fiels, especially programming): http://davidtanzer.net/deliberate_practice http://davidtanzer.net/deliberate_practice
- sheepmullet 11y agoIt sounds like the photographer in your linked article is advocating deliberate practice. He is advocating working on improving specific skills in a realistic setting. Personally, I find side projects one of the least efficient ways to improve. I already spend 8+ hours a day "doing" at work. In contrast I spend less than 30 minutes a day at work learning and understanding theory, new concepts, and different approaches to a problem. So I get a lot more value from focusing my "free time" on the latter.
- jasonlotito 11y agoThe author is specifically advocating deliberate practice. In fact, it's amusing reading the article, as it seems he thinks deliberate "practice" isn't actually "doing" something productive. The article supports, in every way, deliberate practice. I mean, this says it all: "This is compared to us developers learning to touch-type or learning the keyboard shortcuts of our IDEs." No. Deliberate practice for programmers is not limited to just touch-typing or keyboard shortcuts. It's actively learning to use new tools and environments, learning new languages, and learning different ways to program, such as functional or object-oriented programming. It's practicing coding in ways like coding katas. It's digging into code that isn't yours and making the software do new things, and issuing a pull request upstream. Deliberate practice isn't just "practicing." It isn't just mechanical. It's challenging, it's hard, and it improves you. If you think deliberate practice is just practicing mechanics, you are ignorant on the subject.
- kozikow 11y agoI would consider programming contests like Topcoder deliberate practice of some aspects of programming. When writing code at the job I spend maybe 30% writing code that does stuff and half of that is spent on boilerplate (yeah, I work in Java). The rest is spent on writing tests, refactoring, waiting for compilation or code review, etc. Some people would say "but you write different code at programming contests"! It's somewhat true - I feel that different parts of my brain are engaged when working on a "right" edit to a massive codebase. On the other hand, from time to time there are problems that require writing few hundreds/thousands of quite dense, relatively greenfield code and then I feel that "Topcoder" parts of my brain are engaged.
- jasonlotito 11y agoCode reviews, when intentional, are deliberate practice. Both reviewing, and getting reviewed. With deliberate practice, people get caught up in the practice part, and believe that if they are "actually doing something productive, it's not practice." But practice is more than that. It's the intentional application of ideas. The difference between deliberate practice and normal work is that normal work is, in many cases, boilerplate. It's things you know. You are doing things that aren't pushing yourself. Yes, Topcoder and things like that can be deliberate practice, but deliberate practice is not limited to such things. And those who are successful, really successful, don't limit deliberate practice to such events.
- yodsanklai 11y ago1 - some tasks are simple enough that much less than 10000 hours is needed. Consider every day driving. 100 hours should be enough. 2 - some people are order of magnitude more talented better than others at some things. Maths or music come to mind. My personal experience: it took me years of hard working to get decent rhythmic abilities. On the other hand, my sister (who is a professional musician) had a innate sense of rhythm. She doesn't even understand how that could be an issue. Maybe it's more accurate to say that after 10000 hours, one can get close to its full potential, which varies tremendously among people.
- wobbleblob 11y ago> Consider every day driving. 100 hours should be enough. 100 hours should be enough for most people to pass a driving exam, not to become an expert driver.
- clouddrover 11y ago> Consider every day driving. 100 hours should be enough. I'd say that's driving competence, not driving expertise. Formula 1 drivers, for example, usually start out driving go-karts as kids. By the time they get to Formula 1 through all the junior racing categories and feeder series they've been practicing their driving for at least a decade.
- ktRolster 11y agoGenerally when the meaning of 'innate' is actually investigated, it's found to not be something innate; see this paper: http://cogprints.org/656/1/innate.htm http://cogprints.org/656/1/innate.htm >She doesn't even understand how that could be an issue. Sounds like you two haven't put much thought into understanding the issue.
- gdulli 11y agoRight. I took to drumming very easily. Like you said about your sister, not having rhythm is something I don't understand. I think of that as a head start, but it doesn't disprove 10,000 hours. I do still need all the hours to reach my potential. Someone else without that head start but who practices a lot will catch up to me if I don't practice. Even if I do practice the same amount as them, I expect the difference between me and someone without the head start would go down significantly over time. So innate talent is a real thing but it's consistent with 10,000 hours.
- edtechdev 11y agoEricsson's work is classic, but you have to realize A) it is primarily from the 80s and involved studying things like games or sports or trivial pursuits where expertise is more likely to be measured, and B) the author of the book described in this article is Ericsson himself - it's going to be a bit biased. Here is some more up to date research and information on his theories: This recent special issue of Intelligence critiques Ericsson's work: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01602896/45 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01602896/45 The 10,000 hour rule has been pretty refuted in my opinion. There are so many exceptions to the rule that it's not really a valid rule. In fact, one of the articles in that special issue is a meta-analysis that found no evidence for the 10,000 hour rule. Here's a summary: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not...
- paulpauper 11y agoAs someone who has spent 10 years writing online with little to nothing to show for it, this does not work. You need connections, good luck, and or genetically endowed talents to succeed. More hours will not cut it. Also, becoming good enough to be an expert requires being better than 99.9% of people, which by virtue of the Bell Curve is unobtainable for most people. The chess example may be measuring something else (some other normally distributed variable) than IQ, with IQ being an important but only secondary factor.
- jasonlotito 11y ago> More hours will not cut it That is not deliberate practice. Merely spending 10 years writing online is not deliberate practice. Doing something every day is not deliberate practice. > genetically endowed talents to succeed. No. You are not born with the ability to write. Mozart was not a naturally born musician. Tiger Woods did not one day suddenly become a golf pro. > As someone who has spent 10 years writing online with little to nothing to show for it, this does not work. Spending 10 years writing does not mean you spent 10 years deliberately practicing. It merely means you spent 10 years writing.
- Umn44 11y ago"You are not born with the ability to write." Yes you are born with that potential yes. There are many animals that can't because their genetic potential disallows such things. You're ignoring the energy metabolism and resiliency to stress of an organism that defines things like work ethic which is not under conscious control.
- paulpauper 11y agoHow does one 'deliberately practice' writing? Using longer words, writing more? It's not like the most successful writers or writings are the most complicated. Maybe it's also about 'pitching' ideas, networking, but this could be seen as a separate skill than just writing. Finding the optimal linear regression of what people want.
- 11y ago
- sjg007 11y agoDeliberate practice of algorithms, data structures, math, statistics.
- eric_bullington 11y agoAccording to the article, a key skill to acquire are proper metal representations of problems in your field: "You want to be able to clearly and specifically visualize the right way to do something in your head. This is what separates the experts from the chumps." Would anyone like to discuss any particularly effective ways of visualizing programs or data? Approaches you have found effective?
- teach 11y agoIn college I got a LOT of mileage from printing out my code (this was in the 90s) and sitting down with a pencil and tracing through statement by statement. Draw little boxes for each variable, for pointers, for the stack, whatever. Change each value only when the execution gets there. Resist the urge to just skip over -- "this section does such-and-such." I'm fairly certain it's the only reason I made an A in my assembly language courses.
- eric_bullington 11y agoGreat point. On a similar note, I've gotten a lot of use out of stepping through Python algorithmic code using PythonTutor [1], which maintains a visual dashboard of stack frames/variables and heap objects. Very useful, was just using it earlier today. Doing this manually with a pencil and paper is arguably even better for learning purposes, although significantly more arduous. I should try it. 1. http://pythontutor.com/ http://pythontutor.com/
- Retric 11y agoI find it's useful to think in terms of colors or shapes for data. User input shows up RED and gets massaged to be safe. Sometimes a UI gets some data added, or chunks broken off as things flow though the program. The shape can be either how it's shown to the user, how an objects variables are defined, or just some random thing if I have yet to start coding. You can think of bits as coins HTHTT vs 10100, and enumerated types as gears.
- dwc 11y agoThe conflict between the article title and the domain name is delicious.