The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’
It's not how much you practice but
whether you're quick to fix your errors that leads to mastery
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice,
practice. In a groundbreaking paper
published in 1993, cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson added a crucial tweak
to that old joke. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Deliberate practice.
It’s not a minor change. The difference between
ineffective and effective practice means the difference between mediocrity and
mastery. If you’re not practicing deliberately — whether it’s a foreign
language, a musical instrument or any other new skill — you might as well not
practice at all.
I was reminded of the importance of deliberate
practice by a fascinating new book, Guitar Zero: The New
Musician and the Science of Learning. Its author is Gary Marcus,
a cognitive psychologist at New York University who studies how the brain
acquires language. Marcus is also a wannabe guitarist who set out on a quest to
learn to play at age 38. In Guitar Zero he takes us along for the ride,
exploring the relevant research from neuroscience, cognitive science and
psychology along the way. One of his main themes is the importance of doing
practice right.
“Hundreds of thousands of people took music
lessons when they were young and remember little or nothing,” he points out,
giving lie to the notion that learning an instrument is easiest when you’re a
kid. The important thing is not just practice but deliberate practice, “a
constant sense of self-evaluation, of focusing on one’s weaknesses, rather than
simply fooling around and playing to one’s strengths. Studies show that
practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than
raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not
necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice
that most people do, most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the
guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect.”
So how does deliberate practice work? Anders
Ericsson’s 1993 paper makes for bracing reading. He makes it clear that a
dutiful daily commitment to practice is not enough. Long hours of practice are
not enough. And noodling around on the piano or idly taking some swings with a
golf club is definitely not enough. “Deliberate practice,” Ericsson declares
sternly, “requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable.” Having given us
fair warning, he reveals the secret of deliberate practice: relentlessly
focusing on our weaknesses and inventing new ways to root them out. Results are
carefully monitored, ideally with the help of a coach or teacher, and become
grist for the next round of ruthless self-evaluation.
It sounds simple, even obvious, but it’s
something most of us avoid. If we play the piano — or, like Marcus, the guitar
— or we play golf or speak French, it’s because we like it. We’ve often
achieved a level of competency that makes us feel good about ourselves. But
what we don’t do is intentionally look for ways that we’re failing and hammer
away at those flaws until they’re gone, then search for more ways we’re messing
up. But almost two decades of research shows that’s exactly what distinguishes
the merely good from the great.
In an article titled “It’s Not How Much; It’s How,” published
in the Journal of Research in Music Education in 2009, University of
Texas-Austin professor Robert Duke and his colleagues videotaped advanced piano
students as they practiced a difficult passage from a Shostakovich concerto,
then ranked the participants by the quality of their ultimate performance. The
researchers found no relationship between excellence of performance and how
many times the students had practiced the piece or how long they spent
practicing. Rather, “the most notable differences between the practice sessions
of the top-ranked pianists and the remaining participants,” Duke and his
coauthors wrote, “are related to their handling of errors.”
The best pianists, they determined, addressed
their mistakes immediately. They identified the precise location and source of
each error, then rehearsed that part again and again until it was corrected.
Only then would the best students proceed to the rest of the piece. “It was not
the case that the top-ranked pianists made fewer errors at the beginning of
their practice sessions than did the other pianists,” Duke notes. “But, when
errors occurred, the top-ranked pianists seemed much better able to correct
them in ways that precluded their recurrence.”
Without deliberate practice, even the most talented
individuals will reach a plateau and stay there. For most of us, that’s just
fine. But don’t delude yourself that you’ll see much improvement unless you’re
ready to tackle your mistakes as well as your successes.
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