Performance

Traits of Deliberate Practice

Some forms of practice are more effective than others.

Dustin Roman

Nov 9, 2021 • 6 min read

In 1908 Johnny Hayes set the world record for the Marathon in 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds. Today, the world record is held by Eliud Kipchoge at 2 hours, 1 minute, and 39 seconds - almost an hour faster than the original record.

In 1973 David Richard Spencer memorized more digits of pi than any person before him at 511 digits. The current world record is held by Akita Haraguchi, who recited 100,000 digits from memory which took him over 16 hours and 30 minutes to complete.

Take some time and browse a Guinness World Record book, and you will find record after record continually being broken. We have a tremendous ability to make improvements once we know what is possible. Athletes and highly competitive performers have figured out strategies to consistently improve their abilities to what would have been impossible decades ago.

But many of these techniques have not found their way into organizations and working lives, leaving many to feel stuck in their career and personal development.

Psychologist Anders Ericsson was an internationally recognized expert in human performance. He devoted his career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those who have become among the best in the world at what they do. In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise he outlines key traits evident in this type of practice and gives reasons why most people struggle to improve their skillsets.

He writes that we all follow the same pattern with any skill we learn, from riding a bike to cooking. We start with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or book, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.

Once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance, you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that they will get better at it if they continue doing something. But research has shown that generally speaking, once a person reaches acceptable performance and automaticity level, the additional years of practice don't lead to improvement.

For example, there are studies where doctors who have been in practice for twenty or thirty years do worse on specific objective measures of performance than those who are just two or three years out of medical school.

Ericsson argues that to improve, you have to practice with purpose on something specific. You have to get outside your comfort zone in a focused way with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, a way to monitor your progress, and figuring out a way to maintain your motivation.

Experiment

One of Ericsson's students named Steve was discouraged only a few days into an experiment set up to test his ability to remember random digits. There is a strict limit to the number of items a person retains in short-term memory, which the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time. For example, if a friend gives you his address, it's your short-term memory that holds on to it long enough to write it down. You only remember longer sequences by transferring them to long-term memory, which has the same limitations.

The idea for this experiment came from an obscure paper Ericsson had discovered while searching through old scientific studies. With practice, this research showed that someone could improve the number of digits they remembered using only their short-term memory. For example, the study documented that one student improved from an average of 9 digits to 13 while another had gone from 11 to 15. Ericsson wanted to understand how and what methods someone used to make that type of improvement.

The experiment was simple; Ericsson started by reading his student a random five-digit string at one per second (too little time to move into long-term memory.) Then, if the student got it right, he read out a six-digit string, then seven, and kept going until the student got it wrong, which Ericsson then dropped a few digits to build back up. This way, the student was regularly challenged between what he could and couldn't do.

On the fourth day of the experiment with Steve, he was stuck at what psychologists had found to be the limits of short-term memory. After four hour-long sessions, Steve could reliably recall a seven-digit string. He usually got eight digits with no problem, nine was hit or miss, and ten was never. Perhaps this would be as far as he could go.

But the next day, something happened. Steve found a way to breakthrough. He had easily moved up to nine digits which is where he was getting stuck. Ericsson read out a ten-digit number, "5718866610" to Steve's surprise, he got right! He missed the following string with eleven digits, so they dropped back down to nine.

After a few more tries at nine and ten digits. Ericsson read off an eleven-digit string "90756629867" this time, Steve repeated the whole thing without any problems. That was two digits more than he had ever gotten. After spending time dealing with the frustration of being stuck, his mind found a way to breakthrough.

From that point on, Steve slowly but steadily improved his ability to remember longer strings of digits. Every wall he hit, he had to figure out new methods to remember longer strings.

By the 60th session, he was able to remember twenty digits consistently. After 100 sessions, he could remember up to forty. Finally, after 200 sessions, he was able to reach eighty-two digits.

Ericsson would do this experiment with other participants and had one person eventually get to over one hundred digits. Through these experiments and lifelong study, he identified practice traits that work best.

He coined the term "deliberate practice" and believes it's the gold standard for improvement. Applying the below traits will help you design practice methods in any area.