Cobra Effect · Learning and memory
Deliberate practice
Hours alone do not build skill. Focused work on weaknesses does.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:43, with a test and sources.
Berlin, 1993. Three psychologists ask violinists to keep a diary.
Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer were working with students at the city’s music academy. The teachers had sorted them. The best, the good, and those likely to end up teaching. How much had each group practised, alone, by the age of 20?
The best had done about 10,000 hours by 20. The future teachers, under 5,000.
On average. The word matters, and we will come back to it. Ericsson’s point was not the number. It was what the hours contained. The best violinists had not practised more casually. They had practised more deliberately.
That is deliberate practice, and it looks nothing like playing.
A specific goal, just past what you can do now. Full attention, for an hour or two, not all day. Immediate feedback, usually from a teacher who can hear what you cannot. And repetition of the hard part alone, until it isn’t the hard part. It is effortful, unpleasant and not fun. Which is why most people with a hobby stop improving after a few years.
Then Malcolm Gladwell turned it into a rule, and the rule is wrong.
Outliers, 2008. Ten thousand hours, the book said, is the magic number of greatness. Ericsson spent the rest of his life saying that was not what he found. The number was an average, not a threshold. Some took far fewer, some far more. And the hours only counted if they were deliberate. Playing in a band for ten thousand hours makes you a tired band member.
A word of caution about the study itself.
It was small, 30 violinists in all. A 2019 attempt to repeat it found that the best and the good had practised about the same amount. Practice explained less of the difference than Ericsson believed, and talent, luck and teaching explained more. Practice still mattered. It just wasn’t the whole story.
What to actually do tomorrow.
Don’t count hours. Count hard reps. Pick the one thing you get wrong most. Isolate it. Do it slowly, with someone or something that tells you when it’s wrong. Stop while you still have attention left. A month of that beats a year of playing the whole thing badly from the top.
Sources
- Practice, Wikipedia. The idea of deliberate practice and the arguments about it. Search The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer, 1993, for the violin paper.
- Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, 2016. Ericsson’s own account, written partly to correct the ten thousand hour rule. What deliberate practice is, what it is not, and how to build it into a life.
- Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, 2008. The book that made ten thousand hours famous. Read the chapter, then read the criticism section on this page, and then decide what the number means.
Nearby ideas
- Desirable difficulties. The practice that feels hardest is often the practice that sticks.
- The testing effect. Pulling an answer from memory teaches more than reading it again.
- The spacing effect. Spread your study out over time and it lasts far longer.
- The method of loci. Pin what you need to remember to a place you already know.
- The Zeigarnik effect. Unfinished tasks stay on your mind until they are closed.
- Dual coding. Words and pictures together stick better than either alone.
- Cognitive load. The mind can juggle only a few new things at once.
- The illusion of competence. Feeling familiar with material is not the same as knowing it.