practice

In Part One, we looked at theories proposing that 10,000 hours of practice is required to become an expert in almost any field.   So is that all it takes?  In a word: No.  Quality counts; it’s not just the hours, but the way those hours are spent that determines the benefits of practice.

Practice > Play > Perform

An important source for both Levitan and Gladwell is Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, and one of the authors of “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” which includes the study of violinists cited by Gladwell in Part One.

Ericsson and his colleagues acknowledge and agree with earlier studies showing that maximum performance “is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience.”  However, they claim that “the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.”

We have shown that expert performance is acquired slowly over a very long time as a result of practice, and that the highest levels of performance and achievement appear to require at least around 10 years of intense prior preparation.  However, the relation between acquired performance  and the amount of practice and experience was found to be weak to moderate in the earlier review.  We propose that the reason for this comparatively weak relation is that the current definition of practice is vague.

Practice >

Ericsson, et al refer to the activities proven most effective in improving performance as deliberate practice.  Here are the conditions for deliberate practice:

1. The subject must be motivated to attend to the task, and exert effort to improve their performance.
2. The tasks should be designed to take into account the pre-existing knowledge of the subject, so they can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction.
3. The subject should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance.
4. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

Although these conditions were not established specifically for practicing music, they can be easily adapted:

• Pay attention to what you’re doing and focus on improvement; don’t play like a robot or mindlessly noodle
• A teacher should organize and sequence practice materials so they challenge the student; but are not so difficult as to be counter-productive
• Results should be reviewed by an instructor who can diagnose problems, give productive feedback, and suggest methods and strategies to overcome obstacles
• Material should be repeated: first slowly with a focus on accuracy, then increasing speed while maintaining focus on accuracy and musicality

Play >

The authors compare deliberate practice with two other domain-related activities: work, and play.  Play is defined as activities that have no explicit goal and are inherently enjoyable.  Play may result in a state of “flow” when you are completely immersed in an activity, similar to “peak experiences” in sports where players report an enjoyable state of effortless mastery in the execution of an activity.  According to Ericsson:

This state of diffused attention is almost antithetical to focused attention required by deliberate practice to maximize feedback and information about corrective action.

Perform >

Work is defined as “public performance, competitions, services rendered for pay, and other activities directly motivated by external rewards.”  The authors use the game of baseball as a an example to differentiate work and practice: “During a 3 hour baseball game, a batter may get only 5 – 15 pitches (perhaps one or two relevant to a particular weakness), whereas during optimal practice of the same duration, a batter working with a dedicated pitcher has several hundred batting opportunities, where this weakness can be systematically explored.”  They conclude:

We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable.  Individuals are motiviated to practice because practice improves performance.  In addition, engaging in deliberate practice generates no immediate monetary rewards and generates costs associated with access to teachers and training environments.

Enjoy?

We have been reviewing an academic paper that is inherently chin-strokey and implies that “play” is the only one of these activities that a musician may find enjoyable.  While it is understandable that work, play, and practice need to be separated for the purposes of a scientific study, I believe in the real world they often overlap.

Performance isn’t always about the money — peak experiences can be enjoyed onstage and in the recording studio.  Play can definitely contribute to improved performance, especially when improvising and playing with other musicians.  And practice does not have to be penance.  In his foreward to the The Art of Practicing by Madeline Bruser, Yehudi Menuhin writes:

More and more we realize that practicing is not  forced labor; more and more we realize that it is a refined art that partakes of intuition, of inspiration, patience, elegance, clarity, balance, and, above all, the search for ever greater joy in movement and expression.  This is what practice is really about.

~ Yehudi Menuhin

Part Three will take a closer look at other factors that contribute to, or impede, success.  And later, we’ll ask another question:  Why do you want to be an expert anyway?

photo credit: David D’Agostino

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Practice > 3 Hours a Day > 7 Days a Week > for 10 Years

How much should you practice?  In This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel Levitan writes about the ten-thousand-hours theory, which proposes that 10,000 hours of practice is required to become a world-class expert in any field: basketball, ice skating, chess, or the viola.

This idea was further popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.  Gladwell points to examples including Bill Joy, Bill Gates, and the Beatles, while Levitan counts up the hours to Mozart’s Symphony No. 1, which he composed at age 8.

Is there such a thing as “talent”?

By Andreas Kusumahadi

In a study cited by Gladwell, violinists at Berlin’s Academy of Music were divided into three groups: the “stars”, who had the potential to become world-class soloists; the students who were merely “good”; and a third group who did not intend to ever play professionally, the “teachers.”

The students had all started playing around age 5, and for the first few years they all practiced about two or three hours a week.  After age eight, marked differences began to emerge in the amount of time devoted to practice, with the best students “purposefully  and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better — well over thirty hours a week.”

By age twenty, the total hours of practice were:

• Star Violinists: 10,000 hours
• Good Violinists: 8,000 hours
• Teachers: 4,000 hours

The same group studied amateur and professional pianists, with similar results.  The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week, while the professionals increased the hours devoted to practice every year.  Totals at age 20 – Amateurs: 2,000 hours; Professionals: 10,000 hours.

Levitan presents another study, where students were secretly divided into two groups based on their teacher’s evaluation of their talent.  After several years, the students were rated again.  The students who performed the best were those who had devoted the most time to practice — it didn’t matter which group they had been assigned to initially.

Levitan suggests that talent is a label that is used in a circular fashion: "we
think we mean that they have some innate predisposition to excel, but in the end,
we only apply the term retrospectively, after they have made significant
achievements."

Think back to the merely “good” violinists, who had practiced 8,000 hours by age 2o.  What would happen if they worked full-time (2,080 hours American) for another year — would they catch-up to the “stars”?

Gladwell doesn’t address this, but as a practical matter, they are at a crossroads.  If they graduate and become professional musicians, they will be devoting an increasing amount of time to their instruments.  If they leave the academy to teach or follow some other profession, it’s likely that the time devoted to practice will level off or begin decreasing.

There are of course other factors, both genetic and environmental, that go into making an expert musician, and we will look more closely at those in Part Two.  But these studies strongly suggest that none are as important as practice. Gladwell writes:

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That’s it.  And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or much harder than everybody else.  They work much, much harder.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t become an expert after age 20, but in fields such as athletics and music, if you aren’t playing professionally by age 21, I would think the odds of reaching world-class status begin to diminish significantly.  You can still do it, but it will be harder.  Much harder.

Practice > Play > Perform:  What’s the Difference?

Glad you asked.  Part Two will answer this question by digging into the work of Anders Ericsson and Benjamin Bloom, whose studies formed the basis for much of the writings on this topic by both Levitan and Gladwell.  Afterward, we will look at other factors that contribute to (or impede) success. And for all of the 22-year-olds who may now be thoroughly bummed out, we’ll ask another question:  Why do you want to be an expert anyway?

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