Deliberate practice, how and why
There's a term, "Deliberate Practice", that gets thrown around in my circles a fair bit. I recently went and read the original paper by Ericsson et al.
As with most academic papers, there's quite a bit of fluff in it -- e.g., the entire "Brief Historical Background" section, which has no bearing on the actual facts discovered by this study. If you boil it down, though, here is what you get:
Soccer is a complex activity with a lot of subskills. Playing soccer will not help you get significantly better, because you don't spend a lot of time in a soccer game actually executing those skills -- e.g. in the course of a 2-hour game you might take or block only 2 or 3 shots on goal. Spending your own time doing kicking and trapping drills will help. Your practice should consist of (e.g.) "I will practice right-foot-instep kicks focusing on putting the ball into a pre-chosen section of the net each time." The point is that (a) it's a concrete skill that is demonstrably connected to being good at soccer, (b) it's easy to understand, (c) it provides quick feedback. Ideally there would be an instructor there to provide feedback.
Did I miss any important points?
As with most academic papers, there's quite a bit of fluff in it -- e.g., the entire "Brief Historical Background" section, which has no bearing on the actual facts discovered by this study. If you boil it down, though, here is what you get:
- Expertise is not a god-given gift, it is a function of practice;
- There is a correlation between expertise and natural gifts -- taller people will find it easier to become good at basketball -- but practice is still the important part;
- In order to get the most from your practice, you need to:
- Identify the correct skill to practice. It does no good to practice packing and unpacking your guitar, you need to practice playing it.
- Understand how to practice the skill. It does no good to randomly bang on the strings, you need to understand fingering.
- Practice in a way that gives immediate feedback. It does no good to play all of Hotel California with earmuffs on so that you can't hear the music, then listen to a recording at the end to find out how you did.
- Be motivated to practice a lot; and,
- Experiment with different methods. A study was done on people who were trying to improve memory retention of numbers. Those who simply rehearsed the digits made no improvement, while those who used strategies (e.g. chunking and image association) improved significantly. (Up to 1000% in one case)
- You learn faster with a competent instructor than on your own;
- You learn much faster with one-on-one instruction as opposed to in a group. The difference is two standard deviations -- tutored students performed at the 98th percentile compared to instructed with the normal classroom style;
- Once you are an expert you still need to practice or the skills fade;
- You need 10,000 hours of practice over the course of a decade or so to be an expert;
- The world-class expert musicians in the study practiced an average of 24.5 per week; and,
- The world-class expert musicians in the study practiced an average of 3.5 hours per day.
Soccer is a complex activity with a lot of subskills. Playing soccer will not help you get significantly better, because you don't spend a lot of time in a soccer game actually executing those skills -- e.g. in the course of a 2-hour game you might take or block only 2 or 3 shots on goal. Spending your own time doing kicking and trapping drills will help. Your practice should consist of (e.g.) "I will practice right-foot-instep kicks focusing on putting the ball into a pre-chosen section of the net each time." The point is that (a) it's a concrete skill that is demonstrably connected to being good at soccer, (b) it's easy to understand, (c) it provides quick feedback. Ideally there would be an instructor there to provide feedback.
Did I miss any important points?