“Deliberate practice” is one of those popular terms you hear mentioned everywhere but can’t help but cringe at it’s misunderstanding. It’s often simply attributed to the “10 Thousand Hour Rule” or “Ten Year Rule.” When used, it’s falsely attributed to the claim that doing X activity for ten thousand hours will automatically make someone an “expert.” The idea seemed to have become popular with Malcolm Gladwell, who dumbed down the research behind it in his book Outliers, and this already dumbed down version was simplified even more by becoming a meme that spread across people who didn’t even read Malcolm book in the first place. Now ironically the concept of deliberate practice is being used to promote the very idea it sought to debunk: Simply practicing for X amount of time makes you an expert. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take nor see the lengths behind
But more advanced behold with strange surprise,
New distant scenes of endless science rise!” -Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism
Deliberate Practice
When doing any resource you have to understand that there’s primary sources (original sources, or closest to original source as we have available) and secondary sources (interpretations of primary sources). When looking at the people who get the term incorrectly they’re using secondary sources to make their analysis at best (or simple repeating a meme they heard). An example of this was the book Reality is Broken which was one of the foundations for a movement called “gamification.” I read this book years ago, but if memory serves the author had the following premise:
We know that in order to become an expert we need ten thousand hours of practice in something.
I did the math and the average Westerner has spent ten thousand hours playing video game by the age of twenty one.
This means they’ve been deliberately practicing and becoming experts at playing games.
Therefore reality should look more like a game in order to harness these untapped expertise.
I’m trying to avoid a straw-man fallacy but but this is the premise as far as I remember it. Granted we could argue that some of the thoughts of the book could be related to activities of collaboration within video games taken outside the game world and applied in the real world through IT systems (which there is some credibility for but the thoughts are taken too far and break). But I did read the book years ago and found it filled errors at the time. In any case, this book Reality is Broken was now used as a bible of sorts for “gamification” consultants who would charge thousands of dollars for so called “engagement techniques” based on this initial false premise. Did the initial author intend her work to be used in the way these consultants have? I don’t know, it’s debatable. They did steal the work of Richard Bartle personality types distorting it and misapplying it despite Bartles criticisms… Anyhow, we now have this game of broken telephone where the basic idea of deliberate practice keeps getting distorted into something irreconcilable from the original concept and no one wants to admit their distorting the idea since they’ve used to falsely distorted idea as a foundation for their work. A bad situation.
So what is deliberate practice?
The term was quoted by Anders Ericsson in the 90’s. It’s a specific type of training where the individual is consciously aware or their performance, is pushing himself to the limit of said performance, is getting immediate feedback one this performance, any mistakes are immediately corrected and this said activity is repeated again and again.
Ericsson makes it very clear in his paper that deliberate practice is not practice (thus the need to add the word “deliberate” to specify the meaning of the concept he’s explaining and categorize is as something new and specific). It’s not simply doing something for ten years. Two chess players can play the same amount of chess hours for ten years, one becomes a Grandmaster, the other plateaus his skills after three years in despite playing for ten. Ericssons focus was to discover what caused this difference in skill development. So to begin with, we need to make the distinction that it’s a peculiar way of spending time in an activity, not simply spending time in an activity.
I’ll use an example to drill the idea further: Two individuals playing basketball for ten years. Individual A spends all his time playing the actual game with friends, Individual B also does this, but spends a big chunk of his time practicing his footwork, free through and dunking, repeating a single move again and again on his own until it’s perfected.
Both individuals spent ten years playing basketball with the same amount of hours, only individual B performed deliberate practice.
There are many books that explain this phenomena further. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle is a fun one. The author explains some of the basic neurosciences behind the concept.
The brain is divided into two basic components most people have heard of. An overly simplistic definitions of these is as follows:
- Grey matter: The actual amount of neurons in the brain.
- White matter: Myelin sheath that wraps around grey matter and speeds up its communication.
In a similar way athletes will perform different activities during their training aimed at reaching specific developments in their physiology based on these particular training’s, deliberate practice will trigger specific developments in the brain.
In order to develop a new skill we need to start performing an activity and develop a neurological network aimed at performig said activity. Sometimes we use neurological patterns already created previously for a new activity but I’m digressing. Once you have this neurological pattern created, you can improve it by having a myelin sheath grow around the neurological axons, which speeds up the communication between these neurons, protects them from damage and disintegration and improves the skill overall.
Therefore we know that the expertise that is achieved by some individuals is attributed to a large part to the myelin sheath developed in domain specific neurological circuity, and myelin sheath growth is triggered at the levels of growth we need to see these expertise through a very specific process which has been coined deliberate practice (also goes by “deep practice”). So it’s not just spending time on an activity, it’s spending it on a very particular way already explained.
Now, going back to the topic of the “gamification experts” it was a very common practice to claim that video gamers were deliberately practicing during in a state of “flow.” Flow being a pleasurable state were an activity is not too hard but not too easy. One paper called Gaming science: The “Gamification” of scientific thinking links these two ideas in the following way:
“Although games appear to be well-suited to eliciting flow states, is eliciting flow useful for science education? Increasing the positive emotional experience associated with science education is a potentially important factor in engagement. Certainly, it would be helpful for students to be as engaged in activities related to science education as they are engaged in a video game such as World of Warcraft for the simple reason that time spent in deliberate practice is highly related to emerging expertise (Son and Simon, 2012). Gamification can be useful in increasing high levels of sustained attention, which are critical in the type of deliberate practice associated with emerging expertise. Flow also offers the ability to overcome temporal discounting associated with achieving long-term rewards with both less time and energy spent attaining that reward than traditional education approaches.”
As you can clearly read the author is using deliberate practice and flow synonymously. The paper is based in the false assumption that one can deliberately practice and develop expertise in the pleasurable state of flow.
The book Reality is Broken I mentioned earlier has the following to say about the ten thousand hour rule:
I could go on with examples if I wished to put the work researching it further.
But here we have examples were one false assumption has generated a whole industry of “gamification experts” based on this false assumption (not to mention you hear it all the time in general talk at any business or educational event). Now the belief is that simply doing something for ten thousand hours will create an expertise, and if we are going to be doing something, might as well do it in a way we enjoy. Achieving this “fun while we train” objective is believed to create a win-win. Or they might believe that those who have spent their time in frivolous video games are now somehow “experts” at something in the sense Ericsson intended without giving consideration to his work or the process he described which would bring about this expertise. But Ericsson himself has commented on this:
“It is clear that skilled individuals can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states (“flow’” as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) during their performance. These states are, however, incompatible with deliberate practice, in which individuals engage in a (typically planned) training activity aimed at reaching a level just beyond the currently attainable level of performance by engaging in full concentration, analysis after feedback, and repetitions with refinement.” – Anders Ericsson
I hope this pops someones bubble and sends them swirling back into reality.
But I think I’ve said enough. Now we know what it is, what it’s not and how it’s being misapplied. I’ll end the post with a final thought from Fredrick the Great:
“What is the use of life if one merely vegetates? What is the point of seeing if one only crams facts into his memory? In brief, what good is experience if it is not directed by reflection. Vegetius stated that war must be a study and peace an exercise, and he is right.
Experience deserves to be investigated, for it is only after repeated examination of what one has done that the artists succeed in understanding principles and in moments of leisure, in times of rest, that new material is prepared for experiment. Such investigations are the products of an applied mind, but this diligence is rare and, on the contrary, it is common to see men who have used all of their limbs without once in their lives having utilized their minds. Thought, the faculty of combining ideas, is what distinguishes man from a beast of burden. A mule who has carried a pack for ten campaigns under Prince Eugene will be no better tactician for it, and it must be confessed, to the disgrace of humanity, that many men grow old in an otherwise respectable profession without making any greater progress than this mule.
To follow the routine of the service, to become occupied with the care of its fodder and lodging, to march when the army marches, camp when it camps, fight when it fights–for the great majority of officers this is what is meant by having served, campaigned, grown gray in the harness. For this reason one sees so many soldiers occupied with trifling matters and rusted by gross ignorance. Instead of soaring audaciously among the clouds, such men know only how to crawl methodically in the mire. They are never perplexed and will never know the causes of their triumphs or defeats.”