Practice, practice, practice! That’s been the advice to young athletes for years but especially in the last decade as the road to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice became the accepted timeline to sports mastery.
Yet many research papers and anecdotal stories point out the many exceptions on both sides of the equation; kids with amazing skills at a young age, overnight teen sensations who just started playing a sport and twenty-somethings who are still trying to make it to the big time despite 10,000+ hours of practice.
If we could just peer into the brains of these budding superstars to see what’s going on when they learn… oh wait, we can! With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuroscience researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (aka “The Neuro), part of McGill University, recently watched the changes in young adults’ brains after they learned a new task. But they also noticed that a different area of the brain could predict how well each of the students would perform when learning something new.
The 10,000 hour theory has become the American dream for developing athletes. Just work hard enough and your gold medal, Hall of Fame, championship ambitions can come true. It is achievable, measurable and finite. However, many athletes never quite cross the 10,000 hour finish line, and have used the scapegoat reason, “I just didn’t have enough time to commit to the sport.” Now, recent research suggests that while 10,000 hours of deliberate practice may be necessary to achieve world-class status, it may not be the only ingredient to success. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, a research paper by Florida State professor K. Anders Ericsson, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, has been cited in the scientific press over one thousand times earning its own HOF credentials. The gist of it is that Ericsson visited a West Berlin music academy and interviewed violin students and their teachers. First, he asked the students to estimate the number of structured practice hours they had endured up to age 20. Then, he asked their teachers to divide the class into good, better and best thirds. The correlation uncovered showed that the best students had accumulated, on average, over 10,000 hours of practice while the middle group was at about 8,000 hours and the bottom group had not reached 5,000 hours.
After checking this relationship within other groups of skilled experts, Ericsson found similar patterns of 10,000 hours of practice and concluded that innate talent or “what we’re born with” had little to do with becoming an expert in any field, even sports. With that declaration, the dream (and the practice odometer) was launched.
However, since that landmark 1993 paper, other researchers have been finding exceptions to the rule; some experts were crowned with only 3,000 hours of practice while others still had not reached the mountaintop even though they had doubled the 10,000 hour mark.
David Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State, has been searching for the other necessary ingredients for several years. In 2011, he and his colleague Elizabeth J. Meinz found that deliberate practice among pianists did account for almost half of the variance between experts and novices. But in their quest to find out what else mattered to make up the other 50% of variance, they found that working memory capacity, the ability to remember a set of objects while engaged in another task, was also a significant determinant of success.
This month, Hambrick and his team released new research that looked at 14 different studies of chess and music students to find other clues to expertise. Again, they were convinced that deliberate practice alone was not enough.
“The evidence is quite clear,” he writes, “that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice.”
Across those chess and music studies, they found that practice explained about one third of the journey to being world class. One new factor that did emerge was starting at a young age. Logically, someone who started training at age 7 versus 12 would have five more years of practice, but Hambrick found that even when total hours of practice were comparable, the student that started at an earlier age became more accomplished. “This evidence suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills just as there may be for acquiring language,” he concluded.
Also, overall intelligence did make a difference, at least for these chess and music students. Those students with a higher tested IQ, including working memory capacity, were also more likely to end up being experts.
Finally, grit, a determined attitude to succeed, also played a role in creating success. The term has been made famous by Paul Tough in his book How Children Succeed, based on the research of psychologist Angela Duckworth (see TED talk below). The desire and passion to get better drives the willingness to spend so many hours practicing a skill.
So, what does all of this mean for the aspiring superstar? That practice, as much as possible, is still a necessary evil to getting better at a sport. However, it also confirms that different athletes have different qualities and progress through their journey at different paces. They may need some guidance based on their individual strengths that will help them find the right sport.
“If people are given an accurate assessment of their abilities and the likelihood of achieving certain goals given those abilities,” Hambrick predicted, “they may gravitate toward domains in which they have a realistic chance of becoming an expert through deliberate practice.”
Despite being a well-respected cognitive psychology professor at New York University, Gary Marcus had a secret ambition; to shred amazing riffs that would make Eric Clapton envious. The fact that he had been gently told as a child he had no sense of rhythm or tone did not discourage his dream. With a one year sabbatical from NYU available, he turned himself into a lab experiment of how to teach a middle-aged dog new “licks”. At about the same time, Dan McLaughlin was growing restless with his career as a commercial photographer in Portland. However, life as a professional golfer seemed to be the dream destination if only he could find the right path to get there.
On opposite ends of the country, two guys pursuing different goals but with the same underlying principle; devote a large chunk of dedicated time breaking down and learning complicated skills with the help of experienced coaches.
They had both heard of a theory out there by Florida State psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson that claimed the best performers in a variety of fields had accumulated around 10,000 hours of specific, deliberate practice before they became world-class. Some took more hours, some less, but on average it provided a rough target to shoot for before expecting magic with a Stratocaster or a five iron. While Marcus’ window of full-time learning was limited to one year, McLaughlin estimated he could reach 10,000 hours of structured golf practice in six years or around 2016. These timeframes seemed to match their respective goals; McLaughlin’s ultimate measure of success would be to actually earn a player’s card on the PGA Tour, while Marcus just wanted to launch a side passion, maybe start a band. Given his scientific background, Professor Marcus was able to combine his knowledge of learning theory with his quest. In fact, he documented the entire adventure in his 2012 book, Guitar Zero, which offers a mix of cognitive science, music theory and guitar stories. McLaughlin tracks his progress at his web site, The Dan Plan, (and soon in an upcoming book), where he provides daily updates including the countdown to 10,000 hours (only 6,220 to go!) See their video overviews below.
I recently caught up with both men to compare their methods and their progress:
Gary, are you familiar with Dan McLaughlin’s quest to teach himself golf in 10,000 hours? Gary Marcus: “I've been meaning to read more about his story; I think he's been more dedicated about logging the specifics of his practice than I have been. But the number of 10,000 hours itself is pretty crude; there are well-documented cases of people becoming chess masters in barely more than 3,000 hours, and others take 25,000. Some depends on genes, but it also depends on how you practice.”
Dan, what about you; did you know of Gary’s journey to be a guitar god? Dan McLaughlin: “I am familiar with Gary's book although have not personally read it. The writer that I am working with for The Dan Plan's book read Guitar Zero as part of his research and has told me some aspects of his story. A similarity could be seen in his full-on approach to learning, and perhaps the biggest difference is the time frame.”
How related is learning the guitar with, say, learning to golf? Gary: “There are some obvious differences (e.g. great weight on muscle development in golf), but both are complex skills that require extensive neural rewiring. Guitar has its own kind of athleticism, and arguably places greater demands on memory, but in both cases precision is paramount, and one must integrate a great deal of perceptual input in order to perform appropriate motor actions. In both cases, self-discipline is paramount, and some kind of coaching is critical for anyone wishing to be a top performer. Of course, the outfits are better in rock and roll...”
Has your learning progress in golf been pretty linear with gradual improvement every month, or does it go in bursts with plateaus where you stay the same for awhile? Dan: “Learning, from what I have experienced, comes in chunks. This is why putting in time is so crucial, because you never know when the next big learning bump will occur. Sometimes days will pass where it seems like nothing is being achieved then that will be followed by a period of great momentum. In the big picture it may be possible to see that learning evens out over time, but when you are in the thick of it the biggest moves always come in bursts.”
Have you had periods where you've gone backwards in your progress? How do you handle that emotionally? Dan: “Every time you stretch out your neck to improve the first step is in reverse. I have yet to make a large change in my swing and immediately see a positive outcome. Rather, when you are in transition, it at first creates errors which are then followed by a slow improvement in consistency and eventually the new move is grooved and the positive results are reaped. Emotionally, you have to allow for building periods where you know that you will be moving in reverse for a while before you get back to your level and break through to the next.”
Gary: “Learning to cope with failure and to channel into improved performance is an art that any human being ought to develop, no matter what they are learning. Some of that is about setting proper goals, and appreciating progress.”
Both music and golf have “rules” or foundational elements that need to be learned. How do our brains wire themselves to follow these principles? Gary: “Music is a special case in that there is a lot of formal knowledge (about music theory) that can be taught, both demand a lot of unconscious knowledge, too. I'm not a golfer, but I wonder whether there are (aside from the formal rules of the game) mathematical principles in golf that are analogous to the principles of harmony and voice leading. Then again, lots of people make beautiful music without any formal understanding of those rules. (And as in any creative endeavor, the best artists have a good sense of when it is effective to break the rules.)”
In Guitar Zero, you explain that learning a new skill is often spread across multiple areas of the brain. Yet sometimes we hear that specific brain regions are responsible for specific tasks. Can you help us understand the difference? Gary: “I think of the brain as being made up of many subcomponents, whereas I think of most things that we know as depending on choosing that right combination of those components for a particular job. Individual bits of brain tissue often do pretty precise things, but do those same things in the service of many different computations. So-called “muscle memory” is really in the brain, distributed across areas such as somatosensory cortex and the basal ganglia; you don't learn anything unless you've rewired the brain.”
Can there be a transference of guitar skill to a related task like playing a violin? Gary: “For sure, though I am told that the bow is a whole other dimension. But lots of things about rhythm and pitch and motion and perception transfer reasonably well. Look at people like Prince, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, etc who play loads of instruments well.”
Do you think a person’s genes play a role in being a talented performer? Are some people just "born with it"? Dan: “If your genetics are somewhere in the norm of the bell curve I do not think that genes play a role in being a great golfer. There are certain limiting factors such as bone structure limiting range of motion or fused joints, but outside of the extremes we are all capable of being great at this sport. If there was a genetic advantage then there would be a prototype golfer and from what I see golf champions come in all shapes and sizes.”
Gary: You have to have the genes to be Jimi Hendrix, but all you have to do enjoy yourself is to be sufficiently dedicated, and to allow yourself to enjoy the journey, rather than fixating on the destination.
Gary and Dan, thanks so much for your time and we hope to see you on stage and on the leaderboard! Join Axon Sports on Twitter and Facebook.
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