Tag Archives: deliberate practice
Olympic Champions, and Olympic Participants, and that 10,000 Hour Rule
So, as I have watched a few of the events from the Olympics, and I’ve been thinking about the 10,000 hour rule. And I am ready to state the obvious: putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing.
First, a refresher. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, described the 10,000 hour rule. To summarize, it takes 10,000 hours to get really world-class good at anything. (Gladwell got the idea/concept from Anders Ericsson).
And then, in the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, we learn that just any old 10,000 hours is not good enough. You need to put in “deliberate practice” — lots and lots of deliberate practice – in order to get better and better. In other words, you practice with the intent to get better. This kind of practice is exhausting, and almost always needs a very knowledgeable coach, with terrific motivational skills. (A coach who “can correct with creating resentment.” John Wooden).
Now, back to the point of this post: I am ready to state the obvious: putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing. Here’s what I mean.
As we watch the Olympics, we see pretty clearly that some athletes have developed a work ethic superior to others. But there are plenty of athletes who put in pretty much the same kind of time, had the same high level work ethic, as the “winners” who beat them when the starter pistol went off.
So, putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing. In sports, you need the 10,000 hours, plus the right coach, plus a little luck, plus maybe the right genetic makeup, plus…
Plus, plus, plus…
The more we learn, the more we learn how critical the next “plus” might be.
Now, let me back up. If we were not so fixated on winning the gold, we might come closer to admitting that the 10,000 hour rule does in fact guarantee success. Even making an Olympic Team; or, even being good enough to compete in an Olympics Trials Qualifying Event to try to make the team, takes massive skill. So, why is that not “success?” It certainly should be.
And we do know that in many cases, coming in second is every bit a “win.” Did you see the depth of emotion on the faces of Kelci Bryant and Abby Johnston after they won the Silver Medal in Synchronized Diving? They may not have won the Gold, but, it was the first diving medal at all for the USA since 2000, and the first ever medal for the USA in this particular event. Yes, the Chinese duo were better. Noticeably better. But these two young women were the second best in the world, and their 10,000 hours paid off.
Kelci Bryant, left, and Abby Johnston of the USA show off their silver medals from after finishing second in 3-meter synchronized diving. (By Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports)
Maybe we could say this: maybe 10,000 guarantees nothing. But a failure to put in 10,000 hours does guarantee something – you won’t make it to the top without putting in those 10,000 hours.
Now – the other challenge. One reality about this kind of world-class accomplishment is that these athletes show up, every day, with a coach watching and “coaching” every moment. Wouldn’t all of us get better at our jobs if we had that kind of individual coaching, motivating, “pushing us to the limit” daily encounter? I think so.
Work ethic, plus coaching, plus deliberate practice, plus constant feedback, plus measurable goals, plus… The road to true success really is a challenging road.
“Throwing Money” At Your Training Needs Just Might Be A Very Wise Investment
“most of the research shows that when class size reduction programs are well-designed and implemented, student achievement rises as class size drops.
Intuitively, it makes sense that the more attention a teacher can focus on each student, the more the student will benefit and, therefore, perform at a higher level.”
(excerpted from here).
and
As business leaders, we’re voracious seekers of business improvement ideas in the form of conferences, books, blogs, and training. We want our performance to be better, and we know it should be better.
(Gary Harpst: Six Disciplines Execution Revolution)
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It’s Saturday. Let’s think about a big question/problem for American business.
The conventional wisdom goes like this. When you hire someone, make the right hire. If you make the wrong hire, you’ve got trouble.
If you make the right hire, and the person you hired needs to improve in a specific area, or two or three, then provide the right training.
This I know. It is foolish to have a good person (i.e., the “right hire”) trying to succeed at a job that he/she is not trained to succeed at. And when the “right hire” receives the right training, and then gets the right encouragement/supervision, the person, and the company, is more successful.
So – what is the right training? Let’s think about this training question. This is a big issue because in these tight economic times, companies cut expenses where they can – and training is one of the areas that gets cut. And the result of such cuts can definitely lead to more difficulties. When training budgets get cut, people don’t get trained. And then they don’t get better at their jobs. And then, because they don’t get better at their jobs, companies lose more money, or, at least, don’t make as much money as they could.
So – back to the question. What is the right training?
I suggest a simple formula: when the skill/deficiency is a simple matter of learning — for example: how to use a new software program; how to be proficient on Excel; how to create PowerPoint slides — then a training class of many, even very many, students can do the trick.
But the closer you get to what we call the soft skills — which are critical to a person’s success in so many jobs – then a large training class with very many students may not do the trick. No, that’s not strong enough. The closer you get to the soft skills, a large training class, with little one-on-one attention and follow up coaching, will not do the trick. It just won’t.
Let me describe an underlying bias, and then give an example.
A couple of decades ago, George McGovern came to Dallas to speak to a political group. One question he was asked during the Q & A was this: “How can we improve education in this country?” That qualifies as an important need. He said something like this (paraphrased, from memory): “People say that you can’t fix education by throwing more money at the problem. Well, I’m not so sure. Because hiring more teachers takes money. And if there is one thing that we know is true about education, it is this — the smaller the class size, the smaller the teacher-student ratio, the better the educational outcomes.”
Is that true – about the class size issue? Take Dallas. One of the schools that is legendary for its very successful educational outcomes is the private school St. Mark’s School of Texas in Dallas. Now, I know that the parents are very involved. And the students come from families that truly prize a good education. And the school is very demanding. (Check out their current summer reading assignments. This is a school with very high expectations!). And, yes, the teachers are certainly among the very best possible.
But here is a simple fact about St. Mark’s: the teacher-student ration is 6.83 to 1 (I did the math from this page on their website). Let me say that again – that is better than one teacher for every seven students. How does that compare? Well, nationally, the teacher-student ratio is higher in public schools than in private schools. And St. Mark’s ratio is substantially better than the national average for private schools. (You can compare some of these national average numbers here).
In other words, enough money is “thrown at” education at St. Mark’s to guarantee more personal attention. And personal attention produces more development, more correction… better educational outcomes! And those outcomes are better at St. Mark’s than in schools that have higher teacher-student ratios.
So, back to the business lesson. What if you “throw more money” at training? The closer you get to a low teacher-student ratio (trainer-employee ratio), especially for those hard to teach yet very important “soft skills,” the better the training outcomes. It really is, to state the obvious, simple math.
Here’s one example. Say you have an employee who needs to make presentations. This employee is smart, qualified, knowledgeable – but not very adept at making presentations. What do you do?
You can send that employee to a speech class at a local community college. (I teach such classes). That will help – a little, and it will cost very little. But I have classes with up to 25 students. The time I have for one-to-one, individual attention per student is practically zero. And, as much as I hate to admit it, all I can do is “tell” the basics. I can’t do much “coaching” in such classes. And, I am sad to say, many of my students in these classes show little actual improvement in their presentation skills over the course of a semester.
Or, you can bring in a good trainer for presentation skills training. (Karl Krayer and I offer that through Creative Communication Network). And the outcome is almost utterly predictable – the smaller the group of people, the more one-on-one coaching we can provide in the training experience, the better the training outcome.
For example, we are about to lead a two-day session for a company sending 4 people to the training. That is a trainer-employee ratio of 4-1. We will “tell,” but then each participant will practice, over and over again, for the two days. We will video tape, we will point out the bright spots, and then offer suggestions, and corrections. This is very high-impact training.
And, it is possible to get even better outcomes. Say a key employee has a very important presentation or series of presentations to make, and it is important for the company that these go well. If the employee could be more successful, and thus the company could be more successful, if he/she got substantially better, then you could hire a one-to-one presentation skills coach. (Yes, Karl and I offer this training also). This coach will provide some initial training, with very focused one-to-one practice and skill development, then watch a few presentations, offer correctives, point to ways to improve, and then provide periodic check-ups.
This is very expensive training. But maybe not as expensive as continued inadequate performance.
This approach can be repeated with other skill development. For example, Karl Krayer teaches a half day business writing skills session, then meets one-on-one with each participant, going over actual writing examples, and then provides follow up.
Why? Because we forget what we hear/read in the training sessions. We forget what our “coach” told us. There’s a reason why great sports teams practice every day. And there’s a reason why the best sports teams have very low coach-athlete ratios. It takes a lot of work to get good, and than really good, and then even better, at anything.
Such are my thoughts for a Saturday.
The Long View vs. The Short View; or, the old “Forest for the Trees” issue – A Reflection on Learning from Reading Books
I have actually read a fair amount of Aristotle. Not in the original language (although, a little bit of that too). But in my graduate work in rhetoric, we had to read Aristotle. And he is really, really important. But, now, centuries later, his main ideas are usually summarized by others. And the summaries are accessible, make sense, and are profound. For many, a good summary is enough – enough information, enough to launch the thought processes that lead to real-world ideas and changes for the better.
From Aristotle, for example: to be persuasive (rhetoric is all about finding the available means of persuasion), you need logos (a good logical argument), ethos (a good ethical case/argument — true credibility on the part of the speaker/writer), and pathos (a good emotional argument – an engaging “this matters to me” by the speaker/writer). And a few others back from around the time of era of Aristotle add the power of a fourth element, mythos (the narrative appeal – this rings true to our story as a people/nation/company…). Now Aristotle wrote on many other themes, but you get the point. A person writes a book. Others read it. And with the passage of time, they are able to summarize, really effectively, the truths and principles and insights from books. And it helps us understand.
I thought of all this as I read this excellent summary of a series of recent books on the financial crisis. What Caused the Economic Crisis? The 15 best explanations for the Great Recession by Jacob Weisberg. (from Slate.com and Newsweek – I read it on the Slate site).
Though the crisis is recent, there is a large number of books proposing explanations for the economic crisis with clear themes and explanations proposed for consideration. Weisberg summarizes many of these, dividing the suggested explanations into themes and explanations, and concludes with this phrase:
But if we haven’t at least learned that our financial markets need stronger regulatory supervision and better controls to prevent bad bets by big firms from going viral, we’ll be back in the same place before you can say 30 times leverage.
I think the article is worth reading. I have perused a few of the books mentioned, and the article does a good job summarizing the key explanations. And learning these is important – we would really like to dig out of this crisis, and certainly to avoid similar crises in the future.
But the purpose of this post is more about the process of reading books and then learning something important from what we read. None of us (ok – very few of us) can remember all that we read. But we can remember key points, extract the most important principles and themes, and then allow these to inform our thinking and direct our practice. That is why we read (at least, why we read nonfiction and business books) – to learn, to keep learning.
I have learned this from my own experience from reading, and presenting synopses of, business books. In the last few months, I have read Outliers (Gladwell) and Talent is Overrated (Colvin), and learned that it takes 10,000 hours to get really, really good at something, and that those hours have to be spent in deliberate practice – practice for the purpose of getting better. I have read 10-10-10 by Suzy Welch, learning that decisions can be better made if we look at their impact in the next 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. I have read The Opposable Mind (Martin) and discovered that to make the best decisions we need to hold two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time.
These are just a few of the “summaries” that I think of just from the last few months. Are these books worth reading in their entirety? Absolutely. But with all of the stories, supporting information and data in the books, it is the key principles that matter, that shape my thinking, and that I remember most from reading these books.
Paul Nicklen, one of those “10,000 hours” photographers, capturing our world in great photographs
I was in my car today at just the right time. I heard a terrific interview conducted by Kris Boyd of Think on KERA with National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen. He told of the work. the patience, the long-term commitment he had to get just the right photographs. He has spent countless hours in the Arctic looking for those photographs. It is a great interview.
Here is an excerpt about his new book (from his web site):
In this spectacular work, National Geographic photographer and biologist Paul Nicklen breaks new ground with stunning images of life in the polar reaches, and delivers critical new insights into animal behavior and the climate change that threatens the ice and its inhabitants.
I kept thinking about the 10,000 hour rule. You know, the rule that says that it takes 10,000 hours of work (including a lot of deliberate practice) to do the best work possible. This man has certainly spent more than 10,000 hours in search of these perfect photographs. So, I rushed in to look at his web site. What a treasure. Just take a look at this photograph:
Listen to the interview from KERA here. Check out his photographs here. And consider buying his new book, Polar Obsession.
What a treat.
Reinforcement for that 10,000 hour rule and the Power of Deliberate Practice (from Coach Wooden, Gladwell, Colvin, and Levitt & Dubner)
I first learned of the 10,000 hour rule — it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at/to truly master any skill –from reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Then I learned more about how to spend the 10,000 hours in “deliberate practice” from Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.
Here’s more. In Superfreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner refer back to the “father” of the 10,000 hour rule, K. Anders Ericsson. And yesterday, at a lunch gathering, I presented my synopsis of Wooden on Leadership, by the great, legendary, best-ever-coach John Wooden. Though he does not refer to the concept directly, he provided the true “deliberate practice” model, with each session of his practices planned to the minute…
So — here are a few reminders from each of these authors, with brief comment a time or two:
From Wooden:
Have a definite practice plan – and follow it.
The coach must never forget that he is, first of all, a teacher. He must come (be present), see (diagnose), and conquer (correct). He must continuously be exploring for ways to improve himself in order that he may improve others and welcome every person and everything that may be helpful to him.
You must have patience and expect more mistakes, but drill and drill to reduce them to a minimum.
From Gladwell:
The people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
In my synopsis of Outliers, I added these reflections:
• centerpiece to this book is the 10,000 hour rule… — with much intentional practice!
• “Practicing: that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better”
• Some “observations:
1. It really does take a lot of hard, hard work – the 10,000 hour rule really is close to an actual rule!
2. Hard work requires much intentional practice.
3. Success is the result of “accumulative advantage.”
From Colvin:
There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers.
Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. This is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities.
From Levitt and Dubner:
If you don’t love what you’re doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.
“Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.” (K. Anders Ericsson)
(I wrote this in a blog post about Ken Robinson’s The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything a while back:
So — here is the question that we each need to ask: What do I care deeply enough about that I am willing to put in significant time, over the long haul, to get better at it? Even if the time I put in is not necessarily fun.
So, we’re always back to this challenge — where are you investing your 10,000 hours?
Are We Getting Any Better, at Much of Anything? – Try Handwriting…
Outliers
{Note to reader: I wrote this before I read Bob’s post: “Q 256: How to Improve Self-Editing?” They do seem to go together}.
As I have blogged about before, Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) and Talent is Overrated Geoff Colvin) make for a great one-two punch. They each refer to the 10,000 hour rule, they each speak of the time and discipline it takes to get better, and they each challenge us to actually get better.
The Gladwell book is kind of “here is the philosophy.” And here is a key quote:
The people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
The Colvin book, which sadly and accurately states that very, very few people get really good at anything, says that the reason is that simply putting in 10,000 hours on a job is not enough – you have to intentionally work to get better at it. He describes this as deliberate practice. Here’s the key quote:
The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice. (This) definitely isn’t what most of us do on the job every day, which begins to explain the great mystery of the workplace – why we’re surrounded by so many people who have worked hard for decades but have never approached greatness. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
Talent is Overrated
But here is the problem. If we buy into the concept that it takes deliberate practice to get better, what do we then practice – what do we work on? Even the Colvin book seems to be heavy in the sports example arena and a little light in the real world of work arena. How do you get better at work in the everyday world of work?
I’ve got two suggestions. (And, stay with me here – if we work at getting better at a couple of specific ways, maybe we can each figure ways to get better in other ways).
Here are my two suggestions:
#1: Work on getting better at e-mail writing. Think about this: have you ever wished you could pull an e-mail back? (Yes, I know about the new g-mail feature). We have to write so many, many e-mails that we get sloppy, too quick, too unthoughtful. So, here’s a suggestion. Print out five e-mails a week, re-read them, edit them, work on making them better! Ask, “what could I do to improve the quality, the depth, the value of my e-mails?” And remember the writing example from the Colvin book. Benjamin Franklin wanted to be a good writer. His dad “criticized him” in just the right way, and Franklin practiced deliberate practice. This is from Colvin’s book:
When it comes to giving people evaluations – offering praise first, then supporting criticisms with examples – old Josiah Franklin (father of Ben Franklin, after he praised, then “corrected,” his writing style) could be a model for us all.
Benjamin Franklin did not try to become a better essay writer by sitting down and writing essays. Instead, like a top-ranked athlete or musician, he worked over and over on those specific aspects that needed improvement.
Italic Alphabet
#2: Work on getting better at actual writing – handwriting. OK, this one hits too close to home. I feel like my handwriting is a lost cause. And judging from a whole bunch of others, I’m not alone. But twice in the last week, I have read pieces about improving handwriting. One in slate.com (Dead Letters: Everyone has terrible handwriting these days. My daughter and I set out to fix ours), the other in the New York Times. (“Practice material” is included). It may not help enough – but I have certainly spent close to 10,000 hours writing badly. Maybe some time spent in deliberate practice could help reverse this horrible trait.
These are just a couple of simple suggestions. Here is the real question: what do you need to get better at? And how can you design some deliberate practice practice sessions that will help you get better in specific ways that fit your specific challenges?
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You can purchase my synopses of both Outliers and Talent is Overrated, with audio + handout, at our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.
