Practice does not always make perfect, finds study of violinists
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I like the ending.
Self improvement should be more important than just comparing yourself with others for most things. And it is up to oneself to figure out if it's worth continuing or that the skill is worth your time.
>> They interviewed three groups of 13 violinists [...] before having them complete daily diaries of their activities over a week.
You're basically priming interviewees, and without a control group, you're unable to partial out the variance due to "being interviewed". They need diaries from people who were interviewed _after_ taking diaries, and a group of people never interviewed.
>> [... ] complete daily diaries of their activities _over_a _week. While the less skilful violinists clocked up an average of about 6,000 hours of practice by the age of 20, there was little to separate the good from the best musicians, with each logging an average of about 11,000 hours
Extrapolation from a 1-week diary to your entire life until age 20?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no...
https://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/am-...
There is a huge difference between "Excellence requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" and "If you log 10,000 you will be excellent".
The article would disprove the second, but I always came away with the impression of the first (after reading the book).
So to me, in this instance, I'd say "Gee, a misinterpretation of what somebody else said is false? What a surprise".
And more importantly, if you read the literature, you'll find that there's a great deal of dependence on the kind of practice you do. Merely performing mindless repetition isn't going to help at all. You require a certain kind of focussed practice to get the benefits of the 10,000 hours rule Gladwell extols. The book "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" goes in depth about the fallacies in Galdwell's book. One of the authors of that book is the guy whose research formed the basis of Gladwell's own book. I would recommend you read that in order to understand where Gladwell misleads.
In summary, if what you want from a book is pseudo-scientific reasoning for increasing practice time, Malcolm Gladwell is your man. If his words motivate you to practice harder, go ahead and read him. However, if you want scientific reasoning behind why practicing works and how to extract the most out of it, you'd best look elsewhere. The statement "Excellence requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" is itself untrue. This varies wildly with the kind of practice you do, the kind of feedback you get, and the field in which you wish to gain excellence. Oversimplification, as Gladwell does, is an easy way to make yourself a target of accusations of quackery. The statement that "Excellence requires many hours of deliberate practice, and you'd better practice things the correct way for your practice routine to work for you" might be a better characterisation of the science as is currently understood.
At the age of 16 I was dedicating 6 to 8 hours a day practicing. That was the norm among my classmates.
The lead violinist in our orchestra was a prodigy who picked up and mastered a piece in two weeks which most of us would never be able to play.
Trained violinists can tell the difference between many levels of ability and performance.
The truth is that there are people who can play the instrument beyond the reach of everyone else.
That’s true for any highly technical instrument, of which the violin is certainly one.
If studying violin taught me anything, it is that there is a power law to human ability and deliberate practice is simply an augmentation (which is also an unevenly distributes ability).
As the most popular sport in the world—and one which a huge share of young persons try to attain some mastery AND where scouts comb every corner of the earth in search of talent—the stars of the sport are outliers on the orders of 1 in 10^7.
This YT clip (2m33s) of Neymar, Jr doing "The Crossbar Challenge" demonstrates how far out on the long tail the best players are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zre-uH2p4M0
I think it's not controversial to claim no amount of practice could take you to this level unless you "have it."
It's up to the person to make sure that what they practice is correct.
Anyone who has taught piano for example knows the most common mistake of novice students is to omit sharp or flat notes (the black notes) when learning notated music which begins to include them. In this case, the student will practice the wrong notes for long enough before their next lesson that the wrong notes become engrained in their memory model, resurfacing under duress such as in recital. There are similarities for other instruments (strings: intonation, woodwinds: embouchure, percussion: rhythmic accuracy, etc.)
The most talented students seem to gravitate consistently towards robust memory models for their respective instruments technique as a way of freeing themselves up as quickly as possible for the more enjoyable aspects of perfecting a piece of music: refining expression.
Perhaps one day there will be tools which can assist those less naturally predisposed to developing robust memory models, before it's too late for their brain, the way the most talented students do.
The article should highlight more what kind of practice they refer to and what they think is the main contributing factor.
I think to become an expert in something like playing a musical instrument focused practice and repetition is necessary, so having the right coach is extremely important.
However, the most crucial piece might actually be the passion or willingness to learn in my opinion.
As per the article, one of the author Macnamara claims that a complex combination of environmental factors, genetic factors and their interactions explains the performance differences across people. I couldn't access the original paper, however it would be interesting to see how they establish this claim. Also, based on the guardian article, the refutation seems to be targeted at a strawman since the original 1993 paper never claimed that mere repetition was not sufficient.
"Nonetheless, Bryan and Harter (1897, 1899) had clearly shown that with mere repetition, improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels, and further improvement required effortful reorganization of the skill"[1]
Even if the authors had considered only deliberate practice, it would be quite difficult to measure the nature of a practice.
1. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
Read more carefully next time.
It's just feel good science.
[0] https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-ha...
It might be sad for someone but I'm convinced that not everyone has the right talent to be a musician or to play a certain instrument. Some people are geniuses, others are mediocre at best. Everyone has his strengths and talents and it's only normal that we excel at very different things.
My belief in growth mindset has help me improve my communication skills both oral and written. However I also recognise that I have certain limitations based on natural talent. For instance, I’m likely to never to be as good at word games (i.e. scrabble) as many friends and family members. This is at odds with my growth mindset to a certain extent.
Maybe any skill can be improved upon but natural talent gives us an inherit advantage over the rest of the field.
In defence of nurture, 28% of Nobel Prize winning physicists come from families where the father was an academic professional. From the same book (The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity) we learn that this number falls to 6% for Nobel Prize winning writers. However, a whopping 30% of these writers lost at least one parent through death, abandonment or desertion. In contrast, physicists lead fairly normal lives.
Some people pick things up faster than others, but if you put more effort you can still catch up.
It also explains why even talented people still need to practice/learn/etc. to be at the top of their fields.
It also sets a ceiling. Beyond a certain level, no amount of work will make you any better, because you fundamentally don't have the cognitive skill or physical ability to improve further.
I've spent a fair amount of time with musicians, and talent can be very obvious.
You can have a room full of people who have spent years practicing and been through a degree program. They're all outstanding compared to most of the population.
But sometimes one person in that room will still stand out, because their playing will be insightful, compelling, and musical in a way the others can't match. It's an instant thing - it only takes a few bars to hear it.
They won't necessarily have done the most work, or put the most hours in. But they will, in some absolutely fundamental way, "get it" - usually from birth.
The hours and the work refine that ability and make it more obvious. But they can't create it.
The reason she explained to me once is that people see her perform and play and think that's just how easy it is for her.
She said to me once: "Noone sees the thousands of hours I practiced by myself in a dark rehearsal room without even a window at school". That was quite enlightening to me.
So, if someone says it's just "talent", its quite offensive to her. It's hard and dedicated work.
Both are necessary.
She gets upset because she bought into the culture that tells us we control everything about ourselves. Which is somewhat of a lie in many ways.
Also, any random person can learn to play violin sufficient enough to play in an orchestra (besides a physical or mental disability maybe). Maybe not professionally because that needs addition passion and dedication and there is a lot of competition. But playing good enough for a community orchestra that requires audition, pretty much anyone can achieve.
If you imagine every skill is a dimension, you'll be able to traverse to "proficient/adept" quite easily with some dedicated practice
I find the more interesting reflection is how much people overestimate their abilities in the more day to day/mundane skills that everyone has some proficiency in - think "conversation" or separately "running". Both things most humans can do but also most people don't get too much further past novice in them despite being things that we have been doing all our lives.
Turns out that without dedicated practice and good feedback loops, it's possible to stay a novice at something your entire life. So for me at least, talent is about your ability to improve at something with little to no direction.
When I think of the greatest salespeople I know, they have been honing the skill all life, but they also never had anyone teach them what they needed to know or what was important to learn. And yet when I analyze their lives and realize that from young they were constructing feedback loops for things like "how to be funny" or "how to wow a crowd" or "how to negotiate" with virtually zero guidance, I can only infer that this is what genius looks like...
I noticed a real difference between when I switched from a teacher more suited to children to one more for adults. My practice became more focused, my time was better spent and overall the quality of my playing drastically improved.
Additionally, if my teacher is away for a week and I go without a lesson, I notice that I can spend a lot of time creating bad habits which then become muscle memory.
So I can understand why 10k hours of poor quality practice can be worth 5k hours of good, focused practice
> “The idea has become really entrenched in our culture, but it’s an oversimplification,” said Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Yeah, that's because Malcolm Gladwell peddles bullshit.
https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-...
https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-a...
Most people would agree simply spending hours on something doesn't usually get you very far. It's the quality of that training tied to your own aptitude for the subject.
Sadly or thankfully, since we don't know the limits of our own aptitudes, we can really only do high quality training to see where we peak out.
I think it's easy to believe that the above statement is widely understood, but it's not. Meet any kid who has been forced to do piano, swimming or whatever by their parents.
My parents and I know so many others who simply forced their kids to practice practice practice in hopes it will lead somewhere.
12 years of piano. I barely even know how to read music and play any instrument.
You need some feedback about how wrong you are and in what dimension. You then have to adjust that dimension proportionally to the feedback.
All of that is hard.
However, I have also seen other factors play a part. Certainly, the very intelligent artists are prone to self-destruictive criticism, and frequently fade from view. But in my experience, the most important thing an artists can posses is a coherent sense of self.
2. "10,000 hours" is a necessary, not sufficient, condition. Further, some fields (like chess) can enable expert performance with fewer hours than other fields (like history) due to the difference in skills required.
If you start learning by yourself from every 10 hours of practice maybe only 1-2 might count as deliberate. If that efficiency is tracked as well, one could argue that even a motivated learner might take up to 20k hours to get to his 10k hours of deliberate practice.
Longitudinal, crossectional pilot studies at least?
What you find feel free to share it here for others to read. :)
I don't know much about chess, but fields like software and math are analogously low on information volume compared to history, making a much lower baseline on hours for good talent. I'd say musical performance, likewise.
Math has low information volume, but it is slower information. A good historical treatment of a topic may be 2000 pages, and a good math treatment of a topic may be 100pages, but both requiring the same amount of time to study and comprehend.