A long while back, the Freakonomics Blog posted a fascinating article entitled How Did A-Rod Get So Good?, discussing the role of deliberate practice in Alex Rodriguez’s baseball training regimen. A key quote:
When Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in the “expert performance” movement [...] try to explain what it is that makes someone very good at what he or she does, they focus on “deliberate practice.” This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:
1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.
A parallel concept, that of concentration, pops up in this excellent TennisWorld profile of Roger Federer, by Peter Bodos. Federer is effortlessly able to eliminate distractions to focus on the task at hand:
Anyway, a couple of times during his press conferences, someone’s cell phone went off, each time with an annoyingly loud ring tone. Both times, everyone turned, first to locate and then to glare at the culprit: have you no shame? And both times, I noticed, Roger kept his eyes locked on his interlocutor, never glancing in the direction of the phone. I’m sure he was conscious, on one level, that there was an interruption occurring, but he had decided to ignore it. Not even a darting of the eyes towards the irritant. Both coming in the room with his head down and refusing to allow himself to be distracted or interrupted seemed to convey the same thing: he chooses to focus selectively, and focuses intensely once he does.
In a recent post, Jason Kottke tied the two elements together in a picture of successful pitching, that of Rockies pitcher and college physics major Jeff Francis:
Even though I do understand the forces and everything, there’s a separation when I’m pitching. If I throw a good pitch, I know what I did to do it, but there has to be a separation between knowing what I did and knowing why what I did helped the ball do what it did, if that makes any sense at all. If I thought about it on the mound, I’d be really mechanical and trying to be too perfect instead of doing what comes naturally.
[...]
Francis repeatedly pulled the ball back in preparation to throw. But as he flashed his arm forward, his hand would, mind unaware, bring the ball back toward his ear rather than at full extension. It was his body essentially shortening the axis of his arm to decrease the force on his shoulder, protecting him from pain. And Francis could not stop it.
After his 10th pitch and first muffled groan of pain, he stopped.
“It’s hurting you?” Murayama said.
“Yeah,” Francis said.
“I can tell. You’re getting out ahead of your arm. Slow down, stay back a little more.”
“Does it look like I’m scared to throw a little?”
“Are you scared?”
“Not consciously.”
Obviously, all of these examples – Roger Federer, Alex Rodriguez, and Jeff Francis – are sports examples, and many more examples of concentration and deliberate practice can be found throughout the sports world – Tiger Woods has many, many examples of this.
However, these concepts are rarely analyzed in other liberal arts and sciences, which is an interesting split. For one, I consider athletes that perform on the level of Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods and especially Roger Federer (what can I say, I have a soft spot for him) to truly be no different than an artist breaking new creative ground or a scientist pushing forward new discoveries. They both draw upon incredibly honed skills and an ability to concentrate in the face of great distraction to create something new, something unbelievable, something that transcends the way we see the world.
With sports, it’s easy to see deliberate practice at work – Kobe Bryant shooting a thousand jump shots a day, Roger Federer hitting a thousand backhands during a practice session, and so on. Similarly, we can see the concentration when we witness their work – you have to be blind to not see the intensity of Tiger Woods on a Sunday.
The difficulty comes when we attempt to look at training in terms of the liberal arts. With many creative disciplines – everything from scientific discovery and development of mathematical and computational algorithms to painting and sculpting and writing – we do not see the creative process at work. We don’t see Linus Torvalds out there puzzling through an algorithm. We don’t bear witness to Michael Chabon struggling at the keyboard, pushing himself to the limit.
Instead, we merely enjoy the results of their creative labor.
Yet, I argue that deliberate practice and concentration are essential tools in almost any discipline – particularly creative ones.
Over the past three years, I’ve written somewhere around four thousand words a day – some days better than others. Some days, I just pump out finished pieces – and I notice that if I do this too much, I don’t get better as a writer. I grow when I focus on the details, the individual pieces, not the whole.
Deliberate practice, paired with concentration, really works for any creative pursuit if you break apart the tenets.
1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
Quite often, in creative work, we focus on the finished pieces. We need to finish an article or a painting or a program – that is our sign of progress, of success.
Yet, once you reach a basic level of competence where you can crank out those pieces, you’ll never grow beyond that level if you don’t try another approach. You’ve reached the top of the curve when it comes to the skill of finishing a project.
Instead, work on the details.
If you’re a writer, take a paragraph – or even a sentence – from any article you read. Read it. Rewrite it. Don’t worry about the outcome – just make the best little snippet you can.
If you’re a scupltor, take a lump of clay and make nothing but fingers all day. Or noses. Or leaves. Do the same thing if you’re a painter.
If you’re a programmer, rewrite what seems like a simple function, even if you’ll never use it. Minimize the code – or make it more general use. Implement a common algorithm in your language of choice, then revise it.
If you’re a scientist, redo the experiments of others – or even the single techniques. It helps you see the process again and forces you to practice every little step along the way.
Think of it as your batting practice. Your goal is not to score runs here – in fact, you can’t score runs here. What it does is it gives you a little bit more when the time comes and you actually need those skills.
2. Set specific goals.
Kobe Bryant shoots a thousand shots at his off-season workouts. The end result? He’s just a little bit more polished when it comes to the real shot during the NBA finals.
In On Writing, Stephen King suggests writing a thousand words every day. Lately, I’ve take that to mean practice words, not finished words. I’ll sit down, pull paragraphs out of articles or books I like, and rewrite them. I’ll try simple little writing exercises, like describing a leaf or a person or a conversation. Sure, this stuff is rubbish, but when I’m actually bearing down and concentrating on a real project, these honed skills come to the surface.
Do the same. Set daily goals and monthly goals, clear, concrete ones that require you to practice a significant amount on a regular basis. The goals shouldn’t just specify some end result, but instead should focus on deliberate practice. “I’ll rewrite 200 paragraphs this week.” “I’ll draw 1,000 trees this month.” “I’ll pipette 10,000 vials this month.” “I’ll rewrite 500 lines of code today to optimize it for speed.”
Then chain them. Keep a calendar and mark each day where you meet your milestone. Put it front and center (like the one I have on my office wall). When the consecutive Xs on the days where you meet the goal get to be a long chain, you’ll want to keep the chain going.
And then you win.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.
The Internet provides a tremendous forum for sharing many, many kinds of creative work. If you’re a writer, start a blog and comment on other blogs. If you’re a photographer or an artist, join Flickr and, again, join the commenting community, offering real, worthwhile feedback. If you’re a programmer, join an open-source project, comment, and contribute. There are similar opportunities for nearly any kind of creative work, enabling you to share your deliberate practice and receive feedback on them.
Another approach I like to take is “resting” my work. I’ll finish a major piece of writing, then I’ll put it in a drawer or folder somewhere and forget about it for a month. Then, I’ll sit down and re-read it – and usually, I hate it. I edit it like crazy, almost rewriting the whole thing. Then I repeat. Each time, though, it gets better. I improve as a writer, and the work itself improves significantly.
Keep working.
It should be also noted that it takes a lot of practice to reach a world-class level. From page 40 of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers:
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball palyers, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.”
Build focus.
Whatever you want to get good at, start practicing. Break it down into fundamental pieces – as fundamental as you can – and repeat them, over and over again. Eventually, practice them in the face of distraction, until you can block out the noise and interference around you.
Yes, it can be easier to write or create in a silent room with no distractions, but that’s rarely the reality in modern life. Distraction is usually part of the equation, no matter how much you force it out.
So practice ignoring it. Let the phone ring while you write and don’t pick it up – keep going. Ignore your email as you’re digging deep into Photoshop, even if there are new messages. Aim and focus your camera, even as a Mack truck is driving by.
Eventually, with practice, focus comes easier and you’re able to go deeper. The result is the fabled state of being “in the zone,” where you’re completely focused on your important task, bringing those honed individual skills to bear. The result of that is something that changes the world.
Somewhere out there is a high schooler who’s writing incredible things in his journal, day in and day out. He’s reading things, riffing on them, tossing out interesting paragraphs, then crossing them out and trying them again. In twenty years, I’ll be reading his book and perhaps wishing I could write that well. And, most likely, it won’t be the talent that causes this, but the deliberate practice and concentration.
