2 Effective Techniques To Become an Expert In Any Skill You Want
“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person.” — Albert Einstein
1. Deliberate Practice- The Gateway to gaining Expertise
Anders Ericsson, psychologist, researcher at Florida State University, and the original researcher behind the famous 10,000-hours rule (which was promoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his famous book Outliers), states 3 types of practices, that are used for learning.
a. Naive Practice
b. Purposeful Practice
c. Deliberate Practice.
Naive practice is generic practice that you do mindlessly based on what you know already know (without any effort or focus to improve). This type of practice of doing same thing over and over again and expecting that it will improve, does not work at all. Because:
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. ~ Albert Einstein
Purposeful practice is much better. It involves (1) well-defined and specific goals, (2) in a focused manner, (3) with an appropriate feedback system about your mistakes, and (4) with consistent pushing beyond the comfort zone.
It is better than naive practice, as you learn much faster in that.
But, it is only the deliberate practice that opens the doors to mastery for you.
What is this?
Deliberate practice is also known as a gold standard of any practice. This practice has all the elements of the purposeful practice, but it additionally has the element of coaching or teaching added to it, through a clear training program in the established field.
Deliberate practice involves the pursuit of personal improvement via well-defined, specific goals and targeted areas of expertise, as required in purposeful practice, but additionally, it requires a teacher or coach who has demonstrated an ability to help others improve the desired area of expertise — say chess, tennis, or music — and who can give continuous feedback.
Ericsson says:
“It’s not just a matter of accumulating hours. If you’re doing your job, and you’re just doing more and more of the same, you’re not actually going to get better.”
Ericsson succinctly explains how the inner brain structure and neural circuit changes with deliberate practice in below words:
The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.
I loved his wonderful thoughts, when he says:
“There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.”
2. Travel between Learning Zone and Performance Zone.
The second best practice to LEARNING (while ensuring the speed as well) isto constantly travel between learning zone and performance zone.
Learning zone means the time period in our lives, when we are focused on learning to improve our skills. Performance zone are the areas when we are just performing on the skills that we learn.
The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven’t mastered yet,which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them.
That is entirely different from what we do when we’re in our performance zone. In the performance zone our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. In this zone, we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes.
One of the key requirements for learning at faster pace that most highly effective people follow is to continuously travel between the learning zone and the performance zone.
In a wonderful talk by Eduardo Briceno, co-founder & CEO of Mindset Works, a growth mindset training company, he explains how we can get better at things we do care about by citing a real-life implementation as below:
He gives the example of Demosthenes, a political leader, great orator in ancient Greece, and lawyer. In order to become a great orator and a good lawyer, he didn’t always remain in the performance zone. Rather he spent time on learning the skills. He studied long hours about law and philosophy. But he also heard many great speeches to learn and master his public speaking skills.
He had some lisp problem (a minor speech defect), so in order to speak clearly, he used to put stones in his mouth and then practice speaking. He practiced deliberately with greater emphasis on learning in the correct way, and also improve by feedback. This travel between learning zone and performance zone made him learn faster and gain expertise in his field.
While above might seem taking longer to few people. But our objective is to truly master the skill — which is possible by following the above practices. Since these practices will develop strong layers of wisdom in neurocircuits of your brain, through continuous learning and deliberated practice — to serve you for life-time, so rest assured- whatever time it takes is the optimum and shortest to gain mastery.
Because, as is rightly said:
“Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.” ~Robert Greene
Hope you liked this article.
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If you liked above , you may also want to check my other articles below:
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