How To Become An Expert In Any Field Even If You’re A Beginner

The beginning sucks. You hate it as much as politicians hate telling the truth. I can relate because I go through the same struggle. It feels like your efforts are for nothing.

You think it’s a waste of time and energy. And it seems like you’re going nowhere and learning nothing.

I have days like this when I write. I feel like I’m not getting better, but you are even when you don’t see it. I promise if you stay the course you’ll see tangible results.

Decide right now you’ll stick to the script, play your role, and never break character.

This is a slow process. It takes time.

Did you know mango seeds take six years to grow into a tree that bears fruit?

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Do you remember the lesson behind the tortoise and the hare story?

Slow and steady wins the race.

I spent 360 minutes reading about expert performance and here’s what I learned:

Researchers found expert performance is not reached with less than 10 years of deliberate practice so get comfortable.

Studies show it takes authors 10 years to publish their greatest work.

Ericsson’s material has taught me that I need to focus on improving my performance.

I’ve shifted my focus from the reward to honing my skills, I write to improve and to provide value. This approach separates deliberate practice from the other types of activities: work and play.

Work seeks a reward and play is for pure enjoyment.Deliberate practice requires intense training and constructive criticism. I need to make mistakes, learn from them, and develop strategies to improve upon them through innovation. This is the basic concept of focused training.

Achieve expert level then surpass it.

Immediate feedback is important also — you can’t progress without it. Repetition won’t lead to leaps in improvement. You use trial and error to get better. The power is in building a feedback loop that’s improved upon — that’s the key to expert performance.

Here’s an example:

Steve’s Story

Anders Ericsson and Bill Chase experimented with Steve Faloon, a student at Carnegie

Mellon University, who was asked to remember a string of random digits e.g. 4774489.

He got to 10 digits then hit a ceiling. Soon, he found a strategy that broke through it and moved to twenty digits until he hit another wall. Faloon kept fine-tuning his approach and reached 82 digits.

Here are eighty-two random digits:

“1 4 3 7 5 5 4 5 5 0 7 1 3 3 3 2 4 3 9 3 1 0 4 1 2 1 3 1 4 0 2

9 4 3 4 8 4 0 3 8 8 9 9 0 2 8 3 7 8 7 6 4 3 5 6 1 4 8 8 5 7 2

3 1 2 8 0 1 0 5 4 5 6 6 2 1 4 6 6 6 4"

That’s impressive. And It wasn’t luck. Nor was it as a result of repetition. Steve pushed himself out of his comfort zone until he was able to find methods that worked.

And he understood the brain is malleable, it’s not fixed, it grows and changes in response to conscious, intense training — it’s molded like a sculptor molds a block of clay.

You are the sculptor!

Create tasks that challenge your cognitive abilities — they build the gap between skill acquisition and expert performance.

But like muscles — adequate rest is a necessity, or you’ll burn out. Maintain a balance of intense training and rest.

The goal is to get better every day — not to give up!

Resources:

Peak By Anders Ericcson & Robert Pool

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer