What People Get Wrong About Deliberate Practice
Summary
TLDRThis video script addresses common misconceptions about deliberate practice, emphasizing that it's about quality, not quantity. It debunks the '10,000 hours' myth, explaining that expertise depends on the nature of practice and the skill being learned. The script highlights the importance of identifying expert skills as the first step in deliberate practice, which is often overlooked. It contrasts typical educational practices with real-world expert activities, showing a mismatch that hinders skill development. Finally, it stresses that focusing on practice and feedback cycles, rather than just time spent, is crucial for true expertise.
Takeaways
- 🔢 The concept of '10,000 hours' is often misunderstood; it's not a magic number but a rough estimate of the time some violinists spent practicing.
- 🎯 Deliberate practice is about quality, not quantity. It's a specific type of practice aimed at improving performance.
- 🚀 The number of hours to become an expert varies and depends on the quality of practice and the complexity of the skill.
- 🏆 Deliberate practice is distinct from regular practice and is crucial for developing high levels of expertise.
- 🤔 The first step in deliberate practice is often overlooked: identifying the expert skills that distinguish experts from non-experts.
- 🧠 Understanding what expert skills are required is essential to create an effective deliberate practice program.
- 🔍 In education, what is taught often differs from what experts actually do, leading to a mismatch in skill development.
- 🧪 Physicists, for example, engage in a complex process of research that is rarely replicated in educational lab settings.
- ⏱ Focusing on time spent practicing is misguided; instead, the emphasis should be on practice, feedback, and improvement cycles.
- 🔁 The cycle of challenging practice, expert feedback, and further practice is what truly drives learning and skill development.
- 🗣️ The speaker invites viewers to provide feedback on the video's helpfulness, indicating a desire to improve future content based on audience input.
Q & A
What is the main concept of deliberate practice?
-Deliberate practice is about the quality of practice rather than the quantity. It focuses on how one practices, which should be different and more purposeful than regular practice, aiming to develop expert-level skills.
Where did the idea of 10,000 hours come from in the context of deliberate practice?
-The idea of 10,000 hours originated from a comment by Anders Ericsson in a paper about violin players, which was then popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book. However, it's a misconception to associate this number with deliberate practice, as the time required to become an expert varies depending on the quality of practice and the complexity of the skill.
Why is the number of hours not the key factor in deliberate practice?
-The number of hours is not the key factor because deliberate practice is more about the quality of the practice and the specific skills being developed. It also depends on the individual's learning process, the complexity of the skill, and the level of competition or expertise in the field.
What is the first step in deliberate practice that people often forget?
-The first step in deliberate practice that people often forget is to identify the expert skills. Understanding what distinguishes experts from non-experts is crucial for creating an effective deliberate training program.
How does the typical physics education differ from what actual physicists do?
-Typical physics education often involves lectures and labs that follow a predetermined recipe, whereas actual physicists engage in a more complex process involving establishing research goals, deciding on convincing data, determining variables, exploring research designs, and iterating through data analysis.
Why is focusing on time the wrong metric for deliberate practice?
-Focusing on time is the wrong metric because deliberate practice is about the quality of the practice and the feedback cycles that drive learning forward. It's more important to focus on challenging practice, expert feedback, and further practice opportunities.
What is the significance of practice feedback cycles in deliberate practice?
-Practice feedback cycles are significant in deliberate practice because they involve a challenging practice session, expert feedback to improve, and further practice opportunities. This cycle is what truly drives learning and skill development.
What is the role of expert feedback in the process of deliberate practice?
-Expert feedback plays a critical role in deliberate practice by providing insights and guidance on how to improve performance. It helps learners understand their mistakes and refine their skills to progress towards expertise.
How does the video script suggest improving the understanding of deliberate practice?
-The video script suggests improving the understanding of deliberate practice by focusing on the quality of practice, identifying expert skills, and emphasizing practice feedback cycles rather than just the quantity of time spent practicing.
What is the advice given for those looking to apply deliberate practice effectively?
-The advice for applying deliberate practice effectively is to understand the specific skills required for expertise in the field, engage in high-quality practice with a focus on challenging tasks, and seek expert feedback to continuously improve and refine those skills.
Outlines
🎯 The Misconceptions of Deliberate Practice
This paragraph addresses common misunderstandings about deliberate practice, emphasizing that it's about the quality, not the quantity, of practice. The origin of the '10,000 hours' concept is discussed, clarifying that it was a rough estimate for violin players and not a universal rule for expertise. The paragraph also highlights the importance of understanding what distinguishes expert skills from non-expert skills, which is often overlooked. The video creator encourages viewers to identify these expert skills as the first step in deliberate practice, suggesting that without this understanding, effective training programs cannot be created.
🔬 The Gap Between Student Labs and Real-World Physics
The second paragraph contrasts the typical undergraduate physics lab experience with the actual practices of professional physicists. It points out that while students follow predefined steps in labs to confirm known outcomes, real physicists engage in a dynamic process of setting research goals, measuring variables, and iterating on experiments based on data analysis. The paragraph argues that the disconnect between educational practices and real-world expertise hinders students from developing the necessary skills. It also touches on the importance of focusing on practice feedback cycles rather than just the amount of time spent practicing, which is a key aspect of deliberate practice.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Deliberate Practice
💡Expertise Development
💡10,000 Hours Rule
💡Quality of Practice
💡Expert Skills
💡Feedback
💡Practice-Feedback Cycles
💡Expertise
💡Mistakes in Deliberate Practice
💡Competitive Fields
Highlights
Deliberate practice is about quality, not quantity.
The 10,000-hour rule is a misconception; expertise depends on the quality of practice.
Expertise development varies based on the complexity of the skill and the quality of training programs.
The first step in deliberate practice is often overlooked: identifying expert skills.
Expert skills are not always obvious and must be explicitly defined for effective training.
Traditional education methods may not align with the skills needed for expertise.
Physics education as an example where lab practices differ from actual physicist work.
Physicists establish research goals and measure variables, unlike typical lab exercises for students.
Expertise requires understanding the expert practice to develop the right skills.
The focus should be on practice, feedback, and improvement cycles, not just time spent.
Time is necessary for learning but focusing on it alone is not productive.
Feedback is crucial for improvement in deliberate practice.
The video aims to clarify misconceptions about deliberate practice.
The importance of understanding the expert skills before creating a training program.
The video invites viewers to reflect on the helpfulness of the content.
Transcripts
deliberate practice is one of the major
most important ideas in learning and
instruction yet a lot of people get this
idea wrong and specifically there are
three mistakes that i see people making
over and over and over again so i'm
making this video hopefully to address
these
mistakes or these misconceptions mistake
number one is that there is nothing
special or magical
about 10 000 hours the whole point of
deliberate practice is that it's about
the quality
of practice
more so than the quantity
of practice so when anders erickson and
his colleagues first
started to explore
what was driving expertise development
the main question they had is like okay
we've got a bunch of people why are some
people experts and other people not
experts and the explanation that they
came up with was that even though both
of these groups practiced a lot
one of these groups that is the group
that reached high levels of expertise
had a different kind of practice than
the other group the whole idea of
deliberate practice is that it's it's
about how you practice deliberate
practice is different
from
regular
practice right that's the main important
point maybe i have not so i probably
haven't said this enough yet yet but but
that's that's that's the main point it's
about the quality not the quantity so
where did the idea of ten thousand hours
come from well
it came as an offhand comment that
ericsson wrote in a paper on violin
players saying that many of them
estimate they had spent about 10 000
hours practicing and then this comment
was lifted by malcolm gladwell into his
book and then that idea kind of became
cemented in the public imagination and
then everyone just started associating
10 000 hours with deliberate practice
that's not a thing the number of hours
that it takes to become an expert at
something depends so we already said
that it depends on the quality of
practice that you do
right but then it also depends on what
it is you're learning
some skills are more complex than others
some skills are easier to learn
than others right
it also depends on
what your competitors are doing so if
you're talking about becoming an expert
say in a competitive field like chess or
sports or something like this
it's harder to be better than everyone
else if everyone else is already
ridiculously good by the same token it's
also easier to get
good in an absolute sense to be to kind
of learn quickly if there are already
really good training programs access to
really great coaches this kind of thing
okay hope that
makes sense mistake number two is that
everybody forgets about the first step
so if you if you've read about
deliberate practice before or yeah if
you're familiar with the idea
what i want you to do now is to pause
the video
pause the video and
write down these steps of deliberate
practice now while you're pausing the
video i'm going to read a book about
how important it is
to
like this video so why don't we pause
this video and you can click the like
button if you know you happen to have
a free
moment okay
okay
you back you're with me cool so did you
write down for the first step identify
the expert skills
if you did
then you have my hearty congratulations
excellent work but chances are that uh
you didn't and it's easy to do a lot of
people forget about the first step
why
well the first step seems obvious right
isn't it obvious what makes professional
soccer players better than say average
soccer players isn't it obvious what
makes mathematicians really good at math
isn't it obvious what uh makes expert
doctors better than average doctors well
no it's a lot of times it's not obvious
until you know the the expert skills
that are really distinguishing experts
from say non-experts then it's very hard
or it's really impossible to create a
deliberate training program and to
illustrate this i'm just going to dip a
little bit into my own field which is
science education suppose the goal of
physics education
is to
walk students along the road to physics
expertise so we want them to
think the way a physicist thinks
right
well if that's the goal then
we can look and see what people do in
actual classes and the typical physics
class at the undergraduate level
involves lectures and labs and in
lectures
the teachers will talk for a little bit
about new concepts and new kinds of
problems and you get to learn these you
know procedural steps and you get to
learn some kind of deeper ideas
and then in the labs the labs tend to
reinforce the concepts that's taught
that are taught in the lecture so for
instance students will go in and they
will follow a recipe in the lab they'll
follow a series of steps to reach
a
conclusion that is
already known so for instance you might
have students
estimate the acceleration
due to gravity on earth students already
know what the right answer is and
they don't have any real decision-making
power as they go through these series of
steps because the lab is supposed to be
this kind of canonical
walk-through of what you would do so
that's what students are doing in their
classes basically
but if you look at what actual
physicists do when they're actually
doing physics experiments
if we're talking experimental physics
and we're not talking theoretical
physics
it looks completely different than what
students do in the lab so for instance
and i've written some of these steps
down so i don't forget them actual
physicists they have to establish the
overall research goal right they have to
decide what kind of data would be
convincing to other people they have to
determine the important variables and
decide how to measure those variables
let's see
they have to explore different research
designs potentially
they have to decide how to analyze their
data a lot of times they're analyzing
their data in multiple ways and they a
lot of times they need to iterate so
they perform an experiment it doesn't
quite work out the way they want it to
and then they go back and they
have to revisit some of these steps and
change things none of these things
do students do in lab so this is a case
where
the expert skills
and the actual practice that students
are getting
are not matching so students are not
going to develop the skills that we
presumably
want them to develop you have to know
what the expert practice is to move in
the right direction okay mistake number
three people use the wrong metrics now
this relates back to the first mistake
that we talked about earlier that i
talked about maybe you were talking at
the same time so we already talked about
why this 10 000 hours idea
doesn't really work or doesn't really
match with
the idea of deliberate practice but the
idea of putting in your time goes a
little bit deeper
than that of course it takes a lot of
time
to
become an expert in anything but time is
the wrong thing to focus on what you
want to focus on is practice feedback
cycles that's really the meat of
deliberate practice you have a
challenging practice that's really you
know pushing you and challenging you you
have expert feedback feedback that's
going to help you improve and then you
you have these further practice
opportunities and it's really this cycle
that is driving learning forward now
completing those cycles
takes time
reorganizing your brain which is what
learning is
that takes time
but focusing on the time is not going to
get you there as much as focusing on the
quality of your practice and ensuring
that you are focusing on those expert
skills so i have a question for you now
which is
was this video helpful at all
so if you can tell me if this was
confusing
or uh just didn't make any sense because
it was too darn abstract well you can
you can tell me in the comments and i
won't make any more videos like this and
if it was helpful you can tell me that
too so that i will make more videos
maybe on these kind of more abstract
ideas that's it i will
see you next time i appreciate
your
patronage
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