Chapter 4 - The Gold Standard

Studies

• Most factors music students had identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labour-intensive and not fun

• The best music students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance

• The best violin students has spent significantly more time doing solitary practice

• Preteens and teens who could maintain and even increase their heavy practice schedule during these years ended up in the best violinist players

• For ballet dancers, there was a strong relationship between the reported amount of time spent on practice and how high a dancer has risen in the world of ballet

Key Terms

• Memory palace: map of physical locations that someone can visit in a very specific order

General Information

• Deliberate practice is the gold standard

• You need objective ways to measure performance

• The field must be competitive enough that performers have strong incentive to practice and improve

• The field targeted by deliberate practice must be well established, with the relevant skills having been developed over decades or centuries

• The field must have a subset of performers who also serve as teachers and coaches

• Improvement is often hard and not enjoyable while working for it

• Nobody develops extraordinary abilities without putting in tremendous amounts of practice

• Deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve their performance

• Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there

• Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations

• Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically

• While digit-memory training isn’t deliberate practice in its strictest sense, it captures the most important element: learning from the best predecessors

• Subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases

• In many fields, people who are widely accepted as experts are actually not expert performers when judged by objective criteria

• Wine experts don’t even agree with themselves

• Licenses psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training

• In many fields, it is the quality of mental representations that sets apart the best from the rest

• The rule that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields is wrong

• The number of hours of practice necessary to become a master varies from field to field

• We have found non limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice