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