Here’s another example. Ever watch the Olympics? Ever listen to the commentators say things, in real time, like “Oh! That triple lutz was just a little short!” “That push-off was perfectly timed”? You sit there and wonder how these commentators can perceive such microscopic differences in the performance of one athlete versus another without watching the video playback in slow motion. I need that video playback. I am insensitive to those nuances. But an expert has the accumulated knowledge and skill to see what I, a beginner, cannot.
* * *
If you’d like to follow your passion but haven’t yet fostered one, you must begin at the beginning: discovery.
Ask yourself a few simple questions: What do I like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? What matters most to me? How do I enjoy spending my time? And, in contrast, what do I find absolutely unbearable? If you find it hard to answer these questions, try recalling your teen years, the stage of life at which vocational interests commonly sprout.
As soon as you have even a general direction in mind, you must trigger your nascent interests. Do this by going out into the world and doing something. To young graduates wringing their hands over what to do, I say, Experiment! Try! You’ll certainly learn more than if you don’t!
At this early stage of exploration, here are a few relevant rules of thumb taken from Will Shortz’s essay “How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”:
Begin with the answers you’re surest of and build from there. However ill-defined your interests, there are some things you know you’d hate doing for a living, and some things that seem more promising than others. That’s a start.
Don’t be afraid to guess. Like it or not, there’s a certain amount of trial and error inherent in the process of interest discovery. Unlike the answers to crossword puzzles, there isn’t just one thing you can do that might develop into a passion. There are many. You don’t have to find the “right” one, or even the “best” one—just a direction that feels good. It can also be difficult to know if something will be a good fit until you try it for a while.
Don’t be afraid to erase an answer that isn’t working out. At some point, you may choose to write your top-level goal in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil.
If, on the other hand, you already have a good sense of what you enjoy spending your time doing, it’s time to develop your interest. After discovery comes development.
Remember that interests must be triggered again and again and again. Find ways to make that happen. And have patience. The development of interests takes time. Keep asking questions, and let the answers to those questions lead you to more questions. Continue to dig. Seek out other people who share your interests. Sidle up to an encouraging mentor. Whatever your age, over time your role as a learner will become a more active and informed one. Over a period of years, your knowledge and expertise will grow, and along with it your confidence and curiosity to know more.
Finally, if you’ve been doing something you like for a few years and still wouldn’t quite call it a passion, see if you can deepen your interests. Since novelty is what your brain craves, you’ll be tempted to move on to something new, and that could be what makes the most sense. However, if you want to stay engaged for more than a few years in any endeavor, you’ll need to find a way to enjoy the nuances that only a true aficionado can appreciate. “The old in the new is what claims the attention,” said William James. “The old with a slightly new turn.”
In sum, the directive to follow your passion is not bad advice. But what may be even more useful is to understand how passions are fostered in the first place.
Chapter 7
PRACTICE
In one of my earliest research studies, I found that grittier kids at the National Spelling Bee practiced more than their less gritty competitors. These extra hours of practice, in turn, explained their superior performance in final competition.
This finding made a lot of sense. As a math teacher, I’d observed a huge range in effort among my students. Some kids spent, quite literally, zero minutes a week on their homework; others studied for hours a day. Considering all the studies showing that gritty people typically stick with their commitments longer than others, it seemed like the major advantage of grit was, simply, more time on task.
At the same time, I could think of a lot of people who’d racked up decades of experience in their jobs but nevertheless seemed to stagnate at a middling level of competence. I’m sure you can, too. Think about it. Do you know anyone who’s been doing something for a long, long time—maybe their entire professional lives—and yet the best you can say of their skill is that they’re pretty much okay and not bad enough to fire? As a colleague of mine likes to joke: some people get twenty years of experience, while others get one year of experience . . . twenty times in a row.
Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is: “continuous improvement.” A while back, the idea got some traction in American business culture when it was touted as the core principle behind Japan’s spectacularly efficient manufacturing economy. After interviewing dozens and dozens of grit paragons, I can tell you that they all exude kaizen. There are no exceptions.
Likewise, in her interviews with “mega successful” people, journalist Hester Lacey has noticed that all of them demonstrate a striking desire to excel beyond their already remarkable level of expertise: “An actor might say, ‘I may never play a role perfectly, but I want to do it as well as I possibly can. And in every role, I want to bring something new. I want to develop.’ A writer might say, ‘I want every book I do to be better than the last.’
“It’s a persistent desire to do better,” Hester explained. “It’s the opposite of being complacent. But it’s a positive state of mind, not a negative one. It’s not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.”
* * *
My interview research made me wonder whether grit is not just about quantity of time devoted to interests, but also quality of time. Not just more time on task, but also better time on task.
I started reading everything I could about how skills develop.
Soon enough, this led me to the doorstep of cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson. Ericsson has spent his career studying how experts acquire world-class skills. He’s studied Olympic athletes, chess grandmasters, renowned concert pianists, prima ballerinas, PGA golfers, Scrabble champions, and expert radiologists. The list goes on.
Put it this way: Ericsson is the world expert on world experts.
Below, I’ve drawn a graph that summarizes what Ericsson’s learned. If you track the development of internationally renowned performers, you invariably find that their skill improves gradually over years. As they get better, their rate of improvement slows. This turns out to be true for all of us. The more you know about your field, the slighter will be your improvement from one day to the next.
That there’s a learning curve for skill development isn’t surprising. But the timescale on which that development happens is. In one of Ericsson’s studies, the very best violinists at a German music academy accumulated about ten thousand hours of practice over ten years before achieving elite levels of expertise. By comparison, less accomplished students accumulated about half as much practice over the same period.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, the dancer Martha Graham declared, “It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer.” More than a century ago, psychologists studying telegraph operators observed that reaching complete fluency in Morse code was rare because of the “many years of hard apprenticeship” required. How many years? “Our evidence,” the researchers concluded, “is that it requires ten years to make a thoroughly seasoned press dispatcher.”
If you’ve read Ericsson’s original research, you know that ten thousand hours of practice spread over ten years is just a rough average. Some of the musicians he studied reached the high-water
mark of expertise before that, and some after. But there’s a good reason why “the ten-thousand-hour rule” and “the ten-year-rule” have gone viral. They give you a visceral sense of the scale of the required investment. Not a few hours, not dozens, not scores, not hundreds. Thousands and thousands of hours of practice over years and years and years.
* * *
The really crucial insight of Ericsson’s research, though, is not that experts log more hours of practice. Rather, it’s that experts practice differently. Unlike most of us, experts are logging thousands upon thousands of hours of what Ericsson calls deliberate practice.
I suspected Ericsson could provide answers as to why, if practice is so important, experience doesn’t always lead to excellence. So I decided to ask him about it, using myself as a prime example.
“Look, Professor Ericsson, I’ve been jogging about an hour a day, several days a week, since I was eighteen. And I’m not a second faster than I ever was. I’ve run for thousands of hours, and it doesn’t look like I’m anywhere close to making the Olympics.”
“That’s interesting,” he replied. “May I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure.”
“Do you have a specific goal for your training?”
“To be healthy? To fit into my jeans?”
“Ah, yes. But when you go for a run, do you have a target in terms of the pace you’d like to keep? Or a distance goal? In other words, is there a specific aspect of your running you’re trying to improve?”
“Um, no. I guess not.”
Then he asked what I thought about while I was running.
“Oh, you know, I listen to NPR. Sometimes I think about the things I need to get done that day. I might plan what to make for dinner.”
Then he verified that I wasn’t keeping track of my runs in any systematic way. No diary of my pace, or my distance, or the routes I took, my ending heart rate, or how many intervals I’d sprinted instead of jogged. Why would I need to do that? There was no variety to my routine. Every run was like the last.
“I assume you don’t have a coach?”
I laughed.
“Ah,” he purred. “I think I understand. You aren’t improving because you’re not doing deliberate practice.”
* * *
This is how experts practice:
First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance. Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet. Olympic gold medal swimmer Rowdy Gaines, for example, said, “At every practice, I would try to beat myself. If my coach gave me ten 100s one day and asked me to hold 1:15, then the next day when he gave me ten 100s, I’d try to hold 1:14.”I Virtuoso violist Roberto Díaz describes “working to find your Achilles’ heel—the specific aspect of the music that needs problem solving.”
Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal. Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody’s watching. Basketball great Kevin Durant has said, “I probably spend 70 percent of my time by myself, working on my game, just trying to fine-tune every single piece of my game.” Likewise, the amount of time musicians devote to practicing alone is a much better predictor of how quickly they develop than time spent practicing with other musicians.
As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong—so they can fix it—than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.
Here’s how Ulrik Christensen learned this lesson. Christensen is a physician-turned-entrepreneur whose adaptive learning software is designed around the principles of deliberate practice. One of his early projects was a virtual reality game that teaches doctors the proper handling of urgent, complex cardiac conditions such as strokes and heart attacks. During one training session, he found himself alone with a physician who seemed unable to finish.
“I couldn’t figure it out,” Christensen told me. “This guy wasn’t stupid, but after hours of detailed feedback on what he’d done wrong, he still wasn’t getting the right answers. Everyone else had gone home, and there we were, stuck.” Exasperated, Christensen stopped him just before he got the next round of feedback. “Time-out,” Christensen said. “What you just did, treating this patient, is there anything you did just now where you were in doubt? Anything where you weren’t sure it met the new guidelines?”
The doctor thought a moment and then listed decisions he’d been certain about; then he named a few choices about which he was less sure. In other words, he reflected for a moment on what he knew and what he didn’t.
Christensen nodded, listening, and when the doctor was finished, he let him see the computer screen with the same feedback that had been displayed a dozen times before. On the next trial, the doctor executed the procedure correctly.
And after feedback, then what?
Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless. Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.
In the story of the doctor who finally took a moment to think about what he was doing, Christensen kept the practice going until the doctor was doing the procedure without any errors at all. After four consecutive, perfectly correct repetitions, Christensen said, “Good job. We’re done with this for the day.”
And . . . then what? What follows mastery of a stretch goal?
Then experts start all over again with a new stretch goal.
One by one, these subtle refinements add up to dazzling mastery.
* * *
Deliberate practice was first studied in chess players and then in musicians and athletes. If you’re not a chess player, musician, or athlete, you might be wondering whether the general principles of deliberate practice apply to you.
Without hesitation, I can tell you the answer: YES. Even the most complex and creative of human abilities can be broken down into its component skills, each of which can be practiced, practiced, practiced.
For example, deliberate practice is how Benjamin Franklin described improving his writing. In his autobiography, Franklin describes collecting the very best essays in his favorite magazine, the Spectator. He read and reread them, taking notes, and then he hid the originals in a drawer. Next, Franklin rewrote the essays. “Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Like the modern-day experts Ericsson studies, Franklin zeroed in on specific weaknesses and drilled them relentlessly. For instance, to improve his ability to make logical arguments, Franklin would jumble his notes on essays and then attempt to put them in a sensible order: “This was to teach me method in the arrangement of the thoughts.” Likewise, to enhance his command of language, Franklin practiced, over and over again, the translation of prose into poetry and poetry into prose.
Franklin’s witty aphorisms make it hard to believe he wasn’t a “natural” writer from the very start. But perhaps we should let Franklin himself have the last word on the matter: There are no gains without pains.
But what if you’re not a writer, either?
If you’re in business, listen to what management guru Peter Drucker said after a lifetime of advising CEOs. Effective management “demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things. It consists of a small number of practices. . . .”
If you’re a surgeon, consider what Atul Gawande has said: “People often assume that you have to have great hands to become a surgeon, but it’s not true.” What’s most important, Gawande said, is “practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end.”
If you want to break a world record, as magician David Blaine did when he held his breath underwater for seventeen minutes, watch his TED talk. At the very end, the man who ca
n control every aspect of his physiology breaks down, sobbing: “As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic, whether I’m holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It’s practice, it’s training, and it’s”—he sobs—“experimenting”—he sobs again—“while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that’s what magic is to me. . . .”
* * *
After getting to know each other a little better, Ericsson and I designed a study to discover how, exactly, gritty kids triumph at the National Spelling Bee.
I already knew that grittier spellers accumulated more practice and performed better than their less gritty competitors. What I didn’t know was whether deliberate practice was driving these skill improvements, and whether it was grit that enabled spellers to do more of it.
With the help of Ericsson’s students, we began by interviewing spelling bee finalists to learn what sorts of things they did to prepare for competition. In parallel, we pored through published books on the topic, including How to Spell Like a Champ by the bee’s own national director, Paige Kimble.
We learned that there are basically three types of activities recommended by experienced spellers, their parents, and coaches: First, reading for pleasure and playing word games like Scrabble. Second, getting quizzed by another person or a computer program. Third, unassisted and solitary spelling practice, including memorizing new words from the dictionary, reviewing words in a spelling notebook, and committing to memory Latin, Greek, and other word origins. Only this third category of activity met the criteria for deliberate practice.
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