Can anyone become an expert at anything?

The phrase, “Practice makes perfect,” is pretty common.

You probably heard it constantly as a kid, while learning a new skill.

It is true that practice is important when adding a new skill or expertise to your repertoire.

However, one thing that you might not realize is that just practicing over and over, is not as good as giving your practice a higher quality.

As in many things, quality is wanted over (or along with) quantity to get that new skill down pat.

Some scientific research shows that innate talent does not control expert-level performance, but that expert-level practice leads to such a level of performance.

Deliberate Practice

This art of taking your practice to a higher quality level is called deliberate practice.

A paper entitled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” written by K. Anders Ericsson discusses this deliberate action of practicing a skill to gain a higher mastery of it.

Ericsson is a psychology professor and researcher at Florida State University, who has an interest in this art of deliberate practice and professional development, among other things.

Some may believe experts can perform differently than others because of their characteristics, that make them exceptional, in that their talent stems from natural abilities that have been heightened by practice to get to an expert-level.

Ericsson’s research determined that yes, these individuals may have this innate talent that helps them perform in such a way, but that expert status can also be learned/achieved through a deliberate effort.

This means that experts are not only those who are born with a certain talent/gift, but those that are willing to maintain a high level of practice, that will continue to improve their performance.

Implementing Deliberate Practice

You can implement deliberate practice into your own life, to start mastering some of the skills that you are working on.

The only goal when going into deliberate practice for yourself is to keep improving your performance.

It may or may not be something fun for you, but really it is about the effort that is put into it.

There are several components of deliberate practice that you need to know to start implementing this into your life.

Deliberate Practice Components

There are a few essential components to deliberate practice that will ensure that you are going to start improving your speed and the accuracy of your cognitive, motor, and perceptual tasks.

1. You must be highly motivated to put work into the task of improving your performance.
2. Practice activities should be designed based on your current level of knowledge and skill. They should always be challenging, but not too far beyond your current skills.
3. Immediate feedback and knowledge of your results should be received, in order to design future activities and address weak points right away.
4. You need to perform the activities a certain number of times and for a certain duration each day. An indicative amount is 4-5 hours of deliberate practice a day, with up to 60 minutes of practice without a break. In his book ‘Outliers,’ Malcolm Gladwell mentions that a total of around 10,000 hours of practice is needed to achieve expert status.

Feedback is essential because it will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses quickly, so that you don’t make the same mistakes over and over in your practice.

Just repeating the task will not help you continue to improve your performance, but you will need to keep changing what you are working on to improve your skills.

But there is a counter argument to consider as well. Research at Princeton University says that deliberate practice is not the key to achieve expert performance. They study also mentions that deliberate practice does not account for a huge difference in performance levels.

Overall, deliberate practice accounted for only about 12 percent of individual differences observed in performance.

The differences in performance vary based on domain.

“There is no doubt that deliberate practice is important, from both a statistical and a theoretical perspective. It is just less important than has been argued,” the Princeton researchers said.

Your Takeaway

So what should we make of all this?

It’s hard to say and as with many things in life, a balanced approach is best.

• Certainly use the concept of deliberate practice to improve your performance and skill level.
• However, don’t blindly fall for the notion that anyone can become an expert at anything, just by putting in 10,000 hours. That might lead to misguided/wasted efforts and frustration Age, ability, commitment and opportunity should be taken into account as well.

Experts are neither born nor made. It’s some combination of the two.