How to practice for 10,000 hours

(Source: Fan in the wild)

With the popularity of the bestseller "Alien", the slogan "Practicing 10,000 hours of genius" is now known. There may still be a lot of people who believe that the genius of the not-so-born will have innate mystical ability, but scientists have reached a consensus through a lot of research, that is, all the top masters are trained. Not only that, but the scientific progress of recent years, people may have a unified theory about how to become a genius for the first time.

The good news is that in addition to certain sporting events that have special requirements for natural height and body size, there is no mystical innate quality, meaning that everyone is likely to become a top player. As early as more than 20 years ago, Benjamin Bloom, an educator at the University of Chicago, studied 120 elites from music to mathematics and found nothing special in their infancy. Later generations of research have proved that in many areas, even IQ is not the same as a person can reach the level of expertise.

A Hungarian psychologist has long believed that any person can be trained to be a master in any field, as long as the method is appropriate. To prove this, he chose a project that traditionally women were not good at, namely chess. As a result, he and his wife have trained their three daughters to be Masters of Chess world, the famous Polgar three sisters. The experiment even proves that even if you are not interested in this field, you can be trained as a master in this field, because one of the three sisters does not like chess very much.

The bad news is that it takes a long time to be a master. It takes 10 years to practice three hours a day and 10,000 hours to complete, but this is the minimum required to reach the world level. Statistics show that for musicians, the world-class level requires training time of 15-25 years. But the key is not the time of the practice, but the method of practice.

How does a genius come into being? Chinese Traditional thinking more emphasis on a "bitter" word, winter practice Sanjiu Summer Practice dog, even the head cantilever cone thorn stocks. and modern living conditions are getting better, people are beginning to emphasize a "love" word, said interest is the best teacher, emphasizing the fun and fun, "Harvard Girl" parents have written books, introduce their children how to play into the famous school.

Many inspirational stories and popular success books most love to emphasize seems to be "epiphany", that a person is not successful because he did not understand, he did not realize the true self! It seems that once a person has an epiphany about who he really is, he is very simple to be a genius in the field that should belong to him. A salesperson may think that he is actually a novelist, and a doctor may think that he is actually a painter-the only problem is that they have never written novels or painted pictures-but they think they are only a step away from "real self", and if they try, they explode into genius.

All of these personal experiences and inspirational stories about success are unscientific. Suppose a successful person has done 100 things, including attending the speech contest, dress with personality, listening to English songs, favorite color is green and so on, he will be very complacent to write these 100 things in the autobiography, and may also add the influence of the girlfriend. But there are only four things that can really play a decisive role, the problem is that he and the reader do not know which four pieces.

Scientists don't believe in inspirational stories, they only trust research. In the past twenty or thirty years, psychologists have systematically researched the training methods of beginners, general experts and world-class masters in various industries, including athletes, musicians, chess players, doctors, mathematicians, super-memory players, and so on, trying to find commonalities among them. Their research is even meticulous to accurately record every little thing that every student of a conservatory of music does each day, and how much time it takes to do everything, parents and family environment to compare exactly what makes those musical geniuses stand out.

The work is now ripe. In 2006, a 900-page book, the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert performance, was published. This is a landmark academic work on "How to become a genius", which leads directly to the emergence of a series of bestsellers, including Gladwell's "Alien", Geoff Colvin Talent is overrated, and Daniel Coyle's Talent C Ode and so on. The scientists have not only proved that the master is practiced, but also by examining the generality of the best training methods in various fields, summed up a set of unified practice methods, this is called "deliberate practice" (deliberate practice).

Over the years, training methods have been progressing. For example, if a general student uses the normal training method six years to reach the level, another student to use the new training method three years can be achieved, then we can say that the new training method "Effective index" is 200%. Statistics show that Mozart's training at the time, his effective index is 130%. The 20th century genius may not be famous for Mozart, but its training level can reach 300% to 500%! The 13th century philosopher Bacon used to think that no one could have mastered mathematics in less than 30 years, and now students have learned much more math and improved their teaching methods in their teens. In fact, we have done better in all areas today than in the past, the world record of sports has been constantly broken, and the artists ' skills have never been imagined in the past.

Another embodiment of the importance of training methods is the "genius" of the crowd, such as there was a period of Russia to women's tennis, South Korea to women's hockey, not to mention China's absolute advantage of table tennis. Further, even if your country is traditionally not good at this project, as long as a coach fumbling with the science training method, he can bring out a generation of peerless masters, such as China figure skating coach Yao bin. People often feel that China more than 1 billion people actually can not find 11 football genius-if genius is born, then more than 1 billion people must be enough to produce a lot of genius, but genius is practiced out, and China lacks an effective practice environment, the population is no more than the small European countries.

Deliberate practice

For the first time, the concept of "deliberate practice" was introduced by the University of Florida psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. The core assumption of this practice is that the level of expertise is gradually practiced, and the key to effective progress is to find a series of small tasks for the trainees to complete in a sequential manner. These small tasks must be the trainees do not do, but just can learn to master. Completing this exercise requires the trainees to be highly focused, which is quite different from the routine or the fun-colored exercises. The theory of "deliberate practice" has now been widely accepted, and we can summarize its characteristics.

1. Practice in the "learning area" only

The scientists looked at the training of the figure skaters and found that in the same practice time, the average athlete preferred to practise what he had already mastered, while the top athletes practiced a variety of high-difficulty jumps. The average enthusiast plays golf purely to enjoy the course of playing, while professional athletes concentrate on playing the ball in various extreme uncomfortable positions. The real practice is not to complete the exercise, the essence of practice is to continue to do their own bad things.

Psychologists divide people's knowledge and skills into three circular areas that are nested in layers: The inner layer is the "comfort zone", a skill we have mastered, and the "Panic Zone" is the first, the skills we cannot learn at the moment, and the "learning area" in between. Only practice in the learning area, a person may progress. Effective practice tasks must be accurate in the trainee's "learning area", with a high degree of pertinence. In many cases it is necessary to have a good teacher or coach and to find out where we need to improve most from an outsider's perspective.

Just practicing in the learning area is a very strong requirement. The general school classroom often has dozens of people according to the same progress study knowledge, this kind of study is not targeted. The same content, for some students is the comfort zone there is no need to practice, and for some students is panic zone. The teaching of science must be individualized, small-class, or even one-to-teach. True master training is not so much a teacher as teaching students, but rather a master apprentice.

Once you have learned something, you should not continue to spend time on it, you should immediately move on to the next difficulty. Long-term use of this method of training will certainly do more. A 2004 study shows that college students ' academic performance is not directly related to the total time they devote to learning, and the key is learning methods.

2. A lot of repetitive training.

Never going to the meeting, the secret is repetition. California has a "shy clinic" (the shyness Clinic), specifically to help those who do not dare to speak to the opposite sex to overcome shyness. Psychologists at this clinic do not believe in any suggestive therapy or childhood memories, and they believe in practice. They think it is not the thing that makes people shy, but the point we make about things. How to treat the fear of female disease? The practice is to design a variety of different difficult occasions for dialogue training. The first is in the room collective dialogue, role-playing. Then go straight to the street to find a strange beauty and ask for a date. The most difficult thing is to intentionally embarrass yourself in public, such as going to the supermarket and dropping a watermelon on the ground.

This is the essence of the MBA program, which repeats the infrequent, high-difficulty events. A student at a business school may face 20 real business cases a week, and students first study how to make decisions, propose solutions, and finally give practical results and review them. The best way to learn business decisions is not to watch your boss make two decisions every month, but to make 20 simulation decisions every week. The Military Academy's simulation battle, pilots on the computer simulation of a variety of rare aerial hazards, including Churchill to practice speaking in the mirror, are repetitive training.

In sports and music training, more emphasis on "chunking" exercise. First you have to go through the whole movement or the whole song and see what the experts are doing. Then break it down into small chunks, and learn to master them one piece at a A. In this kind of training must be slow, only slow down to perceive the internal structure of the skills, notice their own mistakes. At one of the best violin schools in the United States, there is even a requirement to prohibit students from playing a piece of music consistently, stating that if someone hears what you're pulling, it means you're not practicing correctly. Professional sports training is often about technical action, not the game itself. A high-level American football player has only 1% of the time to play in the team, and the rest is all about basic training.

Conversely, without such prior repetition, a person is often overwhelmed by the uncommon events. Statistics show that doctors who have worked for years have been less likely to diagnose rare illnesses by reading X-rays than students who have just graduated from medical school-because they rarely encounter such cases, and what they have learned in medical school has long been forgotten. The best way to do this is to regularly let the doctors focus on the old X-rays of the past, rather than expect to meet them at work.

3. Continue to receive effective feedback.

What is the greatest use of preaching, tuition, doubts, teachers and coaches? Perhaps for the average person, the primary school teacher's greatest role is to inspire his interest in learning, taught him something, there have been preaching teaching doubts. And the real masters have a strong ability to learn, for them, teachers and coaches the most important role is to provide immediate feedback.

A good and bad action, it is best to have a coach at any time to point out, I must be able to understand the practice results. The practice of not seeing results equals not practicing: If you just deal with something, you will not be good, and you will not care about the bad. In a way, deliberate practice is a mistake-centred exercise. Practitioners must be extremely sensitive to errors, and will feel very uncomfortable if they find themselves wrong and have been practicing until they are corrected.

From a training point of view, what is a really good coach like? John Wooden is the most legendary university basketball coach in the United States, who led the UCLA team to win the NCAA Championship 10 times in 12 years. To get wooden's coaching tips, two psychologists have watched his training sessions and even recorded every instruction he gave to players. The results show that among the 2,326 instructions recorded, 6.9% is praise, 6.6% is dissatisfaction, and 75% is purely information, that is, what to do and how to do. His most common approach is syllogism: Demonstrate the correct action, perform the wrong action again, and then demonstrate the correct action.

Unlike the layman's imagination, the best coaches never deliver any passionate speeches, or even lectures, and speak no more than 20 seconds. They only give the students very specific instant feedback. All training is planned in advance and even involves teaching athletes how to tie their shoes. They seem to have a strange ability to know what the learner is thinking, even if it is the first time to see what the students need most technically. They are absolutely individualized and continuously provide highly targeted and specific guidance.

The highest level of feedback is self-coaching. Master work will be a spectator perspective on their own, every day there are very specific small goals, very sensitive to their own mistakes, and constantly seek to improve.

4. High concentration of spirit.

Deliberate practice does not have the concept of "entertaining". Once a famous violinist said that if you practice your fingers, you can practice all day, but if you are practicing your brain, you can practice two hours a day. A master's practice is up to 1 to 1.5 hours each time, up to 4-5 hours per day. No one gets more. The average female fan may think Beckham's star is cute, and what they may not know is that few players can finish Beckham's training because it's too hard.

Scientists have been investigating a conservatory of music. They put all the violin students here into good (in the future mainly as music teachers), better, and best (future performers) three groups. The three groups of students are the same in many ways, such as starting from around 8 years of age, and even now the total amount of music-related activities (classes, studies, exercises) are the same in 51 hours each week.

The researchers found that all students understood the truth: the music class that really determines your level is not the whole class, but practice alone:
-The best two group students have an average of 24 hours of exercise per week, while the third group has only 9 hours.
-they all think that practicing alone is the most difficult and least fun activity.
-The best two groups of students use the morning's later and early in the afternoon to practice alone, when they are still awake, while the third group uses the late afternoon to practice alone, when they are already very sleepy.
-The best two groups not only practice much, but also sleep a lot. They have more naps.

So what is the difference between the first two groups? It is the total time of the student's history practice. By the age of 18, the best group, the institute averaged a total of 7,410 hours, while the second group was 5,301 hours, and the third group was 3,420 hours. The second group of people is now working as hard as the best group, but it's already late. Visible to be a world-class master, must be put into training as early as possible, this is why talented musicians are from a very small time began to practice.

The learning principle of the human brain

Modern neuroscience and cognitive science believe that almost no skill is born. Even if the recognition of simple objects, grasping things over these simple actions, is also the result of the baby learning. When a person is born, it is impossible to foresee what skills will be needed in the future, and it is impossible for a gene to program all the skills in advance in a genetic way, so that the memory of the brain is wasted. The best way to do this is not to preset any skills, but to provide a ability to learn a variety of skills, which is the ingenuity of the human brain. The genetic approach is to pre-set some basic reactions and sensations to stimuli, such as seeing something tasty that we are hungry for, and so on. These basic reactions require less nerve mobilization. But for higher-level skills, such as playing music, the need to coordinate a lot of nerves must be learned by the day after.

Any one of the human skills is a combination of electrical pulse signals transmitted by a series of nerve fibres in the brain. Anatomy suggests that people with different skills have very different neural structures, especially in areas where the taxi driver's brain identifies directions. In other words, unlike computers, people's mastery of skills is achieved at the level of the brain hardware.

And recently, a faction of scientists believe that myelin is the key to skills training, its role is like rubber to wrap the wire, the nerve fibers are wrapped up, by preventing the leakage of electrical pulses to make the signal stronger, faster and more accurate. No matter what we practice, we are practicing myelin in our brains as if we were arranging a bunch of tangled wires into cables. Until the 2000, when new technology allowed scientists to directly observe the myelin in the living brain, the role of myelin was discovered, and it was not the first time in academic journals to be noted until 2006. Scientists believe that myelin is the brain of the highway, improve signal transmission speed, and can reduce the delay time by 30 times times, a total speed of 3,000 times times, can even control the speed, want to slow down.

The human brain distributes a large number of "free" myelin, which observe the signal emission and composition of nerve fibers, which use more of the nerve fibers, they used to wrap this section of the line, so that the signal transmission in the line faster, forming a highway. That's why practice is so important.

The myelin theory can explain a lot of things. For example, why do children often make mistakes? Their nervous systems are all in, and they know right and wrong, just need time to build up a high-speed network of myelin. Why is it not easy to change habits once they are formed? Because the so-called "habit", in fact, is a combination of nerve fiber cable in the form of "long" in the brain, myelin once the nerve wrap, it will not automatically disperse-the only way to change the habit is to form a new habit. Why do young people learn things fast? For although the myelin is growing in human life, young people grow fastest. The most radical theory is that the most significant difference between a man and a monkey is not the number of neurons in the brain, but the human myelin is 20% more than a monkey! Anatomy shows that Einstein's brain has an average number of neurons, but he has more cells that produce myelin.

Who wants to practice for 10,000 hours?

After watching the pianist Lang's biography, many people may wonder if the child should really be allowed to undergo such training. In fact, top athletes are the children of poor families. Do not practice this 10,000 hours, must become a master, but the problem is to consider the opportunity to practice this 10,000 hours may not be successful.

This is the role of interest. If there is any success factor that scientists cannot explain with training, it is interest. Some children seem to be naturally interested in a certain field. Interest does not necessarily mean that he can do well, even if not interested as long as willing to practice, can also practice. The most important role of interest is to make people willing to practise in this field.

In any case, deliberate practice is a scientific method, and it is worthwhile for us to apply it to our daily work. Obviously most of the things we do in peacetime do not conform to the characteristics of deliberate practice, which may be why most people are not able to become world-class masters. Genius comes from deliberate practice.

How to practice for 10,000 hours