Grit (18 page)

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 can 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.

Several months before the final competition, spellers were mailed questionnaires. In addition to the Grit Scale, we asked them to complete a log in which they estimated the hours per week they spent on various spelling activities. We also asked them to rate how it felt to do these activities—in terms of enjoyment and effort—in the moment they were doing them.

That May, when the finals aired on ESPN, Anders Ericsson and I were watching.

Who took home the trophy? A thirteen-year-old girl named Kerry Close. It was her fifth consecutive year of competition, and from the log she completed in our study, I estimate she’d accumulated at least three thousand hours of spelling practice. Kerry’s triumphant last words at the microphone, articulated with confidence and a smile, were: “Ursprache. U-R-S-P-R-A-C-H-E. Ursprache.”

“I’m
studying as hard as I can for my last year—to go for it,” Kerry
told a journalist who’d been tracking her preparations. “I’m trying to learn words off the regular list, to learn more obscure words that have a chance of coming up.” The year before, the same journalist made the observation that Kerry “does more word study by herself. She works with numerous spelling study guides, makes lists of interesting words from her reading, and labors her way through the dictionary.”

When we analyzed our data, we first confirmed what I’d found the year before: grittier spellers practiced more than less gritty spellers. But the most important finding was that the
type
of practice mattered tremendously.
Deliberate practice predicted advancing to further rounds in final competition far better than any other kind of preparation.

When I share these findings with parents and students, I hasten to add that there are many, many learning
benefits to being quizzed. Shining a light on what you
think
you know but
actually
haven’t yet mastered is one. Indeed, winner Kerry Close later told me that she used quizzing to diagnose her weaknesses—to identify certain words or types of words she consistently misspelled so that she could focus her efforts on mastering them. In a sense, quizzing may have been a necessary prelude to doing more targeted, more efficient, deliberate practice.

What about reading for fun?
Nada
. Pretty much all of the kids in the National Spelling Bee are interested in language, but there wasn’t even a
hint
of a relationship between reading for fun, which they all enjoyed, and spelling prowess.

If you judge practice by how much it improves your skill, then deliberate practice has no rival. This lesson seemed to become increasingly clear to spellers as they spent more time competing. With each successive year of experience, they spent more time practicing deliberately. The same trend was even more pronounced in the month before
the actual finals, when the average speller was devoting
ten hours per week to deliberate practice.

If, however, you judge practice by what it
feels
like, you might
come to a different conclusion. On average, spellers rated deliberate practice as significantly
more effortful
, and significantly
less enjoyable
, than anything else they did to prepare for competition. In contrast, spellers experienced reading books for pleasure and playing word games like Scrabble as effortless and as enjoyable as “eating your favorite food.”

A vivid—if somewhat melodramatic—firsthand description of what deliberate practice can feel like comes from dancer Martha Graham: “Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are
daily small deaths.”

Not everyone would describe working outside their comfort zone in such extreme terms, but Ericsson generally finds that deliberate practice is
experienced as supremely effortful. As evidence that working at the far edge of our skills with complete concentration is exhausting, he points out that even world-class performers at the
peak
of their careers can only handle a maximum of one hour of deliberate practice before needing a break, and in total, can only do about three to five hours of deliberate practice per day.

It’s also relevant that many athletes and musicians take naps after their most intensive training sessions. Why? Rest and recovery may seem an obvious necessity for athletes. But nonathletes say much the same about their most intense exertions, suggesting that it is the mental work, as much as the physical stresses, that makes deliberate practice so strenuous. For instance, here’s how director Judd Apatow describes making a film: “Every day is an experiment. Every scene might not work and so you’re concentrating
—Is it working? Should I get an extra line for editing? What would I change if I had to, if I hated this in three months, why would I hate it?
And
you’re concentrating and you’re exhausted. . . . It’s pretty intense.”

And, finally, world-class performers who retire tend not to keep up nearly the same deliberate practice schedule. If practice was intrinsically pleasurable—enjoyable for its own sake—you’d expect them
to keep doing it.

The year after Ericsson and I began working together, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
^II
spent his summer at my university as a scholar in residence. Csikszentmihalyi is as eminent a psychologist as Ericsson, and both have devoted their careers to studying experts. But their accounts of world-class expertise couldn’t be more different.

For Csikszentmihalyi, the signature experience of experts is
flow
, a state of complete concentration “that leads to
a feeling of spontaneity.” Flow is performing at high levels of challenge and yet feeling “effortless,” like “you don’t have to think about it, you’re just doing it.”

For example, an orchestra conductor told Csikszentmihalyi:

You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist. . . . My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what’s happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment. And [the music]
just flows out by itself.

And a competitive figure skater gave this description of the flow state:

It was just one of those programs that clicked. I mean everything went right, everything felt good . . . it’s just such a rush, like you
could feel it could go on and on and on, like you don’t want it to stop because it’s going so well. It’s almost as though you don’t have to think, everything goes
automatically without thinking. . . .

Csikszentmihalyi has gathered similar first-person reports from hundreds of experts. In every field studied, optimal experience is described in similar terms.

Ericsson is skeptical that deliberate practice could ever feel as enjoyable as flow. In his view, “skilled people can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states (‘flow’ as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) during their performance. These states are, however,
incompatible with deliberate practice. . . .” Why? Because deliberate practice is carefully planned, and flow is spontaneous. Because deliberate practice requires working where challenges exceed skill, and flow is most commonly experienced when challenge and skill are in balance. And, most important, because deliberate practice is exceptionally effortful, and flow is, by definition, effortless.

Csikszentmihalyi has published a contrary opinion: “Researchers who study the development of talents have concluded that to learn any complex skill well takes about 10,000 hours of practice. . . . And the practice can be very boring and unpleasant. While this state of affairs is all too often true, the consequences are
by no means self-evident.” Csikszentmihalyi goes on to share a personal story that helps explain his perspective. In Hungary, where he grew up, on the tall wooden gate at the entrance to the local elementary school, hung a sign that read:
The roots of knowledge are bitter, but its fruits are sweet.
This always struck him as deeply untrue: “Even when the learning is hard,” he writes, “it is not bitter when you feel that it is worth having, that you can master it, that practicing what you learned will express who you are and help you
achieve what you desire.”