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Practice To Become Perfect
Part 1: What is an Expert?
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As some of you may know, my son, Lazarus, is an aspiring ballet dancer. At the age of five, he demonstrated an interest in dance, and my wife and I had him take some classes. Over time, he gravitated toward ballet and is now, at 11-years-old, working toward becoming a professional classical ballet dancer. As I’m writing this, he’s sitting next to me watching a ballet on You Tube. The kid is enthralled!
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The problem is he doesn’t have a ballet dancer’s lean body or high-arched feet. Lazarus is built more like a gymnast and looks more athletic than lean. He’s strong with broad shoulders and a muscular chest. However, because that is not what most of the classical ballet world looks for, it puts him at a disadvantage. Add to that his flat feet, and you’ve got an uphill battle.
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My wife and I try to support my son as much as possible with a positive attitude and supportively telling him to keep trying and never give up. However, this idea of working toward his goal is undermined by the apparent natural talent of some of the kids around him and those he watches on the Internet. If you’ve ever seen a top male ballet dancer, he seems to move, turn, and jump with the grace and strength of a deer. It’s as if he was built for ballet, as if he has an innate natural talent. The same is true about many endeavors. Think of sports, art, chess, or any of a number of careers in which it appears the person was built for that career.
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Luckily for all of us, it turns out that expertise and high-level performance are not innate but rather learned. Talent, my friends, doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. It turns out there is a rich body of research that shows talent is not the sine qua non of excellence.
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“Innate talent doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. It turns out there is a rich body of research that shows talent is not the sine qua non of excellence. ”
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So then what does matter?
Practice works, but...
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We’re not talking about just any kind of practice though, but rather a very specific kind. We’ll get to that in a second. First, it’s worth noting that there is a continuum of skills we all go through while working toward expertise. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition was proposed in the 1980s as an explanation of learning stages. This consists of the following stages1:
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Novice - Follows rules as given without reference to context.
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Competent - The ability to see beyond the basic rules and cope with real world situations.
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Proficient - Attains a more holistic view of the situation; able to prioritize details based on the desired goal.
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Expert - Has an intuitive grasp of the situation, moving beyond rules and guides, all based on a deep tacit understanding. Very high level of performance.
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Mastery – Technically a subsection of expertise, this occurs in moments of very high concentration where the expert performs at a level above his or her regular high level. This is essentially a moment where the subconscious takes over and the master performs without thought.
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For those of you who teach, I’m sure you’ll have little trouble thinking of examples of those in the earlier stages. I’m also sure that some of us have seen a few people who fall into the expert category. For me, the novice is that second to third year podiatry student just starting clinics with a basic understanding of medicine but no experience. A graduate of our podiatric schools would be expected to fall within the competent level, while residents should aim for the proficient level, and I love when my residents demonstrate glimpses of expertise. When I think of mastery, what comes to mind is the classical concert pianist who, while playing beautiful music, seems lost in the moment, almost as if someone else controls their action.
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What we’re really discussing here is expertise. Those of us who are experts at something can only be so lucky as to have those breakthrough moments of mastery. So, what does an expert really look like? What are the behaviors?
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According to one researcher in this field, true expertise demonstrates three characteristics2:
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Performance must be consistently superior to those of the expert’s peers.
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Real expertise leads to concrete results.
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The process can be replicated and measured.
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Deliberate Practice
If experts function above the level of all others, and you buy my argument that talent is not sufficient for expertise, then how does one become an expert? I also mentioned that simple practice, ie, repeating an action over and over, is not good enough. Instead, a different kind of practice is necessary, and that is called deliberate practice.
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“How does one become an expert?”
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Next week, we’ll discuss the specifics of deliberate practice, including what it is, how to do it, and what the research literature says to support its effectiveness.
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Until then, best wishes.
Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
PRESENT Practice Perfect Editor
[email protected] |
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