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Learning and growth

Anders Ericsson

Method over hours

Anders Ericsson (1993 · the violin study) — Method over hours.

Learning and growthModernMethod over hours

What actually happened?

Before the violinists there was a college student the papers call SF. Ericsson and William Chase sat him down several times a week and read him digits to repeat back. He started where everybody starts, at about seven. He was a distance runner, and began hearing strings of numbers as running times, so that 3492 became a near-record mile. Two years and a couple of hundred hours later he could hold eighty-two digits. His memory for letters stayed exactly average. Nothing general had improved. He had built one structure, and it fitted one thing.

Practising what you can do is rest

Fluency is pleasant and it is the feeling of not improving. Progress happens in the region where you keep failing, which looks inefficient from outside and is the only part that changes what you are capable of.

An hour of familiar pieces is an hour of enjoying yourself. What needed the hour was the passage you keep getting wrong.

Feedback outranks hours

Repetition without correction does not teach. It makes the wrong version automatic. Thirty years of driving produces a driver of exactly the same standard, because nobody has ever told him which turn was bad.

If nobody will say which paragraph they stopped reading, build the feedback yourself: put it away a week, then read it as a stranger.

Experts hold models, not memories

What a specialist owns is a mental representation of the field, built by failing against real problems. A chess player sees a position rather than pieces. Watching and memorising do not construct one.

Ten games played and gone back through afterwards teach more than a hundred watched.

Ten thousand hours was never the finding

The number was an average for one group in one field, and half that group had not reached it. He objected to it for the rest of his life, because it converts a demanding result into permission to simply wait.

Ten years in the job is not ten years of experience. It is often one year, repeated, under a longer title.

How do I use it today?

Split your last practice hour in two: the part you could already do, and the part you kept failing at. If the second part is small, that is your answer. Then find out what is going to tell you which attempts were wrong. If nothing is, build that before you add another hour.

Deep read

Practising what you can already do is restStay at the edge of what you cannot doThe best students spent their hours on the bars they could not playTen thousand hours is a misreadingHe spent years saying soTen years of experience can be one year lived ten times

Read alongside

Bruce LeeBoth refuse to count repetitions: Lee practises one kick ten thousand times, Ericsson says those ten thousand only count if something corrects them. Carol DweckShe works on how a failure gets read, he works on whether the task was hard enough to produce one. Haruki MurakamiBoth are about what to do daily over years: deliberate practice keeps you at the edge of what you cannot do, Murakami lowers the daily difficulty so you never break the chain. Cal NewportDeliberate practice requires intense concentration, and Newport sets out why that concentration has become so hard to get hold of today. Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiBoth keep you at the edge of your ability: Ericsson on how to practise so the ability grows, Csikszentmihalyi on why that position is the one that absorbs you.

Further

Bruce Lee Carol Dweck Lev Vygotsky Miyamoto Musashi Fukuzawa Yukichi Haruki Murakami Atomic Habits Cal Newport Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Lines to keep

Purposeful practice means working just past what you can do.

Feedback ranks above hours. Without it, repetition teaches nothing.

What an expert owns is a model of the field, not a memory.