Psychology professor Anders Ericsson spent his lengthy career studying people who excel in their fields and the processes by which they achieve peak performance. After decades of research and thousands of interviews, Ericsson determined that top performance in almost any field requires practice. A lot of practice. But he also determined that experts don’t just practice a lot, they practice differently. They don’t just engage in rigorous or highly specific practice. No, top performers employ what Ericsson called "deliberate practice."
According to Ericsson, deliberate practice contains seven common traits:
- Stand on shoulders. Top performers learn all they can from people who have gone before them. They don’t waste time reinventing past innovations. They seek coaches and mentors who have the most experience and learn as much as possible from them.
- Go beyond comfort. The best experts don’t stop practicing when they become proficient. They push the boundaries of their proficiency and capability. They exercise to the point of exhaustion, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
- Set specific goals. Experts don’t just practice randomly. They are specific about what skills they are deficient in, what needs to be improved, and exactly how they can make changes.
- Full attention. Deliberate practice begins when your mind is fully engaged, and it ends when your mind starts to wander. To practice with full concentration is far more effective than practicing while daydreaming. Practicing while daydreaming is essentially a waste of time.
- Feedback. People cannot improve if they don’t collect direct feedback and employ the means for modifying behavior based on that feedback.
- Mental model. Great performers know what great performance looks like. They have seen it in others, or they have had leaders help them create the mental model. They know what kind of performance they want.
- Modify skills. Improvements in performance are almost always based on the layering of skills on top of previously acquired skills.
Of course, all seven traits of deliberate practice may not always be possible. Coaches or mentors can be scarce, for example. But research has shown that the more closely an expert follows the principles of deliberate practice, the better. Deliberate practice is faster and more reliable at creating expert performance than any known alternative.
