One Thought

Consider the case of Bob:

Bob decides to learn to play the guitar. He gets a guitar, and he practices and practices. A year passes. He is frustrated by his slow progress. Bob notices that his friends Fred and Joe are much better players. Fred has been playing since he was 10 years old, and his ability leaves Bob’s in the dust. Joe’s only been playing for half a year–less than Bob–but he’s already much better. Bob decides that Fred must be so good because he started at a young age–his young mind developed around the instrument. Bob sees Joe’s fast progress and decides that it must be due to talent. After all, why else would Joe progress so quickly? Bob decides that his quest is hopeless. He’s already 30, so starting at 10 like Fred is not an option. And his progress so far has been slow–unlike Joe’s–so he must lack talent. He gives up and goes back to watching TV–bitterly.

Bob’s experience is extremely common.  There is nothing special about playing guitar: I could substitute any non-trivial skill–writing, computer programming, badminton, swordfighting, etc.–and the story would be the same.  It’s hard to become proficient at a new skill.  Bob knows that, and you know that if you’ve ever tried something new.

But I want to know more than that.  What actually made Bob’s friends better guitar players?  Yes, it’s true that the obvious factors–starting at a young age, innate ability–play a role in skill development.  But they aren’t the only, or even the most important, factors.  Bob’s explanation is too simplistic.

I’m going to deconstruct the process of learning a new skill.  My goal is to uncover the factors that control progress.  As it turns out, some of the most important ones are under your control, which means you can exploit knowledge of them to accelerate your progress.  And while some of the factors are fairly obvious, others are not.

But first, a note: This isn’t a “believe-in-yourself” article.  There won’t be platitudes about pushing yourself to the edge or stories of 50-year-olds who realized their childhood dreams.  I’m trying to be more systematic than that.

The factors

What factors control progress in learning a new skill?  Let’s start with the ones you don’t control:

1. Your innate ability, or talent
2. Whether you started at a young age

People often get hung up on these ones.  Bob certainly did.  It’s common to get frustrated by things you can’t control, but it’s also useless.  Besides, the factors you can’t control aren’t the only factors, or even the most important ones.  Consider the ones you can control:

1. The time you spend practicing
2. The effectiveness of your practice
3. How you develop related skills

Though these could be subdivided further, this list should cover the important stuff.  I’ll explain the factors as I go.

Time

Proficiency requires time, and lots of it.  Our minds are slow to adapt.  They can be trained to behave differently, but not without prolonged, consistent practice.

You have to put in some minimum number of practice hours to become proficient in a skill.  Talent can, of course, accelerate progress, but there’s no replacement for raw practice hours.  Take a look at proficient violinists, for example: you won’t find any who haven’t put in thousands of hours of practice.

At least as far as practice hours are concerned, there’s probably a “talent ceiling.”  In other words, proficiency has a minimum, per-skill time requirement.  You won’t become proficient without this minimum amount of effort.  Of course, practice hours aren’t all equal.  Practice is generally most effective when it’s spread over the longest time frame possible.  All else being equal, 200 hours of practice are more effective when spread over 100 days than when spread over 2 weeks.  (And 200 days would likely be even better than 100.)

Much of the learning process happens in sleep and in reflection: information is committed to long-term memory, patterns and connections emerge, and muscle memory develops.  And sleep and reflection happen on their own schedule; they can’t be compressed as practice hours can.  Thus, there’s probably also a minimum time-frame requirement.  You won’t find proficient violinists who haven’t been practicing for years.

It’s generally best to spread a given number of practice hours over as as much time as possible.  A simple example: if you decide to study 10 hours for an exam, it’s better to spread those hours over 2 weeks than over 2 days.  You’ll reap the most benefit from sleep and reflection if you spread out the hours.  (Cramming is a waste of time–literally–compared to the alternative.)  Of course, at some point it doesn’t make sense to spread practice hours any further; I’ll discuss that more later.

Practice evenness is also important.  I’ve assumed in my examples so far that practice hours are spread out relatively evenly.  If you’re practicing 20 hours per week, it’s better to spread that time over 5 days than over 2.  You’ll get more benefit from sleep and reflection with an even spread.

Practice effectiveness

Practice hours aren’t all equal.  I’ve already shown how their distribution over time matters.  Practice effectiveness is also very important.  Though strategies differ across skills, some guidelines apply everywhere.  If you do the following, your practice should be quite effective:

• Eliminate distractions.  Don’t watch TV or try to do something else at the same time.  Solitude is usually best.
• Practice in chunks of time that are neither too small nor too large.  It’s hard to get much useful done in under 15 minutes, and fatigue will set in after some amount of time.  It’s usually unproductive to practice anything for more than, say, 6 hours or so at a time without taking a break.
• Be organized.  Decide what you’re going to do and (roughly) how long you’re going to do it before starting to practice.
• Isolate weak areas and focus on improving them.  It’s natural to avoid confronting weaknesses, but often they are what hold you back most.  If you’re a tennis player and your backhand is weak, develop exercises to isolate the motion and practice until it improves.
• Keep practice varied.  Don’t focus on just one part of the problem at a time; mix things up.  The more sub-skills you practice at the same time, the more benefit you get from sleep and reflection, which work on their own schedule.  For example: if you’re a musician, don’t fall into the common trap of thinking you’ll focus on technique now and songwriting later.
• Put everything together often.  If you’re a musician, perform and record music.  If you play a sport, play it.  Drills are great, but you need to do the thing you’re practicing to be good at.
• Enjoy yourself.  If your practice is all pain, it’s easy to burn out and quit–and that isn’t very effective, is it?

Practice is itself a skill, and an effective practicer will tend to progress more quickly in anything than an ineffective one.  That brings us to…

Development of related skills

It’s possible to start with a huge advantage when you take up a new skill.  I’m not talking about talent or innate ability; you aren’t born with this advantage.  Any skill can broken up into sub-skills, and separate skills can share sub-skills.  That means you’ll be advantaged in a new skill if you’ve already practiced a related skill–a skill with common sub-skills.

Let’s look at the guitar example.  Guitar playing has plenty of sub-skills; here are some of the big ones:

• Finger strength, dexterity, and independence
• Left- and right-hand coordination
• Rhythmic understanding and control
• Music theory knowledge
• Compositional and improvisational ability
• Development of the musical ear (the ability to translate heard melodies and chords to notes)

It’s obvious from this list that a person with experience on another instrument will have an advantage on guitar.  An experienced violinist, for example, will have a huge advantage, as violin shares all the sub-skills I listed.  It’s also possible to have an advantage at guitar without ever having picked up an instrument.  If you’ve listened to a lot of guitar music, you’ll probably have a slight advantage–you already have an implicit knowledge of what the instrument can do.  If you’ve spent a lot of time doing something that requires precise and coordinated hand movements like typing you probably also have a slight advantage.

Two general related skills will aid your progress at any skill: self-discipline and internalization of effective practice techniques.  If you’re self-disciplined, you stand to benefit most from the time-related factors: you’ll put in the hours and you’ll do so consistently over months and years, reaping the benefits of sleep and reflection.  If you’ve internalized effective practice techniques (like the ones I listed in the previous section), you’ll make the most of whatever time you spend practicing.  Most people learn self-discipline and effective practice through–what else?–practice.  You carry over any gains in these areas from a current skill to new ones.

Related skills don’t come for free, but they do provide a huge advantage.  This advantage is often mistaken for talent.  Speaking of which–

What about talent?

Talent, of course, does play a role in skill development.  However, its role may be less significant than you think.  Recent research has tended to downplay talent’s role (see, e.g., this article).

I do know that talent’s role is often exaggerated.  Talent is frequently used as a catch-all explanation for differences in ability.  Consider my initial example: if Bob’s friend Joe is making fast progress on the guitar, it’s easier to say “Joe must be talented” (as Bob did) than it is to examine Joe’s practice habits and related skills.  It’s possible–and maybe even likely–that Joe has no special talent.  He may simply be practicing more effectively than Bob.  Or he may have already played piano for 10 years, which would give him a big advantage on guitar.

The easy explanation here is also the lazy explanation.  Learning a new skill is hard.  If you think talent is necessary–and that you lack it–you’re excusing yourself from having to do the hard work.  If you suspect that someone is more talented than you, examine that person’s time commitment, practice habits, and related skills.  You may find that any difference in ability can be explained without mentioning talent.  And I suspect that if you adopt that person’s time commitment and practice habits, you’ll be happy with the result.

Yes, it’s possible that you lack talent.  But it’s also possible you possess latent talent that can only be brought out with effective practice.  Don’t use talent as an excuse to be lazy.

Putting the factors to use

I’ll finish with some advice on how to put the factors I discussed to use.  I’ve already covered the general strategies for practice time and effectiveness.  In summary: practice as much as you can, over as long a time frame as you can, and as evenly as you can.  Follow the effective practice guidelines.

A little more on time: While time is plentiful, consistent effort is, for most, rare.  There’s an enormous difference between doing something casually for a few years and not doing it at all.  Say I spend one hour per week writing in a journal.  After 3 years, I’ll have 150 hours of writing experience.  Even better, I’ll have benefited from 3 years of sleep and reflection.  For those 3 years, writing was on my mind–as I read books, I related them to my own writing; as I waited for the bus, I ruminated on my last piece; as I slept, my brain rewired itself to become better at writing–all for only one hour per week!

Back-burner projects like journal writing are a great way to develop new skills.  They take little time (by definition) but make very effective use of that time.  An ideal back-burner project is one that focuses on a skill that interests you but that is underdeveloped–something you like doing but aren’t that good at yet.

As you improve a back-burner skill, it becomes more realistic to devote more time to it.  It could even become profitable to do so.  The skills you develop on the back-burner may also prove useful in unexpected ways.  Say I’ve improved significantly as a writer after a few years of writing in my spare time.  Now, say I have a fantastic experience: I get lost in the forests of Guatemala and live among the giant anteaters for a year. Naturally, I’ll want to write a book about my experience, and thanks to my writing background, I can start almost immediately.

You never know how the skills you work on now will relate to what you want to do in the future.  Do a diverse set of things and manage your time effectively.  Don’t worry about talent.  Your work will pay off.