Deliberate Practice and Its Discontents

K. Anders Ericsson spent his career studying experts. Chess grandmasters, concert pianists, surgeons, elite athletes — he wanted to know what they did differently from the merely good. The framework he developed became famous in popular form as the ten thousand hours rule, mainly through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Ericsson himself was uncomfortable with the popular version. He spent the rest of his life trying to correct it.

The popular version says: spend ten thousand hours on a thing, and you will become an expert. This is almost the opposite of what Ericsson actually found.

What he found was that hours alone do almost nothing. The amateur tennis player who has played for thirty years is, in many cases, no better than the amateur tennis player who has played for five. The same is true of most musicians, most chess players, most golfers, most cooks. Time, on its own, produces only the modest fluency required to perform an activity comfortably at the level you already perform it. After that, returns flatten. Most adults plateau in their hobbies and many of their professions, and they plateau early.

What separates experts is not the number of hours but the kind of practice. Ericsson called the kind that worked deliberate practice. It has three features.

First, it happens at the edge of your current ability. Comfortable practice produces no growth. Deliberate practice is, by design, frustrating. You are trying to do something you cannot yet do.

Second, it includes immediate, accurate feedback. You attempt, you see the result, you correct, you attempt again. Without feedback, the practice cannot be deliberate, because you cannot tell what is working and what is not.

Third, it requires full attention. Deliberate practice is exhausting in a particular way — not physically, but mentally. Most studies find that elite performers can sustain only a few hours of it per day, even at peak fitness. The rest of the day is recovery, lower-intensity work, and life.

This framework is depressing and clarifying in roughly equal measure.

It is depressing because most learning that adults do is not deliberate practice. The forty-year-old guitar player practices what he already knows. The senior engineer writes code in the language he has been writing in for fifteen years. The middle manager has the same meeting again. None of this produces growth. It produces continued employment, which is a different thing.

It is clarifying because it explains a phenomenon that mystifies many ambitious people: why working hard does not always make them better. Working hard at things you can already do is not the same as working hard at things you can almost do. The latter is rare and uncomfortable. Most people who feel busy are doing the former.

There is a structural problem here. Many professions do not afford the feedback that deliberate practice requires. A chess move is right or wrong; an opening can be analyzed against a database; a defeated player can replay the game and find the mistake. A managerial decision plays out over months, against thousands of other factors, and may never produce a clear verdict. Ericsson noticed this. He was careful to say that his framework applied cleanly to fields with well-defined success criteria and tight feedback loops, and only approximately to others.

The practical implication is that anyone trying to get measurably better at something should ask, first, what their feedback loop is. If the loop is long, slow, or noisy, expertise will be hard to develop in any disciplined way. If the loop can be shortened — by getting a coach, by recording oneself, by deliberately attempting harder problems with answers available — improvement becomes possible. If the loop cannot be shortened, the honest answer is that you will improve mostly by accident, and probably less than you imagine.