Writes about becoming a master at what you practice. To master something and become the best at what we do, we need to work. We need to practice. Srinivas gives an example about how a band may perform 50 times for a tour, but they would practice 500 times, so they nail the performances. This is similar to athletes who practice and prepare for one big race.
Practice is a decision that we must make that helps us focus on the process.
Everybody wants to become a master, but few want to endure the pain, work, and process required for such an outcome. But it’s in the process where almost all the work actually happens. It’s where the majority of your time will be spent if you intend to master anything. Moments in the spotlight, accolades, and fame are fleeting. You might be big news for a week or month, and then everybody will be back to their lives. Public attention and admiration are a fickle currency, and to depend on them for our well-being and happiness, as Ryan Holiday once said to me, is “a recipe for profound disappointment.”
You practiced far more than you performed. The auditions, the concerts, and moments on stage were small fractions of a much larger process.
The only way you could succeed at this was to fall in love with the process, to practice every day. It’s a lesson that was drilled into me over and over in the 9 years I played the Tuba.
A band might play 50 shows as part of a tour. But they might rehearse more than 500 times to prepare for those 50 shows.
Olympians practice for something that occurs once every 4 years. And in some cases, the performance doesn’t last more than a few minutes.
In the NBA, NFL, or any major league sport, the time spent on practice far exceeds the amount of time spent playing the
It took consistent practice and more than a million words over the course of 5 years. I’ve practiced much more than I’ve performed. A writing practice allows me to write books trains to stay in shape for playing his sport. One of my friends asked me what I was planning to do the morning of my book launch. I said, “I’m going to do what I do every day. I’m going to wake up and write 1000 words. It’s business as usual.”
Practice, the decision to focus on the process instead of the prize is one of our greatest competitive advantages.
What accounts for the difference between an expert and amateur performance? Can anyone become an elite athlete or professional musician with enough practice, or is a native talent the deciding variable? These questions are examples of the age-old nature versus nurture debate.
In fact, the answer to this question has been the subject of considerable interest and research. A landmark 1993 study suggested that practice accounted for about 80% of the difference between elite and amateur performances.1
These findings led to the popular notion of the "10,000-hour rule," or the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Another major study, however, challenged the idea that anyone can become an expert with enough practice.2
How Much Does Practice Matter?
In that study, which appeared in Psychological Science in 2014, researchers analyzed the results of 88 different studies of practice and performance in numerous areas, including music, sports, education, professions, and games. All of these studies involved looking at people who were acquiring a new skill.
The researchers assessed factors including how much the people practiced and how good they eventually became at the new skill. Just how big of a role did practice really play? Not surprisingly, practicing a new skill does have an important role in the learning process.
However, the researchers found that practice alone only accounted for an average of 12% of individual differences in performance across various domains.
Practice accounted for 26% of the variance in games, 21% in music, and 18% in sports. But when it came to education and professions, practice made far less of a difference, with just 4% of the variance attributed to practice in the domain of education and less than 1% for professions.2
Other Contributing Factors
So if the practice is only one piece of the puzzle, what other factors also contribute to learning and skill development? A few things that might be important include your overall intelligence, how early you start learning a new skill, your memory capacity, and your inborn talent.
While the age-old saying suggests that practice makes perfect, researchers have found that practice alone doesn't necessarily succeed. Instead, experts suggest that the right kind of practice really matters when optimizing learning and increasing skills.2
While actual hands-on experience is often touted as the only way to learn a new skill, it leaves out another essential type of rehearsal—mental practice.
The mental practice involves imagining the procedures you must go through to perform a task. For example, a pianist might mentally practice a piece of music while an actor might mentally rehearse his role in a play.
One 2008 study found that medical students who combined mental practice with hands-on experience performed real surgery better than those who had only relied on physical practice and textbook reading.
Researchers have also found that the way a person practice influences how well a skill is learned. In a 2013 study, a research team was collected from more than 850,000 participants as the players learned new skills playing an online game called.
Players guide a neuron from one connection to the next by clicking on possible targets in the game. The purpose is to test how well participants perceive information and make decisions and how quickly they act.
What the researchers were interested in, however, was what kind of effect practice had on game performance. While some players practiced the same amount as others, they displayed much higher scores than the rest.
By analyzing the data, the researchers were able to see that these high-scoring players had spaced out their playing sessions more, suggesting that they spent more time investigating how the game worked than the lower-scoring players. These spaced-out explorations early on paid off in better performance later as the players became more skilled.
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