Make Yourself an Expert
October 23rd, 2006 by Richard CockrumThis week’s Personal Development Carnival was hosted at The Balanced Life Center. One of the articles submitted was No Substitute for Hard Work, from the Grow With Chess Blog. This article speaks about the importance of practice in learning any skill, including chess. I recommend you read it, along with other of the articles in the carnival.
Nature - nurture arguments have been around for a long time, and chances are they’ll be around long after you and I are gone. One interesting battleground is the fight between whether talent or practice in a field is more important.
There are certainly minimal requirements to become an expert in a field. Generally you’ll need to meet any minimal physical requirements, but beyond that, research ( see here and here) is showing that how much time you spend practicing a skill far outweighs any amount of inborn talent, if there is such a thing, in showing whether you will learn a skill. In fact, we’re talking about 10,000 hours of practice being needed to become a world-class expert in your chosen field. K. Anders Ericsson calls this the ten year rule. It takes about ten years of lengthy practice to become an expert in a field.
This isn’t any sort of practice, though. It isn’t just repetition. It is was Ericsson calls effortful study. You have to be continually stretching yourself to reach beyond your current limits, not doing the same thing over and over and over. This is amazingly similar to one of the requirements for working in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has called the flow. To be able to flow, to derive optimal enjoyment from what you are doing, you need to be working on something that is challenging, but not beyond your limits. It has to stretch your skills, without being beyond them.
You may be 10. You may be 80. At any point in your life you can find out what you enjoy, and become an expert in it. All it takes is practice.
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October 24th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Rick, what you say is so true. Becoming an ‘expert’, that is, true mastery, takes time and hard work. In the style of martial arts I study, becoming shodan (1st degree black belt) requires a minimum of three years, and the average is closer to five, for those who aspire to it. Godan, the fifth degree and the highest awarded, is rarely accomplished in less than 20 years.
The terms ‘expert’ and ‘mastery’ don’t mean what they used to, eh?
October 24th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Hey Steve! No, they don’t mean what they used to. We tend to reach a minimal level that is needed for something, and think we are experts at it, forgetting that we just have a base to begin mastering it. It reminds me of Jerry Pournelles’s advice to aspiring writer’s - “First write a million words.”
Or think after working on something for a few hours and not getting the hang of it, that we don’t have the ‘talent’ for it and so give up.
October 24th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Hi Rick,
I saw you at Liz’s party & decided to drop over to see what you have here. Love the total concept.
This post reminds me of something someone said. Too bad I don’t remember who or exactly what. It’s along the lines of filling buckets with mud, becoming a master, then filling more buckets with mud. Can’t be much clearer than that, huh?
October 25th, 2006 at 5:57 am
Hey Carolyn! Welcome in! I hope my writing was clearer than mud.
It’s just my little corner of the blogosphere where I talk about some of the things that help me, and others I hope, to make life a little better.
You just have to remember to get a little better at filling the bucket each time, instead of doing it the same way over, and over, and over, …
October 25th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Good morning, Rick,
Your writing is perfect.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:22 am
I wish it really were, but thank you for saying it is.
Pennsylvania is starting to be covered by SOBs. I know of at leat three, now - you, Joe at Working at Home on the Internet, and me. Maybe it’s something in the water.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Yeah, no doubt it’s in the water. This is from my profile at Blogger: I’ve lived in Pennsylvania, US, all my life. The water here is good, so I stay.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
Hey Rick,
I just found the quote I was looking for last week.
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water,
after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
~~Wu Li
Don’t know where I got the idea it had something to do with buckets of mud.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
I get it.
I’ve seen the quote. It’s always hit me as a perfect image of enlightenment. The world hasn’t changed, but you have.
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:42 pm
[…] In How to Make Yourself an Expert I talked about the amount of time in practice it takes to become a world-class expert in a field. It takes about 10,000 hours of practice to reach that level of proficiency, or around 10 years in normal circumstances. This works out to about 3 hours of practice a day, or 20 - 25 hours a week. […]
July 12th, 2007 at 10:39 am
[…] Welcome to episode 23 of the Shards of Consciousness podcast. This episode is based on an article written in October, 2006, called Make Yourself an Expert. […]
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:05 am
[…] hinders your personal growth and your development of skills. No matter what your natural talent, becoming an expert in a field requires years of practice on progressively more difficult tasks. If you flit from one […]