purposeful practice is the key to high performance. In other words,
top performers in complex fields like medicine, math and chess become
that way through repeated and focused practice that builds their
skills until their performance seems almost super-human — rather than
being born with highly exceptional skill.
Some readers have questioned the evidence, arguing that it is too
simplistic and that even with hard and dedicated practice, not
everyone could become Mozart. Perhaps. But at the very least, the
evidence presented in Matthew Syed's "Bounce" and elsewhere should
convince skeptics that the conventional wisdom significantly
exaggerates the relative role of innate and immutable ability in
complex tasks. (Notice the word "complex." Dedicated practice has
larger payoffs the more complex the task; in more straightforward
tasks, innate ability plays a larger role.)
Or to phrase it differently, it seems plausible that many more people
than commonly believed (but perhaps not all people!) have sufficient
innate skill to perform at world-class levels in complex fields with
sufficient practice; the problem is that they do not undertake the
necessary practice. Indeed, the examples we have of individuals who
put in 10,000 or more hours of dedicated practice and fail to achieve
stunning levels of performance is quite limited — because most people
are not willing to put in that time and effort.
A fundamental question thus becomes why some people are willing to
undertake repeated and focused practice and others aren't. It is not
sufficient merely to log 10,000 hours "practicing" a complex task; one
must sustain an intensity that seems beyond the reach of most people,
and that must come from loving the process. You can't just force
yourself to do it; you must somehow actually enjoy it.
So why can some people do this and others can't? And even if the end
result of purposeful practice is not always (or even usually)
performance at the gold-medal level, are there lessons from those
experiences that can be useful in earning the equivalent of the
bronze?
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that what she calls
"mindset" (in her 2006 book of that name) plays a crucial role in
sustaining the necessary type of intense practice — and that the right
mindset can be quite useful even if your goal is not to win the gold.
Dweck puts forward two mindsets — a fixed mindset, which occurs when
someone believes that personal qualities like intelligence are
immutable, and a growth mindset, which occurs when someone believes
that skills and characteristics can be cultivated through effort. In
the fixed mindset, success is showing you're talented; in the growth
mindset, it's developing yourself.
The evidence Dweck and others present, albeit only suggestive,
indicates that the growth mindset is what sustains purposeful practice
even when things are not going well (which is when most mortals give
up). In particular, Dweck shows dramatic differences in how people
with a growth mindset react to difficulty, assess their own
strengthens and weaknesses, and engage in skill-building but
challenging exercises relative to those with a fixed mindset.
Dweck also suggests that many ways in which we encourage students are
counterproductive. "You're so smart" makes the fixed mindset more
salient; "I'm proud of how hard you're working and that you enjoy the
challenge" makes the growth mindset more salient.
Benjamin Cardozo once wrote that "in the end, the great truth will
have been learned, that the quest is greater than that which is
sought, the effort finer than the prize, or rather, that the effort is
the prize . . . " If the evidence from Syed and Dweck is right — and
it seems that way to me — embracing the unconventional perspective
that the effort itself is the prize is ironically also more likely to
lead to the conventional "prize."
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