Highlights
id979260524
perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift—and, as nearly as we can tell, pretty much everyone is born with that gift.
id979260525
the clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of “gifted” people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.
id979260526
we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones. In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential.
El talento no es innato, se desarrolla.
id979260527
The question then becomes, How do we do it? How do we take advantage of this gift and build abilities in our area of choice? Much of my research over the past several decades has been devoted to answering this question—that is, to identify and understand in detail the best ways to improve performance in a given activity. In short, I have been asking, What works and what doesn’t and why?
La ciencia de la expertise.
id979260528
Over the past few years a number of books have argued that people have been overestimating the value of innate talent and underestimating the value of such things as opportunity, motivation, and effort. I cannot disagree with this, and it is certainly important to let people know that they can improve—and improve a lot—with practice, or else they are unlikely to be motivated to even try. But sometimes these books leave the impression that heartfelt desire and hard work alone will lead to improved performance—“ Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there”—and this is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.
id979260529
The details about this sort of practice are drawn from a relatively new area of psychology that can be best described as “the science of expertise.” This new field seeks to understand the abilities of “expert performers,” that is, people who are among the best in the world at what they do, who have reached the very peak of performance,
id979260530
More than two decades ago, after studying expert performers from a wide range of fields, my colleagues and I came to realize that no matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles. We named this universal approach “deliberate practice.” Today deliberate practice remains the gold standard for anyone in any field who wishes to take advantage of the gift of adaptability in order to build new skills and abilities, and it is the main concern of this book.
Práctica deliberada.
id979260531
Because gaining expertise is largely a matter of improving one’s mental processes (including, in some fields, the mental processes that control body movements), and because physical changes such as increasing strength, flexibility, and endurance are already reasonably well understood, this book’s focus will be mostly on the mental side of expert performance, although there is certainly a significant physical component to expertise in sports and other athletic endeavors.
id979260532
While the principles of deliberate practice were discovered by studying expert performers, the principles themselves can be used by anyone who wants to improve at anything, even if just a little bit.
id979260533
What the second half of the twentieth century did see was a steady increase in the amount of time that people in different areas devoted to training, combined with a growing sophistication of training techniques.
id979260534
I have devoted my career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those people who have used practice to become among the best in the world at what they do. And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these “expert performers,” to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.
Los mismos principios aplican al desarrollo de habilidades en distintas prácticas y disciplinas.
id979260535
the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible. If you wish to develop a truly effective training method for anything—creating world-class gymnasts, for instance, or even something like teaching doctors to perform laparoscopic
La razón? Están involucrados los mismos principios del aprendizaje y el funcionamiento de la mente/cuerpo.
id979260536
There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named “deliberate practice” back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.
id979260537
there is one very important thing to understand here: once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five, that a teacher who has been teaching for twenty years must be better than one who has been teaching for five. But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.
id979260538
Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call “naive practice,”
los tres niveles.
id979260539
Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Our hypothetical music student would have been much more successful with a practice goal something like this: “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row.” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success.
La meta debe traducirse en un problema específico al cual se le atribuye contribuir al no logro. Esto permite abordar el mecanismo asociado en la práctica.
id979260540
Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
id979260541
a key insight from the study of effective practice: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention. Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong. In Oare’s example the music student got belated feedback at school with a C on the performance test, but there seems to have been no feedback during practice—no one listening and pointing out mistakes, with the student seemingly clueless about whether there were errors in the practice. (“ How many times did you play it correctly?” “Umm, I dunno … Once or twice …”)
id979260543
También el feedback, el cual tiene estrecha relación con el aislamiento del mecanismo: debe ser específico, pertinente, relevante y oportuno.
id979260542
This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
id979260544
The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them.
id979260545
The famous violin teacher Dorothy DeLay once described the time that one of her students came to her to help increase his speed on a particular piece that he was scheduled to play at a music festival. He could not play it fast enough, he told her. How fast, she asked, would you like to play it? He answered that he wanted to play it as fast as Itzhak Perlman, the world-famous violinist. So DeLay first got a recording of Perlman playing the piece and timed it. Then she set a metronome to a slow speed and had her student play the piece at that pace, which was well within his abilities. She had him play it again and again, each time speeding up the metronome a bit. And each time he nailed it. Finally, after he had gone through the piece flawlessly once more, she showed him the setting on the metronome: He had actually played it faster than Perlman.
id979260546
Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles—points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through. In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve.
Buena ilustración de un programa de carga progresiva bien ejecutado.
id979260547
while it is always possible to keep going and keep improving, it is not always easy. Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is hard work, and it is generally not fun. So the issue of motivation inevitably comes up:
Parte de la motivación que empuja contra la resistencia ofrecida por el entrenamiento es la constatación de la mejora progresiva: otro motivo para ser muy preciso con el desafío a abordar.
id979260548
Why did he push himself so hard to improve? From talking to him, I believe that a large part of it was that once he started to see improvement after the first few sessions, he really enjoyed seeing his memory scores go up.
id979260549
One other factor was that Steve liked to challenge himself.
La importancia de tener experiencia de práctica sistemática para “suavizar” nuevos desafíos.
id979260550
Furthermore, from years of running he knew what it meant to train regularly, week after week, month after month, and it seems unlikely that the task of working on his memory three times a week for an hour each time seemed particularly daunting, given that he regularly went for three-hour runs.
id979260551
When he heard the digits 907, for instance, he conceptualized them as a pretty good two-mile time—9: 07, or 9 minutes, 7 seconds—and they were no longer random numbers that he had to commit to short-term memory but rather something he was already familiar with.
Hay algo involucrado en este fenómeno asociado a la técnica del memory palace que habla mucho sobre la importancia del anclar el objeto de aprendizaje en la propia experiencia y matriz conceptual.
id979260552
There is a growing body of evidence that both the structure and the function of the brain change in response to various sorts of mental training, in much the same way as your muscles and cardiovascular system respond to physical training. With the help of such brain-imaging techniques as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), neuroscientists have begun to study how the brains of people with particular skills differ from the brains of people without those skills and to explore which sorts of training produce which types of changes. Although there is still a tremendous amount to learn in this area, we already know enough to have a clear idea of how purposeful practice and deliberate practice work to increase both our physical and mental capabilities and make it possible to do things that we never could before.
La metáfora de la “musculatura cerebral” tiene bastante de literal.
id979260553
Maguire’s study, which was published in 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic evidence we have that the human brain grows and changes in response to intense training. Furthermore, the clear implication of her study is that the extra neurons and other tissue in the posterior hippocampi of the licensed cabbies underlie their increased navigational capabilities. You can think about the posterior hippocampi of a London taxi driver as the neural equivalent of the massively developed arms and shoulders of a male gymnast. Years of work on the rings and pommel horse and parallel bars and floor exercises have built muscles that are exquisitely suited for the sorts of movements he performs on those different pieces of apparatus—and, indeed, that make it possible for him to do all sorts of gymnastics moves that were simply not within his reach when he began training. The posterior hippocampi of the taxi drivers are equally “bulked up,” but with brain tissue, not muscle fiber.
id979260554
This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination. But there is a catch: once the compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the physical activity that had previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.
Relación entre homeostasis, sobrecarga progresiva y mejora.
id979260555
In the brain, the greater the challenge, the greater the changes—up to a point. Recent studies have shown that learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned. On the other hand, pushing too hard for too long can lead to burnout and ineffective learning. The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.
En qué medida lo que aplica para el cuerpo aplica también para el cerebro.
id979260556
The fact that the human brain and body respond to challenges by developing new abilities underlies the effectiveness of purposeful and deliberate practice.
id979260557
The details of exactly what happens to which region of the brain can be daunting to anyone who is not trained in neuroscience, but the big picture is clear: musical training modifies the structure and function of the brain in various ways that result in an increased capacity for playing music. In other words, the most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they are actually increasing your ability to play. With such practice you are modifying the parts of the brain you use when playing music and, in a sense, increasing your own musical “talent.”
id979260559
Although the specific details vary from skill to skill, the overall pattern is consistent: Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges. This is the basic message that should be taken away from the research on the effects of training on the brain,
El deporte desarrolla capacidades cerebrales (falacia mereológica?)
id979260560
The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in, from writing a report to driving a car, from teaching a class to running an organization, from selling houses to performing brain surgery. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or white matter or to rewire entire sections in the way that an aspiring London taxi driver or violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.
Un buen relato para entusiasmar con el desarroo de capacidades.
id979260561
With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.