Practice, Practice, Practice

Anders Ericsson 1947-2020

Professor Ericsson discovered that what separated the violinists’ skill levels was not natural-born talent but the hours of practice they had logged since childhood. The future teachers registered around 4,000 hours, the very good violinists 8,000 and the elite performers more than 10,000. The same study was conducted with pianists, with similar results.

Published in 1993 in Psychological Review, the paper later formed the basis for the so-called 10,000-hour rule described in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling “Outliers” (2008), which holds that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a skill or field. Mr. Gladwell’s book popularized Professor Ericsson’s research, even as it irritated him because he felt it oversimplified his findings.

“Many people think what Anders discovered is that quantity of practice makes you a champion,” said Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Grit” (2016), a book about passion and perseverance. “That’s disastrously incomplete. It’s quantity and quality. One of his insights that I hope will have a lasting legacy is people need to work hard, but also smart.”

Professor Ericsson focused on what he called “deliberate practice,” which entails immediate feedback, clear goals and focus on technique. According to his research, the lack of deliberate practice explained why so many people reach only basic proficiency at something, whether it be a sport, pastime or profession, without ever attaining elite status. A Sunday golfer may whack balls around the course for years, but without incorporating such methods that player will never become the next Tiger Woods.

Over his career, Professor Ericsson studied conservatory musicians, chess masters, spelling bee champions, surgeons, ballerinas, runners, professional baseball players and others, seeking out subjects who demonstrated what he characterized as “objectively reproducible performance.” He peppered them with questions, instructed them to keep diaries and studied their routines in minute detail.

In doing so, Professor Ericsson spearheaded the field of performance studies and became “the expert on experts,” as he was often called.

Never once did he come across an elite performer who hadn’t put in the work, he told Larry King in 2016: “This idea that somebody more or less discovers, suddenly, that they’re extremely good at something, I’ve yet to find even a single example of that type of phenomenon.”

In providing a scientific framework for Yo-Yo Ma’s otherworldly cello playing or Michael Jordan’s superhuman basketball moves, Professor Ericsson removed some of the mystery around genius. He “democratized excellence,” Ms. Duckworth said. “Anders completely revolutionized our ideas of what’s possible for most people.”

Excerpted from The New York Times obituary 6 July 2020