The science of expertise vs. ‘talent’
Anders Ericsson is a psychologist who studies how people acquire expert skill and knowledge. It’s research known as the science of expertise. (Notice we say expertise and not talent—we’ll soon see why.) Basically, Ericsson is an expert on how to become an expert. In a book written with mathematician and science writer Robert Pool, he makes the following argument:
Developing expertise in just about any field requires deliberate practice, not innate talent.
Ericsson and Pool’s book is titled Peak: Secrets from The New Science of Expertise, and it’s an enlightening piece of scientific writing, especially if you’re interested in the psychology of intelligence, learning, and memory.
It’s also an entertaining book. In it, Ericsson and Pool include stories about all kinds of amazing and intelligent experts: chess masters, sports stars, and whiz kids with extraordinary memory. For example, Rajveer Meena memorized the first 70,000 digits of pi, which took him over nine hours to recite! My favorite story in the book, however, recaps the legend of Mozart.
Was Mozart ‘talented’ or skilled?
- First, it’s an overstatement to say Mozart composed at age six. Historians have shown that his early compositions are actually in his father’s handwriting. At best, it’s unclear that this work was entirely Mozart’s.
- Second, musicologists have shown that the piano concertos Mozart composed later, at age eleven, were based on sonatas written by other musicians. Mozart’s father probably assigned them to Mozart as composition exercises.
- Third, Mozart’s father was an advocate for teaching music to children. In fact, he wrote a book about teaching music and tested his ideas on other kids (including Mozart’s older sister). After refining his teaching methods, he taught Mozart how to play, analyze, and write music for many years.
Insights from the science of expertise: Practice (not ‘talent’) creates experts
Given these facts, Ericsson and Pool conclude: Mozart’s musical skill and expertise came from years of practice, not innate talent. As they argue in Peak: Secrets from The New Science of Expertise:
So we have no solid evidence that he did compose any significant music on his own before he was a teenager, and good reason to believe he did not. And when he did unequivocally begin to compose music that was original and sophisticated, he had been training to compose for a decade or so. In short, while there is no doubt that Mozart would become an extraordinary musician and composer, there is no evidence for—and plenty of evidence against—the claim that he was a prodigy whose accomplishments cannot be understood as the result of practice and must therefore be attributed to innate talent (Ericsson and Pool, 2016, p 214).
Hence, the moral of stories like Mozart’s, Ericsson and Pool write, is that we develop expertise through hard work and practice, not genes or innate talent:
while innate characteristics may influence performance among those who are just learning a new skill or ability, the degree and the effectiveness of training plays a more significant role in determining who excels among those who have worked to develop a skill. This is because, ultimately, the body’s and the brain’s neural ability to adapt in the face of challenges outweighs any genetic difference that may, in the beginning, give some people an advantage (p 238).
The science of expertise and deliberate practice
Nevertheless, Ericsson and Pool stress, to acquire expertise, you have to practice deliberately. In the science of expertise, deliberate practice means developing skills based on proven training or educational techniques. It’s deliberate because it does three things. First, it requires you to focus. Second, it tweaks your skills via targeted feedback. Third, it helps you fix your mistakes. As the authors summarize,
Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weakness, and figure out ways to address them (p 159).
The science of expertise and creativity
Another insight from Peak: Secrets from The New Science of Expertise concerns creativity. According to the Ericsson and Pool, deliberate practice is not only essential for developing expertise. It’s also an essential element of creativity:
Furthermore, research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly in science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place (p 205).
The science of expertise and motivation
Of course, deliberate practice is extremely hard (and sometimes unpleasant or uncomfortable) work! If you want to become a highly skilled and creative expert, undergoing a grueling learning process of trial and error is the only way to get there. So, according to the science of expertise, how does one stay motivated through it all?
First off, Ericsson and Pool suggest, set a schedule:
set aside a fixed time to practice that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions (p 169).
Next, don’t forget to be social, because hanging around like-minded friends will help you stay motivated:
One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors (p 174).
Real experts and deep work
Ericsson and Pool’s book holds particular relevance in the age of the Internet. After all, thanks to the web, pretty much anyone can go online and claim to be an expert in just about anything, regardless of whether or not they actually put in the time to develop credible skills. Fortunately, Ericsson and Pool’s insights from the science of expertise can help us distinguish real experts from fake ones.
At the end of the day, real experts are those who cultivate highly developed skill sets based on years of deliberate practice. In contrast, fake experts (or charlatans) have only surface-level knowledge, which is obviously not based on years of focusing, receiving feedback, and fixing mistakes.
On a related note, deliberate practice leads to what’s known as deep work, or distraction-free activities of intense concentration that push your cognitive capacities to the limit. This kind of work contrasts with shallow work, or undemanding, logistical-style tasks that don’t require as much concentration.
Now, in an age of digital distractions, getting caught up in the latter is easier than committing to the former. Still, it’s deliberate practice and deep work that allow us to become real experts.
Reference
Ericsson, Anders and Pool, Robert. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Boston: Mariner Books.
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