The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect

MANAGING PEOPLE

The Making of an Expert by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely

FROM THE JULY–AUGUST 2007 ISSUE

Thirty years ago, two Hungarian educators, László and Klara Polgár, decided to

challenge the popular assumption that women don’t succeed in areas requiring

spatial thinking, such as chess. They wanted to make a point about the power of

education. The Polgárs homeschooled their three daughters, and as part of their education

the girls started playing chess with their parents at a very young age. Their systematic

training and daily practice paid off. By 2000, all three daughters had been ranked in the top

ten female players in the world. The youngest, Judit, had become a grand master at age 15,

breaking the previous record for the youngest person to earn that title, held by Bobby Fischer,

by a month. Today Judit is one of the world’s top players and has defeated almost all the best

male players.

It’s not only assumptions about gender differences in expertise that have started to crumble.

Back in 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago,

published a landmark book, Developing Talent in Young People, which examined the critical

factors that contribute to talent. He took a deep retrospective look at the childhoods of 120

elite performers who had won international competitions or awards in fields ranging from

music and the arts to mathematics and neurology. Surprisingly, Bloom’s work found no early

indicators that could have predicted the virtuosos’ success. Subsequent research indicating

that there is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music,

sports, and medicine has borne out his findings. The only innate differences that turn out to

be significant—and they matter primarily in sports—are height and body size.

So what does correlate with success? One thing emerges very clearly from Bloom’s work: All

the superb performers he investigated had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted

teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their

developing years. Later research building on Bloom’s pioneering study revealed that the

amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved.

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not

born. These conclusions are based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional

performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible. Most of these

studies were compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,

published last year by Cambridge University Press and edited by K. Anders Ericsson, one of

the authors of this article. The 900-page-plus handbook includes contributions from more

than 100 leading scientists who have studied expertise and top performance in a wide variety

of domains: surgery, acting, chess, writing, computer programming, ballet, music, aviation,

firefighting, and many others.

The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the

impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest,

often painful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts. It will take you at least a decade to

achieve expertise, and you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate”

practice—practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and

comfort. You will need a well-informed coach not only to guide you through deliberate

practice but also to help you learn how to coach yourself. Above all, if you want to achieve top

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.

performance as a manager and a leader, you’ve got to forget the folklore about genius that

makes many people think they cannot take a scientific approach to developing expertise. We

are here to help you explode those myths.

Let’s begin our story with a little wine.

What Is an Expert?

In 1976, a fascinating event referred to as the “Judgment of Paris” took place. An English-

owned wineshop in Paris organized a blind tasting in which nine French wine experts rated

French and California wines—ten whites and ten reds. The results shocked the wine world:

California wines received the highest scores from the panel. Even more surprising, during the

tasting the experts often mistook the American wines for French wines and vice versa.

Two assumptions were challenged that day. The first was the hitherto unquestioned

superiority of French wines over American ones. But it was the challenge to the second—the

assumption that the judges genuinely possessed elite knowledge of wine—that was more

interesting and revolutionary. The tasting suggested that the alleged wine experts were no

more accurate in distinguishing wines under blind test conditions than regular wine drinkers

—a fact later confirmed by our laboratory tests.

Current research has revealed many other fields where there is no scientific evidence that

supposed expertise leads to superior performance. One study showed that psychotherapists

with advanced degrees and decades of experience aren’t reliably more successful in their

treatment of randomly assigned patients than novice therapists with just three months of

training are. There are even examples of expertise seeming to decline with experience. The

longer physicians have been out of training, for example, the less able they are to identify

unusual diseases of the lungs or heart. Because they encounter these illnesses so rarely,

doctors quickly forget their characteristic features and have difficulty diagnosing them.

Performance picks up only after the doctors undergo a refresher course.

How, then, can you tell when you’re dealing with a genuine expert? Real expertise must pass

three tests. First, it must lead to performance that is consistently superior to that of the

expert’s peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results. Brain surgeons, for example,

not only must be skillful with their scalpels but also must have successful outcomes with their

patients. A chess player must be able to win matches in tournaments. Finally, true expertise

can be replicated and measured in the lab. As the British scientist Lord Kelvin stated, “If you

can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

Things to Look Out for When Judging Expertise

Individual accounts of expertise are often unreliable. Anecdotes, selective recall, and one-off events all can present insufficient, often misleading, examples of expertise. There is a huge body of literature on false memories, self-serving biases, and recollections altered as a result of current beliefs or the passage of time. Reporting is not the same thing as research.

Many people are wrongly believed to possess expertise. Bear in mind that true expertise is demonstrated by measurable, consistently superior performance. Some supposed experts are superior only when it comes to explaining why they made errors. After the 1976 Judgment of Paris, for example, when California wines bested French wines in a blind tasting, the French wine “experts” argued that the results were an aberration and that the California reds in particular would never age as well as the famous French reds. (In 2006, the tasting of the reds was reenacted, and California came out on top again.) Had it not been for the objective results from the blind tastings, the French wine experts may never have been convinced of the quality of the American wines.

Intuition can lead you down the garden path. The idea that you can improve your performance by relaxing and “just trusting your gut” is popular. While it may be true that intuition is valuable in routine or familiar situations, informed intuition is the result of deliberate practice. You cannot consistently improve your ability to make decisions (or your intuition) without considerable practice, reflection, and analysis.

You don’t need a different putter. Many managers hope that they will suddenly improve performance by adopting new and better methods —just as golf players may think that they can lower their scores with a new and better club. But changing to a different putter may increase the variability of a golfer’s shot and thus hinder his or her ability to play well. In reality, the key to improving expertise is consistency and carefully controlled efforts.

Expertise is not captured by knowledge management systems.

Knowledge management systems rarely, if ever, deal with what psychologists call knowledge. They are repositories of images, documents, and routines: external data that people can view and interpret as they try to solve a problem or make a decision. There are no shortcuts to gaining true expertise.

Skill in some fields, such as sports, is easy to measure. Competitions are standardized so that

everyone competes in a similar environment. All competitors have the same start and finish

lines, so that everyone can agree on who came in first. That standardization permits

comparisons among individuals over time, and it’s certainly possible in business as well. In

the early days of Wal-Mart, for instance, Sam Walton arranged competitions among store

managers to identify those whose stores had the highest profitability. Each store in the

Nordstrom clothing chain posts rankings of its salespeople, based on their sales per hour, for

each pay period.

Nonetheless, it often can be difficult to measure expert performance—for example, in projects

that take months or even years to complete and to which dozens of individuals may

contribute. Expert leadership is similarly difficult to assess. Most leadership challenges are

highly complex and specific to a given company, which makes it hard to compare

performance across companies and situations. That doesn’t mean, though, that scientists

should throw up their hands and stop trying to measure performance. One methodology we

use to deal with these challenges is to take a representative situation and reproduce it in the

laboratory. For example, we present emergency room nurses with scenarios that simulate

life-threatening situations. Afterward, we compare the nurses’ responses in the lab with

actual outcomes in the real world. We have found that performance in simulations in

medicine, chess, and sports closely correlates with objective measurements of expert

performance, such as a chess player’s track record in winning matches.

Testing methodologies can be devised for creative professions such as art and writing, too.

Researchers have studied differences among individual visual artists, for instance, by having

them produce drawings of the same set of objects. With the artists’ identities concealed, these

drawings were evaluated by art judges, whose ratings clearly agreed on the artists’

proficiency, especially in regard to technical aspects of drawing. Other researchers have

designed objective tasks to measure the superior perceptual skills of artists without the help

of judges.

Practice Deliberately

To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may

appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades.

However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You

need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most

people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is

different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do

well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you

can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you are learning to play golf for the first time. In the early

phases, you try to understand the basic strokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes (like

driving the ball into another player). You practice on the putting green, hit balls at a driving

range, and play rounds with others who are most likely novices like you. In a surprisingly

short time (perhaps 50 hours), you will develop better control and your game will improve.

From then on, you will work on your skills by driving and putting more balls and engaging in

more games, until your strokes become automatic: You’ll think less about each shot and play

more from intuition. Your golf game now is a social outing, in which you occasionally

concentrate on your shot. From this point on, additional time on the course will not

substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades.

Why does this happen? You don’t improve because when you are playing a game, you get

only a single chance to make a shot from any given location. You don’t get to figure out how

you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same

location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to adjust

your playing style to improve your control. In fact, professionals often take multiple shots

from the same location when they train and when they check out a course before a

tournament.

This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing business and leadership

expertise. The classic example is the case method taught by many business schools, which

presents students with real-life situations that require action. Because the eventual outcomes

of those situations are known, the students can immediately judge the merits of their

proposed solutions. In this way, they can practice making decisions ten to 20 times a week.

War games serve a similar training function at military academies. Officers can analyze the

trainees’ responses in simulated combat and provide an instant evaluation. Such mock

military operations sharpen leadership skills with deliberate practice that lets trainees explore

uncharted areas.

Let’s take a closer look at how deliberate practice might work for leadership. You often hear

that a key element of leadership and management is charisma, which is true. Being a leader

frequently requires standing in front of your employees, your peers, or your board of

directors and attempting to convince them of one thing or another, especially in times of

crisis. A surprising number of executives believe that charisma is innate and cannot be

learned. Yet if they were acting in a play with the help of a director and a coach, most of them

would be able to come across as considerably more charismatic, especially over time. In fact,

working with a leading drama school, we have developed a set of acting exercises for

managers and leaders that are designed to increase their powers of charm and persuasion.

Executives who do these exercises have shown remarkable improvement. So charisma can be

learned through deliberate practice. Bear in mind that even Winston Churchill, one of the

most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, practiced his oratory style in front of a

mirror.

Genuine experts not only practice deliberately but also think deliberately. The golfer Ben

Hogan once explained, “While I am practicing I am also trying to develop my powers of

concentration. I never just walk up and hit the ball.” Hogan would decide in advance where

he wanted the ball to go and how to get it there. We actually track this kind of thought process

in our research. We present expert performers with a scenario and ask them to think aloud as

they work their way through it. Chess players, for example, will describe how they spend five

to ten minutes exploring all the possibilities for their next move, thinking through the

consequences of each and planning out the sequence of moves that might follow it. We’ve

observed that when a course of action doesn’t work out as expected, the expert players will

go back to their prior analysis to assess where they went wrong and how to avoid future

errors. They continually work to eliminate their weaknesses.

Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and

extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to

undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them. The famous

violinist Nathan Milstein wrote: “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with

concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day

long, I asked [my mentor] Professor Auer how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It

really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you

practice with your head, two hours is plenty.’”

It is interesting to note that across a wide range of experts, including athletes, novelists, and

musicians, very few appear to be able to engage in more than four or five hours of high

concentration and deliberate practice at a time. In fact, most expert teachers and scientists set

aside only a couple of hours a day, typically in the morning, for their most demanding mental

activities, such as writing about new ideas. While this may seem like a relatively small

investment, it is two hours a day more than most executives and managers devote to building

their skills, since the majority of their time is consumed by meetings and day-to-day

concerns. This difference adds up to some 700 hours more a year, or about 7,000 hours more

a decade. Think about what you could accomplish if you devoted two hours a day to

deliberate practice.

It’s very easy to neglect deliberate practice. Experts who reach a high level of performance

often find themselves responding automatically to specific situations and may come to rely

exclusively on their intuition. This leads to difficulties when they deal with atypical or rare

cases, because they’ve lost the ability to analyze a situation and work through the right

response. Experts may not recognize this creeping intuition bias, of course, because there is

no penalty until they encounter a situation in which a habitual response fails and maybe even

causes damage. Older professionals with a great deal of experience are particularly prone to

falling into this trap, but it’s certainly not inevitable. Research has shown that musicians over

60 years old who continue deliberate practice for about ten hours a week can match the speed

and technical skills of 20-year-old expert musicians when tested on their ability to play a

piece of unfamiliar music.

Moving outside your traditional comfort zone of achievement requires substantial motivation

and sacrifice, but it’s a necessary discipline. As the golf champion Sam Snead once put it, “It is

only human nature to want to practice what you can already do well, since it’s a hell of a lot

less work and a hell of a lot more fun.” Only when you can see that deliberate practice is the

most effective means to the desired end—becoming the best in your field—will you commit to

excellence. Snead, who died in 2002, held the record for winning the most PGA Tour events

and was famous for having one of the most beautiful swings in the sport. Deliberate practice

was a key to his success. “Practice puts brains in your muscles,” he said.

Take the Time You Need

By now it will be clear that it takes time to become an expert. Our research shows that even

the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training

before they win international competitions. In some fields the apprenticeship is longer: It

now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years of steady practice, on average, before they

succeed at the international level.

Though there are historical examples of people who attained an international level of

expertise at an early age, it’s also true that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

people could reach world-class levels more quickly. In most fields, the bar of performance has

risen steadily since that time. For instance, amateur marathon runners and high school

swimmers today frequently better the times of Olympic gold medalists from the early

twentieth century. Increasingly stiff competition now makes it almost impossible to beat the

ten-year rule. One notable exception, Bobby Fischer, did manage to become a chess grand

master in just nine years, but it is likely that he did so by spending more time practicing each

year.

Many people are naive about how long it takes to become an expert. Leo Tolstoy once

observed that people often told him they didn’t know whether or not they could write a novel

because they hadn’t tried—as if they only had to make a single attempt to discover their

natural ability to write. Similarly, the authors of many self-help books appear to assume that

their readers are essentially ready for success and simply need to take a few more easy steps

to overcome great hurdles. Popular lore is full of stories about unknown athletes, writers, and

artists who become famous overnight, seemingly because of innate talent—they’re “naturals,”

people say. However, when examining the developmental histories of experts, we unfailingly

discover that they spent a lot of time in training and preparation. Sam Snead, who’d been

called “the best natural player ever,” told Golf Digest, “People always said I had a natural

swing. They thought I wasn’t a hard worker. But when I was young, I’d play and practice all

day, then practice more at night by my car’s headlights. My hands bled. Nobody worked

harder at golf than I did.”

It takes time to become an expert. Even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years of intense training before they win international competitions.

Not only do you have to be prepared to invest time in becoming an expert, but you have to

start early—at least in some fields. Your ability to attain expert performance is clearly

constrained if you have fewer opportunities to engage in deliberate practice, and this is far

from a trivial constraint. Once, after giving a talk, K. Anders Ericsson was asked by a member

of the audience whether he or any other person could win an Olympic medal if he began

training at a mature age. Nowadays, Ericsson replied, it would be virtually impossible for

anyone to win an individual medal without a training history comparable with that of today’s

elite performers, nearly all of whom started very early. Many children simply do not get the

opportunity, for whatever reason, to work with the best teachers and to engage in the sort of

deliberate practice that they need to reach the Olympic level in a sport.

Find Coaches and Mentors

Arguably the most famous violin teacher of all time, Ivan Galamian, made the point that

budding maestros do not engage in deliberate practice spontaneously: “If we analyze the

development of the well-known artists, we see that in almost every case the success of their

entire career was dependent on the quality of their practicing. In practically every case, the

practicing was constantly supervised either by the teacher or an assistant to the teacher.”

Research on world-class performers has confirmed Galamian’s observation. It also has shown

that future experts need different kinds of teachers at different stages of their development.

In the beginning, most are coached by local teachers, people who can give generously of their

time and praise. Later on, however, it is essential that performers seek out more-advanced

teachers to keep improving their skills. Eventually, all top performers work closely with

teachers who have themselves reached international levels of achievement.

Having expert coaches makes a difference in a variety of ways. To start with, they can help

you accelerate your learning process. The thirteenth-century philosopher and scientist Roger

Bacon argued that it would be impossible to master mathematics in less than 30 years. And

yet today individuals can master frameworks as complex as calculus in their teens. The

difference is that scholars have since organized the material in such a way that it is much

more accessible. Students of mathematics no longer have to climb Everest by themselves;

they can follow a guide up a well-trodden path.

The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even

painful, feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated students who seek out such

feedback. They’re also skilled at understanding when and if a coach’s advice doesn’t work for

them. The elite performers we studied knew what they were doing right and concentrated on

what they were doing wrong. They deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would

challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance. The best coaches also

identify aspects of your performance that will need to be improved at your next level of skill.

If a coach pushes you too fast, too hard, you will only be frustrated and may even be tempted

to give up trying to improve at all.

Relying on a coach has its limits, however. Statistics show that radiologists correctly diagnose

breast cancer from X-rays about 70% of the time. Typically, young radiologists learn the skill

of interpreting X-rays by working alongside an “expert.” So it’s hardly surprising that the

success rate has stuck at 70% for a long time. Imagine how much better radiology might get if

radiologists practiced instead by making diagnostic judgments using X-rays in a library of old

verified cases, where they could immediately determine their accuracy. We’re seeing these

kinds of techniques used more often in training. There is an emerging market in elaborate

simulations that can give professionals, especially in medicine and aviation, a safe way to

deliberately practice with appropriate feedback.

Real experts seek out constructive, even painful feedback. They’re also skilled at understanding when and if a coach’s advice doesn’t work for them.

So what happens when you become an Olympic gold medalist, or an international chess

master, or a CEO? Ideally, as your expertise increased, your coach will have helped you

become more and more independent, so that you are able to set your own development

plans. Like good parents who encourage their children to leave the nest, good coaches help

their students learn how to rely on an “inner coach.” Self-coaching can be done in any field.

Expert surgeons, for example, are not concerned with a patient’s postoperative status alone.

They will study any unanticipated events that took place during the surgery, to try to figure

out how mistakes or misjudgments can be avoided in the future.

Benjamin Franklin provides one of the best examples of motivated self-coaching. When he

wanted to learn to write eloquently and persuasively, he began to study his favorite articles

from a popular British publication, the Spectator. Days after he’d read an article he

particularly enjoyed, he would try to reconstruct it from memory in his own words. Then he

would compare it with the original, so he could discover and correct his faults. He also

worked to improve his sense of language by translating the articles into rhyming verse and

then from verse back into prose. Similarly, famous painters sometimes attempt to reproduce

the paintings of other masters.

Anyone can apply these same methods on the job. Say you have someone in your company

who is a masterly communicator, and you learn that he is going to give a talk to a unit that

will be laying off workers. Sit down and write your own speech, and then compare his actual

speech with what you wrote. Observe the reactions to his talk and imagine what the reactions

would be to yours. Each time you can generate by yourself decisions, interactions, or

speeches that match those of people who excel, you move one step closer to reaching the

level of an expert performer.• • •

Before practice, opportunity, and luck can combine to create expertise, the would-be expert

needs to demythologize the achievement of top-level performance, because the notion that

genius is born, not made, is deeply ingrained. It’s perhaps most perfectly exemplified in the

person of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who is typically presented as a child prodigy with

exceptional innate musical genius. Nobody questions that Mozart’s achievements were

extraordinary compared with those of his contemporaries. What’s often forgotten, however,

is that his development was equally exceptional for his time. His musical tutelage started

before he was four years old, and his father, also a skilled composer, was a famous music

teacher and had written one of the first books on violin instruction. Like other world-class

performers, Mozart was not born an expert—he became one.

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.

K. Anders Ericsson ([email protected]) is the Conradi Eminent Scholar of Psychology at Florida State University,

in Tallahassee.

Michael J. Prietula ([email protected]) is a professor at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, in

Atlanta, and visiting research scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, Florida.

Edward T. Cokely ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for

Human Development, in Berlin.

Related Topics: ASSESSING PERFORMANCE | DEVELOPING EMPLOYEES

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