فصل 15

PART V

SMART PRACTICE

15

THE MYTH OF 10,000 HOURS

The Iditarod may be the world’s most grueling race: sled dogs compete over a gauntlet of more than eleven hundred miles of Arctic ice, running for more than a week. Typically the dogs and musher go all day and rest at night, or go all night with rest during the day. Susan Butcher reinvented the Iditarod by running and resting alternately in four-to-six-hour chunks throughout the night and day instead of twelve hours on and twelve off. It was a risky innovation—for one, it gave her less chance to sleep (while her dogs slept she would have to prepare for the next leg). But she and her sled dogs had practiced that way, and from the first time she tried, Butcher just knew in her heart the all-out regimen could work. Butcher went on to win the Iditarod four times. She died from leukemia (which had claimed her brother in her childhood) a decade after her racing days. In her honor, the state of Alaska proclaimed the first day of the Iditarod to be Susan Butcher Day. Butcher, a veterinary technician, was a leader in humane treatment of her dogs, making year-round care and training the standard for mush teams rather than an exception. She was attuned to the biological limits of what her dogs could withstand. Poor treatment of dogs has been the main criticism of the race. Butcher trained her dogs much as a marathoner prepares for a race, realizing that rest is as important as running. “For Susan, dog care was the number-one priority,” her husband, David Monson, told me. “She regarded her dogs as year-round professional athletes, giving them the highest-quality veterinary care, training, and nutrition.” Then there was her personal preparation. “Most people can’t imagine the complexity of going on a thousand-mile expedition in the ice and snow that might last for up to fourteen days,” Monson told me. “The temperature varies from forty above to sixty below; you’re at the mercy of blizzards. You’ve got to bring repair kits, and food and medicine for yourself and your dogs, and make the right strategic decisions. It’s like preparing for an expedition up Everest. “For instance, there are ninety or a hundred miles between checkpoints where you’ve cached food and supplies for the next segment, and you need a pound of dog food for each dog every day. But if the next area might have a blizzard, you need to take extra food and shelter for the dogs. And that adds weight.” Butcher had to make such life-and-death decisions—plus stay vigilant and attentive—while getting just one or two hours of sleep a day. While the dogs rested as much as they ran, during their breaks she would be busy caring for and feeding the dogs and herself, and making any needed repairs. “Keeping your attention up during a highly exhausting and stressful time means you have to be methodical and well practiced, so you make the right decisions under duress,” Monson says. She spent hours and hours fine-tuning her mushing skills, studying the subtleties of snow and ice, and bonding with her dogs. But it was her self-discipline that was most prominent in her training regimen. “She was really able to focus,” said Joe Runyan, another Iditarod winner. “And that’s what made her really good at the sport.” The “10,000-hour rule”—that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field—has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops.1 The problem: it’s only half true. If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one. No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”2 “You have to tweak the system by pushing,” he adds, “allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.” Apart from sports like basketball or football that favor physical traits such as height and body size, says Ericsson, almost anyone can achieve the highest levels of performance with smart practice. Iditarod mushers at first dismissed Susan Butcher’s chances of ever winning the race. “In those days,” David Monson recalls, “the Iditarod was considered a man’s cowboy-type sport—rough-and-tumble. You did it because you were tough. Other racers said Susan could never win—she babies her dogs. Then when she won year after year, people realized her dogs were better suited than others for the rigors of the race. That fundamentally changed how folks prepare for and run in the race now.” Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is “deliberate practice,” where an expert coach (essentially what Susan Butcher was for her dogs) takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration. Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference. For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists—the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours—Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular aspect of their performance that a master teacher identified.3 Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them—which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye—and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks. The feedback matters and the concentration does, too—not just the hours. Learning how to improve any skill requires top-down focus. Neuroplasticity, the strengthening of old brain circuits and building of new ones for a skill we are practicing, requires our paying attention: When practice occurs while we are focusing elsewhere, the brain does not rewire the relevant circuitry for that particular routine. Daydreaming defeats practice; those of us who browse TV while working out will never reach the top ranks. Paying full attention seems to boost the mind’s processing speed, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or create neural networks for what we are practicing. At least at first. But as you master how to execute the new routine, repeated practice transfers control of that skill from the top-down system for intentional focus to bottom-up circuits that eventually make its execution effortless. At that point you don’t need to think about it—you can do the routine well enough on automatic.4 And this is where amateurs and experts part ways. Amateurs are content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about fifty hours of training—whether in skiing or driving—people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible. The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau. “The expert performer,” says Ericsson, “actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current level of performance.” Moreover, “The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed and refined their performance.”5 Susan Butcher was training herself and her sled dogs to operate as a high-performing unit. Throughout the year she and her dogs would go through a twenty-four-hour cycle of running and resting periods, then take two days off—rather than risk her dogs slowing down from being over-raced at the then-standard twelve hours. By the time they got to the Iditarod, she and her dogs were at peak conditioning. Focused attention, like a strained muscle, gets fatigued. Ericsson finds world-class competitors—whether weight lifters, pianists, or a dog sled team—tend to limit arduous practice to about four hours a day. Rest and restoring physical and mental energy get built into their training regimen. They seek to push themselves and their bodies to the max, but not so much that their focus gets diminished in the practice session. Optimal practice maintains optimal concentration. ATTENTION CHUNKS

When the Dalai Lama speaks to large audiences on his world tours, often at his side will be Thupten Jinpa, his main English-language interpreter. Jinpa listens with rapt attention while His Holiness speaks in Tibetan; he only occasionally jots a quick note. Then when there’s a pause, Jinpa repeats what was said in English, in his elegant Oxbridge accent.6 Those times that I’ve lectured abroad with the help of an interpreter, I’ve been told to speak only a few sentences before pausing for the interpreter to repeat my words in the local language. Otherwise there’s too much to remember. But I happened to be present when this Tibetan duo was in front of a crowd of thousands, and the Dalai Lama seemed to be speaking in longer and longer chunks before pausing for the translation to English. At least once he went on in Tibetan for a full fifteen minutes before pausing. It seemed an impossibly long passage for any interpreter to track. After the Dalai Lama finished, Jinpa was silent for several moments, as the audience stirred with palpable consternation at the memory challenge he faced. Then Jinpa started his translation, and he, too, went on for fifteen minutes—without hesitation or even a pause. It was a breathtaking performance, one that moved the audience to applaud. What’s the secret? When I asked Jinpa, he attributed his memory strengths to training he got as a young monk in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the south of India, where he was required to memorize long texts. “It starts when you’re just eight or nine,” he told me. “We tackle texts in classical Tibetan, which we don’t yet understand—it would be like memorizing Latin for a European monk. We memorize by the sound. Some of the texts are liturgical chants—you’ll see monks recite those chants completely from memory.” Some of the texts young monks memorize are up to thirty pages long, with hundreds of pages of commentary. “We’d start with twenty lines we’d memorize in the morning, then repeat several times during the day with the text as a prompt. Then at night we’d recite the lines in the dark, completely from memory. The next day we’d add another twenty lines, and recite all forty—until we could recite the entire text.” Smart practice maven Anders Ericsson has taught a similar talent to American college students, who by dint of sheer persistence learned to repeat back correctly up to 102 random digits (that level of digit recall took four hundred hours of focused practice). As Ericsson found, a keen attention lets learners find smarter ways to perform—whether at the keyboard or in the maze of the mind. “When it comes to this application of attention,” Jinpa confided, “it takes some doggedness. You need persistence even though it may be boring.” Such remarkable memorization seems to expand the capacity of working memory, where for a few seconds we store whatever we are paying attention to as we pass it on to long-term memory. But that seeming increase is not a true stretching of what we can hold in attention at any one moment. The secret is chunking—a form of smart practice. “While His Holiness speaks,” Jinpa told me, “I know the gist of what he’s saying, and most of the time I know the particular text he’s talking about. I make a shorthand note for the key points, though I rarely consult the notes when I speak.” That shorthand indicates chunking. As Herbert Simon, the late Nobel laureate and professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, told me some years ago, “Every expert has acquired something like this memory ability” within her specialty. “Memory is like an index; experts have approximately 50,000 chunks of familiar units of information they recognize. For a physician, many of those chunks are symptoms.”7 IN THE MENTAL GYM

Think of attention as a mental muscle that we can strengthen by a workout. Memorization works that muscle, as does concentration. The mental analog of lifting a free weight over and over is noticing when our mind wanders and bringing it back to target. That happens to be the essence of one-pointed focus in meditation, which, seen through the lens of cognitive neuroscience, typically involves attention training. You’re told to keep your focus on one thing, such as a mantra or your breath. Try it for a while and inevitably your mind wanders off. So the universal instructions are these: when your mind wanders—and you notice that it has wandered—bring it back to your point of focus and sustain your attention there. And when your mind wanders off again, do the same. And again. And again. And again. Neuroscientists at Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of meditators going through this simple movement of mind.8 There are four steps in this cognitive cycle: the mind wanders, you notice it’s wandering, you shift your attention to your breath, and you keep it there. During mind wandering the brain activates the usual medial circuitry. At the moment you notice your mind has wandered, another attention network, this one for salience, perks up. And as you shift focus back to your breath and keep it there, prefrontal cognitive control circuits take over. As in any workout, the more reps the stronger the muscle becomes. More-experienced meditators, one study found, were able to deactivate their medial strip more rapidly after noticing mind wandering; as their thoughts become less “sticky” with practice, it becomes easier to drop thoughts and return to the breath. There was more neural connectivity between the region for mind wandering and those that disengage attention.9 The increased connectivity in the brains of the long-term meditators, this study suggests, are analogous to those competitive weight lifters with the perfect pecs. Muscle builders know you won’t get a six-pack belly by lifting free weights—you need to do a particular set of crunches that work the relevant muscles. Specific muscles respond to particular training regimens. So it is with attention training. Concentration on one point of focus is the basic attention builder, but that strength can be applied in many different ways. In the mental gym, as in any fitness training, the specifics of practice make all the difference. ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE

Larry David, creator of the hit sitcoms Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, hails from Brooklyn but has lived most of his life in Los Angeles. On a rare stay in Manhattan to film episodes for Curb—in which he plays himself—David went to see a ball game at Yankee Stadium. During a lull in the game, cameras sent his image up to gigantic Jumbotron screens. The entire stadium of fans stood to cheer him. But as David was leaving later that night, in the parking lot someone leaned out of a passing car and yelled “Larry, you suck!” On the way home, Larry David obsessed about that one encounter: “Who’s that guy? What was that? Who would do that? Why would you say something like that?” It was as though those fifty thousand adoring fans didn’t exist—there was just that one guy.10 Negativity focuses us on a narrow range—what’s upsetting us.11 A rule of thumb in cognitive therapy holds that focusing on the negatives in experience offers a recipe for depression. Cogitive therapy treatments might well encourage someone like Larry David to bring to mind his good feelings when the crowd went crazy for him, and hold his focus there. Positive emotions widen our span of attention; we’re free to take it all in. Indeed, in the grip of positivity, our perceptions shift. As psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who studies positive feelings and their effects, puts it, when we’re feeling good our awareness expands from our usual self-centered focus on “me” to a more inclusive and warm focus on “we.”12 Focusing on the negatives or positives offers us a bit of leverage in determining how our brain operates. When we’re in an upbeat, energized mood, Richard Davidson has found, our brain’s left prefrontal area lights up. The left area also harbors circuitry that reminds us how great we’ll feel when we finally reach some long-sought goal—the circuitry that helps keep a graduate student slogging away at a daunting dissertation. At the neural level, positivity reflects how long we can sustain this outlook. One technical measure, for instance, assesses how long people hold a smile after seeing someone help a person in distress or after watching an exuberant toddler prancing about. This sunny outlook shows up in attitudes: for example, that moving to a new city or meeting new people is an adventure opening up exciting possibilities—wonderful places to discover, new friends—rather than a scary step. When life brings a surprising positive moment, such as a warm conversation, the pleasant mood lasts and lasts. As you might expect, people who experience life in this light focus on the silver lining, not just the clouds. The opposite, cynicism, breeds pessimism: not just a focus on the cloud, but the conviction that there are even darker ones lurking behind. It all depends on where you focus: the one mean fan, or the fifty thousand cheering ones. In part positivity reflects the brain’s reward circuitry in action. When we’re happy, the nucleus accumbens, a region within the ventral striatum in the middle of the brain, activates. This circuitry seems vital for motivation and having a sense that what you’re doing is rewarding. Rich in dopamine, these circuits are a driver of positive feeling, striving toward our goals, and desire. This combines with the brain’s own opiates, which include endorphins (the runner’s-high neurotransmitters). The dopamine may fuel our drive and persistence, while the opiates tag that with a feeling of pleasure. These circuits remain active while we stay positive. In a telling study comparing people with depression and healthy volunteers, Davidson found that after seeing a happy scene those with depression could not maintain the resulting positive feelings—their reward circuitry shut off much sooner.13 Our executive area can trigger this circuit, making us better able to sustain positive feeling, as in keeping going despite setbacks, or just grinding away toward a goal that makes us smile when we picture what reaching it will be like. And positivity, in turn, has great payoffs for performance, energizing us so we can focus better, think more flexibly, and persevere. Here’s a question: If everything worked out perfectly in your life, what would you be doing in ten years? That query invites us to dream a little, to consider what really matters to us and how that might guide our lives. “Talking about your positive goals and dreams activates brain centers that open you up to new possibilities. But if you change the conversation to what you should do to fix yourself, it closes you down,” says Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University (and a friend and colleague since we met in graduate school). To explore these contrasting effects in personal coaching, Boyatzis and colleagues scanned the brains of college students being interviewed.14 For some, the interview focused on positives like that question about what they’d love to be doing in ten years, and what they hoped to gain from their college years. The brain scans revealed that during the positively focused interviews there was greater activity in the brain’s reward circuitry and areas for good feeling and happy memories. Think of this as a neural signature of the openness we feel when we are inspired by a vision. For others the interview focus was more negative: how demanding they found their schedule and their assignments, difficulties making friends, and fears about their performance. As the students wrestled with the more negative questions their brain activated areas that generate anxiety, mental conflict, sadness. A focus on our strengths, Boyatzis argues, urges us toward a desired future and stimulates openness to new ideas, people, and plans. In contrast, spotlighting our weaknesses elicits a defensive sense of obligation and guilt, closing us down. The positive lens keeps the joy in practice and learning—the reason even the most seasoned athletes and performers still enjoy rehearsing their moves. “You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive,” says Boyatzis. “You need both, but in the right ratio.” That ratio would do well to flip far more to the positive than the negative, in light of what’s known as the “Losada effect,” after Marcial Losada, an organizational psychologist who studied emotions in high-performing business teams. Analyzing hundreds of teams, Losada determined that the most effective had a positive/negative ratio of at least 2.9 good feelings to every negative moment (there’s an upper limit to positivity: above a Losada ratio of about 11:1, teams apparently become too giddy to be effective).15 The same ratio range holds for people who flourish in life, according to research by Barbara Fredrickson, who is a psychologist at the University of North Carolina (and a former research associate of Losada).16

Boyatzis makes the case that this positivity bias applies as well to coaching—whether by a teacher, a parent, a boss, or an executive coach. A conversation that starts with a person’s dreams and hopes can lead to a learning path yielding that vision. This conversation might extract some concrete goals from the general vision, then look at what it would take to accomplish those goals—and what capacities we might want to work on improving to get there. That contrasts with a more common approach that focuses on a person’s weaknesses—whether bad grades or missing quarterly targets—and what to do to remedy them. This conversation focuses us on what’s wrong with us—our failings and what we have to do to “fix” ourselves—and all the feelings of guilt, fear, and the like that go along. One of the worst versions of this approach occurs when parents punish a child for bad grades until he improves. The anxiety associated with being punished actually hampers the child’s prefrontal cortex while he is trying to concentrate and learn, creating further impediment to improvement. In the courses he teaches at Case for MBA students and mid-career executives, Boyatzis has been applying dreams-first coaching for many years. To be sure, dreams alone are not enough: you have to practice any new needed abilities at every naturally occurring opportunity. In a given day that might mean anything from zero to a dozen chances to practice the routine you’re trying to master on the way to your dream. Those moments add up. One manager, an executive MBA student, wanted to build better relationships. “He had an engineering background,” Boyatzis told me. “Give him a task and all he saw was the task, not the people he worked with to get it done.” So his learning plan became: “Spend time thinking about how the other person feels.” To get regular, low-risk opportunities for this practice outside his work and the habits he had there, he helped coach his son’s soccer team and tried to focus on the players’ feelings while he coached. Another executive took up tutoring for the same learning agenda, volunteering in a high school in a poor neighborhood. He used this opportunity, says Boyatzis, “to help himself learn to be more attuned and ‘gentle’ when helping others”—a new habit he brought into his workplace. He enjoyed tutoring so much he signed on for several more rounds. To get data on how well this works, Boyatzis does systematic ratings of those going through the course. Coworkers or others who know them well anonymously rate the students on dozens of specific behaviors that display one or another of the emotional intelligence competencies typical of high-performers (for example: “Understands others by listening attentively”). Then he tracks the students down years later and has them rated again by those who now work with them. “By now we’ve done twenty-six separate longitudinal studies, tracking people down wherever they work now,” Boyatzis tells me. “We’ve found that the improvements students make in their first round hold up as long as seven years later.” Whether we’re trying to hone a skill in sports or music, enhance our memory power, or listen better, the core elements of smart practice are the same: ideally, a potent combination of joy, smart tactics, and full focus. As we’ve explored the three varieties of focus, we’ve also heard about ways to enhance each. Smart practice gets to a more fundamental level, cultivating the basics of attention upon which the triple focus builds.