One of the more intriguing books I have come across this year, one that I had a good fortune of picking up during a transatlantic flight, was Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. I found it absolutely unputdownable (finding myself in a metal box 30k ft up in the air with nothing else to do, notwithstanding). It is a young journalist’s journey through the remarkable world of memory champions. Memory athletes as they like to call themselves, are an elite group that has mastered various techniques for putting their memory in hyperdrive. They perform incredible feats like going through a deck of cards and memorising the order of cards in which they are stacked, learning a never seen before poem in a few minutes, remembering strange faces and names and other intricate details. It’s an incredible world few of us know of. I wrote about the memory palace and other techniques mentioned in the book. I got inspired and also tried to apply the techniques to put together a memory palace with world war 2 events. In this post I look at the deliberate practice concept that forms the crux of the trainings of elite athletes, musicians, etc.
Why we don’t keep improving with time
A particular section of the book discusses an interesting question. If practice makes perfect & we type every day, why don’t our typing speed & accuracy keep increasing? We all start being duds at anything and get better with time, but we don’t keep continuously improving with time. We improve early on and then our skill sort of plateaus off and more repetition does not really make us better.
![Graph of skill vs time that illustrates how we hit ok plateau and why we need deliberate practice](https://infermuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ok-plateau-skill-v-time-graph.png" alt:"" %}
In 1967, psychologists, Paul Fitts & Michael Posner did some in-depth research on this and defined the 3 stages of acquiring a skill.
1\. **The cognitive stage**, where we grok the intricacies of any task, learn new techniques in doing it proficiently and start becoming better with more repetition quickly.
2\. **The associative stage**, where we have become good at the task and need to concentrate less. We start make fewer errors, don’t need to consciously think about every action and get better. In the typing example, this is where we go from searching for keys & using one finger to using both our hands.
3\. **The autonomous stage**, in which the brain completely automates the task & moves execution to the part of the brain where no conscious thinking is needed. This is where you are if you’ve been typing for a while. You use both your hands & rarely look at the keyboard. The autonomous stage is one of those evolutionary features that nature has provided us so we don’t have to waste thinking about things that we do regularly, so we can focus on other stuff (look for food or scan our environment for predators).
This is even observed in the FMRI scans of people seen learning something new. Once they get better at it, the parts of the brain, involved with conscious reasoning become less active and other parts take over. This is what is called the **OK Plateau**, where our brain reckons we are Okay with the performance and further repetition of the task, doesn’t improve anything.
> The years we spent doing something correlates very weakly to how good we are at it. The “how we spent those years” is far more critical.
OK Plateau was considered to be the upper bound of our abilities. A 1969 book called Hereditary Genius written by Sir Francis Galton, discussed upper limits to our abilities and linked them to genetics. He observed that people can only get as good as they can. This upper limit was called the Galton wall. According to this view the best we can do, is simply, the best we can do.
##### deliberate practice
Anders Ericsson and his performance psychology associates disagree with this view. In their [paper on the role of deliberate practice](https://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf), they explain how to cross **Ok Plateau**. Deliberate practice is what separates the experts from the ordinary people. This entails artificially challenging ourselves to force ourselves to remain in the cognitive stage. The idea of deliberate practice is pretty simple. Focussing on the technique, staying goal oriented and getting constant feedback. This is true of musicians, athletes, memory champions, even your friend who blows away your mind with her typing skills.
Athletes practice hard moves and musicians play complex tunes. Doing complex exercises were we fail regularly is how we drop ourselves out of the autonomous stage and back to cognitive stage. One technique that comes up often is putting oneself in the shoes of experts. Chess players often play the games played by grandmasters, one move at a time, trying to understand the moves played by them. The years we spent doing something correlates very weakly to how good we are at it. The “how we spent those years” is far more critical.
In a study done to observe people’s typing, people were flashed cards with words, 10-15 times faster than their fingers could keep up. Their performance was poor at first. Over the next few days, however, they figured out the obstacles that were holding them back and their typing speeds improved. Their brains were tricked out of the autonomous modes and back into the cognitive stage.
Want to get better at something? Start deliberately practicing difficult goals. Get a coach to give you regular feedback and keep your eyes on the prize.
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I run a startup called [Harmonize](http://www.harmonizehq.com/). We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, [I tweet ](https://twitter.com/dillisingh)about startup life and practical wisdom in books.