Success: How Experts Become Experts
Everyone needs to practice to become great. It's how we practice that matters.
My breakfast taught me the key to high performance.
I’ve cooked eggs thousands of times. They make a simple tasty breakfast. After years of practice, I learned to cook eggs pretty well.
Or so I thought. Until I came across a viral video clip. In the clip, a chef makes a pristine omelette. With a perfect even yellow color and rounded shape, the omelette looked like a delicate water balloon perched atop a plate. The chef finishes the omelette with a quick slice down the center. The customers gasp in awe and delight.1
I had no idea the simple egg could be so intricate. Inspired to learn to make such an omelette, I watched instructional videos. I bought several new pans. I bought dozens of eggs at a time and practiced. Hundreds of omelettes and much time later, my skills were markedly better. Not viral YouTube video level better, but better enough for a significant level up in my skill.
How is it my omelette skills stayed the same for years, even though I was getting plenty of practice?
What was the mechanism for me to break through my skill plateau?
We expect to plateau in our abilities. We learn a new skill, we practice, we become competent. Once we reach competence, our abilities level off. We reach the limits of our natural ability. Right? Not quite.
Turns out, we’re capable of higher skill than we think. Our limits are often self imposed.
A prior post looked at how talent is overrated. Effort plays outsized role on achievement. This posts dives into the “effort” portion of achievement and excellence.
Effort is not just time spent and hard work. There’s a more specific recipe for successful effort.
Skill Plateaus
A doctor learns medicine to help patients. A software engineer learns code to build products. In our jobs, we learn skills to deliver business results.
As we practice our craft, our skill grows. As our skill grows, we become more competent at our tasks. We deliver a high level of performance at reduced effort. With our competence, we shift from practice of our craft to performance of our craft.
But this is the danger in our growth of skills and expertise.
The competence of high performance feels great. The incompetence of novice practice feels painful. The contrast in experience draws us towards performance over practice. It’s easier to perform what we do well than to practice what we struggle with. We get comfortable with performing well with less effort.
However, when we focus on performance we no longer push our abilities higher. We find ourselves in a plateau with our skills. There’s real consequence with this plateau. Length of work experience is a weak correlate of job performance beyond the first two years, precisely of the skill plateau many reach.2
When we plateau, we assume we’ve reached the limits of our talent or abilities. We look at experts above us and assume they have talents we don’t posses.
However, studies of experts and amateurs reveal a crucial difference. The biggest differentiator between experts and amateurs is how effort is applied during practice time.3
Breaking through skill plateaus
“I see a lot of problems. It’s leaking here. There’s discoloration here.”
The music is intense and the anxiety is palpable. I’m watching a clip of a cooking competition. A group of home chefs is getting their omelettes judged by a panel of expert chefs.4 I learn that in order to get an even yellow color on an omelette, the eggs must be whisked to a particular smoothness and texture. Forget how to beautifully fold an omelette, I had to first learn to prep the eggs. I set off to practice whisking eggs to the uniformity and texture needed.
Researcher K Anders Ericsson has extensively studied experts. A major finding was the world’s experts used their practice time differently from amateurs. Amateurs used their practice time to focus on execution of what they could already do. On the other hand, experts used their practice time to focus on something they couldn’t do well enough or even at all.5
Experts use intentional, focused practice in a specific area of improvement. This focused effort is termed “deliberate practice.”
Deliberate practice, done consistently over time, is the key to breaking through skill plateaus.
How to do Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice improves performance through focused efforts in a specific area. The steps for deliberate practice are straightforward:
1) Identify area for improvement
Select a small, specific area for improvement. Set a goal that’s achievable in the short term. In my omelette journey, whisking eggs was a simple goal - whisk eggs to a mixture where no egg whites are visible and the mixture does not stick to a fork.
Selection of a small area to improve is important to maintain overall performance. If I tried to improve both my egg whisking and cooking together, I would’ve made worse omelettes. We need to maintain our existing skill while we improve a specific area.
We may or may not know what area to seek for improvement. Coaches and mentors are valuable resources to identify areas of focus.
2) Concentrate on the task
Apply complete focus to the specific area to improve. Move from automatic performance during practice time back to concentrated learning during practice time. This is the hardest part. Focus and concentration is not easy. But it’s necessary to both pay attention to the area we’re working on and to preserve successful aspects of our skill.
3) Seek feedback
Examine the effort placed to understand what worked and what didn’t. Feedback can be from a coach or through self-assessment.
4) Repeat the task
Consistent repetition enables automaticity. We build ‘muscle memory,’ and the task becomes easier as we execute with less effort. Repetition integrates our new skill with the rest of our abilities.
Deliberate Practice is easier said than done
“How do experts tough it out though?”
I’ve been asked this about the practice and effort required by experts. Deliberate practice isn’t easy. It’s not considered fun by most either. We have images of Olympians toiling away in gyms, pushing through immense pain to reach the highest levels of performance. Researchers have discovered that experts were neither driving themselves crazy with practice nor practicing for superhuman amounts of time.6 Here are some ways to adopt the tactics of experts:
Relieve judgement
Expectations of performance hinders growth. This is especially true when we’ve reached competent levels of performance. Nobody wants to feel like a beginner again. Relieve judgement on the outcome and embrace the process. Even better, find amusement in any outcome.
Be interested in what you’ve done wrong
We celebrate what we did right. We shame what we did wrong. Rather, with deliberate practice we apply curiosity to what we’ve done wrong. Failure is the guide for what to grow.
Rest, a lot
Experts place hard limits on the amount of focused practice they’ll do in a day. Deliberate practice is hard work. It’s not sustainable for extended periods of time. Expert performers engage in practice without rest for only around an hour. And experts max out at four to five hours a day for deliberate practice. Limits on practice time are necessary to enable the rest required.
..And therefore what?
In the the bigger picture of life, my new omelette skills likely won’t have a significant impact. But it’s not the outcome that is life changing, but rather the mindset and process learned.
Deliberate practice, intentional, repeated practice to improve specific areas, can be applied to endless domains. We open up possibility to become experts where we never thought possible.
Are our current performance levels actually a false ceiling waiting to be broken through? Is there an ability we’ve wanted, but haven’t felt capable to achieve?
“Working at what you can’t do is what turns you into the expert you want to become”
- K. Anders Ericsson
Deliberate practice can lead to big gains in the professional domain. We free ourselves from the faulty notion that more years of experience builds more expertise. The skills needed for success in the economy are ever evolving. What’s deemed high performance today may become irrelevant tomorrow. Deliberate practice enables us to become better where it’s important. We evolve our value to higher levels.
No matter how we apply deliberate practice and the level of expertise we reach, the knowledge of how to reach higher performance is inspiring.
Even if higher performance is applied to making a better breakfast.
The chef makes a French omelette as part of his version of omurice, a Japanese dish consisting of fried rice wrapped in an omelette. There are several videos of the chef, here’s a sample video.
McDaniel, Michael A., Frank L. Schmidt, and John E. Hunter. "Job experience correlates of job performance." Journal of applied psychology 73.2 (1988): 327.
Ericsson, K. Anders. "The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance." The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance 38.685-705 (2006): 2-2.
MasterChef World, 1 Opportunity, 4 Mins & 1 Perfect Omelette
Ericsson, K. Anders. "The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance." The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance 38.685-705 (2006): 2-2.
Chambliss, Daniel F. "The mundanity of excellence: An ethnographic report on stratification and Olympic swimmers." Sociological theory 7.1 (1989): 70-86.
Skill Plateau. Put a name to something that I have been thinking about for some time now.