Unconventional Approaches to Acquire Skills

Skill acquisition is frequently thought of as a difficult process that takes many hours of practice. This is true, but consists of one missing detail. Gaining skill involves a different type of practice. The type of practice required to master a skill effectively is known as deliberate practice. On his blog, Cal Newport profiled an accomplished piano player who described his unusual practice techniques. By using the strategies below he became more skilled than his peers with less practice time:

• Strategy #1: Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy.
  “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”
• Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder.
  “Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”
• Strategy #3: Systematically Eliminate Weakness.
  “Strong pianists know our weaknesses and use them to create strength. I have sharp ears, but I am not as in touch with the physical component of piano playing. So, I practice on a mute keyboard.”
• Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness.
  “Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

The strategies can be applied to any area that requires a deep level of understanding to master a complicated subject. In Cal’s profile, he focused on an astute piano player who used deliberate practice to gain a master-status level of skill at the piano. Business owners, students, and any person with the desire to learn a challenging skill can implement deliberate practice fundamentals. The goal of deliberate practice is to work hard, but not necessarily long. The best learners are able to accomplish a skill without sacrificing an inordinate amount of time. By challenging and disrupting flow, the learning rate is able to exponentially increase.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he makes the claim that to master a skill one needs 10,000 hours of practice. Most of histories greatest legends have been known to practice excessive lengths, but the truly amazing practiced differently. Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, and Albert Pujols have the ability to dominate the sports that they play by individually outworking their opponents. They do this by applying deliberate practice techniques to master their respective sports.

Albert Pujols doesn’t stand in a batting cage and aimlessly swing all day. He studies film of his mechanics, seeks advice from his coaches, and relentlessly challenges himself to improve his muscle memory. By challenging the assumptions of his muscle memory, he is able to practice more efficiently and learn more about his game. In result, he is known as the best player in Major League Baseball despite leaving my beloved St. Louis Cardinals.

The rules of skill acquisition are not easily interpreted. Any person with the desire and will to learn a skill is capable. The truly amazing are able to efficiently and effectively learn a skill in a short amount of time. They are able to harness the deliberate practice strategies utilized and outlined by the piano player to become so amazing that they cannot be ignored.

Investment Return of a College Education

I am a firm believer in the statistics that support the claim that obtaining a college degree increases a person’s lifetime earning potential. From that perspective, one would think that every person is better off going to college. That cannot be a viable claim because everyone is not suited or does not want to attend college.

I don’t believe that every person should go to college. People have different career goals and not all people have the same ambitions. Also, going into an immense amount of debt to attend college is probably not a wise choice in this economy.

If a person wants to go to college, does not have to go into significant debt, and wants to financially improve their lives, college can provide a great return on investment. From a pure investment standpoint, a college education may be the best and least risky investment a young person can make. Lets look at the numbers. A writer for the New York Times, David Leonhardt comments on the returns of education by commenting:

The Hamilton Project, a research group in Washington, has just finished a comparison of college with other investments. It found that college tuition in recent decades has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent. For stocks, the historical return is 7 percent. For real estate, it’s less than 1 percent.

The statistical research by the group highlights that education may be the best investment in the current market. Not only do you get the experience of learning new concepts, but also your money works for you while you get to experience college.

Equity investments are risky and can drain excess cash reserves in a matter of months. If you are looking for the best investment for your cash, invest in yourself with an education and your lifetime earnings will pay dividends.

Inside Education: Is the value of writing in schools deteriorating?

In high school, most students focus on the art of socializing and do not see the value of reading and writing. This inevitably handicaps them academically once they reach the undergraduate level.

In every class that I have taken, some form of writing has been involved. Whether it was biology, history, or economics, I always had to write some type of assignment or essay. The students who are able to write thoughtful and critical essays are the ones who will excel.

Teaching English has evolved negatively due to the increasingly high demands on high school teachers. Students do not want to write because the teachers do not make them. Kim Brooks, an accomplished fiction writer, commented on the burden of teaching English composition:

 At this particular school, every English teacher teaches five sections of English, and each section has approximately 25 students — a dream load compared to what teachers at, say, a Chicago public face. But that still means a three-page formal essay assignment would translate into 375 pages of student prose to be read, critiqued and evaluated.

When a teacher is only making roughly $30,000 a year, the incentives for assigning essay assignments is incredibly low.  The truly great teachers find a way to educate young people by emphasizing the importance of writing as an extracurricular activity. The select few are able to inspire and evoke the passion for writing, no matter the circumstances.

The future of writing lies in the critical thinking aspect of the writing process. Students need to be exposed to the value of thinking through a problem, collaborating with other people, and rewriting until the essay is perfected. This type of process needs to be encouraged by the connectivity of the Internet.

I do believe with the help of the Internet and eBooks, writing will come out of the funk that it is in. There has never been a time before in history that humans have been more self-expressive in the form of writing. With Facebook and Twitter, people across the world are now connecting more than ever. The short status updates are a form of writing and involve significant thinking. This is a small step that could lead the education system to develop the needed technology to improve the entire learning process.

The significance of writing may not be respected as much as it should, but I believe that we should be optimistic about the future of education. The great students will find a way to write and think in a way that will help them once they go off to college. Teachers need to motivate and encourage the fundamentals of writing to the students who will need the skills the most.