Page 133 - The Power to Change Anything

122 INFLUENCER

With some tasks, we stop short of our highest level of pro-
ficiency on purpose. The calculus we perform in our heads sug-
gests that the added effort it’ll take to find and learn something
new will probably yield a diminishing marginal return, so we
stop learning. For instance, we learn how to make use of a word
processor or Web server by mastering the most common moves,
but we never learn many of the additional features that would
dramatically improve our ability.
This same pattern of arresting our development applied
over an entire career yields fairly unsatisfactory results. For
example, most professionals progress until they reach an
“acceptable” level, and then they plateau. Software engineers,
for instance, usually reach their peak somewhere around five
years after entering the workforce. Beyond this level of medi-
ocrity, further improvements are not correlated to years of
work in the field.
So what does create improvement? According to Dr. Anders
Ericsson, improvement is related not just to practice, but to a
particular kind of practice—something Ericsson calls deliberate
practice. Ericsson has found that no matter the field of exper-
tise, when it comes to elite status, there is no correlation what-
soever between time in the profession and performance levels.
The implications are stunning. A 20-year-veteran brain
surgeon is not likely to be any more skilled than a 5-year rookie
by virtue of time on the job. Any difference between the two
would have nothing to do with experience and everything to
do with deliberate practice. Time is required (most elite per-
formers in fields such as music composition, dance, science,
fiction writing, chess, and basketball have put in 10 or more
years), but it is not the critical variable for mastery. The criti-
cal factor is using time wisely. It’s the skill of practice that makes
perfect.
Most of us already have all the evidence we need to con-
firm that deliberate practice can have an enormous effect on
performance levels. Just look at what’s happened to our capac-