What are complex tasks? They are "tasks characterized by combinatorial explosion; tasks where success is determined, first and foremost, by superiority in software (pattern recognition and sophisticated motor programs) rather than hardware (simple speed or strength)."
Chunking. When chess masters "look at the position of the pieces on a board, they see the equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to chunk the patterns with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the relevant 'language,' not from talent." Similarly, Roger Federer does not have faster reflexes than his opponents; rather, his advantage "has been gathered from experience: more precisely, it has been gained from a painstaking process of encoding the meaning of subtle patterns of movement drawn from more than ten thousand hours of practice and competition. He is able to see the patterns in his opponent's movements in the same way that chess players are able to discern the patterns in the arrangement of pieces of a chessboard."
Gary Klein found that "top decision makers -- medical professionals, firefighters, military commanders, and so on -- were making choices based on unexpected factors; it was that they did not seem to be making choices at all. They were contemplating the situation for a few moments and then just deciding, without considering the alternatives. Some were unable even to explain how they happened upon the course of action they took." Expert firefighters "are able to confront a burning building and almost instantly place it within the context of a rich, detailed, and elaborate conceptual scheme derived from years of experience. They can chunk the visual properties of the scene and comprehend its complex dynamics, often without understanding how."
Wayne Gretzky is not physically imposing, shouldn't have been the greatest hockey player ever, but he was able to predict exactly where the puck would be. Gretzky: "I wasn't naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for.... The highest compliment you can pay me is to say that I worked hard every day... That's how I came to know where the puck was going to be before it even got there." Mozart is regarded as a child prodigy, but his father was "a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age three." "Mozart was one of the hardest-working composers in history, and without that deep and sustained application he would have got nowhere." See Tiger Woods, David Beckham, Serene Williams, Laszlo Polgar's chess-playing daughters.
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Most of us have spent over 10,000 hours driving a car but are not expert drivers. Ericsson: "When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly. Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well -- or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can't do that you turn into the expert you want to become." It's about quality as well as quantity.
Deliberate practice or purposeful practice. The "practice sessions of aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one's mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one's capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person."
"Purposeful practice is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again. Excellence is about stepping outside the comfort zone, training with a spirit of endeavor, and accepting the inevitability of trials and tribulations. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance."
Elite figure skaters fall more during their training sessions than other skaters because they are always pushing themselves and attempting more difficult jumps. Former NBA player John Amaechi: in college, nobody on team was match for him, so the coach recruited 6'8" walk-on to practice with team; every time Amaechi's team would get play, the walk-on would jump onto court so they were playing five on six with Amaechi being double-teamed. Amaechi: "I had to create time and space that scarcely seemed to exist. It pushed me past my limits, forcing me to think faster, sharper, deeper and with far greater creativity. In turn, my limits just kept expanding." Mia Hamm: "All my life I've been playing up, meaning I've challenged myself with players older, bigger, more skillful, more experienced -- in short, better than me." Picasso "spent his early years painstakingly carefully drawing eyes and the human body in difficult poses: not just a few hours a week, but countless hours studiously learning his craft."
To attain excellence: (a) need 10,000 hours of practice, (b) practice must involve concentration and dedication, (c) practice must involve pushing oneself to the outer limits.
Research has shown that the body and mind can be altered with purposeful practice: e.g., the body's cells can be reorganized in response to being pushed (long-distance runners come to have larger than average hearts, table tennis players have more supple wrists). Thomas Elbert "found that the region of the brain responsible for controlling fingers in young musicians grew in direct proportion to the number of years of training." In London taxi drivers, the region of the brain spacial navigation was larger than average and continued to grow with more time on the job.
Feedback is essential. In chess: player configured board to historic game of grandmaster, then makes his move, then compares his move to that made by grandmaster. Golf: golfer hits ball, sees how it lands (feedback #1), has coach watching who offers advice, e.g., technical glitch in swing (feedback #2), later watches swing on video (feedback #3).
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Motivation by association. Psychologists Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen's experiment. Gave Yale undergrads an insoluble math problem but first asked students to read a report written by a former Yale math student (who was actually fictitious) and also his biography. For half of the students, the former student's biography was altered to match that of the students. Those students in the matched-birthday group "persevered on the insoluble puzzle a full 65 percent longer than those in the nonmatched group. They also reported significantly more positive attitudes towards math and greater optimism about their abilities."
The talent myth holds that innate ability, not practice, "is what ultimately determines whether we have it within us to achieve excellence." Carol Dweck: Gave University of Hong Kong students with low English skills the chance to take a remedial language class. The fixed mindset students were not interested in taking the class, while the growth mindset students showed a high interest in taking the class. Dweck: "In the growth mind-set, you don't feel the need to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried it's a pair of tens. The hand you're dealt is just the starting point...Although people have differ in every which way -- in their initial talents and aptitudes, interest, or temperament -- everyone can change and grow through application and experience."
Dweck: Gave 5th graders some puzzles. Afterward, each student given score plus six words of praise, either "You must be smart at this!" or "You must have worked really hard!" The students were then given the choice to take either a hard or easy test. Two-thirds of students praised for intelligence chose the easy test, not wanting to lose their "smart" label by potentially failing. Ninety percent of those praised for effort chose the tough test: "they were not interested in success, but in exploring a potentially fruitful challenge." Next students were given an insoluble test. Those praised for intelligence interpreted their failure as proof that they weren't good at puzzles. Those praised for effort persevered on the test longer, enjoyed it more, and did not suffer any loss in confidence. Finally, students given chance to do a test as difficult as the first test: the group praised for intelligence showed a 20 percent decline in performance, while those praised for effort increased their score by 30 percent. Test results replicated three times among different populations.
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Excellence is not sufficient for success. One also needs the ability "to rise above the anxieties and angst, the doubts and the tensions, that so often paralyze lesser performers." "[T]he thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective." Example: Religious athletes like Jonathan Edwards and Muhammad Ali.
The placebo effect. Studies have shown that actively religious individuals have better health results. Religion is the ultimate placebo. But it's possible "to mimic the power of religious conviction." Athletes tell themselves things like: "I have not even considered the possibility of defeat. In my mind we are going to win and nothing will deter me from that fact." Sports psychologists have tried to divorce the performance placebo from religion.
Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Golf: "Doubt is the fundamental cause of error in sports. The power of doubt lies in its self-fulfilling nature. When we entertain a lack of faith that we can sink a short putt, for example, we usually tighten, increasing the likelihood of missing the putt. When we fail, our self-doubt is confirmed...Next time the doubt is stronger and its inhibiting influence on our true capabilities more pronounced." Gallwey eliminates doubt with different mental techniques, most notably a form of mental association:
The technique is simply to remember or associate with a seemingly difficult task (in this case the golf shot) some action that is simple, preferably one that has never failed. For example, when addressing a ten-foot putt, you might remember the action of simply picking up a ball out of the hole.
By vividly associating with this easy act there is no room left in the mind to associate the upcoming putt with failure...Each time I succeeded in totally immersing myself in this concept, there was not a trace of doubt in my mind about sinking the putt...The true professional in every field performs from a base of solid faith in his potential to act successfully. He doesn't listen to self-doubt.
The author: 15 minutes before a competition, he would sit down by himself, close his eyes, and begin deep breathing, the goal being to "get my heart rate down and my mind into a state of deep relaxation." He would then practice positive imagery:
[I]n my case a series of vivid recollections of the greatest and most inspiring table tennis matches I had ever played. First I would be looking in from the outside, like a spectator, seeing the marvelous strokes, applauding the audacious attacks, marveling at the array and diversity of skills.
Then the perspective would switch, and I would be inhabiting my own body, feeling the sensuousness of the ball on the paddle, the uninhibited flow of my movement, and the exhilaration of playing to the best of my ability and beyond. Then I'd switch the focus and imagine myself playing my upcoming opponent, executing the tactics discussed with my coach and sensing a deep and growing feeling of optimism.
I can feel my confidence solidifying. I can feel the doubts dissolving. I am feeling better and better.
Then another mental switch to what psychologists call "positive affirmations." I am no longer seeing myself in action, but stating the following, strangely powerful words: "You can win." Over and over. With growing conviction. Note that I am not saying: "I can win." I am talking to my inner self, as if trying to talk him out of his default skepticism. The last few affirmations are ever so slightly different: "You WILL win! You WILL win!"
And with that, I open my eyes, my head actually nodding in agreement, my face etched with conviction and my lips smiling. Slowly I walk back into the competition arena, nod at my coach, exchange a high five, and walk onto court to shake hands with my opponent. I am in precisely the place, mentally, I want to be. I am at one with myself and my world.
One soccer manager: "To perform to your maximum you have to teach yourself to believe with an intensity that goes way beyond logical justification. No top performer has lacked this capacity for irrational optimism; no sportsman has played to his potential without the ability to remove doubt from his mind."
Taking the positives. When an athlete has a bad performance, he/she should ignore those aspects of the performance "that contradict one's prior optimism while focusing on the good tactics, the winning shots, etc., that support it. To put it another way, top athletes have learned to filter out unwanted evidence in order to sustain an exaggerated belief in their own abilities." "I have sat through dozens of team meetings as a sportsman and have been consistently astonished at the capacity of teammates to dismiss all the negative happenings from their minds." 1996 experiment proved the performance placebo: Buehler, R., & Griffin, D. (1996). Getting things done: The impact of predictions on task completion. In annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Canada.
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Choking. Choking "occurs only under conditions of severe pressure, often when an athlete is confronting a career-defining moment."
After many hours, you start to automate your game, you learn to encode elements of your game in implicit rather than explicit memory. Example: new table tennis player cannot simultaneously make quality shots while also counting how many times a spectator is tapping his foot, while experienced player can do both. Russell Poldrack has found that "the prefrontal cortex is activated when a novice is learning a skill, but that control of the stroke switches over time to areas such as the basal ganglia, which is partly responsible for touch and feel." The migration from the explicit to the implicit system of the brain "frees up attention to focus on higher-level aspects of the skill such as tactics and strategy."
When people choke, they revert back to using the explicit brain system. Psychologist Robert Gray: took a group of outstanding college baseball players and asked them to hit balls when listening to random tones and judging whether the tone was high or low in frequency. This exercise had no effect on the abilities. Gray then asked the hitters to state whether their bats were moving up or down when the tone sounded, and their performance levels plummeted. Why? Because this time they were directing their attention toward the swing itself. In other words, they "were consciously monitoring a stroke that was supposed to be automatic. Explicit monitoring was vying with implicit execution. The problem was not a lack of focus, but too much focus...They were effectively beginners again."
Example: Golfer needs to make easy put to win championship, but he starts to overthink it, thinks about stroke, about angle, on and on.
When executing a simply task (like walking a cup of coffee across an expensive carpet), you should use explicit attention. But not when executing a complex task, a task in which "there are too many interconnecting variables for the conscious mind to handle."
How to prevent choking? Since choking "only occurs in highly pressurized circumstances, what better way than to convince oneself that a career-defining contest doesn't really matter?" This is what Sarah Lindsay kept telling herself at the Olympics: "It's only speed skating!" Sports psychologist Mark Bawden:
In order to make all the sacrifices necessary to reach world-class levels of performance, an athlete has to believe that performing well means everything. They have to cleave to the belief that winning an Olympic gold is of life-changing significance.
But that is precisely the belief that is most likely to trigger a choking response. So, the key psychological skill for someone with a tendency to choke is to ditch that belief in the minutes before competition and to replace it with the belief that the race does not really matter. It is a form of psychological manipulation, and it takes a lot of work to master.
Author after choking in table tennis Olympics, on how he prevented a choking repeat: "My method was to think about all the things that are so much more important than sport: health, family, relationships, and so on. During my prematch routine, I would spend a few minutes in a deeply relaxed state, filling my mind with these thoughts, finishing with an affirmation just like that used by Lindsay: 'It's only table tennis!' By the time I reached the court, my beliefs had altered: the match was no longer the be-all and end-all."
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Athletes tend to be incredibly superstitious -- e.g., Wade Boggs. BF Skinner put hungry pigeons in a cage and fed them; he discovered that "the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they happened to be performing at the moment it was first delivered. So what did the pigeons do? They kept performing the same actions, even though they had no effect whatsoever on the release of food." Most Americans admit to being superstitious. Rituals may exert a placebo effect.
Evolution. Caveman hears rustling in bushes, assumes there's a lion, and runs away. Gets superstitious about the bushes and always avoids them. This can save his life: "a tendency to perceive causal connections that don't actually exist can confer huge evolutionary benefits, providing a cocoon of safety in a turbulent and dangerous world."
Many superstitions -- e.g., bouncing a tennis ball three times in between serves -- are not harmful.
Why do we feel anticlimatic after major victories? "[M]illions of years of natural selection have sifted sequences of DNA just so that we can feel miserable in the aftermath of long-coveted triumph. Why? So that we are able to disengage from our triumph, enabling us to focus on the next challenge. If goal fulfillment induced indefinite periods of contentment, we would be robbed of all future motivation."
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