Practice works! Film at 11! Sort of Book Review of "The Genius in All of Us"

A recent book, "The Genius in All of Us" by David Shenk, examines the increasingly examined relationship between preparation and results. It turns out circumstance is not so much of a factor in life; practice trumps genetics in learning a skill.

Eleanor Maguire's studies of 1999 brain scans of London cabbies revealed greatly enlarged representation in the brain region that controls spatial awareness. Repeated work causes neurological changes. The same holds for any specific task; the relevant brain regions adapt accordingly. The work enhances the ability--not just physically--but neurologically. "Fit for a task" becomes more than a physical comment; the task increasingly fits you.

Some nuggets from the book:
1. Practice causes changes in your body: Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Learned skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not necessarily become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are very specific responses to particular skill requirements.
3. Changes in the brain are greater than in the body: Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time.
4. The type of practice is crucial: Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
5. Duration trumps intensity: Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it's impossible to become great overnight. Practice style and practice time -- emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call 'deliberate practice.'

A certain approach must either be present or developed. (This has some real implication for coaching.) This type of practice regimen requires specific emotional criteria and behavior: a constant self-criticism, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to reload and try again and again and again so that hour after hour must be sacrificed in the pursuit of improvement. A number of separate studies have turned up the same common number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years' time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark.