"Effortful" Practice Makes Perfect

When we talk about mastery, it certainly leads us also to think about expertise. Bestowing this description is actually a much talked about problem in cognitive science, a fact translated into many different researches none more deep as those about chess.

Chess is a crowd favorite for research on expertise because its structure is readily quantifiable, can be broken down into distinct components and can be observed in its natural environment. This means, that one can directly compare the strategies of a novice from a grandmaster in discrete terms-for example, one can determine the probability of a player winning a match against another based on their rank scores.

Without going into the specifics, researches about chess actually yielded two things: (1) that grandmasters are better than novices at chunking information through strong mental templates and; (2) that grandmasters can sift through this chunked information at an instant.

Chunking can be explained by the way we would, for example, interpret the statement "Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow". For a non-native English speaker, this statement can be divided into 11 distinct word-chunks with their definitions, and for a non-reader, this statement might be divided into 41-letters with their phonics - as opposed to someone who would view this as one statement chunk with its childhood affiliations. Obviously, it's easier to manipulate the statement based on a lower chunk (i.e. one statement) as opposed to a higher-numbered one (i.e. 41 letters) but it's also an actual gateway to information: for if one hears it, definitely the words and even the music of a whole song would come into mind. Now if we think about it, we certainly do the same for all the things we learn. The better we get at something, the better we chunk ideas together.

Of course, this capacity to chunk, explore, and sift through information at an instant can only be developed through years of experience... and an additional ingredient. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University (who had initiated much of the research here) also hypothesized that experience is not really enough to explain how chess masters can still play matches while blindfolded (and winning them at that). He argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study", which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence.

This means that logging 10,000+ hours' worth of practice is not enough if each session devoted to the particular craft is not challenging enough. To practice is not just about getting a bit of exercise - it's a whole lot more. It's just like going to the gym: one wouldn't build a significant amount of muscle just by heaving 1-lbs weights every single day, right? One needs a bit of tension or a little challenge, and all this is what effortful practice is. This continuing challenge also becomes a source of motivation for the individual, and every challenge surmounted becomes empirical evidence of one's efficacy. This now becomes a powerful cycle of competence building confidence, and confidence increasing avenues to make one further competent. In a sense, it's all about fuelling one's passions not just with dreams but just simply by going out and giving it a try.

Notes:

1. The article idea and most of its content was made possible because of Scientific American's The Expert Mind written by Philip Ross in August 2006. It's still one of the most cited articles about expert thinking out there.