In academic classes, however, you read the comments on your test or essay, you review what you did wrong, and then you just don’t do it again. No need to battle lots of little ingrained habits.

In each of the subjects that I took upper level classes in (history, philosophy, and political science), there was a need to battle little ingrained habits of poor thinking and to stretch yourself to build better little habits of thinking. Rather than stumbling through courses and adjusting only when and where an instructor tells you to adjust, great students in those fields recognize that it is their habits of thought that lead to either lackluster or stellar performance and those habits are formed through deliberative practice. For many students it is not just their thinking that is required, but thinking about their thinking. Those courses are very reading and writing centric. The required ability for both reading and writing for those courses goes beyond the level taught in primary school. Mortimer J. Adler argues in How To Read A Book that most people do not move beyond the elementary level of reading until they complete graduate school. Thought patterns, or habits of thought, designed to identify bias, to identify second-order effects, to avoid eristic arguments, and to ensure clarity in thinking and writing are not easily developed. This isn’t to say that most classes at the undergraduate level require any deliberative practice at all. But, if one wants to be excellent in any of those fields deliberative practice is going to be very useful.

I’m not sure why this guy presents this stuff as if it’s his own creation.

Geoff Colvin is a reporter, not a researcher. He certainly doesn’t claim these are his ideas. Indeed, the whole point of the article (and now book) is to explain what the latest research has to say about becoming really good.

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In academic classes, however, you read the comments on your test or essay, you review what you did wrong, and then you just don’t do it again. No need to battle lots of little ingrained habits.

Great analysis!

Very interesting. Here’s what I’m wondering, if you were to apply your experience with effective skill development to the task of taking a normal college class, what would that look like?

Overkill. Generally I find that it’s not as necessary to focus as hard in normal classes (I do music as a double degree with law because in Australia it’s customary to do your undergraduate and your law degree concurrently as a 5 or 6 year combined course) - usually the need to focus in music comes from the fact that it’s a set of physical patterns that become ingrained through large amounts of repetition. Getting rid of a bad habit when it’s become so ingrained that it becomes an automatic physical reflex that you don’t even notice is wrong anymore is a pretty monumental task. Deliberative practice works because by breaking practice up into small, manageable chunks, focusing, thinking about what you’re doing, and expecting high standards of yourself, you pick up the skills without burning mistakes into your cerebellum. The same goes for sport, dance, chess, and possibly public speaking. In academic classes, however, you read the comments on your test or essay, you review what you did wrong, and then you just don’t do it again. No need to battle lots of little ingrained habits. I’ve probably repeated each of the phrases I have to play in a recital correctly 100 times before they get to the stage. I wouldn’t dream of rewriting every sentence in a paper that many times, especially not a sentence that is already correct, because once it’s written it’s there and you don’t have to relive it every time someone wants to read your paper.

That said, focus, planning, high standards, and working on weaknesses are good for all activities (and shockingly absent in rather large numbers of students — I think it’s not a coincidence that all the top students at my high school were musicians), it’s just that I think Colvin was referring to things that have a habitual component and constantly need to be relearned and recreated every time you do them rather than things that have a concrete object like a problem set or set of study notes that you can continually go back to and fix.

@Donnie: Csikszentmihalyi’s work forms the backbone of the current positive psychology movement, and his main point is that we obtain a maximal level of HAPPINESS in life when we’re challenged just beyond our comfort zone on a regular basis. Mastery, on the other hand, goes beyond attaining satisfaction, and calls for deliberative practice which Csik doesn’t directly touch on. And concepts like the 10-year rule and deliberative practice have had their proponents way before Csik’s time.