If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives....

[Bob]

https://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/

[dima_76557]

Article has many dubious assumptions:

1) Elite players (foundation - ready) and people getting there (foundation not ready) can be compared for required practice time and type of practice;
2) Elite players always tell truth in surveys;
3) Elite players did not work very hard and very long on "wrong" things to get where they are;
4) Hard work, even if you know how, is not fun;
etc. etc.

Nobody dies from CORRECT and VERY HARD work. Article tells fairy tale. It is nice for countries with good welfare system or if person has options to have career not related to musical performance. Article also suggests that success is for gifted and rich people only.

[lateromantic]

By an interesting coincidence, just a few months ago I read through the famous article referenced in that blog, which was published by Ericsson et al. in the early 1993.  I still have a copy of the pdf document, so I took another look at it just now.  The article was titled "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," and its central theme is the role of accumulated deliberate practice over a period of many years, starting usually in childhood. It reported on two studies.  The first, as discussed in the blog, compared three groups of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin.  The second compared expert and amateur pianists.

The three groups of violinists involved "best violinists" who the music professors judged "had the potential for careers as international soloists," "good violinists" whom they also nominated, and a presumably less skilled group who were studying music ed and were regarded as future "music teachers."  The portion of the results discussed in that blog derived from current practice of these three groups, which, as the article notes, could involve "confounding influences from the activities at the music academy."  In other words (this is my interpretation), if you're busy taking classes and doing other required activities, you squeeze in time in the practice room whenever you can, and that tells us little about your long-run practice habits.

What was much more revealing, I think, was the differences among these three groups in their "retrospective estimates of practice during musical development."  From the article:  "...we statistically analyzed the amount of practice the young violinists had accumulated by age 18. At this age, the best young violinists had accumulated an average of 7,410 hr of practice, which is reliably different from 5,301 hr,the average number of hours accumulated by the good violinists, F(l, 27) = 4.59, p < .05. The average of the best two groups was reliably different from that of the music teachers, who had accumulated 3,420 hr of practice by age 18, F(l, 27) = 11.86, p <.01. Hence, there is complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin."

The lesson to be drawn from this, in my opinion, is rather opposite than what that blog implies:  If you want to be the best, be ready to practice diligently year after year.  Step away from that computer keyboard, and go sit down at the piano keyboard.

[dima_76557]

The lesson to be drawn from this, in my opinion, is rather opposite than what that blog implies:  If you want to be the best, be ready to practice diligently year after year.

Same conclusion as in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers: The Story of Success", which contains similar research with different groups of achievers and non-achievers. The elite players generally simply have been putting in a lot more practice/hours than the rest, already from childhood.

[bernadette60614]

I'd add:  Continuous process improvement in play as well.

10,000 hours at the piano (or in front of an easel) can simply mean 10,000 at the piano (or in front of an easel). 10,000 thoughtful hours, preferably with the appropriate guidance, is, IMHO what makes the difference..