Practice makes perfect ... or does it?

Does innate, inborn talent or lots of practice lead to elite success? To be successful at a sporting activity, or music, or dance, or writing, or anything, it is thought that you are either born with a talent and then sharpen it, or you develop a skill through regular and continuous practice. Generally scientists don’t agree on one over the other.

In 1993 Florida State University researchers studied musicians and found that practice time explained almost all of the 80% difference between elite performers and committed amateurs. Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers presented the 10,000-hour rule – the average number of practice or rehearsal hours that are required to achieve expert performances (International New York Times, July 16, 2014).

A recent paper in the Psychological Science journal adds to the research – and arrives at a different answer. Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University, Brooke Macnamara at Case Western Reserve University, and Frederick Oswald of Rice University compiled results from 88 different studies across a wide range of skills. They estimated that practice time in music, sports, and games such as chess, explains about 20-25% of performance differences between elite performers and those of good performers. In academia, it explains only about 4% of the performance difference of elite professors and good academics (but this is harder to measure, they admit). The current researchers found that practice is important and absolutely necessary to achieve expertise, but it is not as important as many people have been stating, compared to inborn talents.

Detractors of the research say that the definition of “practice” is debatable. What is meant by practice? Is it deliberate practice in which a person is tutored or coached one-on-one, or all kinds of repetitive practice of skills? The researchers say that no matter what definition of practice is used, their results won’t change much.

True elite performers take years to develop and the exact nature of their “practice” may never be known, nor is it known what influence other factors make, such as genetics, parental or friend support, nutrition, other related exercises, the age when the skill is started, the language of learning, personality, how effective the practice session is, how people react to pressure, whether the practice is intense or not, whether chance or luck is involved, and so on. Many of these factors are difficult to control through experiments and research. For example, chess masters vary in the amount of hours of practice, from 3,000 to more than 25,000 in the life of their skill.

Researchers have also found that mixing different skills in a single practice session (new and existing skills) seems to sharpen each skill more quickly than if practiced repeatedly on its own. Varying the pace and timing, and intensity, also seems to make a difference in perfecting skills.

No one can answer the question: what is the optimal kind of practice needed in the specific skill to acquire elite level?

Personality (such as grit, motivation, desire, dedication, and inspiration) surely is a factor. And some maintain that visualization helps too (imagining achieving the goal). And what about the question: to achieve elite status, what is the optimal amount of wishing and hoping and praying?