[Tango-L] Getting to Expert

[Tom Stermitz]

Interesting article in the New York Times about expertise and  
excellence:	
I would like to highlight one paragraph out of the longer quote:

> Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task —  
> playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis  
> serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it  
> involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and  
> concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Sounds about right for tango...



I'm quoting somewhat at length because you may need a login to read  
the article.

http://www.nytimes.com May 7, 2006



> Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida  
> State University .... is the ringleader of what might be called the  
> Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying  
> to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When  
> someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually  
> makes him good?
>
> ...  His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory:  
> training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of  
> numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training,  
> his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept  
> improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to  
> over 80 numbers."
>
> This success, coupled with later research showing that memory  
> itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that  
> the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an  
> intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two  
> people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those  
> differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the  
> information. And the best way to learn how to encode information  
> meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as  
> deliberate practice.
>
> Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task —  
> playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis  
> serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it  
> involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and  
> concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
>
> Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert  
> performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf,  
> surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design,  
> stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not  
> just performance statistics and biographical details but also the  
> results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.
>
> Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and  
> Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be  
> published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait  
> we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way,  
> expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or  
> computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes,  
> practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that  
> parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these  
> particular clichés just happen to be true.
>
> Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes  
> to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if  
> you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very  
> good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't  
> "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply  
> don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what  
> they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the  
> deliberate practice that would make them better.