How to Become a Grand Master
If you want to understand the science of how people get good at something, chess is an excellent place to start. For one thing, it provides a clear definition of ability: your ranking. Though different chess ranking systems have been proposed with varying popularity, the current standard is the Elo system used by the World Chess Federation. This system gives players a score starting at zero that increases as they get better. Its calculation is complicated, but at a high level of approximation it reflects one’s performance at official tournaments. If you do better than expected, it goes up, and if you do worse, it goes down. A solid novice player who plays the occasional weekend competition will have a score in the triple digits. Bobby Fischer peaked at 2785. In 1990, Garry Kasparov became the first player to ever reach 2800. The highest score ever obtained was 2851, also by Kasparov.
The other reason chess proves useful for studying performance is the fact that it’s really hard. To beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, for example, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer had to analyze 200 million moves per second, and to play a competitive opening, it drew from a database of over 700,000 grand-master games. Given chess’s difficulty, we can expect that the strategies required to get good will be more pronounced and therefore easier to identify.
These traits explain why scientists have been studying chess players since as early as the 1920s, when a trio of German psychologists set out to determine if grand masters had freakish memories.1 (Interestingly, it turns out they don’t: Though grand masters are fantastically efficient at storing chess positions in their minds, their general recall ability is quite average.) One study that proves especially relevant to our interests is more recent. In 2005, a research team led by Neil Charness, a psychologist from Florida State University, published the results of a decades-long investigation of the practice habits of chess players.2 Throughout the nineties, Charness’s team had been placing ads in newspapers and posting flyers at chess tournaments, looking for ranked players to participate in their project. They ended up surveying over four hundred players, from around the world, in an effort to understand why some were better than others. Each player was given a form to fill out that requested a detailed history of the player’s chess instruction. The respondents were asked, in essence, to re-create a time line of their development as chess players: At what age did they start? What type of training did they receive at each year? How many tournaments did they play? Were they coached? How much? And so on.
Previous studies had shown it takes around ten years, at minimum, to become a grand master. (As the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson likes to point out, even prodigies like Bobby Fisher managed to fit in ten years of playing before they achieved international recognition: He just started this accumulation earlier than most.) This is the “ten-year rule,” sometimes called the “10,000-hour rule,” which has been bouncing around scientific circles since the 1970s, but was popularized more recently by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling 2008 book, Outliers.3 Here’s how he summarized it:
The 10,000-Hour Rule
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours [emphasis mine].
In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to this rule as evidence that great accomplishment is not about natural talent, but instead about being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice. Bill Gates? He happened to attend one of the first high schools in the country to install a computer and allow their students unsupervised access—making him one of the first in his generation to build up thousands of hours of practice on this technology. Mozart? His dad was a fanatic about practicing. By the time Mozart was being toured around Europe as a prodigy, he had squeezed in more than twice the number of practice hours that similarly aged musician contemporaries had acquired.
What interests me about Charness’s study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour rule by asking not just how long people worked, but also what type of work they did. In more detail, they studied players who had all spent roughly the same amount of time—around 10,000 hours—playing chess. Some of these players had become grand masters while others remained at an intermediate level. Both groups had practiced the same amount of time, so the difference in their ability must depend on how they used these hours. It was these differences that Charness sought.
In the 1990s, this was a relevant question. There was debate in the chess world at the time surrounding the best strategies for improving. One camp thought tournament play was crucial, as it provides practice with tight time limits and working through distractions. The other camp, however, emphasized serious study—pouring over books and using teachers to help identify and then eliminate weaknesses. When surveyed, the participants in Charness’s study thought tournament play was probably the right answer. The participants, as it turns out, were wrong. Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.
On closer examination, the importance of serious study becomes more obvious. In serious study, Charness concluded, “materials can be deliberately chosen or adapted such that the problems to be solved are at a level that is appropriately challenging.” This contrasts with tournament play, where you are likely to draw an opponent who is either demonstrably better or demonstrably worse than yourself: both situations where “skill improvement is likely to be minimized.” Furthermore, in serious study, feedback is immediate: be it from looking up the answer to a chess problem in a book or, as is more typically the case for serious players, receiving immediate feedback from an expert coach. The Norwegian chess phenom Magnus Carlsen, for example, paid Garry Kasparov over $700,000 a year to add polish to his otherwise intuitive playing style.
Notice how well chess fits with our earlier discussion of guitar practice. The “serious study” employed by top chess players sounds similar to Jordan Tice’s approach to music: They’re both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. At the same time, notice how chess-tournament play sounds a lot like my approach to guitar: It’s enjoyable and exciting, but it’s not necessarily making you better. I spent many hours playing songs I knew, including dozens and dozens of hours spent on stage. Like the intermediate players in the Charness study, I was letting this satisfying work pile up ineffectively while Jordan, during these same ages, was painstakingly squirreling away the serious study that would make him exceptional.
In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music.5 If you want to understand the source of professional athletes’ talent, for example, look to their practice schedules—almost without exception they have been systematically stretching their athletic abilities, with the guidance of expert coaches, since they were children. If you instead turned the tables on Malcolm Gladwell, and asked him about his writing ability, he too would point you toward deliberate practice. In Outliers he notes that he spent ten years honing his craft in the Washington Post newsroom before he moved to the New Yorker and began writing his breakout book, The Tipping Point.
“When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents,” Ericsson notes. “However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found.”6 In other words, outside a handful of extreme examples—such as the height of professional basketball players and the girth of football linemen—scientists have failed to find much evidence of natural abilities explaining experts’ successes. It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
Here’s what struck me as important about deliberate practice: It’s not obvious. Outside of fields such as chess, music, and professional athletics, which have clear competitive structures and training regimes, few participate in anything that even remotely approximates this style of skill development. As Ericsson explains, “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This is what happened to me with my guitar playing, to the chess players who stuck to tournament play, and to most knowledge workers who simply put in the hours: We all hit plateaus.
When I first encountered the work of Ericsson and Charness, this insight startled me. It told me that in most types of work—that is, work that doesn’t have a clear training philosophy—most people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.
To successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, therefore, we have to approach our jobs in the same way that Jordan approaches his guitar playing or Garry Kasparov his chess training—with a dedication to deliberate practice. How to accomplish this feat is the goal of the remainder of this chapter. I want to start, in the next section, by arguing that I’m not the first to have this insight. When we return to the stories of Alex Berger and Mike Jackson, we find that deliberate practice was at the core of their quest for work they love.