[mrchicity]

Money quote on page 345: "In the second study, Mosing, Madison, Pedersen, Kuja-Halkola, and Ullén (2014) had over 10,000 twins representing an extremely wide range of music skill estimate deliberate practice and perform tests of music aptitude. Mosing et al. (2014) found that there were genetic effects on both music practice and music aptitude. More important, there was no evidence for a causal influence of music practice on music aptitude. Identical twins differing massively in amount of deliberate practice did not differ significantly in music aptitude."

Apologies for being contrarian, but let me flip things around: Perhaps people who are able to benefit from practice enjoy it and tend to do more of it.

I get excited learning about the latest C++17 features and used to love reading stock exchange specifications, which most people would find about as exciting as a root canal. I find it rewarding because I can apply what I learned and feel a sense of satisfaction. Conversely, I've always sucked at golf and could barely stomach the half-dozen lessons I tried, even though I consider myself a diligent person and spent years practicing many other things. I never improved my swing and the entire experience was nothing but frustration. If you have a rough time at a beginner or intermediate level, it's hard to gin up the desire for continued practice beating your head to a wall.

The premise of this paper is naturally enticing. If you had only tried a bit harder practicing lay ups in gym class, you could be just as good as Michael Jordan (ok more like you could get a bit closer, since they claim practice explains ~20% of results). I don't really buy it.

[wgerard]

> If you had only tried a bit harder practicing lay ups in gym class, you could be just as good as Michael Jordan

I don't think it's that - MJ obviously had a lot of things going for him other than his practice ethic (for one, not too many people are 6'6"). Most people just want to be slightly better than their peers - they want to be the best player on their rec league, and understand they're not going to the NBA.

That holds some water, since as the article notes deliberate practice has more effect at the lower levels of competition.

Or to bring it back to your golf analogy - you were never going to be even a low-level professional golfer, but with enough deliberate practice you could've probably held your own against your co-workers at a company event. That's the goal of most people engaging in deliberate practice, outside of very select environments.

Obviously that doesn't counteract your sheer anguish of practice, though, and you're right that it's quite difficult to practice if you don't have an aptitude for the task.

[taneq]

In the same vein, I think the term "deliberate practice" may produce misleading results. If you love music and you're very good at it, you may not count a jam session or some idle noodling around on a guitar to be "deliberate practice" but they would still contribute to your skills.

Likewise I suspect if you asked a bunch of mid-level gamers how much time they spent "deliberately practicing" to improve their skills, the answer would be low compared to their total playtime, and that their skill levels would correlate much more strongly with total playtime than with deliberate practice.

[barry-cotter]

Neither of your examples qualify as deliberate practice. People can plateau at one skill level for decades and make sudden jumps in ability by deliberately focusing on one specific skill. Expertise is at least in part, the combination of excellence in multiple related skills.

> An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert and focuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities, often paired with immediate coaching feedback. Another important feature of deliberate practice lies in continually practicing a skill at more challenging levels with the intention of mastering it.

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406 [

[taneq]

That's kind of the point. "Deliberate practice" definitely helps to hone particular skills which fill holes in your overall competence. When you're performing at ultra high levels, you probably already have optimal performance in most areas, and all you have left to practice are particular skills.

Also, how you measure "sports performance" and what a percentage point means at different levels seems crucial to the whole thing. Maybe deliberate practice only accounts for 1% of performance... but an athlete who's 99% perfect is twice as good as an athlete who's 98% perfect.

[hooloovoo_zoo]

Bear in mind that the musical aptitude being measured has little to do with how skilled they are as a musician. They are measuring things like ability to differentiate tones separated by 1/2 to 1/30 of a semitone, rather than how much you would want to listen to them play.