Thoughts on Practice

[Jazzdogg]

I found this missive from Delanceyplace.com interesting as it relates to many of the things I routinely practice, including the bass:

"In today's excerpt - practice. Rather than being the result of genetics or inherent genius, truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved with less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years' time

"For those on their way to greatness [in intellectual or physical endeavors],
several themes regarding practice consistently come to light:

1. Practice changes your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific responses to particular skill requirements.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time.
4. Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it's impossible to become great overnight.

"Across the board, these last two variables - practice style and practice
time - emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills,
but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call 'deliberate practice.' First introduced in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond
the simple idea of hard work. It conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. 'Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs
from mere experience and mindless drill,' explains Ericsson. 'Unlike playful
engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It ...
does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but
repeated attempts to reach beyond one's current level which is associated with
frequent failures.' ...

"In other words, it is practice that doesn't take no for an answer; practice that perseveres; the type of practice where the individual keeps raising the
bar of what he or she considers success. ...

"[Take] Eleanor Maguire's 1999 brain scans of London cabbies, which revealed greatly enlarged representation in the brain region that controls spatial awareness. The same holds for any specific task being honed; the relevant
brain regions adapt accordingly. ...

"[This type of practice] requires a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again and again. ...

"The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of
elapsed time - not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day,
Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common
number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years' time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark.""

Author: David Shenk
Title: The Genius in All of Us
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by David Shenk
Pages: 53-57

[longfinger]

deliberate practice...

oh well, time to hit the Simandl with a bow and sound like a Suzuki kid again.... ughh... oh I mean Mmm Mmm Good!

[fingertap]

Excellent information. I have long been big on the ten thousand hours thing.

That's nine hours a day for three years, every day.

Under such discipline, magic happens. I found when I underwent such a training schedule, I had to discover the how-to details myself. This was in the early 1970's. There were some plateaus or 'brick walls' I had to break through.

It was fortunate that I was soon under the gun in a top 40 and variety band with an agent, playing three to four times a week within a radius of 500 miles from base. Ended up concentrated mainly on the College circuit. Not much time to rehearse as a band. Had to learn new tunes every week. Had to learn them well enough that we could just add them to our shows every week.

I slept with my bass more often than not, waking up and playing in the middle of the night from time to time. I breathed, ate, and slept bass for four years with that band and had been playing for years before that. We could have 'gone places' and were starting to do so but the lead guitarist's wife could no longer put up with it. He quit and took the frontman along with him.

We auditioned and tried a lot of players and singers but could never find reliable, dedicated players of the same caliber. We had played a lot of tunes requiring guitar harmonies (such as Allman brothers, etc on the variety side, for the colleges.) We eventually went our own ways and I discovered that I actually could play just about anything I could conceive.

I put up a card on the union board and other places, "East Coast electric bass player for hire, any style, not really a jazz aficionado, no vocals, available immediately within 450 miles radius...extended jobs, O.K..." The agency also helped greatly when I went mercenary. I did this for about three plus years, on and off, starting or joining bands that never really went anywhere close to where I wanted to go. In the process, I discovered several interesting facts.

1.) I had a valuable skill very much in demand.

2.) It was startling to realize just how many places there were to play on the east coast in those days. I wonder if it is the same now? I am long gone from there.

3.) It was also startling to discover just how much drama there was out there. Bass players running off with dancers, leaving a hole I could easily fill. Bass players getting "thirty days in the hole" and me getting a month or longer of steady work at the same club. Bass players getting in fights and ending up in the hospital, or on the run from a cuckolded husband, or from the law.

4.) It was startling to discover that nearly every bar owner had designs complete with elaborate plans on how to "make it, big time." All any of them needed was a band to exploit in order to conquer the microcosmic world of bars and clubs. Especially along the coast in New Jersey, particularly...

There were many other things as well. The main point I want to make here is that the ten thousand hours idea is no myth. At least not for me. Latest case in point: I stopped playing for about twenty years. I played my first full five hour gig with only ninety-six total hours before the show. I was amazed that aside from being technically rusty and nearly developing blisters, it was almost as if I had never stopped.

The TEN THOUSAND HOURS idea worked for me although it was not codified in any book I was aware of at the time.

I plan on completing another concentrated 10,000 hours in the next couple of years. I am well on my way and it is paying off again, in spades...

Young players, it would be greatly to your benefit to investigate the information in the original post here and apply it...


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[Square Bear]

important note - it's not just the magic number of hours. it is the practice style primarily. in other words, you have to become obsessed with achieving beyond yourself for the number to have any meaning at all. i feel that this point is the most significant part of this study. when you have this mindset, you don't even realize 10,000 hours have passed because the time spent is simply what you needed to be doing. in other words, the number is very much the product of the attitude.

[nicoli]

If anyone has read the book 'Outliers', the author deals with this 10,000 hours theory and applies it to people who have achieved great success, like Bill Gates for example.

There is a chapter about The Beatles, and he uses the fact that were playing nine hour gigs off in Germany or something like that for years before they made it big. He figures they actually put in 10,000 hours of stage time as a band, and became incredibly proficient, successful, and experts of their craft because of it.

I don't know if I buy into the idea of 10,000 hours being the critical amount of time, but there is a lot of evidence to support it. Although I would hope that anyone who puts that amount of work into something sees some level of success.

[Square Bear]

i figure it would be pretty difficult to put that kind of time into anything if you weren't seeing some kind of results from your hard work.

[fingertap]

Originally Posted by Square Bear

important note - it's not just the magic number of hours. it is the practice style primarily. in other words, you have to become obsessed with achieving beyond yourself for the number to have any meaning at all. i feel that this point is the most significant part of this study. when you have this mindset, you don't even realize 10,000 hours have passed because the time spent is simply what you needed to be doing. in other words, the number is very much the product of the attitude.

The plateaus and brick walls I mentioned above concerned this very excellent point. It wasn't the hours, per se, rather it was getting over the stumbling blocks I only discovered after becoming dissatisfied with my progress at certain points.

In retrospect, the hours put in were part of the key to being able to figure out or become qualified to observe and comprehend that I was no longer progressing as fast as I needed to. No so-called 'sane' person would find it easy to devote the incredible amount of effort necessary to amass the hours. Being under the gun with the band's requirement for new music each week helped. Not to mention that I got lucky and had a few great teachers along the way.

For the curious who might like to investigate this concept further, here are a few other books in a similar vein:

Malcolm Gladwell’s, 'Outliers,'

Geoff Colvin’s, 'Talent Is Overrated,'

Daniel Coyle’s, 'The Talent Code.'

Do not forget 'The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,' by David Shenk, the topic of the OP.

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