More on Developing Your Critical Listening Skills
Every day Delanceyplace sends me email book excerpts, and the one that came today struck me as particularly relevant to the devilishly difficult audio hobby many of us have been engaged in for most of our adult lives. Some of their excerpts are seen below. (Italics added by me.)
I myself wrote a commentary back in 2006 about the 10,000 hour rule, which I have linked below delanceyplace’s piece, along with other commentaries I think you might enjoy.
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman.
“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ — that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field — has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops. The problem: it’s only half true.
“If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one.
“No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal” .
“Apart from sports like basketball or football that favor physical traits such as height and body size, says Ericsson, almost anyone can achieve the highest levels of performance with smart practice. …
“Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is ‘deliberate practice,’ where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.
“Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient.
How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference.
For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists — the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours — Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular aspect of their performance that a master teacher identified.
“Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them — which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks.
“The feedback matters and the concentration does, too — not just the hours. …