Write a one paragraph summary on the text. (30 minutes). The making of an expert.
A. The research shows that outstanding performance is the product of years of deliberate practice and coaching, not of any innate talent or skill.
Thirty years ago, two Hungarian educators, Laszlo and Klara Polgar, decided to challenge the popular assumption that women don’t succeed in areas requiring spatial thinking, such as chess. They wanted to make a point about the power of education. The Polgars home-schooled their three daughters, and as part of their education, the girls started playing chess with their parents at a very young age. Their systematic training and daily practice paid off. By 2000, all three daughters had been ranked in the top ten female players in the world. The youngest, Judit, had become a grandmaster at age of 15, breaking the previous record by one month.
B. To people who have never reached a high level of competition in sport, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of playing daily for many years. However, simply living in a cave doesn’t make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice – deliberate practice – to develop expertise. Deliberate practice entails considerable, specific, and sustained effort. To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you are learning to play golf. In the early phases, you try to learn the basic strokes and focus on avoiding embarrassing mistakes such as hitting another player with a ball. You practice with novices like yourself and, in a surprisingly short time, your game improves. You work on your skills and practice until your strokes become automatic. Your golf game is now a social outing, in which you occasionally concentrate on your shots.
C. However, from this point on, additional time on the golf course will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades. Why does this happen? You don’t improve, because when you are playing a game, you get only a single chance to make a shot from a given location. You don’t get to figure out how you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to improve your control.
D. This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing any kind of skill. Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them. The famous violinist Nathan Milstein wrote: “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once I asked my mentor, Leopold Auer, how many hours I should practice, and he said, “it really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty”.
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