Key Takeaways
- Practice accounts for only 12% of the difference in performance on average across different skills.
- The best practice mixes hands-on experience with mental practice.
- Spacing out practice sessions results in better performance.
What creates the difference between expert and amateur performance? Can anyone become an elite athlete or professional musician with enough practice, or is genetic talent the deciding variable? These questions are examples of the age-old nature versus nurture debate.
In fact, the answer to this question has been the subject of considerable interest and research. A landmark 1993 study suggested that practice accounted for about 80% of the difference between elite performance and amateur performance.
These findings led to the popular notion of the “10,000-hour rule,” or the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Another major study, however, challenged the idea that anyone can become an expert with enough practice.
How Much Does Practice Matter?
In that study, which appeared in Psychological Science in 2014, researchers analyzed the results of 88 different studies of practice and performance in numerous areas including music, sports, education, professions, and games. All of these studies looked at people who were acquiring a new skill.
The researchers assessed factors including how much the people practiced and how good they eventually became at the new skill. Just how big of a role did practice really play?
Unsurprisingly, practicing a new skill does have an important role in the learning process. However, the researchers found that practice alone only accounted for an average of 12% of individual differences in performance across various domains.
Practice accounted for 26% of the variance in games, 21% in music, and 18% for sports. But when it came to education and professions, practice made far less of a difference, with just 4% of the variance attributed to practice in the domain of education and less than 1% for professions.
Other Contributing Factors
So if practice is only one piece of the puzzle, what other factors contribute to learning and skill development? A few of the things that might be important include your overall intelligence, how early you start learning a new skill, your memory capacity, and inborn talent.
While the age-old saying suggests practice makes perfect, researchers have found practice alone doesn’t necessarily lead to success. Instead, experts suggest the right kind of practice is what really matters when trying to optimize learning and increase skills.
While hands-on experience is often touted as the only way to learn a new skill, it leaves out another very important type of rehearsal—mental practice.
Mental practice involves imagining the procedures you must go through to perform a task. For example, a pianist might mentally practice a piece of music while an actor might mentally rehearse his lines in a play.
One 2008 study found that medical students who combined mental practice with hands-on experience did better when performing real surgery than those who had only relied on physical practice and textbook reading.
Best Way to Practice
Researchers have also found that the way a person practices influences how well a skill is learned. In a 2013 study, a team of researchers analyzed data collected from more than 850,000 participants as the players learned new skills playing an online game called “Axon.”
In the game, players guide a neuron from one connection to the next by clicking on possible targets. The purpose is to test how well participants perceive information and make decisions as well as how quickly they act.
What the researchers were interested in when looking at the game, however, was what kind of effect practice had on game performance. And they noticed some players, who practiced the same amount as others, displayed much higher scores than the rest.
By analyzing the data, the researchers were able to see that these high-scoring players had spaced out their playing sessions more, suggesting that they spent more time investigating how the game worked than the lower-scoring players. These spaced-out explorations early on paid off in better performance as the players became more skilled.
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How to Make the Most of Practice
So how can you practice in a way that will effectively foster skill development? Here are some tips for making your practice count.
- Spend time early on becoming familiar with the process and tools you need to perform the skill.
- Vary your practice sessions early on to help maintain interest and enjoyment.
- Be courageous and don’t be afraid to make mistakes; research has shown that optimal learning often requires making errors.
- Remember that exploration is an important part of learning any new skill.
While practice might not necessarily make your skills perfect, it certainly is still an important piece of the learning puzzle. By balancing methods that include mental rehearsal, hands-on practice, exploration, and other forms of learning, you can optimize skill development and become a more efficient learner.
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
Ericsson KA, Krampe RT, Tesch-Römer C. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review. 1993;100: 363–406.
Macnamara BN, Hambrick DZ, Oswald FL. Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychol Sci. 2014;25(8):1608-18. doi:10.1177/0956797614535810
Sanders CW, Sadoski M, van Walsum K, Bramson R, Wiprud R, Fossum TW. Learning basic surgical skills with mental imagery: Using the simulation centre in the mind. Medical Education. 2008;42(6):607-612. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2007.02964.x
Stafford T, Dewar M. Tracing the trajectory of skill learning with a very large sample of online game players. Psychol Sci. 2014;25(2):511-518. doi:10.1177/0956797613511466
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