Expertise — 10,000 Hours or Something More?

I’d spend ten thousand hours and ten thousand more. Oh, if that’s what it takes to learn that sweet…skill…of yours

Co-Authors: Victoria Claypoole and Kay Stanney

Alright, so that’s not exactly what Dan and Shay are singing about in their recent pop country hit, 10,000 Hours, but let’s be honest, when we first heard that song that’s exactly what us techies were thinking. Malcolm Gladwell made the 10,000 Hour Rule (i.e., it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert) famous in his book Outliers, while Anders Ericsson — the “world expert on world experts” originated the rule. This rule is true for even seemingly overnight sensations, such as Edison, Einstein, the Beatles, Mozart, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates, all of whom trained relentlessly before attaining great success. But what exactly is an expert? Or more appropriately, what constitutes expertise, a word of Latin roots — experiri, which translates to “skillful or experienced in.”

Like many commonly used terms, there is a colloquial definition and an academic definition of “expertise,” which can be confusing. While colloquial definitions are descriptive, primarily derived from how a word is commonly used, academic definitions are decidedly prescriptive. In academic circles, deciding how to define something is often a subject of heated and ongoing debate. In this case, however, the two definitions are mercifully similar: Webster defines expertise as:

“having special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience.”

The prevailing academic school of thought (Ericsson & Harwell, 2019) is that expertise can be defined as:

“reproducible superior performance on domain-specific tasks.”

In short, expertise is the ability to reliably perform at an exceptionally high level in a specific area. What’s interesting about the academic treatment of expertise is that it purports this reliably superior performance can manifest in any area for which the investment of 10,000 hours is made. Just as there are math experts and medical experts, so too are there chess experts and 100-meter dash experts. Expertise applies as much to perceptual skills as it does to cognitive skills and knowledge domains. In fact, experts are just as defined by their fine-tuned perception-action abilities, as they are by their vast body of knowledge.

Expertise — a True Queen

Now it fell out that in the town there was

living a lord, of great authority,

a powerful priest who was named Calchas,

in science a man so expert that he

knew well that Troy would fall utterly…

Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (translated)

Way back in the 14th Century, Geoffrey Chaucer indicated in his epic Troilus and Criseyde that experts are those who acquire mastery through the accumulation of relevant experience. But formal theories of expertise did not start to arise until the famous chess master Adrian de Groot investigated chess mastery (de Groot, 1966). This work was furthered by Chase and Simon’s (1973) work with chess masters, which contributed to the chess craze of the 1970’s — now being revitalized thanks to the Queen’s Gambit… great show, don’t you think? What they found was that world class chess players have ~10,000 patterns stored in memory. With all these stored patterns, chess masters are able to briefly glance at a chess board in any configuration and accurately reproduce from memory the locations of all pieces on the board. This finding appeared in defiance of the limits of human working memory, which Miller (1956) estimated was a mere 5–7 items, or ‘chunks’, of information — how could these masters be recalling the locations of all 32 chess pieces on the board? Further, novices doing the same task were only able to reproduce the locations of 3 or 4 pieces, as might be expected given what we know about working memory capacity.

The experts weren’t possessed of superhuman memory, but rather they had manifested extremely attuned pattern recognition through hours and hours of practice. They didn’t see individual pieces on the board anymore, but rather a group of patterns of chess pieces (or, chunks) that, through seeing thousands of examples, they had become very good at recognizing. This allowed them to ignore most of the individual pieces, as these were extraneous details, and key in on the 3 or 4 most diagnostic features that would tell them the state of the game, and thus the board. Chase and Simon (1973) examined other domains (e.g., football, music, physics) and found the basics of expertise to consistently include copious knowledge and very adept pattern recognition skills primed by vast memory structures that have been honed through years of experience. Subsequent research has confirmed that keen perceptual skill is a defining characteristic of domain experts; from chess players to surgeons to maintenance personnel, experts “see” things in their area of expertise differently than less experienced people (Beam et al., 1996; Sala & Gobet, 2017; Swets, 1998).

So, can anyone become an expert? Pretty much! Expertise is within the grasp of anyone willing to invest extraordinary amounts of time dedicated to learning and practicing the knowledge and skills associated with a given domain. But how you practice may make a difference…

So, How Do We Get Expertise?

Time to start working towards our 10,000 hours, right? Well actually, acquiring this perceptual skill is a function of deliberate practice, and lots of it. Anders Ericcson, the expert on experts, has repeatedly found that acquiring expertise is a function of intentional efforts to identify areas of poor performance and improve them. Where simply doing the thing may qualify as practice, deliberate practice, as Ericcson called it, differs from “regular” practice in that it is targeted at improving a specific, measurable aspect of performance. A medical student preparing for board exams might quiz herself, note any subjects she is weak in, and spend focused time reviewing just those subjects in great depth. In the same way, a professional tennis player, as described in the Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, might watch film of a match to identify weak points in his backhand and spend time working to perfect the timing and mechanics of that one movement. In both cases, the expert is not simply operating in their area of expertise — rereading notes or playing tennis — but improving their skills in a specific facet relevant to their performance.

Through all this mindful repetition, perceptual skill is acquired and honed until the med student doesn’t see a list of symptoms and the tennis player doesn’t see an opponent’s serve. Instead, both see a small subset of the information presented to them, perceiving the subtle patterns, and making connections to their vast body of knowledge to allow them to perform at a high level. It’s not simply 10,000 hours of rote memorization…those 10,000 hours have to be spent intentionally improving weaker areas of a subject which eventually leads to the expertise. Further, this deliberate practice may need to be distributed; Michael Simmons “5-Hour Rule” suggests that one hour, each weekday, devoted to deliberate, highly-concentrated learning is the most effective way to become an expert. Further yet, Simmons suggests that an investment in 10,000 experiments may be more beneficial than 10,000 hours in the pursuit of expertise.

Tips for Acquiring Expertise

If you want to become an expert at something, here are some tips you can leverage in order to acquire expertise:

1. Get a Coach: Einstein had a private math tutor from a young age (Simmons, 2018). Coaches are expertise acquisition experts — that is, experts on making experts. In this context, though, “coach” can refer to anyone who is an expert in what you want to be an expert in. In academia this could be a mentor or advisor, in medicine perhaps a senior physician, in sports — you guessed it — an actual coach. Spending time around, and developing a relationship with, an expert in the area you want to develop expertise is a good practice, but it’s most beneficial when that relationship is one in which you are actively learning (Simmons 10,000 experiments) from them as they exercise or demonstrate their expertise (Gallwey’s showing is better than telling). This will help you to shortcut the learning curves on many of the knowledge and skill areas necessary to achieve superior performance and get feedback that will help you apply the next steps.
2. Set Small, Achievable Goals: Small, measurable, achievable goals that are rooted in specificity will give you momentum (Tank, 2020). If you only start with a lofty goal — I want to be an expert golfer — there is no manageable structure within which to make progress. Setting short-term (e.g., golf five times a week), medium (e.g., reduce my number of strokes per hole by one within 3 months), long-term (e.g., achieve par within one year), and ultimate (e.g., achieve consistent under par performance) goals provides a framework within which to start making gains in expertise.
3. Measure Performance: Get an objective (if possible) measure of your performance in the area you want to become an expert in. Better yet, measure several aspects that contribute to your performance, so you know where you need to focus your deliberate practice efforts. The best athletes watch a lot of tape and the best surgeons keep meticulous records of their patients’ outcomes; if you want to be the best, you need an accurate picture of your performance in as much detail as possible.
4. Identify Weaknesses: Use all that data you’ve been measuring and pick out 1 or 2 areas where you have the most to gain. A swimmer might watch his recent races and find he executes flip-turns a fraction of a second slower than his peers because he takes one stroke too many right before the wall. A mechanic might review her work history and notice some of her regular customers coming in frequently for blown fuses because she has been using the wrong capacity fuse for a particular model of vehicle. Identifying weaknesses is always harder when you don’t have plenty of data, but achieving expertise outright requires that you measure performance so you can identify areas of weakness to target for improvement.
5. Engage in Deliberate Practice: Now that you’ve identified a weak spot, spend focused time improving just that part of your game. For perceptual or procedural skills, this means lots of repetition. Don’t just do it over and over, focus on doing it right every time — really embody that mind-muscle connection. A basketball player working on increasing his points per game might watch tape and try to pick out every time a teammate could set up a give-and-go or he might practice jump shots from a particular spot on the court. For knowledge, deliberate practice looks like acquiring and connecting the knowledge you currently lack. A general physician might read up on the newest pharmaceutical and work to connect its mechanism of action to other drugs of the same kind to better understand the risks and potential interactions when prescribing it.
6. Channel Einstein’s Bent For Experimentation: Einstein strove to conduct one minor invention every 10 days and one major invention every six months (Simmons, 2017). From each experiment, he uncovered lessons-learned that he applied to subsequent experiments, thereby making for an exponential success curve. Jeff Bezos follows this principle… “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day” (as cited in Diamandis, 2016). So, when you are engaged in deliberate practice make sure that you postulate theories and test them, which will foster the building of a mental model of the interconnected cause-effect relationships within your domain of expertise.
7. Use Mental Simulation: Nikola Tesla had an extraordinary power of mental visualization and was known for conjuring up visions of his inventions in his head (Charles, 2018). Those powers led Tesla to be one of the greatest inventors of all time. Through mental simulation, we imagine taking a specific action and simulate the probable outcome over and over again, thereby adding to our 10,000 hours/experiments without lifting a finger! As we anticipate the results of our simulated perceptions, actions, and decisions, our ability to solve new and unique problems improves. So when you are experimenting and starting to build a mental model of how your domain actually works, continuously run mental simulations of different scenarios and test the accuracy of your mental model so that you accelerate your understanding.

The Ever-Elusive Tacit Knowledge

Now that we know what expertise is and how we acquire it, it’s also important to discuss how we consciously — and sometimes unconsciously — demonstrate our expertise. Any time we are asked to recall information, we do so by accessing our long-term memory — this is where we store all of our knowledge! But it’s important to remember that not all memory and knowledge is the same. For example, when you ask your dad how to change a tire, he’ll probably give you some basic facts or tips, explain the general steps involved, and sometimes even show you how. You might even notice that he does extra steps or little tricks when he is showing you that he doesn’t really describe in detail. These details are all different types of knowledge! To understand a bit better, think of knowledge like an iceberg. We start at the top with our explicit knowledge, then we travel below the sea towards our implicit knowledge, and then finally we dive deep to access our tacit knowledge.

• Explicit Knowledge: Easily articulated and characterized as general facts or “knowing what.” An example is your dad describing what the various tools you’ll need to change a tire.
• Implicit Knowledge: Experiential knowledge and the understanding of how to apply explicit knowledge. An example is your dad showing you how to remove lug nuts correctly.
• Tacit Knowledge: Hard to articulate, condition-based knowledge of complex relationships; understanding the underlying rationale for decisions, procedural steps, and actions. You notice your dad tightens the lug nuts by turning the wrench clockwise 6.5 times. When you ask him why, he simply says it’s “what feels right.”

Tacit knowledge tends to be what makes an expert, an expert. It’s the conditional know-how and understanding of complex interrelated relationships that afford expertise. Tacit knowledge is typically learned by observation, imitation, experimentation, mental simulation, and hands-on practice, especially through personal experiences rather than formalized training — so those 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are really all leading up to the acquisition of tacit knowledge. Frustratingly, this tacit knowledge can be extremely hard for experts to articulate. This is because tacit knowledge is stored in the brain slightly differently as it’s a combination of explicit and implicit memory and cognitive processes. This makes accessing tacit knowledge from long-term memory, and in turn communicating the information, particularly complex. Tacit knowledge has even been described as resembling intuition because it’s so difficult to articulate.

Whether experts can fully communicate their knowledge or not, acquiring tacit knowledge through deliberate practice is the underlying key to expertise. Our recent research has suggested that understanding an expert’s tacit knowledge may be the holy grail to training expertise (Claypoole et al., 2020). We are currently developing tools and programs that will capture and preserve an expert’s tacit knowledge in order to develop training and job performance aids for organizations. If successful, these tools and programs could reduce the time to training proficiency significantly and organizations would experience a reduction in knowledge lost due to expert retirement. In short, capturing tacit knowledge is tantamount to replicating your experts.

Conclusion

Experts generally have years, often decades, of experience in their area of expertise. But they didn’t get there just by doing something for a long time, they got there by deliberately practicing and experimenting until they achieved reproducibly superior performance. And just like expertise doesn’t magically appear with time, it may not always be bound to time at all. In the same way an expert coach or mentor can help propel you up the learning curve, soon a virtual expert might be able to do the same anywhere and anytime. But whatever forces might help to accelerate acquiring expertise, the formula remains the same: Identify weaknesses, use deliberate practice to improve, and strive for 10,000 hours… or is that experiments?!

References

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Charles, D. (2018). Nikola Tesla relied on the power of visualization — here’s how to use it in your life. Hive Blog. https://hive.blog/science/@justlikeapill/nikola-tesla-relied-on-the-power-of-visualization-here-s-how-to-use-it-in-your-life

Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90004-2

de Groot, A. D. (1966). Perception and memory versus thought. In B. Kleinmuntz (Ed.), Problem solving research, methods and theory (pp. 19–50). New York: Wiley.

Diamandis, P. (2016, Apr 10). Culture & Experimentation — with Uber’s Chief Product Officer. Abundance Insights. https://medium.com/abundance-insights/culture-experimentation-with-uber-s-chief-product-officer-520dc22cfcb4

Ericsson, K. A., & Harwell, K. W. (2019). Deliberate Practice and Proposed Limits on the Effects of Practice on the Acquisition of Expert Performance: Why the Original Definition Matters and Recommendations for Future Research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02396

Gallwey, T. (2008). The inner game of tennis: the classic guide to the mental side of peak performance. New York: Random House.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: the story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Miller, G. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.

Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Experts’ memory superiority for domain-specific random material generalizes across fields of expertise: A meta-analysis. Memory & Cognition, 45, 183–193. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0663-2

Simmons, M. (2017, Oct 12). 5-Hour Rule: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible. Accelerated Intelligence. https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/the-5-hour-rule-if-youre-not-spending-5-hours-per-week-learning-you-re-being-irresponsible-791c3f18f5e6

Simmons, M. (2018, Nov 8). Unlock your brain’s power with the Einstein technique. Accelerated Intelligence. https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/how-to-rapidly-double-your-brain-power-with-the-einstein-technique-4c9b76ec92c2

Swets, J. A. (1998). Separating discrimination and decision in detection, recognition, and matters of life and death. In D. Scarborough & S. Sternberg (Eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science (2nd ed., pp. 635–702). MIT Press.

Tank, A. (2020, Aug 7). (Deliberate) practice makes perfect: How to become an expert in anything. JotForm Blog. https://www.jotform.com/blog/become-an-expert/