Building domain expertise towards becoming a generalist

Malcolm Gladwell has been the public face that has helped popularize the 10,000 hours expert theory. The researcher who arrived to that insight though was originally K.Anders Ericsson. Looking at some of his original writings we can find a more nuanced explanation of what are the factors that lead to expert performance within this 10,000 hours timeframe and what are the characteristics practice has to embody in order to lead the practitioner towards the aspired expertise.

An expert is, according to the Webster's dictionary, "one who has acquired special skill in or knowledge of a particular subject through professional training and practical experience". Delving deeper into the practical angle of this expert, Ericsson and Lehmann found through their research that:

• IQ has nothing to do with expertise. "General basic capabilities do not predict success in a specific domain"
• The superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and "its transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited"
• "Systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training"

All in all, expertise has nothing to do with the innate qualities of the mind. Expert performance is about skill acquisition (training) and gradual improvement of performance during extended experience in a domain. 

And what about this 'extended experience'? How should people's approach be when spending time practicing? It seems like the general attitude is not about a casual experience or 'leisure experience' as they call it. It is more about exposing oneself to specific types of experiences, or what they call 'deliberate practice'. Research shows that the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts. The mindset with which one approaches the practice has a tremendous influence on how fast expert performance is achieved.  It's not just about spending 10,000 hours in any way possible, but it is about investing 10,000 hours in conscious and deliberate experience.

The main difference between 'deliberate practice' and 'undirected practice' is that deliberate practice focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort: stretch activities that make your brain work in order to figure out how to complete them. These multiple and constant exercises add up over time and contribute gradually to a significant leap in performance.

Suggestions on how to become an expert in a specific domain:

• Learn to discern relevant information and encode it in special representations in working memory. Benefit: allows you to plan, evaluate, and reason about alternative courses of action 
• Encode knowledge around domain-related concepts and solution procedures. Benefit: allows you to reliably and rapidly retrieve stored information whenever it is relevant
• Acquire domain-specific memory skills. Benefit: allows you to rely on long-term memory to dramatically expand the amount of information that can be kept accessible during planning and during reasoning about alternative courses of action
• Increase quality of mental representations. Benefit: allows you to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and to anticipate future events in advance.
• Monitor and evaluate own performance. Benefit: allows you to improve your own performance by designing your own training and assimilating new knowledge.

Related readings:

• "The making of an expert" by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely
• Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice

Photo: Kilian Eng