Member-only story
Does Practice Really Make Perfect?
Serena Williams is known to practice four hours at a stretch. After every formal practice ends, Steph Curry lofts 100 three-pointers, part of a lifetime of intense practice that allows him to make it look so easy during a game. Eighth-grader Karthik Nemmani won last year’s National Spelling Bee by studying specifically for the competition during “months of highly specialized training.”
Despite some 17 years of schooling and decades of professional writing, I still today could not win an 8th-grade spelling bee. Nor would 10,000 hours of drills have gotten me to Wimbledon or the NBA.
Yes, there’s a lot more to perfection than practice. For one thing, studies suggest practice is responsible for somewhere between 1 and 33 percent of a person’s success, depending on the particular pursuit. Meanwhile, how you practice can matter greatly. And for some skills and professions, you can actually practice too much, a new study finds.
Talent vs. Practice vs. Hard Work
The idea that practice makes perfect was thought to be well supported by a 1993 study of musicians, in which researchers led by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson determined that practice accounted for about 80 percent of the difference between elite performers and committed amateurs. “Many
characteristics once believed to reflect innate…
