Could a "dead-on average" person achieve what we usually see is possible only for a prodigy?
Well, the author gives us a flat out Yes, and here is how he explains it.
Have you noticed that in human history, especially Olympics, the examples abound that some moves once dismissed as impossible now are just entry-level?
What is pushing us forward? Practice.
But how?
It's noted that the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles, among which “deliberate practice” is the gold standard.
We can understand how it works by looking into some more basic types of practice,orTHE USUAL APPROACH.
We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.
However, it has never occurred to us that once we have reached the bottleneck,automated abilities will gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.In other words,if you're not going forward, you are going backward.
Then we have the term “purposeful practice" that Steve applied to push himself to get better.It is a step toward deliberate practice.
PURPOSEFUL PRACTICE
Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress.
Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
After being aware that practice, the right sort though, can help ordinary people achieve awesome results, we'd better examine how exactly the amazing sorts of improvement happen.The answer is hidden in our brains, or the adaptability of our brains.
Since there is no easy wayto observe the changes in our brain as it adapts to the increasing demands being placed on it,we need to use brain imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The idea is to see how the brains of people with particular skills differ from the brains of people without those skills and to explore which sorts of training produce which types of changes.
The best example to show how the body adapts to training comes from the amazing and awesome guys，LONDON CABBIES ！
So what sets them apart from others?
Those licensed cabbies have internalized London to a degree that Google Maps, with its satellite images, camera cars, and unfathomable memory and processing power, can only vaguely approximate.
Given the nature of work that London cabbies and bus drivers both do—driving, it must be something else that makes them diverge markedly in terms of memory and navigational skills.
The difference may be that the latter just do the repetitive work day after day without being challenged to solve any problem given by passengers like what requires knowledge of which site is best avoided in rush-hour.
So now it is clear that purposeful practice can have an effect on certain parts of our brains engaged in the mental activities related. Meanwhile, it also shows that human body is incredibly adaptable regardless of which age group we are in. To be more precise,there may be limits, but there is no indication that we have reached them yet.
To understand how we can best tap into our mental potential , we must return to the basics—— how does the cognitive process work?
成长认知的过程阶段 :
“dogs” is just a label for this collection of disconnected knowledge------spend time around and start to understand them----- all this information becomes integrated into one holistic concept----- all that information is immediately accessible > fully capable of recognizing all related facts> able to predict what’s coming next from what has already happened
During this process, our brain is constantly building what is called Mental Representations, a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. It can be seen as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing.
For an expert in a given area, when they are in the zone, there is nothing new or unexpected coming up, just repetition of what preexists in their minds. All they have to do is trigger their memory banks to function, spontaneously.
In other words, they have extremely powerful mental representations always available there. So when we talk about deliberate practice, we are actually talking about developing ever more efficient mental representations, and forming a clear mental picture of what we do.
But it's worth mentioning that MR is domain specific：there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
To sum up, when we are applying deliberate practice, what happens in our brain is that the neural circuitry have changed accordingly followed by highly specialized mental representations which make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.
Once you have established a mental structure for making sense of your work, next time you run into the other relevant information, you will organize and combine the information with all you’ve already assimilated. The new information becomes part of an ongoing story. It’s like a staircase that you climb as you build it. Each step of your ascent puts you in a position to build the next step.
In any area the relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are.
What makes the best mental representation in a given area?
The most efficient and sophisticated ones involve as many details as possible. By putting all of these different elements into an overall map, people with well developed mentle representations will manage to do justice to both the forest and the trees, which helps them assimilate and consider a great deal more information at once.
But before we use deliberate practice as the golden rule, there are several factors to consider since it can not really apply to any area. It should be a highly developed field.
First, there are always objective ways,or at least semi-objective ways—such as evaluation by expert judges—to measure performance.
Second, these fields tend to be competitive enough that performers have strong incentive to practice and improve.
Third, these fields are generally well established, with the relevant skills having been developed over decades or even centuries.
And fourth, these fields have a subset of performers who also serve as teachers and coaches and who, over time, have developed increasingly sophisticated sets of training techniques that make possible the field’s steadily increasing skill level.
The ideal is to find objective, reproducible measures that consistently distinguish the best from the rest, and if that ideal is not possible, approximate it as well as you can. The better you are able to tailor your training to mirror the best performers in your field, the more effective your training is likely to be.
Now you may ask, what exactly lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach?
This distinction between knowledge and skills.
In many cases, we tend to focus on knowledge about one field, little or none of which will have direct application to the skills required in real professional setting.
The general argument has been that the skills can be mastered relatively easily if the knowledge is there.
However, several researchers have examined the benefits of continuing medical education for practicing physicians, and the consensus is that while it is not exactly worthless, it’s not doing much good, either.
Besides, if you teach a student facts, concepts, and rules, those things go into long-term memory as individual pieces, and if a student then wishes to do something with them—use them to solve a problem, reason with them to answer a question, or organize and analyze them to come up with a theme or a hypothesis—the limitations of attention and short-term memory kick in. The student must keep all of these different, unconnected pieces in mind while working with them toward a solution.
However, if this information is assimilated as part of building mental representations aimed at doing something, the individual pieces become part of an interconnected pattern that provides context and meaning to the information, making it easier to work with.
The author believes the best approach will be to develop new skills-based training programs that will supplement or completely replace the knowledge-based approaches that are the norm now in many places.
However, it is particularly difficult to monitor yourself early in the learning process, when your mental representations are still tentative and inaccurate.That explains why it's crucial to get some personal sessions with a coach who could give advice tailored to your performance if you are still a flat-out beginner.
Three Fs: Focus. Feedback.Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
It's always easy said than done. How to rise above/get past plateaus and keep motivated is a major issue for us.
The thing you need to know is ,when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back. So the key is to figure out the problem first. Meanwhile, there are couple of ways to keep you motivated.
One of the most effective is to set aside a fixed time to practice that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions. Extrinsic forces also work a treat. e.g.
1.As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.
2.Surround youeself with like-minded individuals for support and encouragement.
Before we apply the deliberate practice to business scenerio, there are three prevailing myths that need to be recognized.
1.one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetically prescribed characteristics
“I’m not any good with numbers.”
2. if you do something for long enough, you’re bound to get better at it.
3.all it takes to improve is effort. If you just try hard enough, you’ll get better.
For those who are unable to devote hours to practice each day, it's crucial to transform regular activities into practice activities, which means always being in the learning zone to hone your skills, rather than staying comfortably in the performance zone.In particular, the sort of training with immediate feedback is needed.
If your aim is to make your kid a future master in an area, here is what you should do.
In the first stage, children are introduced in a playful way to what will eventually become their field of interest.
Once children find some motivation to explore or to try something out of curiosity or simply playfulness, parents have an opportunity to use this initial interest as a springboard to an activity, but that initial curiosity-driven motivation needs to be supplemented. One excellent supplement, particularly with smaller children, is praise. Another motivation is the satisfaction of having developed a certain skill, particularly if that achievement is acknowledged by a parent.
This is yet another sort of motivation. A child who sees an older sibling performing an activity and getting attention and praise from a parent will naturally want to join in and garner some attention and praise as well. For some children, competition with the sibling may itself be motivating, too.So it is probably no coincidence in these cases that it is generally the younger siblings.
When they reach the second stage, perhaps the most important factor in the early days of an expert’s development is to maintain that interest and motivation while the skills and habits are being built .Obviously all of the future expert performers decided at this juncture that they wanted to keep going. But the motivation must ultimately be something that comes from within the child, or else it won’t endure.
In the case of team sports, like swimming, the students often relished being part of a group of like-minded people. But whatever the reasons, the motivation started to shift from external to internal in origin.
With the step-up in the level of instruction, the parents still provided support, such as paying for lessons and equipment, but the responsibility for the practice shifted almost entirely to the students themselves and their coaches and teachers.
收获：奔着随便看一本书的心态充实了自己的假期。虽然作者很啰嗦，但还是耐着性子都扫了一遍。对于自己，也更深地理解了一层。最大的收获是信心吧。
心态：不会再觉得自己是所谓普通人所以给自己设限。
认知：在开始努力之前，明确什么是有效的练习方式，坚持。把一个大的目标尽可能的细分为自己可控的任务。在不同的阶段用不同的方法，要学会调整策略。兴趣可以培养，用内力和外力推动自己。
方法：刚开始接触一个领域时，要像真正的大师虚心求教。尽可能地感受、熟悉他做事的方法，向他靠拢。及时的反馈，时常停下来审视自己的错误，调整。关键是要跳出舒适圈，找准自己的不足点，克服。
常用词精析：
1.IF
Dan McLaughlin of the Dan Plan offers a good—if extreme—example of how to use instructors to improve. 甚至可以说是...
used when you are adding that something may be even more, less, better, worse etc than you have just said:
Her needs are just as important as yours, if not more so.
The snow was now two feet deep, making it difficult, if not impossible, to get the car out.
2.to the extent
The knowledge helped,but only to the extent that Dario had a better idea of how to practice in order to develop the skill.
to the extent of
so strongly that
•Some people hold their beliefsvery strongly, even to the extent of being prepared to go to prison for them.甚至到了...地步
to the same extent
to the same degree as; as much as
•The rich will not benefit from the proposed changes to the tax system to the same extent as the lower paid. 和...所...的一样
3.Most
He has been training under coaches who know how to get the most out of an athlete.
most前面通常没有the，如果有the，则意义发生变化，不再是“什么的大多数”，the most本身单独成了个名词成分，表示“最大的收益”或“充其量的限度”。【例如】Make the most of your time. 充分利用你的时间（注意：不要误为“你时间的最大部分”）。/Behavior is caused by brain activity, and the most genes can do is to shape the wiring. 行为是由大脑活动引起的，基因最多只能塑造线路（注意：不要误为“大多数基因”）。/ Jane should therefore make the most of every half hour in which she can command his attention. (Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice, Chapter Six) 因此珍妮就得时时刻刻留神，一看到有机会可以逗引他，千万不要错过。
4.AMONG
@used to say that many people in a group have the same feeling or opinion,or that something affects many people in a group:
注意：among+n. 作为介词短语表示某opinion,event,concern...在特定人群中发生
·The problem is causing widespread concern among scientists.
·The general opinion among police officers was that the law should be tightened.
·The changes will mean 7,000 job losses among railway workers.
@used to talk about a particular person, thing, or group as belonging to a larger group:
·She was the eldest among them.
·Innocent civilians were among the casualties.
·My grandfather had among his possessions a portrait by Matisse.
·Representatives were chosen by the students from among themselves. from 后面还可跟介词或副词
@among other things/places/factors etc used to say that you are only mentioning one or two people or things out of a much larger group:
At the meeting they discussed,among other things,recent events in Japan.
在会议上，除了其他事之外，他们还探讨了最近在日本发生的事件。
@if something is divided or shared among a group of people, each person is given a part of it:
·A father’s property was divided among his heirs.
@among yourselves/ourselves/themselves =with each other:
The allies found it hard to agree among themselves.
5.OF
Require sth of sb(注意不是from)
还有copy off of sb /take my eyes off of sb这里的of 都和表示 /拿走，使损失/ 的动词搭配
■used in expressions showing loss（用于表示损失）
•They were robbed of all their savings.他们的全部积蓄都被抢走了。
2.[often passive]~ sth (of sb)to make sb do or have sth, especially because it is necessary according to a particular law or set of rules
• 使做(某事)；使拥有(某物)；(尤指根据法规)规定:
»What exactly is required of a receptionist(= what are they expected to do)?
接待员的职责到底是什么？
6.Best
They tried different tactics in different situations, learning how best to respond to what the other guys were doing.
作为副词well的最高级，best修饰动词时可以同the一起出现，也可以不要the，有the的时候语气更为强调。【例如】Who sings (the)best of all the boys in your class? 你班里的男孩子，谁唱歌唱得最好？但是只有多个事物相互比较时才可以加the，同一事物不同场合的比较就不能加the。【例如】Work out where and how these forceswould best(*the best)be used. 弄清楚这些力量最好在什么地方以什么方式来使用。
best作为副词，放在to be之后，一个动词过去分词之前，往往可以表示一种判断，即“最好对之加以（某种行动）”，此时这个to be pp尽管pp的动词是瞬时的第四类动词，也可以用一般现在时，因为这个句子已经不是通常意义上的叙述句，而是一个判断句，相当于It is best to inf. X (X本是主语，但在此相当于宾语)。【例如】Going to court can be an expensive, time consuming and gut wrenching experience that is best avoided.打官司费钱费时间，又揪心揪肺，最好避免。
7. regardless
If something happens regardless of something else, it is not affected or influenced at all by that other thing. 不管...
It takes in anybody regardless of religion, colour, or creed.
Regardless of whether he is right or wrong, we have to abide by his decisions.
regardless[ADV: ADV after v] 尽管如此，照样
If you say that someone did something regardless, you mean that they did it even though there were problems or factors that could have stopped them, or perhaps should have stopped them.
Despite her recent surgery she has been carrying on regardless.
... if any of them meet with an accident by tumbling into a ditch, or into a river, the rest pass on regardless, and generally leave him to his fate... (Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling) …如果他们当中有谁出了事，掉进沟里或是河里，其余的人还是继续照样过去，通常就让他听天由命…
=anyway
You use despite to introduce a fact which makes the other part of the sentence surprising.尽管
Despite a thorough investigation, no trace of Dr Southwell has been found.
The National Health Service has visibly deteriorated, despite increased spending.
He was obviously distressed despite being unconscious.
=in spite of
despite
If you do something despite yourself you do it although you did not really intend or expect to.
Despite myself, Harry's remarks had caused me to stop and reflect. 不由自主地
despite
You use despite to introduce an idea that appears to contradict your main statement, without suggesting that this idea is true or that you believe it. 尽管有...（传言）说...
She told friends she will stand by husband, despite reports that he sent another woman love notes.
Despite rumours of a fondness for alcohol, he is revealed as a man who never swears.
Verbal phrases:
1.dead-on average
dead on 准准的
I make it dead on half past by my watch.
造句：What time is it ？Bang on midnight.
2.Once he blurted out, “Absolutely right! I’m certain!” 脱口而出
• He blurted everything out about the baby, though we'd agreed to keep it a secret for a while.
造句：I worry that I am going to blurt out something that I will come to regret.
a breakthrough that eventually allowed him to work up to using four four-digit groups,
3. work up to doing something 渐入佳境
to gradually prepare yourself to do something difficult
He’d been working up to asking her for a date all week.
造句:I began by jogging in the park and worked up to running five miles a day.
4. This idea went hand in hand with the belief that individual differences in abilities were due mainly to genetically determined differences in the brain’s wiring and that learning was just a way of fulfilling one’s genetic potential.
伴随着这种观念的还有人们对于...的理解。
5.loose end
[usually pl.]
• a part of sth such as a story that has not been completely finished or explained
(故事等)悬念,未了结的部份,未交代清楚的情节:
»The play has too many loose ends.
这部剧未作交代的东西太多。
»There are still a few loose ends to tie up(= a few things to finish).
还有几件小事需要了结。
Most scientists would have flat out denied that something like what Maguire has seen in the brains of London cabbies was even possible.
6.flat out 竭尽全力；坚决的
1.as fast or as hard as possible
•Workers are working flat out to meet the rise in demand for new cars.
2.(especially NAmE)in a definite and direct way;
•I told him flat out ‘No’.
•It's a 30-year mortgage we just flat out can't handle.
7.what is inside you——intrinsic 内在的推动力
adj.
•~ (to sth)belonging to or part of the real nature of sth / sb
• 固有的；内在的；本身的:
»the intrinsic value of education
教育的固有价值
»These tasks were repetitive, lengthy and lacking any intrinsic interest.
这些作业重复冗长,缺乏真正的趣味。
8.smooth the way
■to remove difficulties firstand make something easier to do or achieve使顺利，使顺畅
•We encourage parents to help smooth their children's way through school.我们鼓励父母帮助自己的孩子为求学之道铺路。
9.grapple with
['græp.l]verb
■to try to deal with or understand a difficult problem or subject尽力解决；设法对付；尽量克服
•Today, many Americans are still grappling with the issue of race.今天，仍有许多美国人还没有克服种族歧视的观念。
10.Since math and science professors have traditionally been very resistant to changing their teaching methods
还有set 也可表示抗拒（尤指对变化和新思想）
■not wanting to accept something, especially changes or new ideas
• 固定的；顽固的；固执的:
»set ideas / opinions / views on how to teach
不变的教学思想/主张/观点
»As people get older, they get set in their ways.
随着年龄的增长,人就积习成性。
与之对应的是open,receptive 的概念
Someone who is receptive to new ideas or suggestions is prepared to consider them or accept them.
The voters had seemed receptive to his ideas.
Do you think that there is any receptive audience for hisremarks.
11.Prime
verb
1.~ sb (for / with sth)to prepare sb for a situation so that they know what to do, especially by giving them special information
•事先指点；使(某人)做好准备
»They had been primed with good advice.
他们事先得到了高人指点。
»She was ready and primed for action.
她已胸有成竹、跃跃欲试了。
[VN to inf]
»He had primed his friends to give the journalists as little information as possible.
他已经知会他的朋友,尽量少向记者透露消息。
12.Given the expense of private instruction, people will often try to make do with group lessons or even YouTube videos or books, and those approaches will generally work to some degree.
用...凑合
•We didn't have cupboards so we made do with boxes.
好句：
One-way streets abound, there are traffic circles and dead ends all over, and through the middle of everything runs the Thames River.
As is the case in so many situations, once you have figured out the right question to ask, you are halfway to the right answer.
Mario took to the ice like a fish to water,skating from the very beginning as if he had been born to it and showing up older children(make them feel ashamed of themselves)who had been skating for years.
围棋基本常识：
Go,which has often been referred to as the Asian version of chess.It is played by two people who alternately交替place their stones棋子—white for one player, black for the other— on one of the intersecting points on the 19 x 19 grid 网格that makes up the board.棋盘The goal is to surround and capture劫 the other player’s stones,and the winner is the one who controls the larger area of the board at the end of the game.
