CHAPTER 13

Excellence: Becoming Your Best

Be not afraid of greatness.

—William Shakespeare

Every single college student in America wants to be good at something, and many want to be truly excellent. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Nothing is more common than the desire to be remarkable.” Excellence may even be today’s most popular spectator sport, where the action is so gripping that the Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of the world battle it out with insanely talented athletes, kindergarten-age violin players, and hot-dog-eating champions for a share of our attention. There is a reason why we don’t clamor for tickets to watch Battle of the Bands That Have Just Started to Learn Their Instruments, eagerly set our DVRs to record the Libyan Professional Basketball League, or insist that our friends must check out the totally average show we saw the night before. Excellence thrills and amazes—it inspires and engages.

Developing excellence, however, is not a spectator sport. It ain’t gonna happen just by watching. If you want it badly enough, though, and are ready to bust your hump in the most disciplined of ways, college is an incubator for taking huge leaps toward realizing your potential.

So how does one achieve greatness? In 1869, the eminent scientist Sir Francis Galton published Hereditary Genius, in which he studied experts of all kinds, from sheepherders to high court judges, and wrestlers to doctors. Galton’s conclusion? You had to be born with it: your pinnacle of success was preset by your parents’ abilities. If your father was a great surgeon, you had it in you to be one, too. If not, stick to whatever else your folks did well, be it bricklaying or astronomy, lest you be doomed to a life of genetically determined mediocrity.

For those who preferred not to carry on the family business, things started looking a bit brighter around the turn of the twentieth century, when University of Indiana researcher William Bryan and his colleague Noble Harter figured out that no matter their genetic imprint, people tend to get particularly good at what they practice right around the ten-year mark. Then, in 1947, Stanford University’s Louis Terman and Melita Oden debunked the popular theory that IQ was the biggest game-changer in people’s success. These studies did a terrific job of showing us what did not make the difference in expert development (genetics and IQ among them), but the question remained: How do human beings develop excellence in a field of their choosing?

In Your Hands

If you want to immerse yourself in the theory and application of expert development, a great place to begin is The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. The A–Z of developing young talent? In here. Hanging on to those mad skills when you’re old? Bingo. The neurology behind expertise? Got it. The role of memory? Schwing! Chess, mathematics, music, acting, writing, ballet dancing, tennis, firefighting—if the expertise you are looking to develop is legal, the how-to can be found among these pages (and if it’s not, the book will still help you figure it out).

There’s just one minor snag: clocking in at 899 pages of prime grade-A scientific study (font size: “tiny”), this sucker is more massive and complex than you can imagine. So in the interest of saving you a little time and sparing you the risk of a hernia and/or chronic dry-eye syndrome, here’s the money shot: what you need to learn is something called deliberate practice (DP).

The first thing you need to know about deliberate practice is that it works. It’s been tested a hundred different ways from Sunday, on everyone from athletes to doctors.

What we find particularly cool about this idea—and particularly cool for you right about now—is not just the remarkable depth and rigor of the science supporting it, but what it signifies. Deliberate practice rejects the Galton theories flat-out, declaring: if you bust your ass to do something, you have a real shot at being extraordinary. And that is amazing.

Developed by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, deliberate practice is based on the simple premise that realizing excellence is not about inherent talents or hitting the genetic lottery, but simply hard work—especially a certain kind of hard work.

So, how are you going to compete with that girl with the scary-high IQ sitting next to you? That guy who just seems to have a knack for getting As on everything (even though he “… like… never” studies)? The kid on your freshman hall who seems to skate by effortlessly on charm alone? Deliberate practice is how. DP doesn’t simply level the playing field, it multiplies the opportunities that are now at your hardworking fingertips.

Whether you are striving for world-class skills or simply seeking to make the most of your potential, DP can be an enormously powerful and efficient bullet train to the next level of development. You may be looking to become the next John Mayer or Dave Grohl of the six-string or just shooting to lead memorably strong sessions of “Can’t Feel My Face” around the campfire. Either way, DP applies. Jumping from the top third of your class to the top 10 percent (or even 1 percent), becoming a working actress or an Oscar winner, a campaign strategist or a cabinet member—this is the place to start. DP is a path to improvement that goes as far as you are willing to bushwhack, no matter who your genetic predecessors may have been. The goal, motivation, and result of deliberate practice is improvement—period.

Here’s an example of what DP might look like in action:

Two students enter college. They both sign up for the same schedule, aspire to similar professional goals, and set aside three hours to study every day. The first student goes to the library for those three hours, finds a quiet place to sit and focus, turns off their phone, and sets specific goals for what they would like to accomplish before they leave. The second student studies in the common area of their dorm (or in the quad if it’s a nice day), with the door open and phone on, responding to texts and welcoming conversations with passing hall mates throughout. Both students work their way through the same amount of reading, but while the second student pushes through without stopping, the first student takes notes throughout (both for the class and on ideas that are of personal interest), pausing at the end of each section to reflect on what they just learned. The first student outlines questions for the professor (with whom they speak on a regular basis) and class discussions. They may even go back to revisit some of the material that was particularly challenging.

At the end of the semester, both of these students have earned very respectable grades. But are they likely to emerge with equally good educations? Will they make the same progress toward their professional goals? Heck no. They’re both looking to acquire knowledge in the same field, but only one of them is on track to mastery. The secret to mastering a skill is not that you practice. It’s how you practice.

In his work both as a performance coach and as a college instructor, Dan frequently turns to DP to help clients and students open new doors and maximize strengths they are either unaware of or underutilizing. He has found that three of the most helpful (and readily available) aspects of deliberate practice are goal-setting, mentorship, and feedback.

Goal Setting

Meredith was two years into the real estate career she had set her sights on back in business school. She felt lucky to have landed at a prestigious firm and was making a decent entry-level income, but she felt frustrated that she wasn’t on the same radar screen as Peter and Audra, two peers who were seen as the rising young stars in the agency. “I feel stuck already,” she told Dan. “They’re halfway around the track on their way to the winners’ circle, and I haven’t even gotten out of the stable!”

“Forget the job titles for a second,” Dan said to her. “What measurements of personal growth would mark your progress?”

“Building my base of knowledge,” Meredith immediately replied.

“Great!” Dan said. “What do you want to learn?”

Meredith rattled off her list: sales, marketing, financing, managing a team…

Together, Meredith and Dan devised a four-month experiment, with Meredith choosing one topic from her list to deliberately practice each month, keeping a journal about what she learned. During her initial deep dive into sales, for example, Meredith asked to sit in on the highest-level sales meetings and presentations at work, and began reaching out to top agents for mentoring advice, studying their work styles and strategies, and getting specific feedback on her own endeavors. She read the memoirs and biographies of the greatest salespeople of all time, from P. T. Barnum to Meg Whitman. At the end of each month, she had filled pages of her journal with notes about all she had learned. She repeated her design-your-own-seminar approach in the following weeks with her remaining topics. At the end of the endeavor, her outlook had shifted from defeated to energized as she realized that she was fulfilling the very goal she had identified as her most desirable: she was learning and growing. Her bosses took notice of the change as well, and the more Meredith asked for fresh opportunities and learned from them, the more opportunities the higher-ups began throwing her way.

Mentors

Oprah had Maya Angelou, Zuckerberg had Jobs, Harry Potter had Dumbledore. And Dan’s best college friend, Jonathan Mannion, had renowned photographer Richard Avedon. When it comes to developing excellence, working with someone who has “been there before” or who knows the path that will enable you to reach your loftiest goals is essential. The very community you cultivate in college can serve to stimulate, cajole, and encourage growth beyond comprehension.

Aspiring photographers at Kenyon College were lucky enough to have a direct pipeline to Avedon, the legendary artist who hired a steady stream of Kenyon grads as assistants. Dan’s buddy Jon landed a gig as fourth (out of four) assistant right after college. It was long hours, hard work, and paid next to nothing—and Avedon was uncompromisingly demanding—but Jon loved learning from him every day. How did Avedon create a scene? Why this light instead of that one? How did he interact with the celebrities who posed for him? How did he run his business? The chance to soak it all in was worth absurd tasks such as finding a prizewinning rooster with the exact same plumage as the one a supermodel’s husband’s dog ate in the neighbor’s yard (try doing that in under twelve hours pre-Internet!). Jon made it to number three assistant before he moved on.

Still, Jon considered his grueling year with the master worthwhile. Absorbing the wisdom of someone more experienced isn’t about finding someone to meet your needs—Jon never made the rookie mistake of wanting a mommy instead of a mentor. The key, he realized, is to find what gifts the mentor has to offer and embrace them. Avedon never told him how to make it in the business, he never even gave him advice, but “the learning came from observation,” says Jon. “The gift was to absorb everything I could,” which is how he came to have a whole roll of candid portraits of Biggie Smalls and other rising hip-hop stars after crashing a Manhattan party hosted by Russell Simmons in the mid-1990s. With the right opportunity, the right advice, and the right equipment, Jon found his calling. Today, with more than three hundred album covers to his name and international gallery shows that have crowds wrapping around the block, Jonathan Mannion is what MTV describes as “hip-hop’s go-to photographer.”

Feedback

Your teachers and mentors aren’t there just to help you set your goals. In deliberate practice, their steady guidance includes very honest feedback—both praising (“Very good, Daniel-san”) and critical (“Show me paint the fence!”), so that you can make immediate adjustments when necessary to ensure constant growth in the right direction. Whether they are yelling at you from the sidelines, sitting next to you at a computer, or huddled over a car engine with you, it is their every tweak, twist, and slightest adjustment that will keep you constantly improving. Just as the greatest performers in the world still consult with their teachers, even business gurus have their own Yodas (see: Bill Gates and Warren Buffett). Sometimes just sitting with a pal or a professor to discuss your work and help you spot those little corrections can pay off in a massive way, and doing so now can get you into a lifelong habit that will pay off in the form of nonstop growth.

Natalie was flattered and excited when corporate recruiters plucked her from the bartending/waitressing ranks to put her on the management track at the restaurant where she worked. She loved the food industry, and being in the high beams of the restaurant owner could only be a good thing, she figured: after all, the guy had built an empire of over a dozen white-hot restaurants in New York City. He was an absolute superstar in the field.

He was also a world-class screamer and perfectionist. The napkins weren’t folded right. The plates weren’t centered properly. The servers weren’t moving fast enough. The hostess was slouching, that busboy was chewing gum. Every directive and complaint came with a barrage of f-bombs and insults. (“They’re frickin’ GUESTS, not frickin’ CUSTOMERS, you frickin’ morons!”) People in Natalie’s class of trainees seemed to be quitting or crying every frickin’ day.

Not Natalie.

For Natalie, the question at the end of each shift wasn’t how she’d been treated, but what she had learned. She turned down the volume and filtered out the abuse to focus on the feedback. Day by day, the instructions the restaurateur was giving all added up to an incomparable handbook on how to structure and run a successful business. Knowing how to receive feedback helped Natalie deliberately practice the new skills she needed. She toughed out the boot camp and eventually become a senior executive.

We call DP forced evolution, because it’s all about pushing yourself (and being pushed) further than you could possibly go without the goals, focus, feedback, tweaks, and timing that DP is all about. It makes the most of your every second, bead of sweat, and ounce of effort. It guides you to set habits that lock you into a rocketlike trajectory and helps you reach levels that you simply couldn’t get to otherwise. The exercises at the end of this chapter will show you some other techniques for instilling DP.

Now That You Know the How, What About the How Long?

Some DP makes you better—more of it makes you great. DP was thirteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg spending hour after hour at the computer while his father taught him programming, and it was also him giving his all in Facebook “hackathon” competitions well after he was worth a billion dollars. It was Georgia O’Keeffe drawing the same wildflower over and over again from different perspectives in her high school art class, and taking up clay sculpting in her eighties after her failing vision no longer allowed her to mix paints or see a canvas. John Hayes, a cognitive psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed that few (if any) of the greatest works of artists such as Mozart and Picasso were produced before they had been hard at work for at least ten years. That falls right in line with Ericsson’s theory, which finds that ten thousand hours of deliberate practice is the key to becoming excellent at almost anything in life. Yup, ten thousand hours: that’s three hours a day of DP for ten years.

How Mark Zuckerberg and Taylor Swift Ruined Your Life

Now, if you are sitting there thinking “Ten years?? Who has ten years??” you are in excellent company (provided that you find our students at NYU to be excellent company…). Ten years of intensely focused work may not have felt like much to our hardscrabble ancestors in the Middle Ages (when this was the standard length for job apprenticeships), but fueled by the hyperearly success of role models like Zuckerberg and Taylor Swift, the burgeoning ranks of twenty-something zillionaires (whose age and net worth are easily accessible with a quick Google search), not to mention the seemingly overnight success of contestants on TV talent shows, by today’s standards ten years is… well… forever. In truth, though, the average age of “groundbreaking innovators” has been rising steadily over the past century, and today 42 percent of today’s wunderkinder are in their thirties, and 40 percent in their forties. You’re likely just more aware of the phenoms in their twenties because their youth tends to generate more media exposure. While they may have seemed to just burst onto the scene to claim instant fame, chances are good that those who are the real deal put in years of deliberate practice that you never saw. Just because you hadn’t heard of Zuckerberg until Facebook took over social media, or Swift before she released her first multiplatinum album at the tender age of sixteen, doesn’t mean they weren’t hard at work since they were kiddos. Zuckerberg began programming in middle school, and Swift first picked up a guitar at the age of nine. Talented? Yes. Hardworking for a long time before realizing success? Very.

The illusion that excellence comes fast and young can ratchet up the pressure you feel not only to hit incredibly high benchmarks, but to do so incredibly (perhaps impossibly) quickly. When the bar (or at least the timeline) is impossible to reach, the first things to get cast aside are often the exact things we need to thrive—like happiness, friendships, and sleep (to name a few). Consider the curious college career of James Madison, a Founding Father and the fourth president of the United States. After graduating from Princeton in two years (instead of the then-standard three), Madison was so exhausted that he was unable to travel back to his home in Virginia for an entire year (which prompts us to note the perils of premature matriculation… sorry).

Deliberate Practice Is NOT Fun

To qualify as DP, each practice session needs to be about nothing but single-minded improvement, and this is where the challenge of deliberate practice shows its true colors. Every single moment is the metaphorical dragging of a metaphorical bag of boulders up a metaphorically muddy hill while you nonmetaphorically suffer. Not fun. “Sucks” is not the official word that Ericsson uses (it’s not very academic), but it gets the point across. If what you’re doing is not at least kind of a pain in the ass, you’re not engaging in DP.

Excellence Is Excellent, but What About Well-Being?

You may have noticed that nowhere in the description of DP did we mention any elements of thriving. Why? Simple—because nowhere in the literature on expert development is it mentioned, either. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Development concludes with a ninety-nine-page index listing 14,320 (yes, we have counted) topics. As you would expect, there are references to “mentors,” “feedback,” and “college students.” There is even a reference to “anxiety,” as well as one to “frustration.” But a reference to, say, “positive emotions” or “relationships”? Nope, not one. “Passion,” “meaning,” or “purpose”? Zilch, zero, nada.

It is as if thriving and excellence couldn’t possibly coexist.

The belief that one needs to make a choice between striving for success and thriving in life is increasingly driving students down a dangerous path, away from the very things that are essential to realizing their potential. We know that relationships are key to being and doing our best in both good times and bad, yet over the past twenty-five years, the percentage of incoming freshmen who spend at least sixteen hours a week socializing with friends has been cut in half, while the percentage of you who spend less than five hours a week with friends is at an all-time high of 38.8 percent. Is it mere coincidence that stress and anxiety for you and your classmates have nearly doubled in the same period? We don’t think so.

No matter how it’s spun, when you give your utmost to be your best, there are going to be some seriously challenging, OMG, argghhh, I-just-can’t-do-this! times ahead (for a hilarious example, Google “Daffy Duck yoiks video”). But positive relationships can help you deal with exactly these moments, serving as a buffer, decreasing stress levels both as you are charging bravely forward and after stressful things happen. The challenge of learning new skills through deliberate practice can be genuinely frustrating, but social connection predicts more individual learning behavior: you get to share your newfound knowledge with your crew, vent about the rough times, and celebrate the great ones.

The same elements that are key to thriving can offer huge advantages on the road to excellence. Positive emotions have been shown to foster faster cardiological recovery (hello, athletes and nervous test-takers!), increase levels of creativity (hello, artists, poets, writers, dancers, and you other creatives!), and set new and more challenging goals (hello, every single one of you who wants to improve at pretty much anything in life!). Optimism helps us overcome perceived limits, mindfulness can be used to deal with challenges, and resilience-related topics such as explanatory styles and thinking traps (all of which you can find in this book) offer strategies to overcome the frustrations that often lead to quitting or burnout. Developing excellence may be hard work, but it does not have to be miserable.

The Gray in Greatness

Okay, all right… everyone slow down for juuuust a minute. Can it really be all hard work and no genetics? That six-foot eleven-inch basketball star of a guy who towers over you in the cafeteria might beg to differ, as would the girl who aced AP calculus… when she was in sixth grade. The pendulum does seem to have swung from all nature to all nurture, without much room for possibilities between the two extremes. How can we possibly shake what our mamas gave us if it doesn’t factor into the equation?

Just as celeb mags have attention-grabbing headlines, and even reputable news publications push the envelope for readership, the sharp-elbowed all-or-nothing arguments that help turn books into bestsellers (see Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers as an example of deliberate practice ruling supreme) echo in the halls of academia. Extreme positions can help establish someone’s theoretical turf, but sometimes at the expense of reason, and in this case perhaps even common sense. It can’t really be as black and white as “nature or nurture,” can it?

Even the principal gunfighters in the high-noon showdown over the origins of expertise considered the numerous factors that go into developing greatness. Just a few years after Galton went all “if your mama’s a sheepherder then so are you” on the world (we paraphrase, and please know that we are not talking about your mama), he acknowledged that extensive training is essential to reaching the highest levels of performance. One hundred years later, K. Anders Ericsson, Mr. Deliberate Practice himself, wrote, “One cannot rule out the possibility that there is something different about those individuals who ultimately reach expert-level performance,” and he emphasized the need for “a better understanding of social and other factors that motivate and sustain future expert performers at an optimal level of deliberate practice.”

Of course, then there is happenstance: You are born first (or last) and thus enjoy the fruits of your parents’ undivided attention (or suffer the lack thereof). You are really, really tall: 17 percent of men over seven feet tall in the United States between the ages of twenty and forty play at least one minute in the NBA (in contrast, guys between six six and six eight have only a .07 percent chance of making it to the show). You happen to have a parent who shares your interest in ballet/Mount Rushmore/reptiles, so you get a leg up with trips to the theater/Black Hills/zoo, a shelf full of books and endless dinner table conversations on the topic. You possess the ideal body type, agility, and mentality to be a champion snowboarder but happen to have been born and raised in San Antonio. Science may like its simple formulas, but the combination of nature and circumstance has a way of creating some awfully complex situations.

And don’t forget that some roads are just longer than others, so ease up and give yourself a break. Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature at the age of forty-one (and is still the youngest to have done so), Alexander the Great didn’t conquer the entire known world until he was thirty-two, and four-time Ironman triathlete Chrissie Wellington didn’t even begin competing until she turned thirty, so you have some time to figure things out and set yourself up.

An extraordinary number of factors contribute to realizing excellence, but this much we know: no matter what talents you were seemingly gifted with at birth (and perhaps a few of these have been integral to your successful path to college), there is no replacement for hard work, and deliberate practice is key to your becoming your very best. And for those of you who have yet to find that special skill, or who believe deep down that there is nothing at which you could be truly special, take heart—when you find your spark, the process of deliberate practice can fan it into a roaring fire and turn an underdog into a true champion.

Becoming great at what we do requires continually increasing levels of intensity and challenge. Yet while it may be essential to keep our eyes on the prize, keeping them open to possibility while simultaneously looking out for our well-being can lead us to even higher heights than we knew existed.

Opportunities for Action

Exercises: From Information to Transformation

You turn information into transformation by taking action. Whether you are shooting for good, better, great, or earth-shattering, opportunities are ripe for you to make the most of your efforts right now. Here are the essential questions to help you get a locus on your focus. Apply these questions to one area or several, but working through them right now can help you make the most of your goals in college:

What is one area that you will focus on for optimal growth and development?

At what time and for how long will you commit to practicing each day?

Who are your ideal mentors, and what are three things you can do to create and nurture relationships with them?

What are two ways in which you will gather high-quality feedback about your efforts (e.g., swapping papers with classmates, asking for specific feedback from professors, focusing on mistakes as opportunities for growth)?

Applying these questions to each area in which you are striving for improvement can help you make exponentially larger leaps toward realizing your potential!

Exercise: The Development Is in the Details

DP brings goal-setting to a whole new level of precision. Far from simply setting goals for ten years from now, or even the end of your semester, we are talking about setting goals for the next day, hour, or even minute. If you play the piano, it is not about playing an entire piece without making any mistakes, but about focusing a portion of your next practice session solely on finger speed or tone or the phrasing of one measure of music. For athletes, it is not just about running faster or shooting better, but rather getting your knees or arms positioned precisely, or developing a breathing technique, or focusing on one type of throw, move, or pass so that you can walk away knowing exactly what aspect of the technique you have improved during that session. When it comes to studying, you are not looking solely at the “A” at the end of the semester, but rather what you will have learned each and every time that you are ready to leave the library. If you are taking French, will you focus on better comprehension or a truer accent in your next study session? Goals in deliberate practice put your efforts under the microscope to track progress regularly and with finely tuned, measurable precision.

In the area(s) where you are most keen to see improvement, use the questions below to create a journal. The first page should list your development goals for the semester. Those will keep your eyes on the prize. The rest of the journal will set your weekly and daily practice goals. Finally, give yourself an opportunity to soak in your achievements: review your improvement each week and every night.

1. What skill developments would clearly indicate improvement?

By the end of the semester

By the end of this week

By the end of today

2. Which development best demonstrated your growth and development today, and why? What related goal achievement over the past week are you proudest of?

The Takeaway

The Big Idea

Achieving greatness in almost any domain is less about hitting the genetic lottery than it is about factors that are very much in your hands.

Be Sure to Remember

Deliberate practice is a finely tuned, very precise way of developing your skills to their utmost and pushing yourself to higher levels than you would achieve otherwise.

Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it has to be unpleasant: integrating aspects of well-being into your developmental process can give you an advantage on the road to realizing your potential.

The process of developing excellence is neither easy nor fast. Experts believe it takes ten years of deliberately practicing a skill to hit the sweet spot.

Making It Happen

Check the checklist: When striving to raise your game by leaps and bounds, keep your checklist on hand, keep it current, and keep it full of challenges.

A goal a day: To boost your skills and your sense of accomplishment, set tough, specific goals for each practice, rehearsal, or study session.

Pain, gain, and laughter: Make sure to incorporate friends, laughter, meaning, and other aspects of well-being into your process. Striving for excellence is not easy, but doing so without positive influences is even tougher.