a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill. To teach himself to write, Benjamin Franklin took the essays in The Spectator, the leading magazine of his day, and translated them into poetry. Then he took his poems and translated them back into prose. Then he analyzed how his final work was inferior to the original Spectator essays.
When he was teaching himself to play basketball, Bill Bradley set himself a schedule. Three and a half hours of practice every day after school and on Sundays. Eight hours on Saturdays. He wore ten-pound weights on his ankles to strengthen them. His great weakness was dribbling, so he taped pieces of cardboard to the bottom of his glasses so he could not see the ball as he dribbled it. When his family took a trip to Europe by boat, Bradley found two long, narrow corridors belowdecks where he could dribble his basketball at a sprint, hour upon hour, day after day.
Deliberate practice slows the automatizing process. As we learn a skill, the brain stores the new knowledge in the unconscious layers (think of learning to ride a bike). But the brain is satisfied with good enough. If you want to achieve the level of mastery, you have to learn the skill so deliberately that when the knowledge is stored down below, it is perfect.
Some music academies teach pianists to practice their pieces so slowly that if you can recognize the tune you’re playing too fast. Some golf academies slow down their pupils so it takes ninety seconds to finish a single swing (try it sometime). Martha Graham covered the mirrors in her dance studies with burlap. If the dancers wanted to check out how they were doing, they would have to feel it by concentrating on the movement of their own bodies.
The more creative the activity is, the more structured the work routine should probably be. When she was writing, Maya Angelou would get up every morning at 5:30 and have coffee. At 6:30 she would go off to a hotel room she kept—a modest room with nothing in it but a bed, a desk, a Bible, a dictionary, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry. She would arrive at 7:00 A.M. and write every day until 12:30 P.M.
John Cheever would get up, put on his only suit, and ride the elevator in his apartment building down to a storage room in the basement. Then he’d take off his suit and sit in his boxers and write until noon. Then he would put his suit back on and ride the escalator upstairs to lunch.
Anthony Trollope, an extreme case, would sit down at his writing table at 5:30 each morning. A servant would bring a cup of coffee at the same time. He would write 250 words every fifteen minutes for two and a half hours every day. His daily total was exactly 2,500 words, and if he finished a novel without writing that allotment, he would immediately start a new novel to hit the mark.
H. A. Dorfman is one of the great baseball psychologists. In his masterpiece, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching, Dorfman says that this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”
Dorfman advises pitchers to adopt the same pregame rituals, game after game. Walk from the locker room to the same spot on the bench, put your water bottle in the exact same spot, stretch in the same way. He tells pitchers to structure the geography of their workplace. There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe—on the mound and off the mound. When a pitcher is on the mound he should be thinking about only two things, pitch selection and pitch location. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should get off the mound.
The mind is focused when it is going forward in a straight line, he argues. The discipline is to put the task at the center. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent and anxiety aren’t at the center. The task is at the center. The master has the ability to self-distance from what he is doing. He’s able to be cool about the thing he feels most passionate