You Never Know What You're Capable Of

“You never know what you’re capable of, until you build it.”

This quote really spoke to me at this particular time in my life, when I’m trying to develop my career path. It was spoken by Dr. Anders Ericsson on the podcast Inquiring Minds, hosted by Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari. Inquiring Minds describes itself as a podcast that, each week, “brings you a new, in-depth exploration of the place where science, politics and society collide.”

10,000 Hours 

Dr. Ericsson, who is Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, was featured on the Inquiring Minds episode “How to Do Everything”, which aired on May 20th, 2016. He is internationally recognized as an authoritative scholar of expert performance. (He is basically an “expert on experts.”) The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something was inspired by his work and largely popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, author of such widely loved books as  Blink and the Tipping Point. 

Ericsson remarked on the podcast that this is idea of 10,000 hours of practice being a gold standard of expertise is a flawed interpretation of his ideas. He worried that focusing too much on clocking in hours rather than “deliberate practice” could actually end up wasting your time if you are not challenging yourself enough during those hours. 

Ericsson used a running analogy to clarify his point. He said that if you’re trying to train yourself to be a good long distance runner, studies have shown that interval training (short  bursts of very challenging, fast running alternating with relaxed periods of walking or light jogging) may actually be a more effective training method than running for longer periods of time at a moderate pace. In short, to Ericsson, it’s not necessarily the amount of hours that you do something, but how much you challenge yourself during your practice time.

The Tough Kind of Practice 

This makes a lot of sense to me, because, at least in my experience, it is the times when my brain is challenged by practice material when I learn the most. It is also the toughest kind of practice to do, psychologically. I think that is actually why it is so tough to become an expert at something: it’s not that we don’t have enough time to practice, but that our brains are wired to take the path of least resistance. As living organisms, It is natural for us to try to conserve energy, and challenging our brains to do something that we see as difficult takes a lot of energy.

I think back to when I practiced piano a lot as a kid (unfortunately, piano is one skill I let drop from my life, but I want to work on a plan to build it back up again). I remember that I always wanted to spend more practice time on songs and scales I already knew well, and would put off learning new pieces as long as possible. It was slow, plodding, and felt so much less fun than playing something skillfully and easily. But the only way that I really grew was by plodding through those tough parts. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter if I spent a lot of time playing pieces that were easy for me, unless I was actively working on improving my performance of those pieces.

Our Capabilities 

There was a lot of helpful information in this Inquiring Minds episode, but I’ll return to the aspect of it that inspired the title of this piece. “You never know what you’re capable of, until you build it.” Ericsson spoke about the common idea that we should spend much of our educational lives on a journey to somehow uncover or discover what we were meant to do, or meant to be passionate about. What if, however, we don’t necessarily have something to discover? Instead, maybe it is enough to find something that interests us, that we would be willing to put in the time to improve, and start doing it. 

It’s impossible to know how much talent you might have in a particular skill or field until you start putting in the deliberate practice, and maybe we could all be saving ourselves so much anxiety about choosing the “right” path for us, by just picking something, learning, practicing, growing, and building. I think this is a really powerful and liberating idea. I think it is so easy to limit ourselves by telling ourselves that we’re not good at something, or we’re not a natural at it, or there are so many people who are better at it than us. We don’t actually know how much we are capable of until we believe that we can do it, and start putting in the practice.