If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers
November 11th, 2011 &
The Berlin Study
In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universit?t der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.
As described in their subsequent , the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.
We’ll call this group the elite players.
For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.
We’ll call this group the average players.
The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.
Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?
The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long,Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.
The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…
Decoding the Patterns of the Elite
We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music. The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).
The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice — .
This might not be surprising, as the importance of deliberate practice had been replicated and reported many times (c.f., ).
But the researchers weren’t done.
They also studied how the students scheduled their work. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.
The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best — the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany’s two best professional orchestras — there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two-sessions a day schedule.
This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives.
Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players.
Also consider relaxation. The researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities — an important indicator of their subjective feeling of relaxation. By this metric, the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all.
Hard Work is Different than Hard to Do Work
To summarize these results:
The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.
I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it:
This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between :
Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.
This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, , then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universit?t der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.
The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.
(Photo by )
This post is the first in my series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which claims that applying
to the world of knowledge work is a key strategy for building
Thanks for the article Cal, as always – great use of the case study method to illuminate this fundamental time-management principle.
But a keen reader will immediately see that from the two elements suggested here, time structured for deliberate practice and the practice itself, it’s the latter that’s the more difficult. To use your example, the maestros not only know when to practice, but they also know how to practice.
I’d argue that it’s this element that prevents most people from becoming more than merely good. And, admittedly, it’s this element that’s the more difficult to crack as it involves a number of cognitive, capital, and emotional elements to align. I’d encourage a future post that discusses some of these generalizable principles (e.g. identifying great coaches, generating constant feedback, self-discipline, etc.) if you feel that they are within the realm of your blog.
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(The definitive academic treatment of deliberate practice.)
(A crazy but brilliant book. An important influence.)
Note: This site is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking .It’s time for doing sth=It’s time to do sth 成立吗_百度知道
It’s time for doing sth=It’s time to do sth 成立吗
提问者采纳
完全正确 后者比较常用而已
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。，基本意思差不多，都是该去做什么的时候了成立
两个意思相近
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出门在外也不愁谁帮我回答下几个简单的英语问题1.“it's about time."在口语中是什么意思,还有它的用法?2.start to do sth和 start doing sth的区别3.working out details的准确意思4.double the work的意思5.i think that's about right_百度作业帮
谁帮我回答下几个简单的英语问题1.“it's about time."在口语中是什么意思,还有它的用法?2.start to do sth和 start doing sth的区别3.working out details的准确意思4.double the work的意思5.i think that's about right
谁帮我回答下几个简单的英语问题1.“it's about time."在口语中是什么意思,还有它的用法?2.start to do sth和 start doing sth的区别3.working out details的准确意思4.double the work的意思5.i think that's about right的意思
1,只是时间的问题.呃,比如说有一件事一定会发生,就是迟早的事,就可以用了.2,start to do是指做一件是没做完,开始做另一件事一件；start doing是指开始做一件事情.和stop的用法有点像.3,写出详细的内容.4,这个不大确定,我估计是重新做一遍工作.5,我想大概是对的.
不好意思,我不会这个}