Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1349: Practice Makes Perfect with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue Practice Makes Perfect with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive. --- I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I’d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can’t get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 One of my favorite podcast episodes was with a professor named Anders Ericsson. He developed the concept of deliberate practice. A fantastic interview. Today, a chapter from my book, Trend Following Masters, Volume Two. It is yours truly, reading that interview with Anders Ericsson. Now, the only thing you have to ask yourself, and maybe I date myself when I say this, but today, when you listen, is it live or is it Memorex? I hope you enjoy this chapter from my book, Trend Following Masters, Volume Two.
0:59 Speaker 00 Chapter Two, K. Anders Ericsson, Deliberate Practice.
1:05 Speaker 00 Anders Ericsson was an internationally renowned psychologist who studied expert performance in domains such as music, chess, medicine, and sports, and how expert performers attain their superior performance by acquiring complex cognitive mechanisms through extended deliberate practice. He was the author of nearly 300 publications and the author or editor of several books, including the 2016 book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, which he co-wrote with Robert Poole. Michael Note, K. Anders Ericsson was one of my top five favorite interviews, and I have conducted 500-plus interviews.
1:50 Speaker 00 If you have infinite excuses about why you can't do this or that, then you won't like Anders's research and wisdom. Michael Covel, Stephen Curry is probably the best basketball player in the NBA today. He's not a big guy, no huge physical attributes, but he has hit three-pointers like they're going out of style. I posted on Facebook, "This is all a result of deliberate practice." Immediately, somebody jumped in and said, "Oh, no, he was born with it. His father played in the NBA. It's the genes." I thought to myself, "I wonder what the professor would say." K. Anders Ericsson. We know of a number of fathers and sons who were successful in sports.
2:34 Speaker 00 It raises the issue, why does that happen? There are two extreme accounts. One would be that you're born with the genes that allow you to do it. The other one is that you're born to a father who early on helps you guide your practice in such a way that once you reach adolescence and adulthood, you've had this practice history that can explain your superior performance. Michael, how did this become your passion? What were the triggering moments early in your life when you realized, "I want to go down this deliberate practice route"? Anders, that would go back almost to high school. A lot of people are interested in trying to understand how they can get better.
3:17 Speaker 00 I was interested in reading biographies of people whom I admired. As I started my doctoral work, I wanted to find a method of tapping into what the experts were thinking when they were exhibiting this superior behavior. That was the key step here because at that time, there wasn't all that much work on the subject. People were skeptical as to whether experts could report anything relevant that could explain their superior performance. When I started to ask, people were reporting information that helped me understand how they were able to achieve a higher-than-average performance. The next step was when I was invited to go and work with Herb Simon, who later got the Nobel Prize when I was a post-doc in his lab.
3:58 Speaker 00 The reason why I came to him was to come up with a theoretical framework for the ways people express their thinking when they're engaging in activities. That framework would help us to relate that information to models that could regenerate superior performance on various tasks, ranging from chess to mental multiplication and other kinds of activities. Then I started working with one of the senior professors at Carnegie Mellon University, where Herb Simon was at the time. We were interested in whether it is possible for people to change their capacity. At that time, people thought that short-term memory, how much you could think about at a given time, was capacity that couldn't be changed. One way to study individual differences in that capacity
4:43 Speaker 00 is to read people some numbers and see how many they would be able to repeat back perfectly. If you put somebody in a lab situation and read them a series of digits, they were able to get seven numbers 50% of the time. They would be even better if you only read them six digits. They would be virtually perfect if you only read them five. But the number of digits that a person could hold on to and report back exactly in order was on average seven. Something between five and nine captured what average people could do. We then started to ask the question, if you give people practice on that particular task, can they improve performance?
5:28 Speaker 00 We found a volunteer who, after about 40 hours, was able to do over 20 digits. By collecting all the reports on what changes in his thinking processes were developing along with his increased ability to do this task, we got a better understanding of how people could improve their memory in this particular task. With even more training, he could recall sequences up to 80 digits. We trained a friend of his who was able to get over 100. We studied some people in China who at the time had the world record. They were able to do over 300 digits. Michael, the insights on to how to break through those thresholds were starting to piece together for you and your team. Anders, that came a couple of years later when people were starting to ask me,
6:14 Speaker 00 who cares if you can remember digits? Okay, you've shown that this performance which seems incredible was trainable.
6:22 Speaker 00 Because obviously, when you train an individual, the person's genes and DNA don't change through the training. I started thinking that if you can train that particular performance in that particular task, could you use training to improve performance generally? Or improve it in other particular tasks, like planning chess moves or making medical diagnoses? The key insight was that you could train one specific task. This was consistent with what we found in the digits case. Because if we tested the guy who could do eighty numbers, he could only do about six consonants. It was a domain-specific skill. He was able to improve his performance and his memory capacity,
7:05 Speaker 00 but it was limited to a particular type of material and a little bit to the characteristics of the task more generally. Michael, if we stay with the numbers memorization example, to use some of your terminology, this was not naive practice, this was purposeful practice. What is purposeful practice compared to what many of us might think of as practice? Anders, one of the keys to purposeful practice is that you get immediate feedback on your performance. Especially in a professional context, you often have to wait to know whether you were right. Doctors diagnosing a patient will obviously try to do the best they can,
7:47 Speaker 00 but they don't get feedback on whether they were accurate or not until much later, and sometimes never.
7:54 Speaker 00 In our digital memory task, we could tell the subject immediately whether he made any mistakes. That gave him a feedback loop so he could think about what he was generating. He formed meaningful associations primarily with running times to group them into three digits that would be a mile time. Four minutes and thirty-two seconds would be a good model time for an amateur athlete. He was then able to realize when he made mistakes, and he could experiment with new ways of encoding the digits to allow him to progress and remember longer and longer sequences. Michael, to jump to another example which I find fascinating, taxi drivers in London are a special breed.
8:38 Speaker 00 They go through intense training, they have to learn London streets inside and out, and this changes their brains physically. Anders. The taxi driver story is particularly interesting because we're talking about people who aren't special in any way. In fact, they've tested their cognitive abilities and found that they're pretty much normal people. But in order to pass the test that allows them to be cab drivers, they are given arbitrary starting points and end points. And from memory, they have to report what would be the most efficient route to take a passenger between those destinations. This is something that they've done well before we had GPS and all this electronic help. It took many years of training to pass this qualifying test,
9:21 Speaker 00 which required them to learn over 10,000 streets and all the interconnections. When Maguire and colleagues in England scanned the brains of individuals who had mastered the map, they found that they had changed. Their study showed how increased memory can influence the basic structure of the brain. There are now plenty of other examples. But Maguire's study was interesting because she analyzed and compared cab drivers to bus drivers, who are driving as much and have the same level of experience. But the bus drivers did not exhibit these brain changes associated with mastering the map of London streets. Michael.
10:02 Speaker 00 The learning of the streets by London taxi drivers is all about deliberate practice. But if one stops being a taxi driver, if one ceases to perform this particular skill, will you see a regression in the brain changes? Will the brain changes revert to the mean, so to speak? Anders. We see in a number of domains that maintaining the practice is key for maintaining high levels of performance. A lot of people will recognize that when they stop exercising, their performance after a couple of years reverts back to the normal level. That seems to be a key in all the skills that we've looked at. Without practice, you revert back to where you started if you wait long enough. Michael.
10:47 Speaker 00 For many skeptics out there, they might look at some of these child prodigies and draw inferences and conclusions. I can think of two in particular that you discuss in Peak. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a fantastic example. Everyone has some general understanding of the brilliance of this child from a young age. Also, the first female chess grandmaster, Zuzia Polgar. Elaborate for anyone that says, Mozart, he was a child prodigy, he was born with it. Zuzia Polgar, all of her sisters, they're all brilliant at chess. What does practice have to do with this? Anders. Let's take Mozart, because he is the one most people are familiar with.
11:32 Speaker 00 What we're saying is you need to look at Mozart's upbringing. One of the things people don't recognize is that Mozart's father was a famous musician.
11:42 Speaker 00 When Wolfgang came along, I guess his father had some ideas about the possibility of training young children. He's actually the first person to write music training for younger children. He invested pretty much his whole life training Mozart and his older sister. Recent research has shown that some of the characteristics Mozart exhibited, for example, his remarkable ability to listen to a tone and be able to say which key on the piano produced that particular tone, are abilities that virtually any child seems to be able to attain if you give them the training. But it has to be quite early. Similar to Mozart starting to play when he was three or four years old,
12:24 Speaker 00 you have to start the music training that early, when the brain seems to be receptive to learning those kinds of distinctions. You can then preserve those abilities as an adult, but it's difficult or almost impossible if you start practicing at an older age. Michael. People might be thinking, I don't want my child to have such intense deliberate practice at a young age. You're not making a value judgment here. You're saying the data shows there is something to be said for this early start in childhood. Anders I would like to clarify that it's important if you want to produce a healthy, happy adult, you make sure the training is consistent with what the child wants to do.
13:07 Speaker 00 You're simply providing the child with opportunities for training. I've had some contact with Laszlo Polgar, the father of the three Polgar daughters who were so successful in chess. A key idea of his is that you have to put the child in charge. You're helping them to master whatever the activity is that they select in a motivating, supportive environment. Michael Break open the idea that nurture can win out, that it's not necessarily what you're born with. We get caught up in the idea that we're fixed, but in terms of being able to change, even if we go beyond the discussion of elite performers, average people who might want to master something later in life are not etched in stone, are they?
13:53 Speaker 00 Anders One key that I found helpful when I talk to adults who want to acquire skills is to realize that younger prodigies might spend half an hour or so where you're training them with an explicit goal, so they have to be 100% concentrated. But if you push children to do a lot more than that until they're ready to increase their time of training, they are going to feel averse and not be willing to do it. When it comes to adults who want to run a marathon, I've heard of people who go out the first time and run for maybe 45 minutes, and then they're so sore, they never do it again. If you're going to change the body, it's got to be gradual. You need to stimulate and push for change,
14:36 Speaker 00 but you can't go so far that you're harming the body and stretching your motivation to a point where you no longer want to pursue it. Michael In terms of making these achievements, we are constantly up against homeostasis, but breaking through boundaries is part of deliberate practice. Anders I would say that if you're not trying to change something, you're probably not doing deliberate practice. The key idea of deliberate practice is that you're trying to do something that you can't do well. By figuring out ways to do it better, you will raise your performance to a level that you didn't have before.
15:17 Speaker 00 Michael Chess is a fantastic example. The best chess players are not looking at all the individual pieces on the board. They're thinking in patterns. They've developed their ability to analyze based on pattern recognition. Explain the notion of chunking or mental representation using chess as an example. Anders If you take a paragraph written in English, English speakers will read it and it will make sense. If it describes some physical situation or interaction, people will form an image in their head of that interaction. I would argue that the chessboard is a little bit the same for a skilled chess player.
15:59 Speaker 00 They can see the structure, what are the weak spots, and where likely attacks would be successful. By having chess masters think out loud when they're seeing a position and trying to pick the best move, we can learn what features they notice. The way they probe the position is to make a move in their mind and then think of what the opponent's move would be. They keep doing that maybe four or five times, or even more, in order to diagnose what would happen if they make a particular starting move. Understanding what's going on in the chess player's head raises the question, how did they get to be able to do this type of thinking? That gets to the core of what we've been studying here.
16:39 Speaker 00 How do you build up these mental representations that allow you to think through issues in your head and then decide on the best action in a given situation? Michael We sometimes hear examples of a chess player playing against 25 people at the same time, or maybe even blindfolded. It sounds so impressive, but what's interesting is that once you get to that level where you have put in the time to develop those mental representations, it's not necessarily difficult for those particular players to play 25 people at the same time blindfolded. It's a parallel skill that comes with having already reached grand master level. Anders
17:20 Speaker 00 What most people find difficult to understand is how you can play blindfolded. You have to make the chess position in your head and think about it. You can't look at any kind of perceptual configuration. That seems to be a skill that people don't practice. It comes about once you learn to plan the moves in your head. Eventually, you acquire the skills that allow you to do it without the chessboard. You can do it completely mentally. When you want to play several games, you're doing that same thing. I've heard that players try to pick different kinds of games, so as not to confuse one game with another. There's a lot of minor skills that people acquire in order to be able to play multiple games.
18:03 Speaker 00 The amazing thing is this building up of that mental representation that allows you to do things in your own mind that other people need to do perceptually by seeing the chess pieces on the board.
18:16 Speaker 00 Michael I want to go back to the NBA basketball player Stephen Curry. When you get to this high level of achievement, it doesn't stop. It allows you to get to the next level. You can't skip steps. Anders We don't have evidence that there's any sort of magic goal improvements, but if you monitor what the individual has been doing up to a given point, you can see the improvements in the things that they're working on. The hallmark of an expert is being able to identify things they can do differently or better. Once you've reached that high level, you're able to work on things that other people wouldn't even notice in order to increase your performance beyond your already exceptional level. Michael
19:01 Speaker 00 Across your many years of studying expert performers, do they ever come out and say that their improvement was easy? Anders I have had a chance of being on a couple of panels with Olympic medal winners, musicians, and chess players. I'm yet to find anybody who wouldn't recognize this process of incremental improvement. This kind of continuous commitment that once you practice, you're going to do it with full concentration, because otherwise you're wasting your time. During thirty years of research, I've probably encountered some fifty cases where people initially claim this was an exception.
19:39 Speaker 00 But by looking more closely at the evidence, I've been able to construct what I think is a plausible explanation that's based more on this continuous practice, even though the practice may not have been observed by people who thought the improvement occurred spontaneously. Michael, there have been many authors of popular books who have been inspired or influenced by your work. Among them would be Malcolm Gladwell. There's a couple of issues in his work that I would love you to address. One that has become ingrained into society is that you can become an expert in ten thousand hours, and explain the example of how the Beatles got to be the Beatles.
20:20 Speaker 00 Anders, the research that we did with violinists in a music academy in Berlin showed that the most talented, or the ones that the music teacher viewed as having the highest probability of succeeding as musicians, were also those that reported spending more time practicing by themselves. We argue that this is effective when you have a teacher telling you exactly what you need to do, and then you go ahead and do it. The more you do, it's likely that you will get better. We reported that those academy students, when they were twenty years old, had practiced on average for ten thousand hours, which is a pretty amazing number. I guess Gladwell was struck by this.
21:02 Speaker 00 He came up with a rule that was a little oversimplified. He said that in order to achieve an international level of performance, you need to have spent ten thousand hours. He pointed to the Beatles as a group that played a lot of music in Hamburg, Germany, before they became famous. The issue I have with his statement is that there's nothing I know of that makes it a magical ten thousand hours. The estimates that I've seen for piano competitions would require these individuals to spend more like twenty-five thousand hours to win.
21:36 Speaker 00 There are other skills where it seems you can be world-class with less than 1,000 hours of deliberate practice. We checked some of the biographies of the Beatles and they didn't play more than maybe 1,500 hours in Hamburg in total, although they were playing pretty much 10 or 12 hours a day. I would argue that playing in front of an audience only improved their ability to play as a band. The Beatles were mostly famous for their ability to compose music and then perform it. To explain how they got to be better composers would make me look for activities that were more directly related to improving their composing ability. Again, you need a lot of practice. We totally agree with Gladwell about that.
22:20 Speaker 00 But there's no magical boundaries. It doesn't make someone an expert when they've done 10,000 hours of an activity. The key is to spend a lot of time trying to improve specific aspects. If you can sustain that amount of training for thousands of hours, evidence shows that you are likely to be exceptional. If you keep pushing, you may end up being world-class. Michael Malcolm Gladwell brought up another issue that I thought was interesting, which has to do with birth dates. Anders If a sports coach is trying to find the most talented kids, it would make sense to pick out the ones who are performing a little bit better.
23:00 Speaker 00 It's been found that people who are successful and reaching the highest levels are much more likely to be the oldest in their age cohort, who were practicing together as children and adolescents. Now, it's also been pointed out that these effects are not incredible, except for certain types of extreme situations. For example, the best 13-year-old soccer players in England were the oldest among their cohort, rather than those born in the latter half of the year. Michael One of the things that's fascinating about your work is the motivational aspect. You look at the examples and you say to yourself, "I can do anything if I want to." But motivation's a tricky thing.
23:44 Speaker 00 For example, the movie Whiplash is about a young jazz drummer and a demanding teacher who pushes him. The young guy cracks at several points, but, at the end of the movie, he accepts the instruction. He has the push. It's unclear where it comes from exactly, maybe it was the teacher. And something finally clicks. Why don't you speak about social motivation? Whether we're talking about extraordinary performers or the corporate world, because your work translates to the corporate world as well. The "I can't" attitude is, as you describe, a real red flag, isn't it? Anders I was struck by the convenience of claiming that you can't do something, or that you lack the talent.
24:29 Speaker 00 Take learning a foreign language. I've encountered a lot of people who say they can't do that. Essentially, what that means is, they're not going to put in any energy if they're only going to waste it. A colleague of mine fell in love with a woman who only spoke Spanish. He had always had difficulty learning languages, but he successfully mastered Spanish because he had a concrete reason. Also, when you're interacting with another individual, it's a pretty good learning environment because you get immediate feedback about whether they understand you or not. It's interesting when it comes to music teachers. It's convenient to tell some students that they lack talent because they're not willing or able to make progress. It almost takes away the responsibility of the teacher
25:14 Speaker 00 to help the student find the motivation they need in order to progress. Once we identify motivation as something that teachers, especially good ones, are able to instill in their students, then it changes how we view education. Similarly, if we can convince students to find the right kind of training that will help them improve, this will give them the motivation and confidence to succeed. It is a paradox that if you don't believe you're going to get any better, it's difficult to motivate yourself to put in the practice. That belief needs to be changed before it makes sense for the teacher and the student to invest in this gradual progress.
25:56 Speaker 00 I also think that having good metrics is key, so the student can see how they're improving. By not getting the immediate feedback that is an essential component of deliberate practice, you don't have a sense that you're getting better. That may confirm your sense that it's a waste of time. Michael, I'm thinking of comedians, guys like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Gary Shandling, who put in immense hours on stage and in small comedy clubs in their early twenties. Then thirty years later, they've become some of the biggest celebrities out there. What's interesting about comedians is, they are always willing and able to talk about who came before them.
26:38 Speaker 00 In a different domain, chess grandmasters will study the games of their predecessors. Many people like to imagine, "I must invent it out of whole cloth, I must come up with it on my own." But you've seen in your work that expert performers look at the experts before them, don't they? Anders. That gets to this effect of learning. We see it in all sorts of domains. For example, in the fourteenth century, it would take a lifetime to understand advanced math, because students had to discover it for themselves. Today, you can get that same level of information from math teachers and the curriculum. The same thing with music.
27:20 Speaker 00 The level that people are playing at today is vastly superior to what they were doing in the nineteenth century. These historical changes are the direct result of young individuals finding teachers to fast-track them to learn things in the correct way. They can then go beyond what previous practitioners have done in order to create a unique contribution. This applies to virtually all the major creative individuals. For example, Mozart's father had him copy pieces by other composers as a way of learning the structure of musical composition. Picasso excelled in the traditional skills of drawing natural scenes, thereby acquiring the techniques that allowed him to do things that hadn't been done before, and to make what he was seeing in his mind's eye.
28:06 Speaker 00 People are afraid that they're somehow going to erase their unique contribution, whereas it's more a case of needing the tools to realize whatever contribution you are going to make. I don't find good evidence that learning these tools will somehow remove any originality.
28:24 Speaker 00 Michael As a guy that used to play baseball as a right-handed hitter, I know that I have a big difference between my right and my left hip. One of the most fantastic examples to give people a flavor for deliberate practice, and what can happen physically, is that of a great tennis player like Roger Federer. So much practice at such a young age. It's not just the muscles in the racket arm that are changing, it's the actual bones, isn't it? Anders The kind of changes you can observe are far-reaching. Talking about bones, we know that height can't be changed by training, but it influences the thickness of the bones. It's clear what the mechanism is. Hitting the tennis ball creates vibrations in the arm,
29:09 Speaker 00 which releases chemicals that stimulate bone growth. If you take x-rays of tennis players, the arm they use to hold the racket has much thicker bones than the other arm. If you study endurance athletes, the muscles of the heart are restructured to maximize the pumping capacity. Even the arteries grow to allow more blood to circulate. We also see more capillaries surrounding those muscles that need a lot of oxygen to be able to sustain running, swimming, or whatever the endurance activity is. Michael Amazing that not only can deliberate practice develop a skill, but it can also change the structure of the brain or the body. You've dedicated your life to studying this.
29:54 Speaker 00 It's going to be up to other people to come along and say, "Anders got all this wrong." That's going to be a tough challenge. Anders I'm doing my best to keep up with developments in genetics and other domains to monitor any relevant evidence. Interestingly, in genetics, people believe that once we were able to describe DNA, we would find differences in genes between elite athletes and other people who didn't have any obvious genetic problems.
30:24 Speaker 00 But that research has not uncovered any individual genes that would explain why some people perform so much better than others. Personally, I see interesting evidence that training history provides a much better explanation for individual differences. If we take something like the outstanding performance of Kenyan runners, the kind of training history they have and the benefits of training at a high altitude as young children would seem to contribute to differences in performance. Michael. Many have talked about barefoot running playing a role as well. Anders. Exactly. Once you start looking at what sets apart the best runners from the less successful ones, it is the efficiency of their running.
31:08 Speaker 00 Their ability to run without using up more energy and oxygen. They have been able to come up with training that allows them to maximize the effectiveness of the whole bodily system, as opposed to some kind of specific thing that would be more a plausible target for a single gene. Michael. I had a chance to interview Vernon Smith, who shared the Nobel Prize with Daniel Kahneman for their behavioral work. For those of you that might not know, Vernon Smith has Asperger's. I went to interview him in his college office and we were setting up cameras, lights, and everything. I said, "Dr. Smith, we're going to bug you here. We're going to be making a lot of noise setting everything up." He looked at me and he said, "I will never hear you."
31:53 Speaker 00 It was such an interesting comment. Six months later, I was at the offices of one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world. I mentioned to him that I had seen Vernon Smith and we started talking about Asperger's. He said, "Oh yeah, we've got a ton of guys working at our firm who have Asperger's because these guys can focus like no tomorrow." Why don't you address the issue that these people might have a perceived advantage by being on the autistic spectrum? Anders.
32:23 Speaker 00 I have not personally done any research on the issue of Asperger's and these kinds of syndromes. But I've been working with numerous expert performers. And when you put them in the lab, one of the things I've noticed is how they start out being relaxed. Then as we get closer to the actual test, they become completely focused and are able to sustain it. I think it would be interesting to research whether there are individual differences in how able people are to reach that state of full concentration. But to me, one of the prerequisites for being able to stretch yourself is that you focus all your attentional resources on improving whatever aspect you've chosen.
33:04 Speaker 00 When I talk to these individuals, they tell me how important it is for them to get enough sleep. In order to be able to exhibit full concentration for maybe three or four hours a day, you need to have a lot of time for relaxation and recuperation. Five hours seems to be the upper limit for full concentration. The best data we have is on authors with no other responsibilities, who write for about four or five hours starting in the morning and use the rest of the day to recuperate. So they wake up refreshed for another four or five hours of productive writing. I've talked to surgeons and other individuals who are aware of balancing that level of full concentration with recuperation.
33:49 Speaker 00 If you want to maximize how much you're putting in and getting out, you'd like to keep on a pretty stable daily schedule. Michael. Having written books myself, the interesting aspect for me is when those moments of intense focus happen inside, when you enter that flow state, time can stand still. Maybe you don't achieve a huge volume of work, but the quality and the precision that you can find in a flow state is addictive.
34:18 Speaker 00 Anders. A lot of people refer to flow as highly enjoyable. But several people have pointed out that if you reflect on being in a flow state, you're no longer in it. It's almost like you can only recognize it afterwards. Some people have compared the flow state to being totally relaxed, where you're not trying to impose any constraints on what you're doing. I would argue that the flow state you were referring to is more like being so focused that you're no longer aware of the time that you're investing. Those are two different states. The playful enjoyment of skiing downhill and having a sense of effortlessness is a different kind of phenomenon than the one where you have that sustained focus and where time disappears.
35:04 Speaker 00 Michael. Deliberate practice takes hard work and effort, but it's not something you can do with a team, is it? Anders. Given that you're trying to improve some aspects of your own performance to optimize the benefits of deliberate practice, you have to be in control of your own training. I often mention the example of playing doubles in tennis. You miss a backhand volley, then the game continues and you get another opportunity maybe thirty minutes later. You're not going to do that any better. Compare that to a training situation where you have full concentration and the resources of a coach. The coach will give you a backhand volley that's easy and you're standing up by the net. Then, as you perfect your control over this,
35:48 Speaker 00 the coach starts to place increasingly more difficult volleys. Eventually, you have to move away from the net. The endpoint is that you're rallying and he includes a backhand volley within the rally. One or two hours of working like that with a coach is going to improve your backhand volley so much more than maybe a year or two of playing games with your friends. Michael, you've spent a lifetime studying expert performers, but your own career has also been about deliberate practice. Anyone that has a focused direction in life has a lot of experience of deliberate practice. What are some of the changes you think you've seen in yourself over your career? Anders. I would point to a couple of important events.
36:32 Speaker 00 When I started my career, like most people, I spent as much time as I could on all the various activities, ranging from teaching to doing research and all sorts of things. Then I got the opportunity to go to the Max Planck Institute. This is where we did the research on the violinists at the Music Academy. That position was a little bit different from my previous job at the University of Colorado. I didn't have any teaching, and I had a lot of free time. That was the first time I realized that I could put in more hours working hard than I could get benefit from. The sense that there was a maximum. Setting aside three or four hours to write and then doing other less demanding activities
37:15 Speaker 00 made me feel much better than trying to fill every minute with various things. You need to take control over your time, and also maybe even say no to activities. You can ensure your schedule is aligned with your priorities in terms of what you want to put in your best hours on. A lot of people I've talked to since then have found that to be a useful idea. When it comes to issues related to doing science, I would argue that deliberate practice, at least in a generalized way, corresponds to seeking out people who disagree with you. I've found that some people in research don't like to be criticized. They get annoyed. I've tried to establish dialogues with people who have different views.
37:57 Speaker 00 I've found that instead of doing things I've always done and talking to people who agree with me, trying to convince people who don't agree with me often generates a lot of references to new stuff that I didn't know about. By understanding their views, I can do a better job of describing what I think is compelling evidence. When you submit a manuscript, you get reviews, and it got to the point that I could anticipate what the reviewers were going to say. It gave me a sense of self-confidence to feel as if I knew what they were going to be concerned about. Sometimes, you can disagree about how compelling certain evidence is,
38:36 Speaker 00 but at least if you understand where other people are coming from, you're more likely to be successful than if you don't understand what makes them upset. Michael. You talk about Jamarcus Russell, who was a phenomenal quarterback at Louisiana State University. He left college as a junior. He was the first pick in the draft, but he flamed out and didn't make it. Then you look at a guy like Tom Brady with the New England Patriots. He was pick one hundred ninety-nine. Professional sports is big business, but it seems some teams have not yet figured out how to project who is going to put in the deliberate practice. Anders. My view is that the best football players are also the ones that have a deeper understanding of the game.
39:22 Speaker 00 I had a chance to talk to several of the Eagles players and coaches, and they recommended some players that they felt were standing out. I was compelled by hearing their history of how, from early on, they were able to figure out what other people on their team and the opposing team were doing. They started out having a refined grasp of what was going on in the game. That gave them the ability to assess what they needed to do to be able to behave in the most effective way. It's so commercialized in the NFL that it's hard for a coach with responsibility for a whole team to find the time and the resources to help individual players. Some people might say, "By the time you get to NFL, you should have learned these things already."
40:08 Speaker 00 Maybe college or high school might be a better place to introduce these ideas. Maybe you would find people who are even more motivated to develop more effectively. Michael. I would have loved for someone to have told me these insights when I was a serious baseball player at the age of fifteen, because you get caught up in other things. You practice hard and you get to a certain level, but then you plateau. You don't necessarily know you're plateauing, but if you had the insight of deliberate practice and the motivation, you could see that plateau more clearly, and then perhaps push through it. It's a fantastic way to think for young athletes in particular. Anders.
40:50 Speaker 00 The part I like is that as you get better in your understanding of yourself and the game environment, every game becomes more interesting, because you have a more refined way of analyzing it. Then once you have the experience, you can go back and identify things you can improve. It's almost like you're reaching over a peak and you can see beyond to things that you weren't able to conceive of previously. That psychological richness comes closely with this idea of representations and your ability to evaluate your own performance. Then you can use that to direct your own training and see how you're getting better. When I talk to some athletes, they're just doing what they're doing. They're not able to appreciate what's possible.
41:34 Speaker 00 That appreciation might make it much more interesting for them, and thereby enhance all sorts of things related to the activity they're involved in. Michael. Clearly the work that you've put together is not age-dependent. But with the youngsters you've studied, when did they start to have this self-appreciation versus being involved in deliberate practice but not necessarily seeing the bigger picture? Anders. A finding that is interesting with respect to child prodigies is that a number of music prodigies don't have successful adult careers. Some people have argued that if the parent has taken control of the early training, when the child reaches late adolescence and early adulthood, they have to take control themselves and go beyond what the teacher or the parent was helping them do.
42:20 Speaker 00 The idea of allowing the child to be, as Laszlo Polgar said, "a co-author in the process of developing their own performance," is critical.
42:30 Speaker 00 The more you can listen to the child and make sure they are understanding and always building up these representations that allow them to take over more and more, that generates self-confidence. But it's also critical that to keep moving ahead, you need to have mastered and internalized all the things that you're required to do. Michael. Even if it's later in life, you can drastically improve yourself at almost any stage of the game. You've pointed out that people might decide they want to run a marathon at 80 years of age. That's motivating. Anders. Once you start looking at the experience of making improvements, you get that same
43:14 Speaker 00 excitement that some people get from climbing mountains. It's something that you can do even if you live in the middle of the city because most of the improvements are happening in your own mind. If I could contribute to providing people with an opportunity to enrich their lives, that would make me happy.
43:38 Speaker 00 I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets.
43:47 Speaker 00 Whether a new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected] . I will send you the right trend following steps to take along with my free video.
44:14 Speaker 00 But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.
Previous Ep. 1348: Jerry Parker, Moritz Seibert, Richard Liddle and Gareth Abbot with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1350: Steve Burns with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
