In high school, I had a big lead over my classmates in French lessons, because the year before I had studied French using exactly the same teaching material. But my lead didn't last the year. Which I have wondered (and resented) about ever since. I found the answer to why I never got better in Daniel Goleman's book Focus.

The question of what it takes to achieve success – to become an expert in a chosen field – is not just something that puzzled me. It has preoccupied psychologists for decades. In recent years, there has been a claim in popular psychology about a 10,000 hour rule. The idea is that this is the number of hours one must invest in training to become a genius in any field. But in Focus: The hidden patterns behind performance, acclaimed psychologist Daniel Goleman rejects the 10,000-hour rule in favor of the more complex truth behind the well-known rule of thumb.

How you use the 10,000 hours is decisive

The problem with the 10,000 hour rule is that it is only half the truth. It doesn't matter how you train. If you spend 10,000 hours practicing golf but make the same mistakes over and over again, you're not going to be at the top of the world rankings. You'll still be a half-bad golfer – just 10,000 hours older.

It turns out that the secret to success is not the number of training hours, but the quality of the time used. Whether you manage to challenge yourself and continuously correct your mistakes. What researchers call deliberate practice, or conscious training. Conscious training means that you are fully concentrated on your training and not just using your time. To get the full effect, training is often supplemented with guidance from an expert, trainer or coach. In short, conscious training can be boiled down to the difference between quality and quantity.

In his book, Goleman calls this type of training "Smart Practice”. As Golman says in Fokus: The many hours of training ARE necessary but not sufficient if you want to reach the top. The research underlying the 10,000-hour rule showed that, in addition to practicing for 10,000 hours, the best violinists did so under the expert guidance of a skilled teacher, and that they were all fully focused on improving one specific part of their playing. the hallway.

Goleman identifies another important element to the recipe for success: feedback loops. A feedback loop allows you to spot mistakes and correct them, just as ballet dancers use a mirror when they practice. Ideally, this feedback should come from an expert. This is why all the best athletes have a coach. Without this feedback, you cannot reach world class level.

This kind of concentration requires a top-down focus. That is reflective action rather than daydreaming, or as Goleman calls it; thought flight.

Because while top-down thinking is necessary for your training, the bottom-up mind-flight system works against it. To get the full effect of your training, you must use your full attention. Then you watch TV while training, when you never reach the highest level:

"Full concentration can increase the brain's processing speed, strengthen the synaptic connections and expand or create neural networks for what we practice."

Are you satisfied with "ok"?

But only to a certain level. As soon as you master a new routine, repeated training changes this ability from being in the intentional top-down system to belonging to the automatic bottom-up system, making performing the routine effortless.

And this is where the professionals differ from the amateurs. If you settle for "ok", your skills will not develop further and you will reach a plateau. Professionals, on the other hand, keep pushing themselves away from this bottom-up automation by consciously changing their focus to some other area where they can improve. Their top-down focus counteracts the brain's urge to automate routines.

And that was definitely what happened to my French skills in high school. I felt that I had become "good enough". If I was going to get better, it required a concentrated effort that my 17-year-old self would not give. (I was also busy looking at boys and writing Danish style)