And you probably also learned that we didn’t always believe that.

You might have learned about Ptolemy, who believed that the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. It seems impossible to believe now, but that was the established wisdom for thousands of years. People were executed for disputing this scientific “fact”.

When Copernicus came up with his idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun, it didn’t make sense. The scientists of the day disputed his claims and showed through “science” that he was ‘wrong’, by demonstrating that his theories couldn’t explain what was happening any better than the established wisdom. In fact, Copernicus’ model offered worse predictions than Ptolemy’s model.

But with contributions from Galileo and Kepler united under Newton, our world experienced a paradigm shift (in the original/ Thomas Kuhn sense of the term). And suddenly our textbooks were rewritten. And so “The Sun revolves around the Earth. The Sun has always revolved around the Earth.” became, “The Earth revolves around the Sun. The Earth has always revolved around the Sun.”

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we of course know that we know the truth.

And yet, do we? Perhaps one abusing ‘Relativity’ might posit that it all depends upon where you are stationed – that from the perspective of the Earth, the Sun does revolve around it and vice versa. And maybe they are both wrong.

Such is the nature of “science”: The perpetual quest to prove oneself wrong.

The special challenge falls on those individuals who lead periods of revolution. Scientific, cultural, social, linguistic. Whether they are the revolutionary leaders of climate change or economics or politics or even intelligence.

You see it in someone like Howard Gardner in positing Multiple Intelligences back in 1983. Or Edward de Bono’s “Lateral Thinking”. Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. From ‘ridiculous’ to ’self-evident’ in but a short few years.

If we are going to support and facilitate the development of more of these game-changing Great Minds – people with “capital C” Creativity – what sort of systems, policies, procedures, experiences and opportunities might we want to create?

In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

Ultimately, most of what we learn is false. It’s our best guess, but at best it’s almost certainly wrong or flawed. We want to get to those moments of joy and pure experience when we can create genius.

I wonder what would happen if  we would just choose to put our desire to control to the side, and accept the ambiguity, the obstacles and the knowledge that even our best work will probably be wrong. And just keep blowing raspberries.

He was young and strong and had been training hard for a few months.

Little did he know that I had trained since before he was walking. It began when I was 15, and I loved spending hours in the hall, relentlessly asking questions of my instructor long after the class had finished. So when I hit him, he was pretty surprised

When I step back into one of those same classes today, I remember most of the techniques but my skill level has suffered – perhaps more than I would like to admit. But I’m still not your average beginner.

In my first session back, it’s best if I just watch, or pair up with a beginning student. In my second session back, I can pair up with someone who has been training for a few months. And after a few weeks, I’ll expect to match it with the guys who have been training for a year or more.

But why? Why can we get so much better so quickly?

It’s the same with older experts. After playing at the top of their field, they will stop doing so much deliberate practice. The sportsperson won’t be competing so they won’t be training – at least not as much. The doctor won’t be studying and maintaining their skills through regular patient contact. The linguist will struggle in a language after not having used it for a while. We all get ‘rusty’.

If you’ve been reading much of what I’ve said before, you’ll know that deliberate practice is important for skill acquisition. But deliberate practice is also important for maintaining those skills.

(So if you find yourself competing with someone who seems to be ‘past it’, you might want to check how much practice they have been getting lately.)

It’s like there is a ‘trait’ component and a ‘state’ component of skill. The ‘trait’ component is how good you are at your worst – when Lleyton Hewitt plays tennis at his worst, he’s still much better than most of us. But there is also something else: “How good are you today?” We could call that part our ‘state’ skill level because it depends upon our state in any given moment. To compete with the best, you might need to have a high level of “state skill” and combine that with being at your best on that day with a high “trait skill”.

As you get better, you not only polish your performance skills, but create mental and physical adaptations. When you start driving, it’s hard work to keep the car in the right gear, to check the mirrors, steer and keep a safe distance from the cars around you. After a while, you just need to think “turn right” and you can. Some of this comes from tasks becoming automated so they require less attention, some of it comes from using a better strategy and having better technique. But even the best of us can have a bad day – so there is a ‘state’ component and a ‘trait’ component.

The great thing about deliberate practice enhancing our ‘trait skill’ level is that once you have developed a high level of performance, you can take those adaptations with you without too much effort.

It’s the ‘hard work’ of deliberate practice that creates a context for these adaptations. It’s hard work because we are learning to do things differently. Rehearsal or playing the game can give you ‘experience’ but this polish doesn’t improve the stone. Deliberate practice upgrades the quality of the underlying stone.

So, as you begin 2010, I hope that you can find ways to upgrade your skills, not just getting a little better…

Genius is a choice.

It’s a big deal.

And you’ll want to do it every day.

Not just 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday. Not even Monday to Saturday. But every day of the week.

Our good friends Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer found back in 1993 found that experts practised the same amount every day, including weekends.

So pick your area and start practising. Every day.

But the truth is that it’s not that simple, is it?

There are some people who work really hard – who spend hours practising or playing – but who don’t get better. Maybe you were one of them.

Sometimes we can do things a lot and not get better at all. In fact, sometimes we get worse!

When I was playing tennis as a child, I would hit the ball and play tournaments and show up to expensive coaching sessions. And at my best I consistently got mediocre results.

The trouble was that I didn’t get feedback. I was practising but I wasn’t doing it the way I needed to if I wanted to actually get better. Instead, I rehearsed the skills I had over and over until I could play ‘well enough’. But I didn’t get better than that.

Nobody told me what I needed to do and I didn’t figure it out for myself. Maybe I could have but I didn’t.

As you read this, you have been walking for a long time. Yet how much better at walking are you today from last year?

Deliberate practice goes beyond just doing the same things over and over again, and instead is focused on actually getting better. It’s about finding ways to push yourself – to make your best even better – and it’s not always easy.

Sometimes you might need to invent ways to challenge yourself.

Because that is what the best of the best will do.

Being an ‘expert’ is simultaneously honoured and stigmatized in much of the world. In some parts of the world excellence has even been systematically repressed. And yet, we still want to know “what it takes”.

Successful people spontaneously do things differently from those who stagnate. In particular, they have different practice histories. We consistently see that they engage in “deliberate practice” – they work to innovate the way they do what they do.

You can read more about what the lead editor of The Handbook has to say in an interview with Fast Company here.

Being excellent isn’t easy. But it is a lot more simple than you might believe.

But over time, we do need to find a way to go beyond them.

We cut away the scaffolding of environmental supports. We find apprenticeship arrangements – relationships offering guided practice and support self-regulation. Eventually, we can know the difference between what is good enough and what isn’t, so we can set our own standards.

Mastery comes when we can spend time creating our own learning environment and when we can get fast feedback and create challenges that suit our skills. And at this point, we access external supports very selectively – supports like competitors, performance conditions and even coaches.

1. Experts solve problems that novices cannot.
2. Experts solve problems that novices can solve but much more rapidly and accurately.

We also observe that the thinking process used by genius to solve problems is briefer, reflecting that more subprocesses have been automated.

I have taught martial arts since 1998. Last week, I was working with one of my students, a man named Kenny, on punching. I wanted Kenny to throw a left jab then a right cross. A novice would need to be told "left punch, right punch" – or something even more simple. Someone who had trained with me for a while could be told "double head punch". However, Kenny had done quite a bit of boxing training; for him "one-two" was enough. Indeed, even after a few minutes, if I used the term "left-right" or "double head-punch", he would internally translate that as "one-two". Kenny is skilled, but he is not an expert.

My original fascination in genius came from the contrast between Jack and Barry. Barry studied hard. Jack didn’t. But they got similarly outstanding results.

When we were 16, they completed an examination in advanced mathematics. Here, they were asked to show a proof. However, the proof was impossible. Each identified that the question was flawed and so in a sense ‘solved’ the problem. To gain marks for the problem, Barry provided six pages of working. Jack only provided three pages.

At the time, we thought that Jack was smarter – after all, he had worked it out in half the time that it took Barry. However, while Barry was granted full credit for his six pages of working, Jack was only granted half-marks.

One more thing to remember (that has relevance to the self-help goal setting world):

1. Experts work forward, noticing and reporting consequences of the ‘givens’ until a solution appears, at least on problems that are easy for them.
2. Novices work backwards from the problem goal.

Let me encourage you to work on the framing of your questions. Through finding the right framing and noticing the most appropriate characteristics, you increase your chances of finding the models and strategies that can give you the answer you seek.

Daniel Smith