> _The 4 Things It Takes to Be an Expert_. Directed by Veritasium, 2022. _YouTube_, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA). # The 4 things it takes to be an expert While it is often agreed than it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field, that is generally not enough. Indeed, such practice needs to meet four additional criteria: 1. **==Repeated attempts with feedback==** 2. **==A valid environment==** 3. **==Timely feedback==** 4. **==It needs to be deliberate==** ## Good practice requires repeated attempts with feedback **During practice, tennis players can repeatedly hit a ball and immediately see if if the ball is in or out. This is the basic block of deliberate practice.** However, some professions cannot perform such training. A study by political scientist Philip Tetlock tried to evaluate how accurately political and economic advisors could predict the result of political or economic events, such as the bursting of the dot-com bubble. It turned out that they performed worst than random chance. See [[Tangible feedback allows for easier habit building]]. ## Good practice requires a valid environment **The more deterministic the environment, the better the practice.** Athletes, musicians and scientists can improve because the setting of their practice is deterministic and they can easily draw conclusions from their training or experiments. However, other fields may involve randomness; for instance, hedge funds typically perform worse than the market average because stock prices are mostly random in any small time period, and traders are misguided by their search for a pattern in random noise. ## Good practice requires timely feedback **While feedback is important to any form of practice, what really matters is whether the feedback is immediate or delayed; the sooner you can see whether you did good or bad, the sooner you can improve your performance by altering your behaviour.** Psychologist Daniel Kahneman compared the performance of anaesthesiologists and radiologists: the former get more immediate feedback and did perform better at their own task overall. The same applies to recruiters: it is difficult for them to improve at their job since they cannot immediately know whether the employee they hired is a good fit for their company or not; the result will only come in a few months, or even years. ## Good practice requires to be deliberate **In order to improve, you need to constantly practice at the edge of your ability.** A musician will have to play harder and harder pieces, while a basketball player will have to practice more and more difficult shots. Otherwise, performance merely stagnates, and may even decline. Experienced doctors perform worse than graduates at diagnosing rare diseases, because they have not been exposed to those in a long time. In chess, the best predictor of skill level is not the number of games played, but the amount of hours dedicated to solitary study.