走出舒适区－拥抱进步【刻意练习 07A】

Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice. Oare’s music student shows no sign of ever pushing himself beyond what was familiar and comfortable. Instead, the student’s words seem to imply a rather desultory attempt at practice, with no effort to do more than what was already easy for him. That approach just doesn’t work.

Our memory experiment was set up to keepSteve from getting too comfortable. As he increased his memory capacity, I would challenge him with longer and longer strings of digits so that he was always close to his capacity. In particular, by increasing the number of digits each time he got a string right, and decreasing the number when he got it wrong,I kept the number of digits right around what he was capable of doing while always pushing him to remember just one more digit. 

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “practice” during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.

Key words & phrases

1)      comfort zone   舒适区

2)      show no sign of…   没有显现…

3)      imply   v. 显示，说明

4)      desultory   adj. 漫不经心的（marked by lack of definite plan or regularity or purpose）

5)      capacity   n. 能力，能力上限

6)      amateur   n. 业余爱好者，外行; adj. 外行的，业余的

7)      no better than   不比...强