The Road to Excellence

Speech at the Ceremonial Admission

of MBA VI on 09 October 2009
H.R.Lim A Po

Dear Participants,
Some of you may have heard of John McEnroe. In the late seventies and early eighties
he was Americas World no 1 professional tennis player. He won seven Grand Slam
singles titles - three at Wimbledon and four at the US Open- nine Grand Slam men's
doubles titles, and one Grand Slam mixed doubles title. He is remembered for his shotmaking artistry and superb volleying and he was inducted into the International Tennis
Hall of Fame in 1999.
I worked for Shell in The Hague at the time that McEnroe was reaping glory and in those
days a favorite saying of my boss, Paul Everard, was: If you want to play like McEnroe,
you have to practice like McEnroe. I thought that I understood the underlying message
of this phrase being that there is no substitute for hard work. But it is only recently,
when I read about Malcolm Gladwells latest book titled Outliers (Uitblinkers) that I
appreciated the deeper sense of Pauls favorite saying. He was making a reference to a
particular notion of work ethic. This particular notion of work ethic was coined deliberate
practice in 1993 by Anders Ericsson1 a professor of Psychology at Florida State
University. The essence of this work ethic is that one will achieve excellence only
through an enormous amount of hard work over many years; and not just any hard work,
but work of a particular type that is demanding and painful.

Researching the reasons why some people excel in a particular activity Ericsson found
out that not all practice makes perfect just like living in a cave does not make you a
geologist. What you need is a particular kind of practice deliberately and specifically
designed to improve performance. (Gerichte oefening).
Ericsson suggests that a number of particular clichs regarding work ethic that over the
years has lost originality and effectiveness, still happen to be true. The first one being
that expert performers are made, not born. The second is that practice makes perfect,

K.Anders Ericsson, Ralf TH.Krampe, and Tesch-Romer, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the
Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review 1993 Vol.100 no 3,363-406;

be it not all types of practice and the third that when it comes to choosing a life path you
should do what you love, because if you dont love what you do, you are unlikely to work
hard enough to get very good at it. Ericsson infers from this the good news that
everybody is improvable to remarkably high levels and the bad news that the
improvement only comes about due to hard work.

Based on these conclusions Ericsson describes the concept of deliberate practice for
exceptional performers like McEnroe, as activity, that is explicitly intended to improve
performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond ones level of competence,
provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. The number one
indicator of success therefore is to be systematic and effective at using practice time.

These conditions of deliberate practice for world class performers could be translated for
more general learning which you will experience during your MBA study over the next
two years, in the following terms: optimal learning experience takes place when a highly
motivated student with good concentration performs a well defined task at an
appropriate level of difficulty, receives informative feedback and gradually engages in
reflective practice. This approach to learning is important because it represents a full
shift from the often used term mastery learning to the newer viewpoint that talks about
teaching and learning as a process. Incorporating deliberate practice in education is all
about developing the person in fact the finished product is the person, not some test
result, paper, or project.

The specific learning characteristics of deliberate practice become clear in contrasting

them with those of play and work.2 Work is about doing things over and again and more
of the same. Because learning requires that we get out of our comfort zone and do
something new there is consequently little learning in work. Work sometimes involves a
public performance where the high cost of mistakes even discourages experimenting
and learning and although work activities do offer some opportunities for learning, they
are far from optimal.
In contrast, deliberate practice allows for repeated experiences in which the individual
can attend to the critical aspects of the activity and incrementally improve her or his

See Anders Ericsson et al. 368

performance in response to feedback from teachers or mentors and in response to

reflective practice.
The external rewards of work activities include social recognition and most important,
money which enables performers to sustain a living. In deliberate practice external
rewards are almost completely lacking. Practioners of deliberate practice are driven by
the pay-off of better; improving performance is the reward in and of itself.

Play is intrinsically enjoyable, with the person often in the state of effortless flow that is
very different from deliberate practice as a highly structured activity. Unlike recreational
learning deliberate practice requires high levels of concentration with few outside
distractions and is not typically spontaneous but carefully scheduled. In spite of the fact
that certain activities can have inherent appealing qualities, continued repetition could
lead to habituation and fatigue. The sacrifices required by deliberate practice are not
driven by the status of winning or the accolades that come from success but focus on
sustainable long term learning benefits.

It should be clear that the concept of deliberate practice is far more than simply referring
to hard work. It is a specific and unique kind of activity, neither work nor play. It is
characterized by several elements that form a powerful whole. Writer Geoff Colvin in
Why Talent is Overrated highlights eight different characteristics which I have
compressed to five.
(1) Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance with the key word
being designed. The essence is continually stretching an individual just beyond his
or her current abilities.
(2) Feedback on results is continuously available. In many important situations a
teacher, coach or mentor is vital for the feedback.
(3) It is highly demanding mentally. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and
concentration. That is what makes it deliberate and sets it apart from both, mindless
routine performance and playful engagement
(4) The need to self-regulate ones activities by monitoring them and adopting reflective
practices: There is a before-work component. Self-regulation begins with setting
goals not big, life directing goals, but more immediate goals for what you are going
to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers dont set goals at all; they
just slog through their work.

There is a during-work component. The most important self-regulatory skill that top
performers in every field use during their work is self-observation.
There is an after-work component as well. Practice activities are worthless without
useful feedback about the results. There must be self-evaluation and the best
performers judge themselves against a standard that is relevant for what they are
trying to achieve.
(5) It is hard. This follows inescapably from the other characteristics of deliberate
practice which could be described as a recipe for not having fun. Doing things we
know how to do well is enjoyable, and that is exactly the opposite of what deliberate
practice demands. Instead of doing what we are good at, we insistently seek out and
improve what we are not good at.
The Passion-Practice-Performance Chain3

You may legitimately now ask yourself the question what drives deliberate practice.
What do people who excel have that others do not? The simple answer is passion,
exceptional motivation. Passion is a strong inclination toward an activity that individuals
like, that they find important, and in which they invest time and energy. Another
important characteristic of passion is that the activity concerned has been internalized
3

Roni DiRomualdo, Are Top performers born or made, Wisconsin Technology Network
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ATPBOM.html downloaded 07-10-09

into their identity. Ericsson noted that if one does not love what one does then chances
are good that she or he will never put in the time needed to master it. In other words, top
performers dont need the activity to be fun to motivate them to do it. Their passion,
their motivation to perform better makes the activity worth-while, no matter how difficult,
strenuous, and effortful it may be.
Hence, passion represents a major motivational force underlying deliberate practice. It is
an important source of fuel that allows people to go through long and frustrating practice
sessions, and that eventually helps them attain high levels of performance.

However, passion does not influence performance directly. Rather, passion sets things
in motion by providing people with the energy and goals to engage in deliberate practice,
and it is this deliberate practice that has a direct influence on performance. Passion
provides the motivation for deliberate practice and deliberate practice results in high
performance. It does so because it enables one to identify certain sharply defined
elements of performance and then work intently and intensely on them. Such practice
over many years is an important predictor of the attainment of world class performance
like McEnroe has achieved. But recent studies show that it is also an important predictor
for performance attainment within the span of a couple of years like the MBA program
and within the span of even just a few months like the period of thesis writing within the
program.4

It appears from the foregoing that for each of you to display sustained involvement and
improvement in achievement; passion and debate practice have to be implicated in your
performance attainment in the program. .Excellence is not magic and it is not born. It
happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can
put in the focused and continuous effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery.
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities and who have had the strength
and presence of mind to seize them. These people do not necessarily have an
especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they
almost always have important mentors. And one thing they always have is an incredible
investment in effort driving the virtuous chain of passion, practice and performance.
*
4

Larry C.Farmer & Gerald R. Williams, Paper prepared for UCLA/IALS Sixth International Clinical
Conference Enriching Clinical Conference 2005, http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=2958
downloaded 07-10-09