In his new book "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise", psychologist Anders Ericsson and journalist Robert Pool distill an impressive body of research on "mastering almost any skill." Indeed, deliberate practice can help you master new skills. Deliberate practice involves a series of techniques designed to learn efficiently and purposefully. This involves goal setting, breaking down complex tasks into chunks, developing highly complex and sophisticated representations of possible scenarios, getting out of your comfort zone, and receiving constant feedback.

But as they note midway through their book -- and I believe this is a really important caveat-- the techniques of deliberate practice are most applicable to "highly developed fields" such as chess, sports, and musical performance in which the rules of the domain are well established and passed on from generation to generation. The principles of deliberate practice do not work nearly as well for professions in which there is "little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies", and "many of the jobs in today's workplace-- business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on."

And may I also add: almost any creative domain!

Deliberate practice is really important for fields such as chess and instrumental performance because they rely on consistently replicable behaviors that must be repeated over and over again. But not all domains of human achievement rely on consistently replicable behaviors. For most creative domains, the goals and ways of achieving success are constantly changing, and consistently replicable behaviors are in fact detrimental to success. While Kobe Bryant showcasing the same slam dunk and Tiger Woods getting a hole in one will reliably induce public applause, scientists can't keep publishing the same paper over and over again, and writers can't keep writing the same critically acclaimed novel over and over again and expect the same acclaim.

Artists are under constant pressure to surpass what they and others have done before, and it is precisely this pressure that drives them toward ever increasing originality. Artistic products can lose their "shock value" quickly. How many times would Lady Gaga have to consistently wear her meat dress without people getting bored? If people applied the techniques of deliberate practice to create a meat dress and wear it for Halloween, would those individuals be lauded for their creative genius? Probably not.

While creativity often draws on a deep knowledge base, creative products, by definition, are much more than expert products. This is because creativity must be original, meaningful, and surprising. Original in the sense that the creator is rewarded for transcending expertise, and going beyond the standard repertoire. Meaningful in the sense that the creator must satisfy some utility function, or provide a new interpretation. This constantly raises the bar of what is considered useful, and puts immense pressure on creators to find new meanings. Finally, creative products must be surprising in that the original and meaningful creative product must be surprising not only to oneself, but to everyone. This is exactly how the United States Patent Office evaluates new applications. Original and meaningful ideas that could have been created by any expert in the field are considered "obvious" and are therefore unpatentable. Creative products-- such as the discoveries of Galileo and Leeuwenhoek-- are surprising to everyone, novices and experts alike.

Over the past 50 years or so, there have been many systematic studies of the career trajectories of creative people, the traits that predict creativity, and the life experiences of creative people. This wealth of research on creativity contradicts the notion that deliberate practice is the sole-- or even the most important-- aspect of creativity. Below I will summarize 12 of these findings.

I hope I have convinced you that creators are not mere experts. Creativity does draw on a deep knowledge base, and delibrate practice can certainly contribute to many aspects of creativity, but ultimately creativity involves much more than just deliberate practice. Creators are not necessarily the most efficient, but their messy minds and messy processes often allow them to see things others have never seen, and to create new paths that future generations will deliberately practice. I have immense respect for Ericsson's body of work on deliberate practice, and do believe that deliberate practice can help you get better in virtually any skill. However, I also believe that an accurate understanding of creativity is important for how we recognize, nurture, value, and ultimately, reward it, across all sectors of society.

© 2016 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved

* Thanks to David Epstein for reminding me of this point.

Note: I drawed heavily on Dean Simonton's research in this post, and owe a huge debt of gratitude to him for his important research on creativity.