2011 was a big year for articles that intelligently criticized the college-for-all idea; below you’ll find the top 10 must-reads and a little blurb about each. But first, ZTC news!

I’m offering a new “ZTC Camp” program for young adults ages 16-21! It has a different name (“The Asheville Intensive”) but the purpose and activities are highly similar to 2011′s ZTC Camp. Check out The Asheville Intensive over at Unschool Adventures.

November and December didn’t see any new ZTC blog posts because I was busy with two high-energy projects. First was the Unschool Adventures Writing Retreat, a program that brought together 19 teenage unschoolers from across the USA & Canada for a month of intensive, self-paced writing. The group produced an excellent Tumblr blog documenting day-to-day life at the retreat, and I wrote about my experience leading the program.

The other project I’ve been focusing heavily on is the ZTC book manuscript, currently undergoing peer review.

Finally, on the ZTC website we have some new features: a red flag icon for students who are currently seeking MAGE assistance (browse the student directory to see), and photos now included in both the student & MAGE directories.

And now, without further ado…

The Top 10 Must-Read College Articles from 2011

(All articles were previously listed on ZTCollege.com, the ZTC Scoop.it news page, or our Facebook page.)

 10. Money Lessons for Every High School Graduate

More like: life lessons for every 17-year-old. Zac Bissonnette, the author of Debt-Free U, makes five excellent points: Debt is slavery, College debt takes its toll, Rich friends may be broke, Materialism is misery, and TV makes you feel poor.

 9. Eight Alternatives to College

James Altucher weaves endless wisdom against college orthodoxy. Here he lays out a few concrete suggestions for what to do instead of college, including Start a Business, Travel the World, Create Art, Make People Laugh, Write a Book, Work in a Charity, Master a Game, and Master a Sport.

8. We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

As the founder of the Thiel Fellowship that offers teenagers $100,000 to “stop out of college” and start a business instead, Peter Thiel puts his money where his mouth is.

7. Buying an Education or Buying a Brand?

Seth Godin asks simple questions with razor-sharp insight: “Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?”

 6. The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

A strong analysis from an economic and historical perspective. “A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.”

5. How Blogging for HuffPost is Like College

Katherine von Jan explains how—college or not—success is all about self-directed learning.

4. Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?

A long article that’s worth your time. “Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi couldn’t have put it better himself.

3. Will Dropouts Save America?

Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires, argues: “It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic — and seldom-mentioned — fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.”

2. College Has Been Oversold

Why do we subsidize liberal arts degrees equally as much as science, technology, engineering, and math? An economist’s perspective.

1. Lessons From Famous College Dropouts

Squeaking in on December 31st, here’s the last must-read college article of 2011: A great list of accomplished people without college degrees.

Top photo: Flickr / Earlham College

This is part four in a four-part blog series about the psychology of self-directed learning that underpins the ZTC strategy.

Self-Doubt #3: Self-Image

Problem: “I can’t do this / I wish I could do this / I’m not that type of person.”

Solution: Understand the connection between intrinsic motivation & deliberate practice. Change your beliefs and your language.

Go-to books: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Mindset by Carol Dweck.

We find the final self-doubt—self-image—at the intersection of the first two: self-motivation and talent.

Intrinsic motivation and deliberate practice are the keys to self-directing your higher education. But they can only work their magic if you believe that you’re the right “type of person.” And if you went through twelve years of public schools (as I did), I don’t think that I convinced you of that yet.

To overcome this negative self-image, I still need to show you that:

• you’ll put in the hard work associated with deliberate practice,
• deliberate practice is worth the effort,
• and you’re fundamentally capable of self-directing your education.

To answer these concerns, we’ll cite three areas of research:

• the cross-over between intrinsic motivation and deliberate practice,
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow” studies, and
• Carol Dweck’s “Mindset” studies.

First: What makes people put in the hard work associated with deliberate practice? Being inherently unpleasant, doesn’t doing DP contradict intrinsic motivation? Why on earth would you do endless violin scales or computer programming tasks or writing drills?

To be clear, I never said that doing ZTC means doing only deliberate practice. As we saw above, most people can only do 4-5 hours of DP per day before they’re wiped out. But more importantly, there’s no reason that you have to strive for world-class achievement in everything you do. There are many slower and more pleasurable ways to pursue your interests. To become fluent in the classics, for example, you could find a literature buff and ask him to give you reading and writing assignments, mini-tests, and constant feedback (the DP route). Or you could kick up your feet in a sunny field and flip through The Odyssey. Sure, you won’t be gaining proficiency nearly as quickly as you could with DP, but if your interest is casual, then that’s okay.

With that caveat aside, the answer to the “why do DP if it’s hard?” question is: DP actually builds intrinsic motivation.

Remember that intrinsic motivation requires three ingredients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. “Mastery” is the chance to build deep competency. And DP, of course, builds deep competency. Therefore, deliberate practice and intrinsic motivation form a virtuous circle.

You can rely on yourself to put in the hard work that DP demands because, in the end, it will stoke your intrinsic motivation. Studies linking creative achievement to intrinsic motivation confirm this, as does the personal experience of anyone who felt the motivational boost that follows a successful DP activity.

Doing DP can stoke your autonomy as well. When you build competency rapidly, you move closer to a state of self-reliance, i.e. autonomy. Think of the motorcycle mechanic who apprentices himself to a more experienced mechanic (a classic DP situation) and gains a brand new technique for dissembling an engine. Not only does he reap the reward of greater mastery, but he’s now one step closer to working with motorcycles autonomously—by starting his own business, for example. (Conversely, increasing the mechanic’s autonomy would not increase his competency.) In this way, DP provides a double-whammy in intrinsic motivation gains, and this newfound motivation inspires you to continue putting in the hard work and long hours.

We’re edging into the next question: Why is DP worth the effort? Is increased skill and self-motivation all that we have to gain?

A deeper answer comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneer of “flow” theory and a central figure in positive psychology.

Csikszentmihalyi started his life as a painter in Hungary, fleeing to the U.S. at age 22 when Soviet tanks started rolling into the country. Now fascinated by the question of why humans oppress each other, he entered graduate school in psychology and wrote a thesis on how artists create art. As Csikszentmihalyi reported:

I was struck by how deeply [the artists] were involved in work, forgetting everything else. That state seemed so intriguing that I started also looking for it in chess players, in rock climbers, in dancers and in musicians. I expected to find substantial differences in all their activities, but people reported very similar accounts of how they felt. Then, I started looking at professions like surgery and found the same elements there—a challenge which provides clear, high goals and immediate feedback.

And thus began his study into the “flow” state, culminating in the 1993 book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.”

Flow is a state of energized focus and single-minded immersion in an activity. Similar to deliberate practice, flow requires clear goals, high concentration, and immediate feedback. But unlike DP—which is hard and painful—flow feels effortless. As  Csikszentmihalyi discovered, people in flow report:

• A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness.
• A distorted sense of time.
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures are apparent).
• A high sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• A lack of awareness of bodily needs (one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it).

Csikszentmihalyi discovered that, also like DP, flow requires a matching of challenge level to skill level. But flow won’t occur in a low-challenge/low-skill environment—like walking down an uneven sidewalk. This challenge might match your skill (as a walker), demand your focus, and provide immediate feedback (i.e. not falling), but it won’t put you into flow. Flow always requires high challenge and high skills.

Flow, you might say, is the ultimate intrinsic reward.

For many, flow is a spiritual experience. And this explains why DP is worth your effort: it opens the door to the flow experience. Every time you do DP you have the chance to breaking out of the grey clouds of painful effort and bask in the warm light of effortless achievement. But you can’t achieve this state without the hard, painful effort first.

So now you have two good reasons to DP: it reinforces self-motivation and it opens the door to flow. But the question remains: Are you capable of change? Now that you know the benefits of deliberate practice, will you actually do it?

As Colvin concluded in Talent is Overrated, the question of why some people put in the hard hours  of DP boils down to belief:

Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work, properly designed, with intense focus for hours a day and years on end, your performance will grow dramatically better and eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there’s at least a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance.

But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, or by a lack of general abilities at a level that you think must be necessary, then there’s no chance at all that you will do the work.

So what do you believe? Are you with me and Colvin in the belief that “great performance is not reserved for a preordained few,” or are you forever limited by your lack of an innate gift for self-motivation, talented work, IQ, or something else?

Carol Dweck of Stanford University has researched this belief extensively, concluding that individuals can either have a “growth mindset” or “fixed mindset.” (Her book, Mindset, documents her experiments extensively.)

Simply put, fixed mindset people put more stock in nature while growth mindset people put more stock in nurture. In the fixed mindset, Dweck explains, “effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort.” In the growth mindset, however, “effort is what makes you smart or talented.”

Dweck continues to explain that “people with the growth mindset thrive when they’re stretching themselves” while people with the fixed mindset thrive when “things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging—when they’re not feeling smart or talented—they lose interest.”

Obviously, the growth mindset is what you need to tackle the challenge of deliberate practice. But the fixed mindset is an insidious little bug that  probably took residency in your brain years ago. So how you do you switch to a growth mindset?

Dweck suggests goal-setting, brainstorming,  and simply changing your perspective as ways to build a growth mindset.

But she hints at a more effective intervention in an experiment on feedback.

Dweck gave a few hundred early adolescent students a set of challenging problems from an IQ test. After the test, Dweck’s team gave the students two types of feedback: one praising ability (“Wow, eight out of ten, you must be really smart!”) and the other praising effort (“Wow, eight out of ten, you must have worked really hard!”). As you would guess, the team was trying to instill the fixed mindset in the first group and the growth mindset in the second group.

The results appeared immediately. When presented with a new, more difficult problem set, the ability-praised group didn’t want to participate. Why would they expose themselves to a challenge that might strip them of their “smart” label? The effort-praised group, on the other hand, welcomed the new challenge. Failure and effort can coexist, after all.

The effort-praised group also did better on the IQ test. The ability-praised group did poorly on subsequent tests, even when they went back to the easier problems. “Since this was a kind of IQ test,” Dweck observed, “you might say that praising ability lowered the students’ IQs. And that praising their effort raised them.”

If you want to build a growth mindset, it appears that surrounding yourself with a specific type of feedback is key.

Remember what we learned from Edward Deci: external motivators like bribes and threats reduce a person’s intrinsic motivation. Guess what’s also in this category? Feedback. That’s because much of the day-to-day feedback that humans give to each other focuses on labels and faults. When your boss says “you’re a dumbass,” he doesn’t help your self-motivation. This is the quintessential “ability praise” that Dweck proved futile.

But there’s an exception to this rule: positive,  constructive, and effort-focused feedback. Research shows that this kind of feedback, unlike its rude stepbrother, actually increases creativity and intrinsic motivation.

Unsurprisingly, this is also the type of feedback used by deliberate practice.

I was lucky enough to learn how to give this type of feedback as a windsurfing and climbing instructor at a wilderness summer camp. At the beginning of the summer, the camp director told me that I was only allowed to give two types of feedback to my struggling students. I could tell them:

• What specific actions they were doing well
• What specific actions they should try next time

That sounded simple enough. But the hard part, I quickly discovered was avoiding all the other, unhelpful feedback that I habitually gave.

I couldn’t tell campers what they did wrong (“Don’t put your hand there!”). I couldn’t give fluffy feedback (“Great effort!”). I had to deeply understand my discipline (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to give them specific advice). And I couldn’t use labels (“You’re so talented!”). Only effort, action, and details were on the table.

The feedback worked incredibly well. I had 11-year-old campers tell me that they chose to suffer through the high winds and cold waters of windsurfing class, day after day, because of my feedback. Because were learning in leaps and bounds. Only later did I realize that these kids were experience deliberate practice and flow. And my feedback was helping them push themselves.

To build a growth mindset, you can learn to give—and ask for—positive, constructive, and effort-focused feedback. You can start giving it to yourself. And you can banish (from thought and speech) its opposite: negative, unhelpful, and label-focused feedback. Doing these things is the key to unlocking the power of intrinsic motivation, deliberate practice, and flow.

 

Sources for this article include:

Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Mindset by Carol Dweck.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/24/news/ls-52870

 

Top image:

Flickr/Fathzer

This is part three in a four-part blog series about the psychology of self-directed learning that underpins the ZTC strategy.

Self-Doubt #2: Talent

Problem: “I’m not smart/talented enough.”

Solution: Recognize that talent is grown—not born—and “deliberate practice” can grow it very quickly. And at the base of deliberate practice is the growth mindset.

Go-to book: Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.

“Even if I could motivate myself,” you protest, “skipping college is only for geniuses! Mere mortals like myself had better toe the line. I’m not smart enough to make it happen.”

How many of us tell ourselves this story, and how many wild opportunities has it foreclosed—not only in the realm of education?

Is talent, genius, and giftedness granted to you by the evolutionary lottery? Is it foolish to imagine that you could build deep skills without college? How do people get good at something, after all?

To find the answer, let’s begin with the story of Anders Ericsson. In 1978 Ericsson was a young psychology researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh conducting an experiment with a college student called (for the purpose of the experiment) “SF.” Ericsson’s goal: train SF to remember and recall as many random digits as possible. It was a pure memory workout. A giant breakthrough moment happened when SF succeeded in reciting a list of 22 random numbers.

22 digits was no simple feat. Other students had dropped out of the experiment after struggling to recall many fewer digits. (Most people can only easily memorize seven numbers.) But SF had tenaciously put up with Ericsson’s training for multiple weeks, slowly progressing from 11 to 15 to 22 digits. But SF’s achievement wasn’t only remarkable for its difficulty.

Firstly, SF was no natural-born genius. Before the training began, SF’s memory tested as average, as did his standardized test grades. This implied that you and I could also remember 22 random numbers (e.g. 5 8 3 5 7 1 0 7 6 8 4 5 3 3 0 1 2 5 8 2 4 6) if we underwent Ericsson’s training.

Secondly, 22 digits turned out to only be a stepping stone. With further practice, SF kept setting new memory records. After two years and roughly 250 hours of memory training, SF could recall 82 digits.

Thirdly and most significantly, nothing in SF’s progress indicated that 82 digits was his limit. Ericsson and his research partner concluded that “There is apparently no limit to improvements in memory skill with practice.”

Of course, remembering random numbers doesn’t make you a better human being. Instead, Ericsson’s experiment was important because it showed that a regular person could achieve world-class performance with a special type of training that Ericsson would later call “deliberate practice” (or “DP” for short). Memorizing random numbers was just the beginning.

Fifteen years later, Ericsson conducted his landmark study that introduced DP to the world. This time he studied a field that people actually care about: music. Ericsson’s team went to the Music Academy of West Berlin—famous for producing world-class violinists—and asked the academy’s professors to separate their students into three categories:

• top violinists (potential international soloists),
• very good violinists (potential symphony orchestra members), and
• just-okay violinists (probably music teachers).

Ericsson’s team then interviewed the elected students about every aspect of their musical careers: when they started playing and competing, how many hours a week they practiced, how many music-related activities they did in a typical week, and more. The students filled out extensive time-diaries and commented on how they felt during various activities at the music academy.

Analyzing the data, Ericsson’s team discovered surprising similarities between the three categories of violinists. Despite their differences in performance, students from every group had studied the violin for at least a decade, and they also spent the same total amount of time academy activities like lessons, practice, classes, etc.—roughly 51 hours per week. From these numbers alone—total career time and weekly activity time—it was impossible to predict who would become a top violinist.

The big difference among the groups turned out to be the amount of solitary practice. The top two groups clocked in at 24 hours per week of solitary practice, while the third group did only 9 hours per week. This finding suggested that more solitary practice produced better violinists. But it also presented a problem: What differentiated the top violinists from the very good violinists, who did equal amounts of solitary practice?

One answer appeared in the students’ extended histories: specifically, the total number of hours that a student had spent practicing over his entire life.

By age 18, the top violinists had spent 7,410  hours in practice, while the very good ones had spent 5,301. (The third group spent 3,420.) The top violinists, the team discovered, had indeed practiced more—just earlier in their lives.

Another answer appeared in how the top violinists described their experience of solitary practice. Unlike the other violinists, the top students didn’t consider practice fun or lighthearted; instead, they described it as hard, challenging, and unpleasant. In addition to putting in more hours, the Music Academy’s star students were doing an entirely different kind of practice: what Ericsson called “deliberate practice.”

Finishing the quest that started with SF and 22 random numbers, Ericsson reported his grand discovery in a 1993 paper: doing a certain type of practice, and doing a lot of it, is the key to expert performance. Unfortunately, Ericsson’s theory languished in academic obscurity for over a decade. until popular authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics fame), Malcolm Gladwell (of Outliers fame), and Geoff Colvin (author of Talent is Overrated) brought deliberate practice to the public eye.

So what does deliberate practice look like specifically? How is it different from regular “practice,” such as fooling around on a guitar? Colvin explained it best:

• DP first requires that you know exactly what you want to achieve. (e.g. “I want to play this specific riff from my favorite song” rather than “I want to get better at the guitar.”)
• DP is designed to nudge you just past your current level of performance. (In other words, it’s practice composed of bite-sized nuggets that meet your exact challenge level. Not too hard, not too easy.)
• DP is repeatable. (You can work on each bite-sized nugget over and over again. But once you’ve mastered that nugget, you press on.)
• During DP, performance feedback is constantly available to you. (Someone or something is telling you how you’re doing.)
• DP is highly mentally demanding; no one can do it for more than 4 or 5 hours a day.
• When you’re doing DP, it’s not much fun.  It’s strenuous and painful.

As you can see, DP is quite unlike regular “practice.” Think of a teenage girl teaching herself bass guitar. What does her practice consist of? Most likely:

• She has a fuzzy and larger-than-bite-size goal.
• She’s working with a book or website that can’t customize the practice specifically for her performance level.
• Nobody is around to observe her, provide feedback, and adjust the challenge level. (Or no one has prepared her to provide her own feedback, as the music professors did for the violin students’ solitary practice.)
• The practice isn’t too difficult, but she also doesn’t feeling like she’s growing.

The result of such practice is a plateau. On a plateau, you can practice all day but gain little skill. The normal response to this disheartening situation is to quit outright.

The antidote to plateauing is deliberate practice, but DP isn’t just for hobbies. As Ericsson suggested, it’s the pathway to high achievement in any field.

Anyone who has participated in a high-challenge/high-achievement sport, business, study group, or personal project knows what DP feels like: It’s the experience of intensive learning that’s unpleasant in the moment, but satisfying in the end.  It’s the experience of moving quickly and purposefully toward a well-defined goal. And therefore it’s no wonder that DP hours, when added up, lead to incredible performance.

Ericsson famously suggested that the key to achieving world-class performance in any discipline is to put in 10,000 hours—at least 10 years—of deliberate practice. More importantly, he argued that the “10,000 hour rule” isn’t optional for top performance; it’s mandatory. And so-called geniuses don’t get an exception.

Applying Ericsson’s logic, authors Levitt, Dubner, Gladwell, and Colvin, looked at the lives of Mozart, Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other so-called geniuses through the DP lens and made an incredible discovery: each had spent roughly 10,000 hours doing deliberate practice before making their greatest achievements.

You’ve probably heard that Mozart started composing symphonies at age 5; but did you know that his father Leonard, a famous performer and composer himself, initiated young Mozart into an intensive performance and composing program at age 3? Or that Mozart didn’t produce his first masterpiece until age 21, after 18 years of intensive practice?

Tiger Woods was also a case of early training by a skilled father: Earl Woods put a golf club into his son’s hands at ripe old of age of 18 months. Before winning the U.S. Amateur Championship at age 18, Tiger had racked up 15 years of (very deliberate) practice.

Bill Gates debugged mainframe computers, digitized an electric power grid, (perhaps) created the first computer virus, and founded a small company (with Paul Allen) that earned $20,000 years before dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft.

At age 12, Mark Zuckerberg devised a messaging program called “Zucknet” that his father implemented in his dental office. In his early teens Zuckerberg built computer games, worked with a private computer tutor, and took graduate courses in programming from a local college. In high school, he started a company and built Synapse Media Player (an early version of the music software Pandora), which AOL and Microsoft expressed interest in buying. And at Harvard, he built two social networking programs, CourseMatch and FaceMash…all before becoming the “genius” inventor of Facebook.

Colvin argues that deliberate practice, not high inborn IQ or memory, is what matters for high achievement. Each of the “geniuses” above illustrate  this fact. Nevertheless, it’s easy to feel that some giant chasm separates “them” from “us.” What explains that?

It’s not that Mozart, Woods, Gates, Zuckerberg, or (insert top performer in your field of interest here) was born with significantly more talent than you. They were simply born into unique environments that gave them deliberate practice  opportunities at a very early age.

For the rest of us (who did not grow up in such unique circumstances), we must create deliberate practice situations for ourselves. If we do so, then we have a shot at high achievement; it will just appear later in life.

So far we’ve covered DP in sports, music, and business—but how does DP apply to college-type learning? In 2010 a team at the University of British Columbia replaced one week of lecture in an undergraduate physics course with DP-oriented small group tasks, student-to-student discussions, and targeted instructor feedback. The result? The attendance, engagement, and test performance of more than 200 physics students increased dramatically, producing the most effective “educational intervention” ever observed in a study.

So the answer is yes: college-type, theoretical learning can benefit from DP too.

The significance of deliberate practice to Zero Tuition College now becomes clear. If the reason that you won’t consider a radical educational path is that you fear a lack of personal talent, genius, or giftedness: fear not. Building talent in one or two fields is an unquestionably important part of the college experience because it makes you employable. But as we learned above, talent is a product of deliberate practice, and deliberate practice doesn’t require an institution.

What DP does require is a knowledgeable mentor or coach to design appropriate challenges for you, provide feedback, and nudge you forward when practice gets tough. If as a college student you can join (or create) such a deliberate practice experience with a professor, graduate student, or fellow undergraduate, that’s fantastic. But must a DP mentor, coach, or teacher come from an expensive institution? Certainly not. Talent is talent, and you can find knowledgeable people who will design DP for you outside of college. We’ll tackle the challenge of finding such people later.

But first we must dispel the third boogeyman of self-doubt. Deliberate practice may unlock the gates to high-level achievement without college— but DP is hard. The endless hours of violin practice in Ericsson’s study didn’t sound fun. Why would you purposefully subject yourself to DP? Are you not the “type of person” who throws herself into challenging situations?

 

Sources for this article include:

Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.

http://www.deliberatepracticeblog.com/?p=116

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/index.htm

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Fi-Gi/Gates-Bill.html

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Zukerberg/149279965119328?sk=info

http://www.biography.com/articles/Mark-Zuckerberg-507402

 

Related ZTC blog posts:

Deliberate Practice Strikes Again

What is Deliberate Practice?

10 Ways to Do Self-Directed Learning