Activation exercises

Activation exercises

Remember – activation and preparation are not the same thing.

C.3 Just a Minute

‘Just a minute’ is UK radio game show in which one person must speak on given subject, without hesitation or repetition, for 60 seconds or more. The speaker doesn’t know in advance what the subject is. The subject is suggested by the others in the group and they then asssess the speaker’s performance according to a set of public speaking guidelines you have been working with as part of your course.

To use this an activation exercise simply choose the topic you want to activate as the topic for your speeches.

Can you speak fluently and confidently on any subject at a few seconds notice? This exercise will help you to sound confident even when you are not.

C.4 Just a Minute 2

When you are comfortable with the exercise Just a Minute (C.1) above extend the time the speaker has to improvise for towards 2 minutes and then add the following element to the exercise.

One of the people listening shows a card (to the speaker) with a word or concept written in large letters on it. The person speaking must incorporate the word/concept on the card coherently into the improvised speech.

A further stage is to show the card only to the speaker and not to the other listeners. Those listeners must try to guess what was on the card from the speaker’s intonation. If the speaker has mastered the art of controlled public speaking they will not give away which word was on the card by, for example, sounding hesitant or smiling when they come to include that word in their improvised speech.

A.31 Improvise from prepared information

Take a topic that has been prepared and on which you have read a good deal of material. Before the speaker starts giving the speech (or you start looking at a text for sight-translation), get the interpreter(s) to pretend to be the speaker and improvise for a few minutes on the topic.

B.44 Vocabulary ball

Pick a subject, perhaps the subject of the days lesson. Throw the ball to someone. That person must (catch the ball) and improvise for 1 minute, spitting out as much vocab and idiom related to the subject as possible.

Source: Llewylln-Smith

A.37 Sight translation

If you can find the text of a speech on a subject similar to the one you are going to interpret, then doing a sight translation of that text is an excellent way to prepare. It will give you an opportunity to practise actually using the expressions and terminology that you have collected while preparing. It may sound trivial, but it is much harder to work out, or recall, and then use a translation, or expression, a first time, than it is any of the subsequent times. Consequently it is better to make sure that the ‘first time” is not in the booth, but part of your preparation.

*Exercises from Conference Interpreting – a students’ practice book, Andrew Gillies

Reading about practice

On this page you will find a brief introduction to some of the more useful texts published on consecutive interpreting. This page is work in progress, so if you have found something you think should be here drop us a line.

Conference Interpreting – a student’s practice book (2nd edition 2023)

Andrew Gillies

Read a review of this book at InterpretAmerica

A compilation of tried and tested practical exercises which hone the sub-skills that make up successful conference interpreting. Includes section on how to organise practice sessions out of class.

Read a review of this book at the Interpreter Diaries

Lesen Sie ein Rezension dieses Buches bei der MDÜ – Fachzeitschrift für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer

Put together by senior UN intepreter James Nolan, offers some good strategies for simultaneous interpreting and interesting exercises to practise the same strategies. You will need Fr, En and Es in your combination to use all the examples though. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are most useful.

Interpreting: From Preparation to Performance. Recipes for practitioners and Teachers, Compiled by

Csilla Szabó et al, British Council, Budapest. ISBN963 20 6409 7

Being a successful interpreter

Jonathan Downie

A practical guide to improving your work and professional life.

Read a review by the American Translators’ Association

Read a review at AIIC

Articles

Effektives Selbststudium – Schlüssel zum Erfolg in der Dolmetscherausbildung

Heine, Manfred (2000) In: Kalina, Sylvia et al. (eds) Dolmetschen: Theorie, Praxis, Didaktik. St. Ingberg: Röhrig, 213-229.

Using Audacity for dual-track recording of interpreting practice

(for a Mac)

This file is more a set of instructions than a description. But in brief Audacity allows a trainer to

1) listen asynchronously to both interpreting and source speech at the same time and

2) add feedback into the same file, with the feedback directly associated to the part of the interpreting in refers to.

There are two stages to get you to a dual track (both source speech and the interpreting in a single recording).

  • 1. Convert Youtube speeches to MP3
  • 2. Record interpreting over the original speech as a second track.

Convert Youtube speeches to MP3

1. Go to your Youtube film and copy the URL

2. Go to https://ymp4.download

3. Paste the Youtube film URL and click on the format you want (eg. MP3 320kbps)

4. Click „download” and then again on the new green “download” button that will appear

5. The downloaded MP3 file will appear in your Downloads folder

Record interpreting over the original speech as a second track

Download, install and open Audacity.

To interpret

2. Drag and drop MP3 file of source speech into Audacity window.

3. Click on Tracks menu

4. Choose        Add new

                        Stereo track

(Put the microphone volume up high and speaker volume relatively low. These are both underneath the green play button)

5. Press red record button to start interpreting

6. Stop interpreting

7. File/ Export

Teacher, to listen and give feedback.

Feedback in the audio recording

9. Click on Tracks menu

10. Choose      Add new

                        Label track

11. Click the part of the recording to which the feedback comment relates

12. To add a new label

            Edit Menu

            Labels

            Label at selection

            click where you want to add a comment

            type text into box provided

13. Repeat 12 for each feedback comment.

14. Save project as an Audacity .au file

– Once you record the “project” you can still edit the feedback The result looks like this:

Sending the project to a student

You need to send both the .au file and the _data folder of the same name (eg. Peter.au & Peter_data) for the student to be able to open the file at the other end. It’s a very big file! When they open the .au file it must inside the same folder as the _data folder.

15. To compress the file and folder into a zip file

Mark the file and folder and (ctrl + click) or (right click) on them. Choose “compress”. A .zip file will be created

16. Share the .zip file with your student… eg. via Gdocs

(It’s a very big file… approx 130MB for 10min speech)

When you play back the project you might not immediately see your feedback as it is later down the folder.

NB. My limited experience when listening with Audacity is that it pushes us towards very detailed micro-commentary. So it is well worth listening to the interpreting again as a whole, almost ignoring the original, to get that overall impression back.

Difficultés psychiques

L’apprentissage de l’interprétation de conférence et les difficultés psychiques qui lui sont inhérentes

Chris Guichot de Fortis
Senior Interpreter NATO

Vous voilà apprentis interprète de conférence, et je vous félicite de votre choix de carrière, qui vous comblera à terme de ses bienfaits, professionnels, intellectuels et personnels. Cependant, il se peut que vous ne sachiez pas, ou pas encore, quel peut être le cortège de difficultés et d’angoisses qui va trop souvent de pair avec les études que vous avez choisies.

J’ai une expérience de vingt ans de pédagogue dans diverses écoles d’interprétation en Belgique, en France et au Royaume-Uni. Année après année, j’ai pu constater (à ma grande tristesse!) que la majorité des étudiants qui se consacrent aux études du diplôme de «Master » d’interprétation de conférence, trébuchent sur les difficultés insoupçonnées, d’ordre émotionnel et psychique, qui sont fort malheureusement incontournables dans ce contexte.

Mon but ici est de vous prévenir quant aux contraintes personnelles et aux pressions psychiques qui font partie intégrante de la profession et des études qui y ouvrent l’accès, et de vous prémunir contre ces embûches. J’espère ainsi, en vous permettant de vous consacrer les yeux grand ouverts et en pleine connaissance de cause à votre apprentissage de la profession, vous épargner bien des états d’âme et des mises en cause personnelles habituellement angoissantes. En somme, je voudrais que vous deveniez des interprètes compétents et épanouis, mais aussi que vous preniez du plaisir en apprenant à accéder à ce statut…

1) Jusqu’ici, il y a fort à parier que vous avez toujours été les meilleurs, ou presque, dans vos études de secondaire et/ou de baccalauréat ou de licence, car les écoles d’interprètes recherchent toujours les étudiants les plus doués et les plus motivés. Dès à présent, cependant, vous ne serez sans doute plus le numéro un, ce qui bien entendu est tout-à-fait logique, mais ce fait peut imposer un petit ré-étalonnage mentale et psychique avant de pouvoir assumer avec sérénité le nouveau statut de ‘petit poisson dans un grand étang’.

Il faut également comprendre que vous vous attaquez désormais à une matière extrêmement difficile, et il se peut que ce soit la première fois de votre jeune vie que vous tentez d’acquérir une gamme de compétences techniques qu’il vous sera impossible de maîtriser de prime abord. En effet, surtout en ce qui concerne l’interprétation simultanée, personne n’y arrive dès le début de l’apprentissage, et il faudra travailler très dur, et patienter jusqu’à ce que le métier rentre et que le déclic s’opère. La bonne nouvelle est que, à condition de posséder les compétences linguistiques et intellectuelles requises et de travailler et de vous entraîner comme des forcenés, cet heureux déclic arrivera presque immanquablement, tôt ou tard. Moralité de l’histoire : soyez patients, travaillez dur, écoutez les conseils et ne soyez ni étonnés ni déprimés de ne pas y arriver tout de suite, et de connaître bien des hauts et des bas, autant intellectuels que psychiques…

2) Vous ne la savez peut-être pas encore, mais l’interprétation de conférence est un art où les performances et les prestations se font grâce à une improvisation permanente, le plus souvent sans ‘filet de sécurité’ et en faisant appel en temps réel à une vaste panoplie de compétences et de réflexes complexes, peu naturels et initialement fragiles.

Voici une description assez parlante du jazz, description qui décrit à merveille les complexités et les gloires de l’interprétation simultanée:

« Controlled spontaneity. Like ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing – jazz isn’t something you plan, it’s something you do. You practice, you play your scales, you learn your chops, then you bring all your knowledge, your conditioning to the moment.

‘In jazz, every moment is a crisis’, said Wynton Marsalis ‘and you bring all your skill to bear on the crisis’.
Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet and the painter –it’s all right there –no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens….. »

(Christopher Moore – A Dirty Job)

Comprenez que nous sommes des artistes et des performers, évoluant sur la corde raide, et que notre profession exige, de par sa nature, que nous ‘sortions nos tripes’, que nous nous investissions d’une manière intense, intègre et très personnelle dans nos prestations, que nous y mettions tout ce qui est en nous. C’est ainsi que nous devenons des interprètes de conférence dignes de ce nom, dignes du message, dignes de nos délégués.

La contrepartie d’un tel investissement de soi, c’est que les commentaires et critiques que vous feront vos professeurs, peuvent vite prendre des tournures personnelles blessantes et/ou contre-productives, ou être perçus par vous de cette manière. Il est essentiel que professeurs et étudiants se rappellent à tout moment que les études impliquent que ces derniers soient évalués et jugés en leur qualité d’interprètes de conférence (potentiels) et non pas en tant qu’êtres humains. Pour vous, étudiants, il est important de trouver en vous le moyen d’accepter et d’agir sur le feedback de vos pédagogues, mais sans le prendre comme atteinte à la personne que vous êtes et sans vous mettre en cause vous-même sur le plan psychique– je vous assure que ce malheureux amalgame est tout-à- fait courant!

3) Notre profession peut être qualifiée d’art du spectacle, et les interprètes de conférence sont des performers ou artistes, montant sur scène et puisant dans toutes leurs ressources pour animer, inspirer et informer un public ayant besoin d’eux pour participer à l’événement. Il est donc jugé légitime que ceux qui ‘consomment’ l’interprétation en ‘assistant au spectacle’, s’arrogent le droit de juger et de commenter les prestations des interprètes, un peu comme le font les critiques et le public devant une performance à l’opéra, aux Jeux Olympiques ou au théâtre.

Peut découler de ce phénomène un effet de stress et d’angoisse, décrit comme suit par le champion de tennis Pat Cash :

“I’m referring to the pressures of the game that grow and grow to such an extent that you almost reach the stage where you resent and despise the sport you play. And most of those pressures come from within your own brain.
I reached the point…where, during a match, so many people were prepared to make judgements on somebody they didn’t know…”

Je ne voudrais absolument pas que vous tombiez dans ce piège, alors réjouissez-vous plutôt de pouvoir vous montrer des performers polyvalents et doués, et acceptez que ce phénomène est à la fois le fléau et le couronnement du travail de l’interprète de conférence.

Une contrepartie évidente de ce constat, c’est que l’interprète de conférence qui craint d’être écouté, ne pourra survivre ! Or, il est très courant de voir les débutants se taire par simple effet de peur et d’intimidation, lorsqu’ils se savent écoutés par un collègue ou un professeur – il s’agit d’un défi de plus à surmonter, et si vous arrivez à reconnaître cette peur pour ce qu’elle est, plutôt que d’y céder vous finirez par vous délecter à l’idée d’avoir une occasion d’afficher vos compétences grandissantes!

4) Je vous recommande, jeunes interprètes en devenir, de vous construire un ‘personnage professionnel’ que vous revêtirez pendant les heures de travail ou d’exercices, quittes à l’ôter une fois le travail fini, pour redonner libre cours à votre caractère habituel, et sans aucun doute estimable et fascinant! Vous devez vous habituer à devenir de fins professionnels pendant les heures où vos clients dépendent de vous, et il peut être passionnant de construire et de perfectionner ce ‘personnage bis’, qui épatera – de par sa résistance, son énergie, son intelligence, sa fiabilité, son savoir-faire, sa discrétion et son professionnalisme – tous les acteurs des conférences auxquelles vous assisterez. Ce personnage, vous devez pouvoir l’assumer (et l’assumer intégralement) à la vitesse de l’éclair, comme si vous actionniez un interrupteur.

5) La profession de l’interprétation de conférence s’est développée et est structurée de manière à passer presque toujours par des tests grandeur nature, en temps réel devant un auditoire. Ceci est le cas qu’il s’agisse d’obtenir votre diplôme d’interprète ou d’être accepté comme freelance ou permanent au sein d’une organisation internationale, et que l’on aime ou non ces passages obligés, ils sont incontournables. C’est un peu à l’image d’un chanteur, d’un acteur, d’un athlète, d’un musicien ou d’un danseur, qui doit montrer de quoi il est fait en situation de stress réelle, et souvent dans des contextes où ‘toute erreur se paie cash’.

En fait, puisque nous gagnons notre pain quotidien en nous livrant à des performances de cet art complexe, il est normal et souhaitable, pour tout entité diplômant ou employeur éventuel, de vouloir apprécier le niveau de prestation de l’interprète (potentiel) en situation de crise (voir 2) ci- dessus), car notre travail consiste à gérer une ‘crise permanente’. Chez l’interprète de conférence, il va un peu sans dire que l’évaluation continue n’est pas vraiment utile, puisque nous ne valons jamais plus que notre dernière prestation en date..

Voilà quelques-unes de mes idées, un peu à l’emporte-pièce, concernant les expériences que vous risquez de vivre en tant qu’étudiants- interprètes. J’espère, sincèrement, que vous aurez vite fait de comprendre que, malgré les difficultés décrites, dont certaines s’appliqueront sans aucun doute à votre cas, le jeu en vaut très largement la chandelle. Notre profession est unique, passionnante, complexe, envoûtante, et je vous souhaite de la vivre intensément et d’une manière qui vous inspirera tout au long de vos années en cabine !

Christopher Guichot de Fortis (AIIC)
Interprète principal au Siège de l’OTAN,
Bruxelles 26 septembre 2011

Practice Guide Guichot de Fortis

by Chris Guichot de Fortis
Senior Interpreter, NATO
January 2015

“You have a mind, it wants to learn. Acquire an arsenal of knowledge with which to arm yourself…our modern age is a time when learning is power….every man must know everything. Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing we use to fly…your brain must hurry to eat all the facts it can hold, before the next age of darkness.”
(Phillip Depoy – “The King James Conspiracy”)

It has become increasingly apparent to me over the years that a considerable number of students studying conference interpreting (at Master’s and other levels), find it difficult to know exactly how to proceed, and which tactics and techniques to adopt in their efforts to improve their consecutive and simultaneous techniques, and strengthen both their ‘A’ and ‘B’ languages. So, I felt it might be useful for me to provide a few hints and guidelines to help my future colleagues, which is my goal in this informal (and far from exhaustive) guide; I hope and trust that it will be of assistance both to those still engaged in their studies, and recently qualified young conference interpreters.

If you are to progress, it is important that you understand that the formal hours of teaching and training offered by your school during your interpreting studies can only be considered as simply the tiny tip of what is a complex and extensive iceberg. If you limit yourself to this ‘official’ training and practice, be advised from the start that you will have practically no chance either of passing your diploma exams or (much more importantly) of actually becoming a conference interpreter! Please divest yourself immediately of the misapprehension that simply attending classes will automatically make you into a conference interpreter – from today on, devote your energy, your willpower and your imagination to external/supplementary/independent training activities aimed at making you both competent and autonomous.

Think of your formal classes more as a chance to have regular access to experienced trainers, who will be able to observe your performance and provide advice to enable you to then go away and progress. Remember that even though Olympic athletes (and theirs, linguistically, is the level of difficulty and excellence in performance at which you are aiming) resort systematically to specialist professional trainers, these experts can only observe performance and indicate what form the athlete’s training should take. It will be the individual athlete’s muscles and tendons which will bring Olympic success, and not those of the coach – it is therefore up to the athlete to make the lengthy, focused, sustained and considered efforts which will progressively strengthen and develop muscles, resilience and technique, and lead to success in performance.

In your case, it is your own brain that you must painstakingly develop, nourishing synapses and creating the new neuronal pathways which are a prerequisite for simultaneous interpretation, and to which there are no shortcuts: there can literally be no substitute for many many hours of purposeful and targeted practice, actually carrying out the interpreting task! You may practice alone or in a group, and must regularly seek evaluations and advice from seasoned professional interpreters/pedagogues, who know where the bar is set. This professional feedback should lead to the adoption of strategies to remedy any faults identified, and this practice/feedback loop should be repeated many times.

It is usually said that, to acquire a high-level specialist skill, some 10.000 hours of deliberate practice are required. While this will indeed be necessary for you to achieve a truly expert level of performance (which should legitimately be your aim after a couple of years in the profession, if you wish to make a living from conference interpreting in a competitive world), to reach the level required to actually launch one’s career, several hundred hours (in conditions as near to those of real life as possible) should suffice!

During your practice sessions, I suggest that you draw inspiration from the text in Annex I below, detailing the training methods and strategies employed by experts and specialist performers in a variety of fields.

It is very important that you practice even a little every day (while allowing yourself a weekly day of rest!), rather than opting for less frequent but rarer but longer, intensive bursts of activity. On days when you have classes, I recommend a daily average of 90 minutes’ concentrated training, in two 45 minute slices, all disciplines included; on those days when you have no formal interpreting classes, you should at least double this amount of time. Work also at acquiring the conference interpreter’s essential skill of ‘throwing the switch’ and being able to concentrate immediately and totally on the task at hand, while relaxing just as fully when the time is right. This ability (a skill in its own right), is so frequently disregarded and/or misunderstood, but it will be the basic key to the success of your training and practice, and later to your life as a practicing professional conference interpreter.

You will find below a short list of exercises which I hope and believe will help you develop as a conference interpreter. I should add the rider that each person, each brain and each linguistic and professional profile is different – you should therefore put together a reasoned, rational and achievable study and training plan to suit your own abilities and circumstances, and stick to it even when the going gets tough (as will often be the case, trust me!). If you would like to consult me (c.guichot@aiic.net) for help in establishing a tailor-made personal training plan, I would be very happy to help if time permits:

1) Listen every day, for at least an hour, to spoken-word radio (NPR, BBC Radio 4 and World Service, for English), at times with complete focus and concentration and at times as a background to your routine activities. Whether you are an English ‘A’ or ‘B’, the advantages here are multiple:

  • –  during the ‘concentrated’ listening periods, you will improve your grasp of current affairs and geopolitics, and enhance the lexical breadth and depth of your language
  • –  at all times, in the absence of visual cues, your ears and brain will become accustomed to instinctively and rapidly seizing the meaning and cadences of the (‘C’ or ‘B’) language, and to honing active listening skills
  • –  in listening to radio speech while engaged in other relatively undemanding activities, you will train your brain to listen and extract meaning with only a part of its capacity; this is an absolute goal to be reached in simultaneous interpreting, where the brain must be free to concentrate on the more ‘noble’ core functions of interpretation, i.e. understanding, processing and transposing complex ideas.

2)  Practice simultaneous, using real-life speeches delivered by speakers who are making no concessions to the fact that you are interpreting them, and pulling no punches! Use headphones and a computer, record your work and check it afterwards; as often as possible, ask for feedback from an experienced interpreter with the relevant ‘A’ language (if need be, arrange to send sound files by email). I hope that the list of useful links in Annex II will help you here.

3)  Form a training and practice group with other students or young colleagues,: negotiate access to a room with interpreting booths (use imagination and lateral thinking, and do not take ‘no’ for an answer!) and organize regular and frequent training sessions. Attend these sessions come what may, even when tired or discouraged, as they will be a source of motivation and cross-fertilisation; while the learning curve is still steep, it is easier to struggle with others than alone. You should attend these sessions systematically, no matter how (or how confident) you are feeling mentally or physically, because others will be depending on you and your commitment. The discipline will later stand you in good stead as a professional interpreter, and will help develop your character and reliability, making you a sought- after colleague.

In your work with the practice group, every member in rotation should prepare and deliver speeches, which will also develop your self-confidence and hone other communication skills that will help you greatly in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. While working in a group, be constructive in your feedback to colleagues, but also frank and demanding. Undemanding or superficial feedback (too many schools tend to be insufficiently demanding of their students) does more harm than good, and it is only through constructive frankness that you will progress. Try hard to move beyond a simple recitation of inaccuracies and language errors, and seek to identify weaknesses in listening, concentration, reasoning and understanding, all of which will undermine successful interpretation. A further bonus here is that in learning to critique colleagues, you will also become better able to identify your own problems.

In Annex III below you will find a description of an excellent group of this type, which is primarily aimed at recent graduates. This is an example from which to draw inspiration; please take into account the intellectual property involved in the format and website of this group, and make sure to ask permission from the group organizer (listed in the Annex) before cutting and pasting any part of her work.

4)  Practice on-sight translation every day, alone or with others; fix the goal of finding (in your ‘A’ language) 5 or 6 versions of each and every sentence without hesitation, varying grammar, syntax and word order; in your ‘B’ language, your goal should be to provide 3 versions with equal speed. You can work on this exercise anywhere and at any time, using virtually any type of text, and it is indispensable for increasing the speed and flexibility of your thought processes, and your linguistic breadth and depth in all your active languages.

5)  Perform 4-minute slices of consecutive interpretation, preferably in front of an audience made up of your colleagues or of ‘pure consumers’ who have no knowledge of the source language – this is a good motivator for young interpreters, as it places them in a situation where their interpretation is truly necessary, a salutary and welcome change from the artificial circumstances in which most such tasks tend to be carried out in a learning environment.

6) Spend a considerable amount of time ‘shadowing’ (see guide at Annex IV below) elegant, flowing and convincing speeches in all your active languages (‘A’ just as much as ‘B’). Do not forget that even your mother tongue will not yet be at a level sufficient to be able to professionally interpret complex arguments and ideas. In addition, shadowing is the best possible tool for acquiring a strong ‘B’ language, so that it can be employed reflexively, confidently and convincingly: after many tens of hours of practice, this technique will help you automatically employ correct vocabulary and register in your ‘A’ language, and appropriate cadences, accent and rhythms in your ‘B’ language.

_____________________________________________________________________

ANNEX I

Article : « Elite Players’ Practice »

The Berlin Study

In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.

As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.

We’ll call this group the elite players.

For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.

We’ll call this group the average players.

The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.

Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?

The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long, Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.

The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…

Decoding the Patterns of the Elite

We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music.

The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).

The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability.

This might not be surprising, as the importance of deliberate practice had been replicated and reported many times (c.f., Gladwell).

But the researchers weren’t done.

They also studied how the students scheduled their work. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.

The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods.

When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best — the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany’s two best professional orchestras — there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two- sessions a day schedule.

This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives. Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the

average players.

Also consider relaxation. The researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities — an important indicator of their subjective feeling of relaxation. By this metric, the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all.

Hard Work is Different than Hard to Do Work

To summarize these results:

  • The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
  • but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
  • and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin. I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it: the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.

This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

  • Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
  • Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment. This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work. The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.