当我们回顾历史上那些最富有创造力的生命时，会发现一条悖论：他们确实将一生奉献给了自己的事业，但并没有在整天不停地工作。
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比如查尔斯·狄更斯（Charles Dickens）和亨利·庞加莱（Henri Poincaré），这些不同时期不同领域的人都对工作充满激情和成功的雄心壮志，几乎都抱有超人的专注力。然而，在他们的日常生活中，他们通常每天只花几个小时去做那些被后世认为最重要的工作。其余的时间，他们爬山徒步、睡午觉、和朋友一起散步，或者坐着思考。换句话说，他们的创造力和生产力并不来自无休止的工作。他们卓越的创作成就来自“适度”的工作。
如果一些历史上最伟大的人物没有在工作上投入很长的时间，那么揭开他们创造力秘诀的关键就在于不仅要了解他们是如何工作的，还要了解他们是如何休息、怎样做到劳逸结合。
“懒虫”达尔文？
让我们先来看看这两个人的生活——他们在各自的领域都很有成就，两人还是住在伦敦东南的唐恩村（village of Downe）的邻居和朋友。而且，从不同的角度来看，他们的生活为工作、休息和创造力之间的联系提供了一个切入点。
首先，想象一个穿着斗篷、一言不发的人行走在乡间蜿蜒小径的画面。一天早晨，他低着头行走，显然是陷入了沉思。在外人看来，他走得很慢，不时会停下来聆听他周围树林里的声音；他曾经在皇家海军做博物学家，并且习惯于做曾在巴西的森林里做过的事：采集动物标本、研究南美洲的地理和地质——这些都为他在 1859 年出版《物种起源》并达到生涯顶峰奠定了基础。现在，查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）年纪大了，他从采集标本转向了理论研究。达尔文悄无声息进行移动的能力反映了他自己对专注和安静的需求。事实上，他的儿子弗朗西斯说，达尔文隐藏自己气息的能力强大到曾经在离他只有几英尺远的地方遇到过“和幼崽玩耍的母狐狸”，并经常同夜间狩猎回来的狐狸打招呼。
如果那些狐狸从达尔文的隔壁邻居，男爵约翰·卢伯克（John Lubbock）门前穿过，它们可就得赶紧逃跑了。卢伯克喜欢在清晨带着他的猎犬在乡间穿行。如果说达尔文有点像《傲慢与偏见》中的班纳特先生——一个谦和中庸的君子，虽然彬彬有礼，但却偏爱家庭和书籍；那么卢伯克则更像宾利先生，外向而热情，是一位在生活和社交上游刃有余的富家子弟。达尔文年纪老迈，饱受各种疾病的困扰，而卢伯克即使在 60 多岁的时候仍然拥有“伊顿公学六年级男孩所特有的优雅散漫的举止”。但是这对邻居都喜欢科学，尽管他们的工作生活如同他们的性格一般截然不同。
在晨练和早餐后，达尔文会从 8 点开始进行一个半小时的学习和工作。9 点 30 分，他会读早上送来的邮件并写信。十点半，达尔文回到更加认真的工作中，有时他来到他的鸟舍、温室或其他的屋子进行实验。到了中午，他会表示：“我今天结结实实地工作了一上午呢”，并前往他买房后不久铺设的步道上散步（一部分的步道穿过了卢伯克家族租给达尔文的土地）。达尔文会在散步回来一个多小时后吃午餐，并再写一些回信。3 点的时候他会小睡一会儿。一个小时后，他会起来，去步道上再走一圈，然后回来继续做研究。到了 5 点半，他会和他的妻子艾玛以及家人一起吃晚饭。遵循这个时间表，他写出了 19 本书，其中包括关于攀爬植物，藤壶和其他科目的技术类书籍、充满争议的《人类的由来（Descent of Man）》和《物种起源（Origin of Species）》——这可能是科学史上最著名的一本书，至今仍然影响着我们对自然和我们自身的思考方式。
任何回溯达尔文日程安排的人都不禁会注意到这位伟大“造物主”身上的矛盾之处：达尔文的一生是与科学紧密结合的一生。达尔文从大学毕业以来一直致力于科学采集、探索和最终的理论化。他和艾玛从伦敦搬到了乡下，给家庭和自己的科学事业带来了更多的空间。“唐恩小筑（Down House，达尔文故居）”为他提供了实验室和温室，农村给了他工作所必需的安宁和平静。但与此同时，他的日子比起今天的我们似乎并不太忙。达尔文的“工作”时间，只包括三个 90 分钟的时间段。如果他是今天的一所大学的教授，他肯定拿不到终身教职。如果他在一家公司工作，他会在一个星期内被解雇。
这并非因为达尔文没有时间观念或者缺乏雄心壮志。达尔文有很强的时间观念，他觉得自己不能浪费任何事物。当他在“小猎犬号”（the Beagle）上环游世界的时候，他写信给他的妹妹苏珊·伊丽莎白（Susan Elizabeth）说：“一个敢于浪费一个小时的人并不懂得生命的价值。”当他决定是否要结婚的时候， 他担心的是，“时间上的浪费——晚上无法阅读”。在日记中，他记录了因为慢性病所失去的时间。他在自传中承认，他对科学的“纯粹的爱”，“很大程度上得益于同僚博物学家们对他的雄心的尊重“。他充满激情和动力，以至于他习惯于焦虑地对自己的想法及其影响进行自我驳斥。
约翰·卢伯克（John Lubbock）则远没有达尔文那么出名，但在 1913 年去世的时候，他是“英国最有成就的业余科学家之一，当下最多产、最成功的作家之一， 最真诚的社会改革者，也是近期议会历史上最成功的立法者之一”。卢伯克对科学的兴趣涵盖了古生物学，动物心理学和昆虫学，但他最经久不衰的成就是考古学。他的著作使术语”旧石器时代（Paleolithic ）“和”新石器时代（Neolithic）”流行起来，到了今天考古学家仍在使用。他购买了伦敦西南部古老的定居点埃夫伯里（Avebury），将这片古迹从开发者的破坏中拯救出来。今天，它的受欢迎程度和对于考古学的重要性可与巨石阵相媲美，对它的保护使卢伯克在 1900 年获得了埃夫伯里男爵（Baron Avebury）的称号。
卢伯克的成就不仅仅在科学上。他继承了父亲生意兴隆的银行，在维多利亚时代的末期将其发扬光大，并推进了英国银行体系现代化。他在议会待了几十年，在那里他是一位成功和受人尊敬的立法者。他的传记列出他撰写的 29 本书，其中有许多畅销书被翻译成不同语言。卢伯克甚至在同时代的伟人中也算是高产的。查尔斯·达尔文在 1881 年谈到他时说：（卢伯克）怎么能有那么多的时间用于“科学，写作，政治和商业”，这对我来说是一个谜。
卢伯克作为一名政治家，他的显赫声望靠的是倡导休息。英国的银行假日是他的发明，在 1871 年生效的时候，他获得了巨大的赞同和支持。这些假日的出现使他广受爱戴，大众媒体将它们命名为“圣•卢伯克日（St. Lubbock’s Days）”。他花了几十年的时间来倡导《提早休业法案》（Early Closing Bill），该法案规定，每人每周的工作时间需要被限制在 18 至 74 小时之内；在他接手这个事业的 30 年后，这项法案在 1903 年 4 月终于被通过，它被称为《埃夫伯里法案》（Avebury’s Bill）。
卢伯克践行着他的理念。在家，他六点半起床，八点半开始工作。他把自己的一天划分为半小时的间隔，这是他从父亲身上学到的一种习惯。经过多年的实践，他能够将自己的注意力从与合作伙伴或客户间“复杂的金融观点”无缝转移到“单性生殖这样的生物学问题”。
所以，尽管他们的个性差异和成就都不一样，但达尔文和卢伯克都做到了一些在现代似乎越来越陌生的事——休息。他们的生活是充实难忘的，他们的成就是惊人的，但他们的日子也充满了闲暇。
这看起来像是一个矛盾，或者是我们大多数人难以企及的平衡。其实不是。 我们将会看到，达尔文和卢伯克，以及其他许多有创造力且高产的人物，并没有因为闲暇而影响他们的成就。相反，他们的成就源于这些闲暇。即使在今天这种“全天无休”的社会中，我们也可以学习如何劳逸结合，使我们变得更聪明、更有创意、更快乐。
庞加莱和他的四小时
达尔文并不是唯一一位把献身科学事业与短时间工作相结合而闻名的科学家。我们可以在许多其他人的职业生涯中看到类似的模式。
科学是一个竞争激烈、损耗巨大的事业。科学家的成就——他们撰写的文章和书籍的数量、他们获得的奖项、他们的作品被引用的速度——都有详细记录，并且易于衡量和比较。因此，他们的“财产”往往比那些商界领袖更容易界定。同时，不同学科间也有很大的差别，给我们提供了风格迥异的个性和工作习惯。此外，大多数科学家还没有被赋予那种用来包装商业领袖和政治家的、被夸大和模糊的光环。
所以，一些研究者开始对工作休息安排如何影响思考和灵感感兴趣。亨利·庞加莱（Henri Poincaré）就是一个例子，这位法国数学家，他的公众地位和成就可与达尔文相比拟。庞加莱的 30 本书和 500 篇论文涵盖了数论、拓扑学、天文学、天体力学、理论和应用物理学以及哲学。美国数学家埃里克·坦贝尔（Eric Temple Bell）称他为“最后一个全才”。
庞加莱不仅在科学家圈子中享有盛名。1895 年，他与小说家埃米尔·左拉（Émile Zola）、雕塑家奥古斯特·罗丹（Auguste Rodin）和朱勒·达卢（Jules Dalou）以及作曲家卡米尔·圣·桑斯（Camille Saint-Saëns）一起成为法国精神病学家爱德华·图卢兹（Édouard Toulouse）对天才心理学的研究对象，该研究指出：庞加莱有着非常规律的工作时间。他在上午十点至中午，下午五点至七点之间做最艰难的思考。一天四个小时足以让 19 世纪最伟大的数学天才解决一个复杂的数学问题。
谁是最优秀的学生？
20 世纪 80 年代，卡尔•安德斯•埃里克松（Karl Anders Ericsson）、拉夫•克拉姆普（Ralf Krampe）和克莱门斯特-拉默（Clemens Tesch-Römer）在柏林的一所音乐学院对小提琴专业学生的研究中发现了类似的模式。埃里克松、克拉姆普和拉默按照成绩和表现把学生分为“优秀”和“普通”两个等级。在采访了学生和他们的老师，并让学生记录他们的日程之后，他们发现有好几个因素决定了谁是最优秀的那一拨。
首先，优秀的学生之所以优秀，是因为他们不仅比他人练得更多，而且他们进行的是刻意练习。埃里克松解释说，在刻意的练习过程中，人们“专心致志地进行一项特定的活动，以提高自己的表现”。刻意训练是有针对性的，有条理的，并能给予明确的目标和反馈；它需要你时刻注意自己在做什么，并找出改进的方法。当学生们有清晰而长远的目标时，他们会想方设法地进行刻意训练，这会将杰出作品与普通作品、成功者与失败者区分开来。一个经过刻意练习的人可能获得最快的速度，最高的分数，或者最优雅的解决方案。
其次，这需要一天又一天地坚持不懈。刻意练习并不有趣，并且不是马上就能见效的。这意味着天还没亮你就要在泳池里练习打腿和划臂，或者在本可以和朋友出去玩的时间里在封闭的房间里练习指法或者呼吸，花费数小时来完善他人注意不到的细节。在刻意练习中很少有自然产生的、即时的愉悦，所以你需要很强的意志。这些长时间的工作将会得到回报，这不仅将改善你的职业前景，还会让你变得更加专业和独特。这么拼可不只是为了甩掉肥肉，你这样做是因为它增强了你对你是谁，以及你将成为谁的信念。
刻意练习的观点和埃里克松等人对世界级成就获得者花费在练习中的总时间的测量得到了很多关注。这项研究是马尔科姆·格拉德威尔（Malcolm Gladwell）的基础（在他的书《异类》（Outliers）中有充分阐述）——任何事情都需要 10,000 小时的练习才能成为世界级的人物，从国际象棋传奇人物鲍比·菲舍尔（Bobby Fischer）到微软创始人比尔·盖茨（Bill Gates），他们成名之前都经过了至少 10,000 小时的练习。对于橄榄球教练、音乐教师和雄心勃勃的父母来说，这个数字成为通向美国职业橄榄球大联盟、茱莉亚音乐学院或麻省理工的黄金之路：在一种将压力和过度劳动视为美德而不是恶习的文化中，10,000 小时是一个令人印象深刻的大数字。这敦促人们在年轻时便开始忙碌，并努力坚持。
但埃里克松和他的同事们在研究中发现了一些几乎每个人都忽视了的东西。他们观察到，“刻意练习”是一种只能在每天有限的时间内坚持下去的艰苦活动。练的太少，永远无法成为世界级。不过，练的过多，会增加受伤的几率，并让你精疲力尽。为了取得成功，学生必须“避免身心俱疲”，并且“控制练习的量，使他们每天或每周都能恢复过来”。
那些优秀的学生是如何在有限的练习时间内获得杰出成就的呢？他们的练习节奏遵循着一种独特的模式：每周在练习室或运动场投入很多的时间，但并不会让一次练习持续太长时间。他们进行的是强度大、时间短的练习，每次持续约 80 到 90 分钟，之后会有半小时的休息。
把这些练习片段加起来，也就是每天四小时的时间，大概是达尔文每天完成他最艰难的工作的时间，哈代和李特尔伍德用在数学上的时间，狄更斯和史蒂芬金花费在写作上的时间。即使是世界上最好学校的充满野心的年轻学生们，在为进入一个充满竞争的领域做准备的时候，每天也只能做到四个小时真正的全神贯注。
埃里克松总结说，（刻意练习的）上限是指，“不是根据可用的时间，而是根据可用的（精神和物质）资源来付出努力的练习”。学生们的一天不是只有四小时的练习——上课、彩排、家庭作业和其他一些事情会占据他们一天中的其他时间。在采访中，学生们表示“主要是他们有能力维持刻意练习的必要精力，这缩短了他们的练习时间。”这就是为什么要花费十年时间才能达到格拉德威尔的 10,000 小时标准：如果你能维持这个强度，每天练习 4 个小时、每周练习 20 小时（假定周末休息），或者每年工作 1000 小时（假设为两周假期）。
休息决定卓越
埃里克松和他的同事们还观察到另外一件事，除了进行更多的练习外，柏林音乐学院的优秀学生与普通学生之间的区别还有一处，不过这一点几乎完全被忽略了：他们的休息方式。
最杰出的演奏者实际上比普通人每天的睡眠时间多大约一个小时。而且他们不熬夜。他们睡得多主要是因为他们通常在白天会小憩一会儿。当然每个人情况不同，但是最好的学生一般都遵循早上进行最艰苦和最长时间的练习的模式，下午打个盹，然后在下午或者晚上进行第二次练习。
研究人员还要求学生们估计一周中他们花在练习、学习等活动上的时间，然后让他们把自己一周的日程记录下来。当他们比较采访和记录的结果时，他们注意到数据中有一处奇特的异常。
普通的小提琴手倾向于低估他们在休闲活动中所花费的时间：他们认为自己每周用大约 15 个小时在这上面，实际上他们花费了近两倍的时间。相比之下，优秀的小提琴手可以“相当准确地估计他们分配给休闲活动的时间”——大约 25 个小时。 最优秀的演奏家能够投入更多的精力来管理自己的时间，思考利用时间的方法，并评估自己已经做过的事情。
换句话说，顶尖的学生正在运用一项刻意练习的习惯——正念（mindfulness）。这是一种能觉察自己表现的能力，让本人能够意识到他们的时间是有价值的，需要慎重地利用——这也包括休息时间。他们了解刻意休息的巨大价值。一些最具创造力的时刻在我们休息的时候产生，这一过程能让大脑无意识地持续运作，并且可以让人从中学习如何更好地休息。在音乐学院，刻意休息是刻意练习的伙伴，这对于其他专业的工作室、实验室以及出版社同样适用。正如在达尔文和庞加莱身上的发现，练习和休息都是必要的，二者不可分割。
对于关注这项柏林音乐学院研究的人们来说，这一部分优秀学生的经历：睡眠模式、对闲暇时间的重视、以及刻意休息的培养，作为一种对刻意练习的必要补充——并没有被提及。在《异类》中，马尔科姆·格拉德威尔强调了杰出音乐演奏家的练习时间，却没有告诉我们这些学生的平均睡眠或者小憩时间比那些表现普通的同学要多一小时。
这并不是说格拉德威尔误解了埃里克松的研究；他只是忽略了那部分。而且他有很多持相同观点的同僚和朋友，每个人都略过了对于睡眠和休闲的讨论，仅仅去关注 10,000 小时。
这说明了科学家、学者和我们几乎所有人都存在的一个盲点：我们更重视专注的工作，认为创造力来自生活窍门和与众不同的习惯，或是被阿得拉（Adderall，一种治疗注意力缺失/多动症的药）或LSD（Lysergsäure-diäthylami，一种强烈的半人工致幻剂）所激发。那些研究世界级成就获得者的人只关注那些成功者在健身房、跑道或琴房里所做的事情。每个人都关注最明显，可衡量的训练或工作形式，并试图使这些训练或工作更有成效。他们不会去想是否有其他的方法来提升表现、改善生活。
这就是我们为何愿意相信取得世界级成就是经过了 10,000 个小时的练习的。但这是错误的。成功需要的是 10,000 个小时的刻意练习，12,500 个小时的有效休息以及 30,000 个小时的睡眠。
When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.
Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.
How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations?
I think we can. If some of history’s greatest figures didn’t put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate.
Let’s start by looking at the lives of two figures. They were both very accomplished in their fields. Conveniently, they were next-door neighbors and friends who lived in the village of Downe, southeast of London. And, in different ways, their lives offer an entrée into the question of how labor, rest, and creativity connect.
First, imagine a silent, cloaked figure walking home on a dirt path winding through the countryside. On some mornings he walks with his head down, apparently lost in thought. On others he walks slowly and stops to listen to the woods around him, a habit “which he practiced in the tropical forests of Brazil” during his service as a naturalist in the Royal Navy, collecting animals, studying the geography and geology of South America, and laying the foundations for a career that would reach its peak with the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Now, Charles Darwin is older and has turned from collecting to theorizing. Darwin’s ability to move silently reflects his own concentration and need for quiet. Indeed, his son Francis said, Darwin could move so stealthily he once came upon “a vixen playing with her cubs at only a few feet distance” and often greeted foxes coming home from their nocturnal hunts.
Had those same foxes crossed paths with Darwin’s next-door neighbor, the baronet John Lubbock, they would have run for their lives. Lubbock liked to start the day with a ride through the country with his hunting dogs. If Darwin was a bit like Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a respectable gentleman of moderate means who was polite and conscientious but preferred the company of family and books, Lubbock was more like Mr. Bingley, extroverted and enthusiastic, and wealthy enough to move easily in society and life. As he aged, Darwin was plagued by various ailments; even in his 60s, Lubbock still had “the lounging grace of manner which is peculiar to the Sixth-Form Eton boy,” according to one visitor. But the neighbors shared a love of science, even though their working lives were as different as their personalities.
Even in today’s 24/7, always-on world, we can blend work and rest together in ways that make us smarter, more creative, and happier.
After his morning walk and breakfast, Darwin was in his study by 8 and worked a steady hour and a half. At 9:30 he would read the morning mail and write letters. At 10:30, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary, greenhouse, or one of several other buildings where he conducted his experiments. By noon, he would declare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and set out on a long walk on the Sandwalk, a path he had laid out not long after buying Down House. (Part of the Sandwalk ran through land leased to Darwin by the Lubbock family.) When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters. At 3 he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk around the Sandwalk, then return to his study until 5:30, when he would join his wife, Emma, and their family for dinner. On this schedule he wrote 19 books, including technical volumes on climbing plants, barnacles, and other subjects; the controversial Descent of Man; and The Origin of Species, probably the single most famous book in the history of science, and a book that still affects the way we think about nature and ourselves.
Anyone who reviews his schedule cannot help but notice the creator’s paradox. Darwin’s life revolved around science. Since his undergraduate days, Darwin had devoted himself to scientific collecting, exploration, and eventually theorizing. He and Emma moved to the country from London to have more space to raise a family and to have more space—in more than one sense of the word—for science. Down House gave him space for laboratories and greenhouses, and the countryside gave him the peace and quiet necessary to work. But at the same time, his days don’t seem very busy to us. The times we would classify as “work” consist of three 90-minute periods. If he had been a professor in a university today, he would have been denied tenure. If he’d been working in a company, he would have been fired within a week.
It’s not that Darwin was careless about his time or lacked ambition. Darwin was intensely time-conscious and, despite being a gentleman of means, felt that he had none to waste. While sailing around the world on the HMS Beagle, he wrote to his sister Susan Elizabeth that “a man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” When he was deciding whether or not to marry, one of his concerns was that “loss of time—cannot read in the evenings,” and in his journals he kept an account of the time he lost to chronic illness. His “pure love” of science was “much aided by the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists,” he confessed in his autobiography. He was passionate and driven, so much so that he was given to anxiety attacks over his ideas and their implications.
Darwin is not the only famous scientist who combined a lifelong dedication to science with apparently short working hours. We can see similar patterns in many others’ careers, and it’s worth starting with the lives of scientists for several reasons. Science is a competitive, all-consuming enterprise. Scientists’ accomplishments—the number of articles and books they write, the awards they win, the rate at which their works are cited—are well-documented and easy to measure and compare. As a result, their legacies are often easier to determine than those of business leaders or famous figures. At the same time, scientific disciplines are quite different from each other, which gives us a useful variety in working habits and personalities. Additionally, most scientists have not been subjected to the kind of intense myth making that surrounds, and alternately magnifies and obscures, business leaders and politicians.
Finally, a number of scientists were themselves interested in the ways work and rest affect thinking and contribute to inspiration. One example is Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician whose public eminence and accomplishments placed him on a level similar to Darwin. Poincaré’s 30 books and 500 papers spanned number theory, topology, astronomy and celestial mechanics, theoretical and applied physics, and philosophy; the American mathematician Eric Temple Bell described him as “the last universalist.” He was involved in efforts to standardize time zones, supervised railway development in northern France (he was educated as a mining engineer), served as inspector general of the Corps des Mines, and was a professor at the Sorbonne.
Poincaré wasn’t just famous among his fellow scientists: In 1895 he was, along with the novelist Émile Zola, sculptors Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou, and composer Camille Saint-Saëns, the subject of a study by French psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse on the psychology of genius. Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between 5 and 7 in the afternoon. The 19th century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.
The 60-plus-hour-a-week researchers were the least productive of all.
We see the same pattern among other noted mathematicians. G.H. Hardy, one of Britain’s leading mathematicians in the first half of the 20th century, would start his day with a leisurely breakfast and close reading of the cricket scores, then from 9 to 1 would be immersed in mathematics. After lunch he would be out again, walking and playing tennis. “Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician,” he told his friend and fellow Oxford professor C.P. Snow. Hardy’s longtime collaborator John Edensor Littlewood believed that the “close concentration” required to do serious work meant that a mathematician could work “four hours a day or at most five, with breaks about every hour (for walks perhaps).” Littlewood was famous for always taking Sundays off, claiming that it guaranteed he would have new ideas when he returned to work on Monday.
A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t. The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between 10 to 20 hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working 35 hours a week were half as productive as their 20-hours-a-week colleagues.
From there, the curve rose again, but more modestly. Researchers who buckled down and spent 50 hours per week in the lab were able to pull themselves out of the 35-hour valley: They became as productive as colleagues who spent five hours a week in the lab. Van Zelst and Kerr speculated that this 50-hour bump was concentrated in “physical research which requires continuous use of bulky equipment,” and that most of those 10-hour days were spent tending machines and occasionally taking measurements.
After that, it was all downhill: The 60-plus-hour-a-week researchers were the least productive of all.
Van Zelst and Kerr also asked faculty how many “hours per typical work day do you devote to homework which contributes to the efficient performance of your job” and graphed those results against productivity as well. This time, they didn’t see an M but rather a single curve peaking around three to three and a half hours a day. Unfortunately, they don’t say anything about total hours spent working at the office and home; they only allude to “the probability that” the most productive researchers “do much of their creative work at home or elsewhere,” rather than on campus. If you assume that the most productive office and home workers in this study are the same, this cohort is working between 25 and 38 hours a week. In a six-day week, that works out to an average of four to six hours a day.
You see a similar convergence of four- to five-hour-long working days in the lives of writers. The German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann had settled into a daily work schedule by 1910, when he was 35 and had published the acclaimed novel Buddenbrooks. Mann started the day at 9, shutting himself in his office with strict instructions not to be disturbed and working first on novels. After lunch, the “afternoons are for reading, for my much too mountainous correspondence and for walks,” he said. After an hour-long nap and afternoon tea, he would spend another hour or two working on easy short pieces and editing.
Anthony Trollope, the great 19th-century English novelist, likewise kept a strict writing schedule. In an account of his life at Waltham House, where he lived from 1859 to 1871, he described his mature working style. At 5 o’clock in the morning, a servant arrived with coffee. He first read over the previous day’s work, then at 5:30 set his watch on his desk and started writing. He wrote 1,000 words an hour, an average of 40 finished pages a week, until it was time to leave for his day job at the post office at 8 o’clock. Working this way, he published 47 novels before his death in 1882 at the age of 67, though he gave little indication that he regarded this as remarkable, perhaps because his mother, who started writing in her 50s to support her family, published more than 100 books. He wrote, “All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary laborers—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”
Trollope’s steady working hours were matched by his contemporary Charles Dickens. After an early life burning the midnight oil, Dickens settled into a schedule as “methodical or orderly” as a “city clerk,” his son Charley said. Dickens shut himself in his study from 9 until 2, with a break for lunch. Most of his novels were serialized in magazines, and Dickens was rarely more than a chapter or two ahead of the illustrators and printer. Nonetheless, after five hours, Dickens was done for the day.
While this kind of discipline might seem to be an expression of Victorian strictness, many prolific 20th-century authors worked this way, too. Like Trollope, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz worked as a civil servant, and he mainly wrote fiction in the late afternoon, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Canadian writer Alice Munro, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Australian novelist Peter Carey said, “I think three hours is fine” for a day’s work; such a schedule allowed him to write 13 novels, including two Booker Prize winners. W. Somerset Maugham worked “only four hours” a day, until 1 p.m.—“but never less,” he added. Gabriel García Márquez wrote each day for five hours. Ernest Hemingway would start work about 6 in the morning and finish before noon. Unless deadlines were looming, Saul Bellow would retreat to his study after breakfast, write until lunch, and then review his day’s work. Irish novelist Edna O’Brien would work in the morning, “stop around one or two and spend the rest of the afternoon attending to mundane things.” Stephen King describes four to six hours of reading and writing as a “strenuous” day.
Karl Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer saw a similar pattern in a study of violin students at a conservatory in Berlin in the 1980s. Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer were interested in what sets outstanding students apart from merely good ones. After interviewing music students and their teachers and having students keep track of their time, they found that several things separated the best students from the rest.
First, the great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately. During deliberate practice, Ericsson explained, you’re “engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve one’s performance.” You’re not just doing reps, lobbing balls, or playing scales. Deliberate practice is focused, structured, and offers clear goals and feedback; it requires paying attention to what you’re doing and observing how you can improve. Students can engage in deliberate practice when they have a clear route to greatness, defined by a shared understanding of what separates brilliant work from good work, or winners from losers. Endeavors where one can have the fastest time, the highest score, or the most elegant solution are ones that allow for deliberate practice.
Second, you need a reason to keep at it, day after day. Deliberate practice isn’t a lot of fun, and it’s not immediately profitable. It means being in the pool before sunrise, working on your swing or stride when you could be hanging out with friends, practicing fingering or breathing in a windowless room, spending hours perfecting details that only a few other people will ever notice. There’s little that’s inherently or immediately pleasurable in deliberate practice, so you need a strong sense that these long hours will pay off, and that you’re not just improving your career prospects but also crafting a professional and personal identity. You don’t just do it for the fat stacks. You do it because it reinforces your sense of who you are and who you will become.
The idea of deliberate practice and Ericsson et al.’s measurements of the total amount of time world-class performers spend practicing have received a lot of attention. The study is a foundation for Malcolm Gladwell’s argument (laid out most fully in his book Outliers) that 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to become world-class in anything, and that everyone from chess legend Bobby Fischer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates to the Beatles put in their 10,000 hours before anyone heard of them. For coaches, music teachers, and ambitious parents, the number promises a golden road to the NFL or Juilliard or MIT: Just start them young, keep them busy, and don’t let them give up. In a culture that treats stress and overwork as virtues rather than vices, 10,000 hours is an impressively big number.
But there was something else that Ericsson and his colleagues noted in their study, something that almost everyone has subsequently overlooked. “Deliberate practice,” they observed, “is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day.” Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out. To succeed, students must “avoid exhaustion” and “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”
The best students generally followed a pattern of practicing hardest and longest in the morning, taking a nap in the afternoon, and then having a second practice.
How do students marked for greatness make the most of limited practice time? The rhythm of their practice follows a distinctive pattern. They put in more hours per week in the practice room or playing field, but they don’t do it by making each practice longer. Instead, they have more frequent, shorter sessions, each lasting about 80 to 90 minutes, with half-hour breaks in between.
Add these several practices up, and what do you get? About four hours a day. About the same amount of time Darwin spent every day doing his hardest work, Hardy and Littlewood spent doing math, Dickens and King spent writing. Even ambitious young students in one of the world’s best schools, preparing for a notoriously competitive field, could handle only four hours of really focused, serious effort per day.
This upper limit, Ericsson concluded, is defined “not by available time, but by available [mental and physical] resources for effortful practice.” The students weren’t just practicing four hours and calling it a day; lectures, rehearsals, homework, and other things kept them busy the rest of the day. In interviews, the students said “it was primarily their ability to sustain the concentration necessary for deliberate practice that limited their hours of practice.” This is why it takes a decade to get Gladwell’s 10,000 hours: if you can only sustain that level of concentrated practice for four hours a day, that works out to 20 hours a week (assuming weekends off), or 1,000 hours a year (assuming a two-week vacation).
It’s not just the lives of musicians that illustrate the importance of deliberate practice. Ray Bradbury began writing seriously in 1932 and wrote 1,000 words a day. “For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week,” he recalled, but they never quite came together. Finally, in 1942, he wrote “The Lake.” Years later he still remembered the moment.
“Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time. I wrote the story sitting outside, with my typewriter, on the lawn. At the end of an hour the story was finished, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up, and I was in tears. I knew I had written the first really good story of my life.”
Ericsson and his colleagues observed another thing, in addition to practicing more, that separated the great students at the Berlin Conservatory from the good, something that has almost been completely ignored since: how they rested.
The top performers actually slept about an hour a day more than the average performers. They didn’t sleep late. They got more sleep because they napped during the day. Of course there was lots of variability, but the best students generally followed a pattern of practicing hardest and longest in the morning, taking a nap in the afternoon, and then having a second practice in the late afternoon or evening.
The researchers also asked students to estimate the amount of time they spent practicing, studying, and so on, and then had them keep a diary for a week. When they compared results from interviews and diaries, they noticed a curious anomaly in the data.
The merely good violinists tended to underestimate the amount of time they spent in leisure activities: they guessed they spent about 15 hours a week, when in reality they spent almost twice that. The best violinists, in contrast, could “estimate quite accurately the time they allocated to leisure,” about 25 hours. The best performers devoted more energy to organizing their time, thinking about how they would spend their time, and assessing what they did.
In other words, the top students were applying some of the habits of deliberate practice—mindfulness, an ability to observe their own performance, a sense that their time was valuable and needed to be spent wisely—to their downtime. They were discovering the immense value of deliberate rest. They figured out early that rest is important, that some of our most creative work happens when we take the kinds of breaks that allow our unconscious minds to keep plugging away, and that we can learn how to rest better. In the conservatory, deliberate rest is the partner of deliberate practice. It is in the studio and laboratory and publishing house, too. As Dickens and Poincaré and Darwin discovered, each is necessary. Each is half of a creative life. Together they form a whole.
For all the attention the Berlin conservatory study has received, this part of the top students’ experiences—their sleep patterns, their attention to leisure, their cultivation of deliberate rest as a necessary complement of demanding, deliberate practice—goes unmentioned. InOutliers, Malcolm Gladwell focuses on the number of hours exceptional performers practice and says nothing about the fact that those students also slept an hour more, on average, than their less-accomplished peers, or that they took naps and long breaks.
This is not to say that Gladwell misread Ericsson’s study; he just glossed over that part. And he has lots of company. Everybody speed-reads through the discussion of sleep and leisure and argues about the 10,000 hours.
This illustrates a blind spot that scientists, scholars, and almost all of us share: a tendency to focus on focused work, to assume that the road to greater creativity is paved by life hacks, propped up by eccentric habits, or smoothed by Adderall or LSD. Those who research world-class performance focus only on what students do in the gym or track or practice room. Everybody focuses on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make those more effective and more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance, and improve your life.
This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.
作者简介：Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is the founder of the Restful Company and a visiting scholar at Stanford. His writing has appeared in such publications as Scientific American, the Atlantic, Slate, Wired, and American Scholar. He lives in Menlo Park, California.
转自：Nautilus
撰文 | ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG
图片 | HANNAH K. LEE
翻译 | 何伟雄
审校/编辑 | 魏潇
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