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They found that how interested the students were in the passage was thirty times more important than how “readable” the passage was.

Maybe the right question to ask is: Why do some people decide to practice a lot in the first place? Could it be because their first efforts proved mostly successful?   (That’s a useful reminder to avoid romanticizing the benefits of failure.) Or, again, do they keep at it because they get a kick out of what they’re doing? If that’s true, then practice, at least to some extent, may be just a marker for motivation. Of course, natural ability probably plays a role in fostering both interest and success, and those two variables also affect each other.

By contrast, when the hours were logged, and the estimates presumably more reliable, the impact of practice was much diminished. How much? It accounted for a scant 5 percent of the variance in performance. The better the study, in other words, the less of a difference practice made.[1]