Peak Anders Ericsson Quotes

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.

Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it.

The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in,

The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach.

you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving. This

A world in which deliberate practice is a normal part of life would be one in which people had more volition and satisfaction.

the key to improved mental performance of almost any sort is the development of mental structures that make it possible to avoid the limitations of short-term memory and deal effectively with large amounts of information at once.

Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.

Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before.

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt.

Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.

The key thing is to take that general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without

meaning aids memory.

Consider this: Most people live lives that are not particularly physically challenging. They sit at a desk, or if they move around, it’s not a lot. They aren’t running and jumping, they aren’t lifting heavy objects or throwing things long distances, and they aren’t performing maneuvers that require tremendous balance and coordination. Thus they settle into a low level of physical capabilities—enough for day-to-day activities and maybe even hiking or biking or playing golf or tennis on the weekends, but far from the level of physical capabilities that a highly trained athlete possesses.

What is the exact nature of the ability? and, What sorts of training made it possible? In thirty years of looking, I have never found an ability that could not be explained by answering these two questions.

Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.

This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.

If we can show students that they have the power to develop a skill of their choice and that, while it is not easy, it has many rewards that will make it worthwhile, we make it much more likely that they will use deliberate practice to develop various skills over their lifetimes.

The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do — that takes you out of your comfort zone — and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation. This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who

Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We

abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. So

You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

In short, perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift

Indeed, one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing.

Call it “the New Year’s resolution effect”— it’s why gyms that were crowded in January are only half full in July and why so many slightly used guitars are available on Craigslist. So

if there is no agreement on what good performance is and no way to tell what changes would improve performance, then it is very difficult—often impossible—to develop effective training methods.

Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.

The clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon only a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training. The study has completely rewritten our understanding of perfect pitch.

In a field you’re already familiar with—like your own job—think carefully about what characterizes good performance and try to come up with ways to measure that, even if there must be a certain amount of subjectivity in your measurement. Then look for those people who score highest in the areas you believe are key to superior performance. Remember that the ideal is to find objective, reproducible measures that consistently distinguish the best from the rest, and if that ideal is not possible, approximate it as well as you can. Once

If you teach a student facts, concepts, and rules, those things go into long-term memory as individual pieces, and if a student then wishes to do something with them—use them to solve a problem, reason with them to answer a question, or organize and analyze them to come up with a theme or a hypothesis—the limitations of attention and short-term memory kick in. The student must keep all of these different, unconnected pieces in mind while working with them toward a solution. However, if this information is assimilated as part of building mental representations aimed at doing something, the individual pieces become part of an interconnected pattern that provides context and meaning to the information, making it easier to work with. As we saw in chapter 3, you don’t build mental representations by thinking about something; you build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over. When you’re done, not only have you developed an effective mental representation for the skill you were developing, but you have also absorbed a great deal of information connected with that skill.

Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential. And this is true whether our goal is to become a concert pianist or just play the piano well enough to amuse ourselves, to join the PGA golf tour or just bring our handicaps down a few strokes.

The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation. This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who wishes to improve—but it is still just a start.

The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training. Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.

As researchers Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool underscore in their book Peak, mastery requires deliberate practice, and lots of it. But if you love it, you do it. Picasso experimented with other forms of art but kept painting as his focus. Michael Jordan did a stint at baseball, but basketball was where he really thrived. Play hardest in your area of strength and you’ll achieve depth, meaning, and satisfaction in your life.

A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player’s mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver’s mental representations will be useless for basketball. This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner

If you talk to these extraordinary people, you find that they all understand this at one level or another. They may be unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive adaptability, but they seldom buy into the idea that they have reached the peak of their fields because they were the lucky winners of some genetic lottery. They know what is required to develop the extraordinary skills that they possess because they have experienced it firsthand. One of my favorite testimonies on this topic came from Ray Allen, a ten-time All-Star in the National Basketball Association and the greatest three-point shooter in the history of that league. Some years back, ESPN columnist Jackie MacMullan wrote an article about Allen as he was approaching his record for most three-point shots made. In talking with Allen for that story, MacMullan mentioned that another basketball commentator had said that Allen was born with a shooting touch—in other words, an innate gift for three-pointers. Allen did not agree. “I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life,” he told MacMullan. “When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.” And, indeed, as MacMullan noted, if you talk to Allen’s high school basketball coach you will find that Allen’s jump shot was not noticeably better than his teammates’ jump shots back then; in fact, it was poor. But Allen took control, and over time, with hard work and dedication, he transformed his jump shot into one so graceful and natural that people assumed he was born with it. He took advantage of his gift—his real gift.   ABOUT

We can shape our own potential. Art

With practice, you began to recognize entire words by themselves. C-A-T became simply cat, thanks to a mental representation that encoded the pattern of the letters in that word and associated that pattern with both the sound of the word and the idea of a small, furry animal that meows and often doesn’t get along well with dogs. Along

The first step toward enhancing performance in an organization is realizing that improvement is possible only if participants abandon business-as-usual practices. Doing so requires recognizing and rejecting three prevailing myths.

one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing. The

It is one of the most enduring and deep-seated of all beliefs about human nature—that natural talent plays a major role in determining ability. This belief holds that some people are born with natural endowments that make it easier for them to become outstanding athletes or musicians or chess players or writers or mathematicians or whatever. While they may still need a certain amount of practice to develop their skills, they need far less than others who are not as talented, and they can ultimately reach much greater heights. My studies of experts point to quite a different explanation of why some people ultimately develop greater abilities in an area than others, with deliberate practice playing the starring role. So let’s separate myth from reality by exploring the intertwined roles of talent and training in the development of extraordinary abilities. As we’ll see, innate characteristics play a much smaller—and much different—role than many people generally assume.

Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.

Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people

perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.

Blindfold chess offers one of the most dramatic examples of what is possible to accomplish with purposeful practice. And learning a bit about blindfold chess can give us a clear idea of the sorts of neurological changes that arise from such practice.

The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward, to do things that others have not. And once a pathfinder shows how something can be done, others can learn the technique and follow. Even if the pathfinder doesn’t share the particular technique, as is the case with Richards, simply knowing that something is possible drives others to figure it out.

During the first part of this stage, the encouragement and support of parents and teachers was crucial to the child’s progress, but eventually the students began to experience some of the rewards of their hard work and became increasingly self-motivated. A piano student performed for others and appreciated the applause. A swimmer basked in the approval and respect of peers. These students became more vested in the process, and their self-image started to include those abilities that were setting them apart from their peers. In the case of team sports, like swimming, the students often relished being part of a group of like-minded people. But whatever the reasons, the motivation started to shift from external to internal in origin.

In many of the cases that have been studied, children with talented siblings also had one or both parents encouraging them as well. The Polgár sisters we know about, and Mozart too: his father was not far behind László Polgár in his focus on developing a prodigy. Similarly, Serena and Venus Williams’s father, Richard Williams, started them on tennis with the intention of turning them into tennis professionals. In such cases it can be hard to disentangle the influence of the siblings from that of the parents. But it is probably no coincidence in these cases that it is generally the younger siblings who have reached greater heights. Part of it may be that the parents learn from their experiences with the older siblings and do a better job with the younger ones, but it is also likely that the presence of an older sibling fully engaged in an activity provides a number of advantages for the younger sibling. By watching an older sibling engaging in an activity, a younger child may become interested in—and get started on—that activity much sooner than he or she might otherwise. The older sibling can teach the younger one, and it can seem more like fun than lessons provided by the parent. And competition between siblings will likely be more helpful to the younger sibling than the older one because the older one will naturally have greater skills, at least for a number of years. Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn’t introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general. They encouraged their children’s curiosity, and reading was a major pastime, with the parents reading to the children early on, and the children reading books themselves later. They also encouraged their children to build models or science projects—activities that could be considered educational—as part of their play. But

Grit by Angela Duckworth; Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool; The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin; and how’s this for a wishful title: The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk) emphasize the role of nurture over that of genetics and downplay the role of innate ability.

This is true even for something as mundane as insurance sales. A recent study examined knowledge about multiline insurance (life, home, auto, and commercial) in 150 agents. Not surprisingly, the highly successful agents—as determined by their sales volumes—knew more about the various insurance products than the less successful agents.

One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritize their practice.

keep this one thing at the front of your mind: subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases.

Which brings us back to Benjamin Franklin again. As a young man he was interested in all sorts of intellectual pursuits—philosophy, science, invention, writing, the arts, and so on—and he wished to encourage his own development in those areas. So at twenty-one he recruited eleven of the most intellectually interesting people in Philadelphia to form a mutual improvement club, which he named “the Junto.” The club’s members, who met each Friday night, would encourage each other’s various intellectual pursuits. Every member was expected to bring at least one interesting topic of conversation—on morals, politics, or science—to each meeting. The topics, which were generally phrased as questions, were to be discussed by the group “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.

But since we know that practice is the single most important factor in determining a person’s ultimate achievement in a given domain, it makes sense that if genes do play a role, their role would play out through shaping how likely a person is to engage in deliberate practice or how effective that practice is likely to be.

while innate characteristics may influence performance among those who are just learning a new skill or ability, the degree and the effectiveness of training plays a more significant role in determining who excels among those who have worked to develop a skill.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Robert R. Hoffman, and Paul J. Feltovich

Suppose there was some group of people who selected beginning chess players for some chess program according to what seemed to be their “innate talent.” They would teach a group of youngsters how to play and then, after three or six months had passed, look to see who were the best. We know what would happen. On average, the kids with higher IQs would have an easier time in the beginning learning the moves and would be selected for further training and grooming; the others would not be offered a spot in the program. The end result would be a collection of chess players with much higher than average IQs. But we know that in the real world there are many grandmasters who don’t score particularly well on IQ tests—so we would have missed the contributions of all of those people who could become great chess players.

RECOMMENDED READING Brooks, David. The Road to Character. New York: Random House, 2015. Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Damon, William. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York: Free Press, 2009. Deci, Edward L. with Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Emmons, Robert A. Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Ericsson, Anders and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Heckman, James J., John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (eds.). The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Kaufman, Scott Barry and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: Perigee, 2015. Lewis, Sarah. The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Matthews, Michael D. Head Strong: How Psychology is Revolutionizing War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. Oettingen, Gabriele. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Renninger, K. Ann and Suzanne E. Hidi. The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015. Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Tetlock, Philip E. and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015. Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately. And this requires us to take a step back and view performance from a fundamentally different vantage point. Consider an irony in the way we traditionally think about success. If you look at science or, indeed, popular literature, the focus is on individuals. How can we improve the knowledge or perceptiveness of ourselves or our colleagues? Fine books such as Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Sources of Power by Gary Klein and Mindset by Carol Dweck have become bestsellers. All examine, in their different ways, how we can improve individual abilities through time.

The classic conception of human nature is captured in the name we gave ourselves as a species, Homo sapiens….We call ourselves “knowing man” because we see ourselves as distinguished from our ancestors by our vast amount of knowledge. But perhaps a better way to see ourselves would be as Homo exercens, or “practicing man,” the species that takes control of its life through practice and makes of itself what it will.

Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.

as the number of bytes in your random-access memory (RAM)

In 1908 Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon in what a spectator at the time described as “the greatest race of the century.” Hayes’s winning time, which set a world record for the marathon, was 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds. Today, barely more than a century later, the world record for a marathon is 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds—nearly 30 percent faster than Hayes’s record time—and if you’re an eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male, you aren’t even allowed to enter the Boston Marathon unless you’ve run another marathon in less than 3 hours, 5 minutes. In short, Hayes’s world-record time in 1908 would qualify him for today’s Boston Marathon (which has about thirty thousand runners) but with not a lot to spare. That same 1908 Summer Olympics saw a near disaster

One of the best, if sometimes bizarre, places to see the results of this sort of practice is in Guinness World Records. Flip through the pages of the book or visit the online version, and you will find such record holders as the American teacher Barbara Blackburn, who can type up to 212 words per minute; Marko Baloh of Slovenia, who once rode 562 miles on a bicycle in twenty-four hours; and Vikas Sharma of India, who in just one minute was able to calculate the roots of twelve large numbers, each with between twenty and fifty-one digits, with the roots ranging from the seventeenth to the fiftieth root. That last may be the most impressive of all of them because Sharma was able to perform twelve exceedingly difficult mental calculations in just sixty seconds—faster than many people could punch the numbers into a calculator and read off the answers.

The most effective interventions, Davis found, were those that had some interactive component—role-play, discussion groups, case solving, hands-on training, and the like. Such activities actually did improve both the doctors’ performance and their patients’ outcomes, although the overall improvement was small. By contrast, the least effective activities were “didactic” interventions—that is, those educational activities that essentially consisted of doctors listening to a lecture—which, sadly enough, are by far the most common types of activities in continuing medical education. Davis concluded that this sort of passive listening to lectures had no significant effect at all on either doctors’ performance or on how well their patients fared.

Similarly—and more in line with the sorts of factors that may play a role in acquiring skills with practice—nine-month-old infants who paid more attention to a parent as that parent was reading a book and pointing to the pictures in the book grew up to have a much better vocabulary at five years of age than infants who paid less attention.

If all you want to do is to safely drive your car from point A to point B or to play the piano well enough to plink out “Für Elise,” then this approach to learning is all you need.

Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call “naive practice,” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.

TEACHER: How many times did you play it? STUDENT: Ten or twenty. TEACHER: How many times did you play it correctly? STUDENT: Umm, I dunno . . . Once or twice . . . TEACHER: Hmm . . . How did you practice it? STUDENT: I dunno. I just played it. This is naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math problems and tried to solve them.

Most importantly, it is a gift that every one of us is born with and can, with the right approach, take advantage of.

most traits that play a role in expert performance can be modified by the right sort of practice,

The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to

They had been pushed out of their comfort zone, and the muscles responded by getting strong enough to establish a new comfort zone. Homeostasis had been reestablished.

Steve’s performance illustrates a key insight from the study of effective practice: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers. None of them ever quit on me. So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.

But since the 1990s brain researchers have come to realize that the brain—even the adult brain—is far more adaptable than anyone ever imagined, and this gives us a tremendous amount of control over what our brains are able to do. In particular, the brain responds to the right sorts of triggers by rewiring itself in various ways. New connections are made between neurons, while existing connections can be strengthened or weakened, and in some parts of the brain it is even possible for new neurons to grow.

In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.

Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training