Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

by K. Anders Ericsson

One of the implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your job.

But one thing is clear: with few exceptions, neither doctors nor nurses gain expertise from experience alone.

This strategy acknowledges that because what is ultimately most important is what people are able to do, training should focus on doing rather than on knowing—and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area.

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. Thus, one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.

Dan’s later experience illustrates one final lesson about instruction: you may need to change teachers as you yourself change. For several years he improved with his original golf coach, but at some point he stopped getting better. He had absorbed everything this coach could teach him, and he was ready to find a coach at the next level. If you find yourself at a point where you are no longer improving quickly or at all, don’t be afraid to look for a new instructor. The most important thing is to keep moving forward.

the importance of engaging in purposeful practice instead of mindless repetition without any clear plan for getting better.

There was focus but no joy. This is a key to getting the maximum benefit out of any sort of practice, from private or group lessons to solitary practice and even to games or competitions: whatever you are doing, focus on it.

Learning to engage in this way—consciously developing and refining your skills—is one of the most powerful ways to improve the effectiveness of your practice.

In particular, she could be working on sharpening her mental representations of her stroke—figuring out exactly how her body feels during a “perfect” stroke. Once she had a clear idea of what that ideal stroke felt like, she could notice when she deviated from that ideal—perhaps when she was tired or when she was approaching a turn—and then work on ways to minimize those deviations and keep her strokes as close to ideal as possible.

Chambliss concluded that the key to excellence in swimming lay in maintaining close attention to every detail of performance, “each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.”

Even in those sports such as bodybuilding or long-distance running, where much of the practice consists of seemingly mindless, repetitive actions, paying attention performing those actions the right way will lead to greater improvement. Researchers who have studied long-distance runners have found that amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running, while elite long-distance runners remain attuned to their bodies so that they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race. In

Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.

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. Real life—our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies—seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities. Franklin did it with his exercises, each focused on a particular facet of writing. Much of what a good teacher or coach will do is to develop such exercises for you, designed specifically to help you improve the particular skill you are focused on at the moment. But without a teacher, you must come up with your own exercises.

This is purposeful practice. It does no good to do the same thing over and over again mindlessly; the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.

To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.

We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat—over and over again. Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.

some of which you will be better at than others. Thus, when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back. The question is, Which ones?

This, then, is what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have failed. First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else.

fact, if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute. People generally find it much easier to push themselves in some areas than in others.

Furthermore, once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about: If you don’t have innate musical talent, forget about ever being a good musician. If you don’t have enough willpower, forget about ever taking on something that will require a great deal of hard work. This sort of circular thinking—“The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing”—is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.

think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration. Maintaining the motivation that enables such a regimen has two parts: reasons to keep going and reasons to stop. When you quit something that you had initially wanted to do, it’s because the reasons to stop eventually came to outweigh the reasons to continue. Thus, to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.

One of the most effective is to set aside a fixed time to practice that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions. It can be difficult enough to push yourself to practice in the best of situations, but when you have other things you could be doing, there is a constant temptation to do something else and to justify it by telling yourself that it really needs to get done.

Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted.

For purposeful or deliberate practice to be effective, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and maintain your focus, but those are mentally draining activities. Expert performers do two things—both seemingly unrelated to motivation—that can help. The first is general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy. If you’re tired or sick, it’s that much harder to maintain

nap after their morning practice session. The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that—and

The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it’s not as hard to keep going.

As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.

you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.

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.

This technique can be used in nearly any area: put together a group of people all interested in the same thing—or join an existing group—and use the group’s camaraderie and shared goals as extra motivation in reaching your own goals. This is the idea behind many social organizations, from book clubs to chess clubs to community theaters, and joining—or, if necessary, forming—such a group can be a tremendous way for adults to maintain motivation.

improvement. Break your long journey into a manageable series of goals and focus on them one at a time—perhaps even giving yourself a small reward each time you reach a goal. Piano

The only two things that all these people have in common are that they all have had a dream and that they’ve all realized, after learning about deliberate practice, that there is a path to achieving that dream. And this, more than anything else, is the lesson that people should take away from all these stories and all this research: There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.

once they become one of the best at what they do, they still constantly strive to improve their practice techniques and to get better. And it is here at the frontier that we find the pathbreakers, those experts who go beyond what anyone else has ever done and show us all what it is possible to achieve.

What is important is that Susan became interested in chess as a child—and that she became interested in the only way that a child of that age (she was three at the time) could become interested: she saw the chess pieces as fun. As toys. As something to play with. Young children are very curious and playful. Like puppies or kittens, they interact with the world mostly through play. This desire to play serves as a child’s initial motivation to try out one thing or another, to see what is interesting and what is not, and to engage in various activities that will help them build their skills. At

In the first stage, children are introduced in a playful way to what will eventually become their field of interest.

At this stage, the parents of children who are to become experts play a crucial role in the child’s development. For one thing, the parents give their children a great deal of time, attention, and encouragement. For another, the parents tend to be very achievement-oriented and teach their children such values as self-discipline, hard work, responsibility, and spending one’s time constructively.

Once a child can consistently hit a ball with a bat, say, or play a simple tune on the piano or count the number of eggs in a carton, that achievement becomes a point of pride and serves as motivation for further achievements in that area.

Simply by interacting strongly with their children, parents motivate their children to develop similar interests.

Once a future expert performer becomes interested and shows some promise in an area, the typical next step is to take lessons from a coach or teacher.

Parents help their children establish routines—say, practicing the piano for an hour each day—and they give them support and encouragement and praise them for improvements.

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.

Bloom found that after two to five years at this stage, the future experts began to identify themselves more in terms of the skill they were developing and less in terms of other areas of interest, such as school or social life. They saw themselves as “pianists” or “swimmers” by the age of eleven or twelve or as “mathematicians” before they turned sixteen or seventeen. They were becoming serious about what they did.

Musicians enjoy performing music. Mathematicians enjoy doing mathematics. Soccer players enjoy playing soccer. Of course, it is possible that this is completely due to a self-selection process—that the only people who would spend years practicing something are those who naturally love to do it—but it is also possible that the practice itself may lead to physiological adaptations that produce more enjoyment and more motivation to do that particular activity. That is nothing but speculation at this point, but it is reasonable speculation.

The corpus callosum is significantly larger in adult musicians than in adult nonmusicians, but a closer look finds that it is really only larger in musicians who started practicing before they were seven. Since the initial publication of these findings in the 1990s, research has uncovered a number of other regions of the brain that are larger in musicians than in nonmusicians, but only if the musicians started training before a certain age. Many of those regions are related to muscle control,

At this point, there are more questions than there are answers about the differences in learning among brains of various ages, but for our purposes there are two lessons to carry away: First, while the adult brain may not be as adaptable in certain ways as the brain of the child or adolescent, it is still more than capable of learning and changing. And second, since the adaptability of the adult brain is different from the adaptability of the young brain, learning as an adult is likely to take place through somewhat different mechanisms. But if we adults try hard enough, our brains will find a way.

The most important lesson they gleaned from their teachers is the ability to improve on their own. As

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.

Progress is made by those who are working on the frontiers of what is known and what is possible to do, not by those who haven’t put in the effort needed to reach that frontier. In short, in most cases—and this is especially true in any well-developed area—we must rely on the experts to move us forward. Fortunately for all of us, that’s what they do

investigate the stories of such prodigies, and I can report with confidence that I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice.

Now when they see a certain arrangement of pieces, they don’t have to carefully figure out which piece is attacking or could attack every other piece; instead they recognize a pattern and know almost reflexively what the most powerful moves and countermoves would likely be. No longer do they have to apply their short-term memory and analytical skills to imagine what would happen if they made this move and their opponent made that move and so on, trying to recall the position of every piece on the board. Instead, they have a good general idea of what is going on in a given position—in terms of lines of force or whatever imaging technique they use—and they use their logical abilities to work with their mental representations, rather than the individual pieces on the board.