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

by K. Anders Ericsson

Of course, the abilities measured by IQ tests do seem to play a role early on, and it seems that children with higher IQs will play chess more capably in the beginning. But what Bilalić and his colleagues found was that among the children who played in chess tournaments—that is, the chess players who were devoted enough to the game to take it to a level beyond playing in their school chess club—there was a tendency for the ones with lower IQs to have engaged in more practice.

In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.

In 2007, quarterback JaMarcus Russell of Louisiana State University was chosen first overall in the NFL draft; he was a complete bust and was out of football within three years. By contrast, Tom Brady was picked in the sixth round of the 2000 draft—after 198 other players—and he developed into one of the best quarterbacks ever.

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.

This is the dark side of believing in innate talent. It can beget a tendency to assume that some people have a talent for something and others don’t and that you can tell the difference early on. If you believe that, you encourage and support the “talented” ones and discourage the rest, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy. It is human nature to want to put effort—time, money, teaching, encouragement, support—where it will do the most good and also to try to protect kids from disappointment. There is usually nothing nefarious going on here, but the results can be incredibly damaging. The best way to avoid this is to recognize the potential in all of us—and work to find ways to develop it.

For instance, it has always been surprising to me when I talk to full-time athletes and their coaches how many of them have never taken the time to identify those aspects of performance that they would like to improve and then design training methods aimed specifically at those things. In reality, much of the training that athletes do—especially athletes in team sports—is carried out in groups with no attempt to figure out what each individual should be focusing on.

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 can take charge of your own potential.

The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job. They will need to see firsthand—through their own experiences of developing abilities they thought were beyond them—that they control their abilities and are not held hostage by some antiquated idea of natural talent.

And they will need to be given the knowledge and support to improve themselves in w...