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

by K. Anders Ericsson

The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

The details about this sort of practice are drawn from a relatively new area of psychology that can be best described as “the science of expertise.” This new field seeks to understand the abilities of “expert performers,” that is, people who are among the best in the world at what they do, who have reached the very peak of performance, and I have published several academic books on the topic, including Toward a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and Limits in 1991, The Road to Excellence in 1996, and The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance in 2006.

But while the abilities are extraordinary, there is no mystery at all about how these people developed them. They practiced. A lot. The world-record time in the marathon wasn’t cut by 30 percent over the course of a century because people were being born with a greater talent for running long distances. Nor did the second half of the twentieth century see some sudden surge in the births of people with a gift for playing Chopin or Rachmaninoff or for memorizing tens of thousands of random digits. What the second half of the twentieth century did see was a steady increase in the amount of time that people in different areas devoted to training, combined with a growing sophistication of training techniques.

You have become a tennis player. That is, you have “learned” tennis in the traditional sense, where the goal is to reach a point at which everything becomes automatic and an acceptable performance is possible with relatively little thought, so that you can just relax and enjoy the game. At this point, even if you’re not completely satisfied with your level of play, your improvement stalls. You have mastered the easy stuff.

Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who’s been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who’s been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.

Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.

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

Purposeful practice is focused.

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

Purposeful practice involves feedback.

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

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.

In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve.

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.

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.

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. Steve had done this.

The human body has a preference for stability.

musical training modifies the structure and function of the brain in various ways that result in an increased capacity for playing music. In other words, the most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they are actually increasing your ability to play.

practicing the piano as a child will lead to certain neurological advantages that you just can’t match with practice as an adult.

developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area.

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, from writing a report to driving a car, from teaching a class to running an organization, from selling houses to performing brain surgery. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough.

And here is the key difference between the traditional approach to learning and the purposeful-practice or deliberate-practice approaches: The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone. In this view, all that you are doing with practice—indeed, all that you can do—is to reach a fixed potential. 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. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.

If we look at the overall history of blindfold chess, we find that this same thing is true for most blindfold chess players throughout history. They worked to become chess masters, and they found themselves, with little or no additional effort, able to play blindfolded.

What was surprising, however, was that neither the mid-range player nor the chess master did much better than the novice in remembering the positions of pieces arranged randomly on a board.

When asked what they see when they are mentally examining a chess position, grandmasters do not talk about visualizing the physical chess pieces on a board as they would if they were relying on some sort of “photographic memory” of the position. This would be a “bottom-level” representation. Instead, their descriptions are much more vague, sprinkled with such terms as “lines of force” and “power.” A key thing about these representations is that they allow a chess player to encode the positions of pieces on the board in a much more efficient way than simply remembering which piece is on which square. This efficient encoding underlies a master’s ability to glance at a chessboard and remember the positions of most of the pieces and, in particular, the ability to play blindfold chess. Two other features of these representations are worth noting, for they are examples of themes that will appear again and again as we explore the broader world of mental representations. First, the mental representations are more than just ways of encoding positions. They allow a chess master to glance at a game in progress and get an immediate sense of which side has the advantage, which directions the game might take, and what a good move or moves might be. This is because the representations include, in addition to the positions of the pieces and the interactions between them, the various weaknesses and strengths of the two players’ positions and moves that are likely to be effective in such po...

Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.

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.

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 or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon. Of course, some people do become overall memory experts or athletes in a number of sports or doctors with a general set of skills, but they do so by training in a number of different areas.

these representations are preexisting patterns of information—facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on—that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations. The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory. 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.

Any relatively complicated activity requires holding more information in our heads than short-term memory allows, so we are always building mental representations of one sort or another without even being aware of it.

What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.

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.

To study this phenomenon, I and two colleagues, Paul Ward and Mark Williams, investigated how well soccer players can predict what’s coming next from what has already happened on the field. To do this we showed them videos of real soccer matches and suddenly stopped the video when a player had just received the ball. Then we asked our subjects to predict what would happen next. Would the player with the ball keep it, attempt a shot at the goal, or pass the ball to a teammate? We found that the more accomplished players were much better at deciding what the player with the ball should do. We also tested the players’ memory for where the relevant players were located and in what directions they were moving by asking them to recall as much as they could from the last frame of the video before it was hidden from them. Again, the better players outperformed the weaker ones. We concluded that the advantage better players had in predicting future events was related to their ability to envision more possible outcomes and quickly sift through them and come up with the most promising action. In short, the better players had a more highly developed ability to interpret the pattern of action on the field. This ability allowed them to perceive which players’ movements and interactions mattered most, which allowed them to make better decisions about where to go on the field, when to pass the ball and to whom, and so on.

Do expert climbers come up with some of their own grips based on their particular abilities, hand size, number of fingers, etc.? They may or may not have names for these kinds of grips because if they are really idiosyncratic, they won’t be talking to other people about them—at least not much.

when experienced climbers saw a particular hold, their brains sent a signal to their hands preparing them to form the corresponding grip—again, without conscious thought.

For the experts we just described, the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it. The same is true for all experts—and most of us are experts at something, whether we realize it or not.

mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.

Researchers refer to this sort of writing as “knowledge transforming,” as opposed to “knowledge telling,” because the process of writing changes and adds to the knowledge that the writer had when starting out.

The first thing Imreh did when she sight-read the piece was to develop what he called an “artistic image”—a representation of what the piece should sound like when she performed it.

These fields have several characteristics in common. First, there are always objective ways—such as the win/loss of a chess competition or a head-to-head race—or at least semiobjective ways—such as evaluation by expert judges—to measure performance.

Second, these fields tend to be competitive enough that performers have strong incentive to practice and improve.

Third, these fields are generally well established, with the relevant skills having been developed over decades or even centuries.

fourth, these fields have a subset of performers who also serve as teachers and coaches and who, over time, have developed increasingly sophisticated sets of training techniques that make p...

The traditional view held that differences among individuals performing at these highest levels would be due primarily to innate talent. So differences in the amount and type of practice—in essence, differences in motivation—wouldn’t matter at this level. We were looking to see if this traditional view was wrong.

To look for these differences, we interviewed each of the thirty student violinists in our study in great detail. We asked them about their musical histories—when they started studying music, who their teachers were, how many hours a week they spent in solitary practice at each age, what competitions they’d won, and so on. We asked them for their opinions on how important various activities were in improving their performance—practicing alone, practicing in a group, playing alone for fun, playing in a group for fun, performing solo, performing in a group, taking lessons, giving lessons, listening to music, studying music theory, and so on. We asked them how much effort these various activities required and how much immediate pleasure they got while they were doing them. We asked them to estimate how much time they’d spent on each of these activities during the previous week. Finally, because we were interested in how much time they’d spent on practice over the years, we asked them to estimate, for each year since they’d started to practice music, how many hours per week on average they had spent in solitary practice. The thirty music students were also asked to keep daily diaries for each of the next seven days in which they would detail exactly how they’d spent their time. In the diaries, they recorded their activities in fifteen-minute increments: sleeping, eating, going to class, studying, practicing alone, practicing with others, performing, and so on. When they were d...

The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance,

was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep—and often an afternoon nap.

One of our most significant findings was that most factors the students had identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labor-intensive and not much fun; the only exceptions were listening to music and sleeping.

The other crucial finding was that there was only one major difference among the three groups. This was the total number of hours that the students had devoted to solitary practice.

the largest differences in practice time among the three groups of students had come in the preteen and teenage years.