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

by K. Anders Ericsson

The same pattern that we saw among the student violinists has been seen among performers in other areas. Observing this pattern accurately depends on being able to get a good estimate of the total number of hours of practice people have put into developing a skill—which is not always easy to do—and also on being able to tell with some objectivity who the good, better, and best are in a given field, which is also not always easy to do. But when you can do those two things, you generally find that the best performers are those who have spent the most time in various types of purposeful practice.

In the most highly developed fields—the ones that have benefited from many decades or even centuries of steady improvement, with each generation passing on the lessons and skills it has learned to the next—the approach to individualized practice is amazingly uniform.

We began by noting that the levels of performance in such areas as musical performance and sports activities have increased greatly over time, and that as individuals have developed greater and more complex skills and performance, teachers and coaches have developed various methods to teach these skills. The improvement in performance generally has gone hand in hand with the development of teaching methods, and today anyone who wishes to become an expert in these fields will need an instructor’s help.

deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance. Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others.

we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and practice that is both purposeful and informed. In particular, deliberate practice is informed and guided by the best performers’ accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel. Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.

deliberate practice is characterized by the following traits: Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed. Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. 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 conscio...

That teacher or coach must draw from a highly developed body of knowledge about the best way to teach these skills. And the field itself must have a highly developed set of skills that are available to be taught. There are relatively few fields—musical performance, chess, ballet, gymnastics, and the rest of the usual suspects—in which all of these things are true and it is possible to engage in deliberate practice in the strictest sense.

This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.

If you are trying to identify the best performers in an area that lacks rules-based, head-to-head competition or clear, objective measures of performance (such as scores or times), keep this one thing at the front of your mind: subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases. Research has shown that people are swayed by factors like education, experience, recognition, seniority, and even friendliness and attractiveness when they are judging another person’s overall competence and expertise.

Vulnerable to biases does not necessarily mean driven by them. In the absence of better metrics, structured subjective judgements still have value. Weaker evidence is not no evidence.

In many fields, people who are widely accepted as “experts” are actually not expert performers when judged by objective criteria. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon concerns wine “experts.”

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.

People aren’t citing Bergin anymore for this finding?

Once you’ve identified the expert performers in a field, the next step is to figure out specifically what they do that separates them from other, less accomplished people in the same field, and what training methods helped them get there.

Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start.

If you find that something works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, stop.

And finally remember that, whenever possible, the best approach is almost always to work with a good coach or teacher. An effective instructor will understand what must go into a successful training regimen and will be able to modify it as necessary to suit individual students. Working with such a teacher is particularly important in areas like musical performance or ballet, where it takes ten-plus years to become an expert and where the training is cumulative, with the successful performance of one skill often depending on having previously mastered other skills. A knowledgeable instructor can lead the student to develop a good foundation and then gradually build on that foundation to create the skills expected in that field.

Finally, a good teacher can give you valuable feedback you couldn’t get any other way.

First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours.

Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average.

Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.”

More importantly, however, performing isn’t the same thing as practice.

All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles’ success.

This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers.

Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

This puts the ten-thousand-hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world’s best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement.

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.

The first is our old friend, the belief that one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetically prescribed characteristics.

The second myth holds that if you do something for long enough, you’re bound to get better at it.

The third myth states that all it takes to improve is effort.

The deliberate-practice mindset offers a very different view: anyone can improve, but it requires the right approach.

One benefit of “learning while real work gets done” is that it gets people into the habit of practicing and thinking about practicing.

This practice-driven mindset is very similar to that of expert performers, who are constantly practicing and otherwise seeking ways to hone their skills.

For anyone in the business or professional world looking for an effective approach to improvement, my basic advice is to look for one that follows the principles of deliberate practice: Does it push people to get outside their comfort zones and attempt to do things that are not easy for them? Does it offer immediate feedback on the performance and on what can be done to improve it? Have those who developed the approach identified the best performers in that particular area and determined what sets them apart from everyone else? Is the practice designed to develop the particular skills that experts in the field possess? A yes answer to all those questions may not guarantee that an approach will be effective, but it will certainly make that much more likely.

Think of it as the Top Gun approach to improvement. In the early days of the Top Gun project, no one stopped to try to figure out what made the best pilots so good. They just set up a program that mimicked the situations pilots would face in real dogfights and that allowed the pilots to practice their skills over and over again with plenty of feedback and without the usual costs of failure. That is a pretty good recipe for training programs in many different disciplines.

One way would be to use videos of actual surgeries, run them up to a certain decision point, then stop them and ask, “What do you do next?” or “What are you looking at here?”

knowledge. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something—solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay—the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.

The knowledge helped, but only to the extent that Dario had a better idea of how to practice in order to develop the skill.

When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.

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.

Finally, the researchers found that no type of continuing medical education is effective at improving complex behaviors, that is, behaviors that involve a number of steps or require considering a number of different factors. In other words, to the extent that continuing medical education is effective, it is effective in changing only the most basic things that doctors do in their practices.

In short, the implicit assumption in medical training has been that if you provide doctors with the necessary knowledge—in medical school, through medical journals, or through seminars and continuing medical education classes—this should be sufficient.

Once you have identified people who consistently perform better than their peers, the next step is to figure out what underlies that superior performance. This usually involves some variation of the approach, described in chapter 1, that I used in the memory work with Steve Faloon. That is, you get retrospective reports, you have people describe what they’re thinking about as they perform a task, and you observe which tasks are easier or harder for someone and draw conclusions from that. The researchers who have studied doctors’ thought processes in order to understand what separates the best from the rest have used all of these techniques.

This ability—to recognize unexpected situations, quickly consider various possible responses, and decide on the best one—is important not just in medicine but in many areas.

It has even developed the Think Like a Commander Training Program to teach this sort of adaptive thinking to its junior officers using deliberate-practice techniques.

When the researchers interviewed the surgeons after the operations about their thought processes during the surgery, they found that the main way the surgeons detected problems was by noticing that something about the surgery didn’t match the way they had visualized the surgery in their preoperative plan. Once they noticed the mismatch, they came up with a list of alternative approaches and decided which was most likely to work. This points to something important about how these experienced surgeons perform: over time they have developed effective mental representations that they use in planning the surgery, in performing it, and in monitoring its progress so that they can detect when something is wrong and adapt accordingly.

mental representations. One standard approach for examining the mental representations that people use to guide themselves through a task is to stop them in the middle of the task, turn out the lights, and then ask them to describe the current situation, what has happened, and what is about to happen.

Or, in the case of real surgeries, the doctors can be questioned before and after the operations about how they envision the surgery going and about their thought processes during the surgery;

Geoff Colvin’s book Talent Is Overrated,

First, while a good teacher does not have to be one of the best in the world, he or she should be accomplished in the field. Generally speaking, teachers will only be able to guide you to the level that they or their previous students have attained.

A good teacher should also have some skill and experience in teaching in that field.

The best students to talk to are those who started working with a teacher when they were at about the same level you are now, since their experience will be closest to what you yourself will get from a teacher.