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

by K. Anders Ericsson

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.

the motivation started to shift from external to internal in origin.

The parents still provided support, such as paying for lessons and equipment, but the responsibility for the practice shifted almost entirely to the students themselves and their coaches and teachers.

people who develop skills in a certain area through years of practice seem to get a great deal of pleasure from engaging in that skill.

Generally when they’re in their early or mid teens, the future experts make a major commitment to becoming the best that they can be. This commitment is the third stage.

However, expertise in some fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn’t start training as a child. Understanding such limitations can help you decide which areas you might wish to pursue.

There are master’s divisions in track and field competitions with age brackets up to eighty and beyond, and the people who train for these events do so in precisely the same way that people who are decades younger do; they just train for shorter periods with less intensity because of the increased risk of injury and the increased amount of time the body takes to recover from training.

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.

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.

These are the people whose contributions leave their fields forever changed, the pathfinders who lead the way into new territory so that others can follow. This is the fourth stage of expert performance, where some people move beyond the existing knowledge in their field and make unique creative contributions. It is the least well understood of the four stages and the most intriguing.

But where does such creativity ultimately come from? Is it not a whole other level beyond deliberate practice—which is, after all, based on practicing things in ways that other people have figured out in order to develop skills of the sort that others have already developed? I don’t believe so. Having studied many examples of creative genius, it’s clear to me that much of what expert performers do to move the boundary of their fields and create new things is very similar to what they were doing to reach that boundary in the first place.

There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them. Even the famous “aha” moments could not exist without a great deal of work to build an edifice that needs just one more piece to make it complete.

Expert performers develop their extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step by step in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts.

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.

I have made it a hobby to 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. My basic approach to understanding prodigies is the same as it is for understanding any expert performer. I ask two simple questions: 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.

the only two areas where we know for certain that genetics affects sports performance are height and body size.

They found that the autistic savants are much more likely than the nonsavants to be very detail-oriented and prone to repetitive behaviors. When something captures their attention, they will focus on it to the exclusion of everything else around them, retreating into their own worlds. These particular autistic people are more likely to practice obsessively a musical piece or memorize a collection of phone numbers—and thus are likely to develop skills in those areas in the same way the people engaging in purposeful or deliberate practice do.

The bottom line is that every time you look closely into such a case you find that the extraordinary abilities are the product of much practice and training. Prodigies and savants don’t give us any reason to believe that some people are born with natural abilities in one field or another.

But somewhere along the way someone convinced them that they couldn’t sing. Interviews have found that it was usually some sort of authority figure—a parent, an older sibling, a music teacher, maybe a peer they admired—and it usually came at some defining—and often painful—moment that they still remember quite well as adults. Most often they were told they were “tone-deaf.” And so, believing they just weren’t born to sing, they gave up.

We don’t know why, but we can speculate: All of these elite players were committed to chess, and in the beginning the ones with higher IQs had a somewhat easier time developing their ability. The others, in an effort to keep up, practiced more, and having developed the habit of practicing more, they actually went on to become better players than the ones with higher IQs, who initially didn’t feel the same pressure to keep up.

While people with certain innate characteristics—IQ, in the case of the chess study—may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time, and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining how skilled a person becomes.

Indeed, a number of Nobel Prize–winning scientists have had IQs that would not even qualify them for Mensa, an organization whose members must have a measured IQ of at least 132, a number that puts you in the upper 2 percentile of the population.

and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best.

When people assume that talent plays a major, even determining, role in how accomplished a person can become, that assumption points one toward certain decisions and actions. If you assume that people who are not innately gifted are never going to be good at something, then the children who don’t excel at something right away are encouraged to try something else.

In a group meeting I had with all of the Eagles coaches in the spring of 2014, we discussed how all the great players seem to be aware of what the relevant team and opposing players were doing so they could discuss it after a training session or a game. However, I found that even those coaches who recognized the importance of effective mental representations did little to help the less elite players improve their representations; instead, they generally found it easier to pick players who had already acquired effective mental representations and then provide them with additional training to further improve those representations.

we discussed in chapter 5, a major difference between the deliberate-practice approach and the traditional approach to learning lies with the emphasis placed on skills versus knowledge—what you can do versus what you know.

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.

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.

When preparing a lesson plan, determining what a student should be able to do is far more effective than determining what that student should know. It then turns out t...

The questions and tasks were also designed to push the students outside their comfort zones—to ask them questions whose answers they’d have to struggle for—but not so far outside their comfort zones that they wouldn’t know how to start answering them.

Begin by identifying what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step. Then give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.

I think there would be tremendous value in helping children and, especially, adolescents develop detailed mental representations in at least one area,

One benefit that a young student—or anyone, really—gets from developing mental representations is the freedom to begin exploring that skill on his or her own.

The best way to help students develop their skills and mental representations in an area is to give them models they can replicate and learn from, just as Benjamin Franklin did when he improved his writing by reproducing articles from The Spectator. They need to try and fail—but with ready access to models that show what success looks like.

Having students create mental representations in one area helps them understand exactly what it takes to be successful not only in that area but in others as well. Most people, even adults, have never attained a level of performance in any field that is sufficient to show them the true power of mental representations to plan, execute, and evaluate their performance in the way that expert performers do. And thus they never really understand what it takes to reach this level—not just the time it takes, but the high-quality practice. Once they do understand what is necessary to get there in one area, they understand, at least in principle, what it takes in other areas. That is why experts in one field can often appreciate those in other fields.

We need to map out the various factors that make up an expert over his or her entire lifespan in order to provide direction for other people who want to develop expertise.

Even those who don’t reach the frontiers of a field can still enjoy the challenge of taking control of their own lives and improving their abilities. A world in which deliberate practice is a normal part of life would be one in which people had more volition and satisfaction.

In the future most people will have no choice but to continuously learn new skills, so it will be essential to train students and adults about how to learn efficiently.