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

by K. Anders Ericsson

these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.

Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.

Purposeful practice is focused.

Purposeful practice involves feedback.

feedback must be timely

Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone.

Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”

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.

“Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

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.

look for anything that might interfere with your training and find ways to minimize its influence.

you will find that as you maintain your practice over time it will seem easier.

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.