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

by K. Anders Ericsson

Toward a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and Limits in 1991, The Road to Excellence

The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.

Expert writers do it very differently. Consider how my coauthor and I put this book together. First we had to figure out what we wanted the book to do. What did we want readers to learn about expertise? What concepts and ideas were important to introduce? How should a reader’s ideas about training and potential be changed by reading this book? Answering questions like these gave us our first rough mental representation of the book—our goals for it, what we wanted it to accomplish.

With this definition 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.

The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.

There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement.

Given the expense of private instruction, people will often try to make do with group lessons or even YouTube videos or books, and those approaches will generally work to some degree. But no matter how many times you watch a demonstration in class or on YouTube, you are still going to miss or misunderstand some subtleties—and sometimes some things that are not so subtle—and you are not going to be able to figure out the best ways to fix all of your weaknesses, even if you do spot them.

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.

This, then, is what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have failed. First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else.

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

He has approached that height a few times since, but has never equaled it. In the 2014 Commonwealth Games he jumped 2.21 meters, less than he was able to jump eight years earlier in the 2006 Commonwealth Games, when he first made a name for himself. The most obvious conclusion to draw from this is that when Thomas first competed in college in 2006, he had already had a great deal of training—both high-jump training and training to jump higher for dunking—so it was difficult for further training to make a big difference. If he had indeed never trained, there should have been much more improvement.

Its interesting that in a book about practice. An example is provided of an athlete making no progress from practice. As well as his initial success is based on unproven practice

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.