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

by K. Anders Ericsson

“Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there”—and this is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

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

Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short.

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

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.

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.

Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation.

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 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.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.

If you don’t know for sure what constitutes improvement, how can you develop methods to improve performance?

if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.

amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running, while elite long-distance runners remain attuned to their bodies so that they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race.

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.

If you’re a manager, pay attention to what goes wrong when things get busy or chaotic—those problems are not anomalies but rather indications of weaknesses that were probably there all the time but were usually less obvious.

Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted.

This is the dark side of believing in innate talent. It can beget a tendency to assume that some people have a talent for something and others don’t and that you can tell the difference early on. If you believe that, you encourage and support the “talented” ones and discourage the rest, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy. It is human nature to want to put effort—time, money, teaching, encouragement, support—where it will do the most good and also to try to protect kids from disappointment. There is usually nothing nefarious going on here, but the results can be incredibly damaging. The best way to avoid this is to recognize the potential in all of us—and work to find ways to develop

They will need to see firsthand—through their own experiences of developing abilities they thought were beyond them—that they control their abilities and are not held hostage by some antiquated idea of natural talent.