Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

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.

I can think about a specific point sophomore year. My coach came up to me on the range and said, “Justin, what are you doing?” I was hitting balls and said, “I’m practicing for the tournament.” And he said, “No, you’re not. I’ve been watching you, and you’re just hitting balls. You’re not really doing a routine or anything.” So we had a conversation, and, like you said, we started a routine, a practice routine, and from then on I really started to practice where it was a conscious action working towards a specific goal, not just hit balls or putt.

The biggest problem he discovered from these exercises was that his vocabulary was not nearly as large as those of the writers for The Spectator. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the words, but rather that he didn’t have them at his fingertips when he was writing. To fix this he came up with a variation of his first exercise. He decided that writing poetry would force him to come up with a plethora of different words that he might not normally think of because of the need to fit the poem’s rhythm and the rhyming pattern, so he took some of the Spectator articles and transformed them into verse. Then, after waiting long enough that his memory of the original wording had faded, he would transform the poems back into prose. This got him into the habit of finding just the right word and increased the number of words he could call up quickly from his memory.

The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do — that takes you out of your comfort zone — and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better. Real life — our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies — seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities.

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.

We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat — over and over again. Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.

a mutual improvement club,21 which he named “the Junto.” The club’s members, who met each Friday night, would encourage each other’s various intellectual pursuits. Every member was expected to bring at least one interesting topic of conversation — on morals, politics, or science — to each meeting. The topics, which were generally phrased as questions,

These teachers are enthusiastic and encouraging and reward their students — with praise or sometimes more concretely with candy or other small treats

The bottom line is that no one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with “innate talent.” No one has ever found a gene variant that predicts superior performance in one area or another, and no one has ever come up with a way to, say, test young children and identify which among them will become the best athletes or the best mathematicians

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. The clumsy ones are pushed away from sports, the ones who can’t carry a tune right away are told they should try something other than music, and the ones who don’t immediately get comfortable with numbers are told they are no good at math. And, no surprise, the predictions come true: the girl who was told to forget about sports never becomes any good at hitting a tennis ball or kicking a soccer ball; the boy who was told he was tone-deaf never learns to play a musical instrument or to sing well; and the children who were told they were no good at math grow up believing it. The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

When everything goes well they experience a level of effortlessness similar in many ways to the psychological state of “flow” popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.12 This gives them a precious “high” that few people other than experts ever experience.