Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

THE LESSON OF PERFECT PITCH The year is 1763, and a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is about to embark on a tour around Europe that will jump-start the Mozart legend. Just seven years old and barely tall enough to see over the top of a harpsichord, he captivates audiences in his hometown of Salzburg with his skill on the violin and various keyboard instruments. He plays with a facility that seems impossible to believe in someone so young. But Mozart has another trick up his sleeve that is, if anything, even more surprising to the people of his era. We know about this talent because it was described in a rather breathless letter to the editor about the young Mozart that was published in a newspaper in Augsburg, Mozart’s father’s hometown,1 shortly before Mozart and his family left Salzburg for their tour.

The story of mozart

and Mozart’s father, as a composer and music teacher, had nearly every imaginable musical instrument in his house. Nor was it just musical instruments. The boy could identify the notes produced by anything that was sufficiently musical — the chime of a clock, the toll of a bell, the ah-choo of a sneeze. It was an ability that most adult musicians of the time, even the most experienced, could not match, and it seemed, even more than Mozart’s skill on keyboard and violin, to be an example of the mysterious gifts that this young prodigy had been born with.

Mozrts father had every imaginable instrument in the house...

In particular, a good deal of research has shown that nearly everyone with perfect pitch began musical training at a very young age — generally around three to five years old.3 But if perfect pitch is an innate ability, something that you are either born with or not, then it shouldn’t make any difference whether you receive music training as a child. All that should matter is that you get enough musical training — at any time in your life — to learn the names of the notes. The next clue appeared when researchers noticed that perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch. If perfect pitch is indeed a genetic gift, then the only way that the tonal-language connection would make sense would be if people of Asian ancestry are more likely to have genes for perfect pitch than people whose ancestors came from elsewhere, such as Europe or Africa. But that is something that is easy to test for. You just recruit a number of people of Asian ancestry who grew up speaking English or some other nontonal language and see if they are more likely to have perfect pitch.

Asians and perfect pitch

We now know that this isn’t the case, either. The true character of perfect pitch was revealed in 2014, thanks to a beautiful experiment carried out at the Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo and reported in the scientific journal Psychology of Music.6 The Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara recruited twenty-four children between the ages of two and six and put them through a months-long training course designed to teach them to identify, simply by their sound, various chords played on the piano. The chords were all major chords with three notes, such as a C-major chord with middle C and the E and G notes immediately above middle C. The children were given four or five short training sessions per day, each lasting just a few minutes, and each child continued training until he or she could identify all fourteen of the target chords that Sakakibara had selected. Some of the children completed the training in less than a year, while others took as long as a year and a half. Then, once a child had learned to identify the fourteen chords, Sakakibara tested that child to see if he or she could correctly name individual notes. After completing training every one of the children in the study had developed perfect pitch and could identify individual notes played on the piano.

Training can develop brilliant skills

This is an astonishing result. While in normal circumstances only one in every ten thousand people develops perfect pitch, every single one of Sakakibara’s students did. The clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon only a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training.

Imp one - right exposure and training is vital!

developed that ability at all. Nonetheless, Mozart was indeed born with a gift, and it was the same gift that the children in Sakakibara’s study were born with. They were all endowed with a brain so flexible and adaptable that it could, with the right sort of training, develop a capability that seems quite magical to those of us who do not possess it. In short, perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift — and, as nearly as we can tell, pretty much everyone is born with that gift.

Flexible and adaptable brain

But we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills — such as perfect pitch — that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones. In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential. And this is true whether our goal is to become a concert pianist or just play the piano well enough to amuse ourselves,

Learning is developing skills not categorisation

some period of one’s lifespan. More generally, there is a complex interplay between genetic factors and practice activities that we are just beginning to understand. Some genetic factors may influence a person’s ability to engage in sustained deliberate practice — for instance, by limiting a person’s capability to focus for long periods of time every day.

The ability to focus for lomg periods of time

These fields have several characteristics in common. First, there are always objective ways — such as the win/loss of a chess competition or a head-to-head race — or at least semiobjective ways — such as evaluation by expert judges — to measure performance. This makes sense: if there is no agreement on what good performance is and no way to tell what changes would improve performance, then it is very difficult — often impossible — to develop effective training methods. If you don’t know for sure what constitutes improvement, how can you develop methods to improve performance? Second, these fields tend to be competitive enough that performers have strong incentive to practice and improve. Third, these fields are generally well established, with the relevant skills having been developed over decades or even centuries. And fourth, these fields have a subset of performers who also serve as teachers and coaches and who, over time, have developed increasingly sophisticated sets of training techniques that make possible the field’s steadily increasing skill level.

Several common characteristics of top fields

In the fall of 1987 I took a position at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. After finishing my memory studies with Steve Faloon, I had followed up by studying other examples of exceptional memory, such as waiters who could recall the detailed orders of many customers without writing them down and stage actors who had to learn many lines every time they began a new play.2 3 In each case I had studied the mental representations that these people developed in order to build their memory, but they all had a major limitation: they were “amateurs” who had undergone no formal training but had just figured it out as they went along. What sorts of achievement might be possible with rigorous, formal training methods? When I moved to Berlin I suddenly had the chance to observe just such methods in musicians. That opportunity arose thanks to the presence of the Universität der Künste Berlin — or, in English, the Berlin University of the Arts — which is located not far from the Max Planck Institute. The university has thirty-six hundred students in four colleges — a college of fine arts, a college of architecture, a college of media and design, and a college of music and the performing arts — and the music academy in particular is highly regarded for both its teaching and its student body. Its alumni include the conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, two giants of twentieth-century conducting, and the composer Kurt Weill, best known for The Threepenny Opera and, in pa...

Music andmemory

Specifically, the music-education students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they were eighteen, the better violin students had practiced an average of 5,301 hours, and the best violin students had practiced an average of 7,410 hours. Nobody had been slacking — even the least accomplished of the students had put in thousands of hours of practice, far more than anyone would have who played the violin just for fun — but these were clearly major differences in practice time.

Violin npractice hours

When the writer asked him why he was doing it, Dan gave an answer I really liked. He said he didn’t appreciate the attitude that only certain people can succeed in certain areas — that only those people who are logical and “good at math” can go into mathematics, that only athletic people can go into sports, that only musically gifted people can become really good at playing an instrument. This sort of thinking just gave people an excuse not to pursue things that they might otherwise really enjoy and perhaps even be good at, and he didn’t want to fall into that trap.

Why only certain people can ex el

completely different from anything I’d ever done,” he said. “I wanted to prove that anything’s possible if you’re willing to put in the time.”

Statement of life

Per was taking just such a class, so I suggested he get some personal sessions with a coach who could give advice tailored to Per’s performance. 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. More than anything else, this is a problem of mental representations. As we discussed in chapter 3, one of the main purposes of deliberate practice is to develop a set of effective mental representations that can guide your performance, whether you are practicing a karate move, playing a piano sonata, or performing surgery.

Why mental reps are important

Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses. Thus, one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.

How to grow as a student

It’s particularly important to query a prospective teacher about practice exercises. No matter how many sessions a week you have with an instructor, most of your effort will be spent practicing by yourself, doing exercises that your teacher has assigned. You want a teacher who will guide you as much as possible for these sessions, not only telling you what to practice on but what particular aspects you should be paying attention to, what errors you have been making, and how to recognize good performance.

Most of the work is you yourself

In group classes, with the instructor at the front and all of the students following en masse, it is far too easy to just “go through the motions” instead of actually practicing them with the specific goal of improving a particular aspect of one’s performance. You do ten kicks with your right leg, then ten kicks with your left.

How to improve performance?

The advice I offered to Per Holmlöv in this area can be applied to just about anyone who is getting started on deliberate practice: Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.

Shorter training sessions at full capacify

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. Franklin did it with his exercises, each focused on a particular facet of writing. Much of what a good teacher or coach will do is to develop such exercises for you,

Expertise nd teacbhing

Note that these students weren’t simply doing the same thing over and over again: they were paying attention to what they got wrong each time and correcting it. This is purposeful practice. It does no good to do the same thing over and over again mindlessly; the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.

2

brush up on their delivery. 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.

it will feel to be twenty pounds lighter or to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Then after a while, reality hits. It’s hard to find the time to work out or practice as much as you should, so you start missing sessions. You’re not improving as fast as you thought you would. It stops being fun, and your resolve to reach your goal weakens. Eventually you stop altogether, and you don’t start up again. Call it “the New Year’s resolution effect”—

Samal nd sandesh are good at xsliberate practice

attribute. People generally find it much easier to push themselves in some areas than in others. If Katie became a grandmaster after ten years of studying chess and Karl gave up on the game after six months, does that mean Katie had more willpower than Karl? Would it change your answer if I told you that Katie spent a year practicing the piano and then quit before she started chess, while Karl is now an internationally renowned concert pianist? This situational dependence calls into question the claim that some sort of generic willpower can explain an individual’s ability to sustain daily practice for months,

Question grit

his father became curious about how fast

example, you may find yourself motivated to practice harder because you don’t want to let your

expected to ask at least one interesting question each week and that he would also be answering others’ questions gave him extra impetus to read and examine the most urgent and intellectually challenging matters in contemporary science, politics, and philosophy.

Incentive to be upto date with latest happenkngs

And this, more than anything else, is the lesson that people should take away from all these stories and all this research: There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.

Follow yourdream and use deliberate practice tp get there

Judit was the crown jewel of László Polgár’s experiment. She became a grandmaster at fifteen years,3 five months, making her at that time the youngest person, male or female, to ever reach that level. She was the number-one-ranked women’s chess player in the world for twenty-five years, until she retired from chess in 2014. At one time she was ranked number eight in the world among all chess players, male or female, and in 2005 she became the first — and so far only — woman to play in the overall World Chess Championship.

Women chess player

Each of them became among the very best in the world in an area in which the measured performance is extremely objective. There are no style points in chess. Your school background doesn’t matter. Your résumé doesn’t count. So we know without any doubts just how good they were, and they were very, very good.

No style pointss in chess

The precise details are not important, however. What is important is that Susan became interested in chess as a child — and that she became interested in the only way that a child of that age (she was three at the time) could become interested: she saw the chess pieces as fun. As toys. As something to play with. Young children are very curious and playful. Like puppies or kittens, they interact with the world mostly through play. This desire to play serves as a child’s initial motivation to try out one thing or another, to see what is interesting and what is not, and to engage in various activities that will help them build their skills. At this point they’re developing simple skills, of course — arranging chess pieces on a chessboard, throwing a ball, swinging a racket, organizing marbles by shape or pattern — but for future experts, this playful interaction with whatever has caught their interest is their first step toward what will eventually become their passion.

Play to start learning.

began to identify themselves more in terms of the skill they were developing and less in terms of other areas of interest, such as school or social life. They saw themselves as “pianists” or “swimmers” by the age of eleven or twelve or as “mathematicians” before they turned sixteen or seventeen. They were

See yourselfnas skilled professional is imp

The most obvious performance issues are those that involve physical abilities. In the general population physical performance peaks around age twenty. With increasing age we lose flexibility, we become more prone to injury, and we take longer to heal. We slow down. Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their twenties. Professional athletes can remain competitive in their thirties or even early forties, with recent advances in training.

Physical fields need early starts

they started breaking new ground. It makes sense that this should be so: After all, how are you going to come up with a valuable new theory in science or a useful new technique on the violin if you are not intimately familiar with — and able to reproduce — the accomplishments of those who preceded you?

Very familiar with what came before them

teachers is the ability to improve on their own. As part of their training, their teachers helped them develop mental representations that they could use to monitor their own performances, figure out what needs improving, and come up with ways to realize that improvement.

Help them become e xperts on their own

make it complete. Furthermore, research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time — exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place. For example, a study of Nobel Prize winners found that they had generally published scientific papers earlier than most of their peers and that they published significantly more papers throughout their careers than others in their discipline.31 In other words, they worked harder than everyone else.

Work hard and focus for long periods of time

Deliberate practice takes advantage of the natural adaptability of the human brain and body to create new abilities. Most of these abilities are created with the help of detailed mental representations, which allow us to analyze and respond to situations much more effectively than we could otherwise.

What is deloberate practise

As it happens, 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. There are far too many reputed natural prodigies for me to address more than a fraction of them here, and that is not the purpose of this book. But let’s look at a few cases just to provide a taste of how seemingly magical abilities can quickly become more believable when examined through the lens of deliberate practice.

Ericssons research on expert performers

According to many biographies,6 he first began composing music when he was six, and he was eight when he wrote his first symphony.

Mozart childhood

In short, the evidence is that, like Mozart, Lemieux had a lot of practice before people

Lemieux practice

basics.13 Donald Thomas, originally

exceptional abilities through the lens of those two earlier questions I posed — What is the talent? What practice led to the talent? — you can pull back the curtain and find what is really going on.

2 questions of everyone

board. With enough solitary practice, the mental representations become so useful and powerful in playing the game that the major thing separating two players is not their intelligence — their visuospatial abilities, or even their memory or processing speed — but rather the quality and quantity of their mental representations and how effectively they use them. Because these mental representations are developed specifically for the purpose of analyzing chess positions and coming up with the best moves — remember, they are usually developed through thousands of hours of studying the games of grandmasters

How mental reps matter

scientists there is no correlation between IQ and scientific productivity.43 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. Richard Feynman, one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century, had an IQ of 126; James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, had an IQ of 124; and William Shockley, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the invention of the transistor, had an IQ of 125.44 Although the abilities measured by IQ tests clearly help performance in the science classroom, and students with higher IQs generally perform better in science classes than those with lower IQs — again consistent with Binet’s efforts to measure school learning — among those who have become professional scientists, a higher IQ doesn’t seem to offer an advantage.

Iq and nibel research

need to hold a Ph.D. to be able to get research grants and conduct research, and getting a Ph.D. requires four to six years of successful postgraduate academic performance with a high level of writing skills and a large vocabulary — which are essentially attributes measured by verbal intelligence tests.

Phd work

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 or the best doctors or the best musicians. There is a simple reason for this. If there are indeed genetic differences that play a role in influencing how well someone performs (beyond the initial stages when someone is just learning a skill), they aren’t likely to be something that affects the relevant skills directly — a “music gene” or a “chess gene” or a “math gene.” No, I suspect that such genetic differences — if they exist — are most likely to manifest themselves through the necessary practice and efforts that go into developing a skill.

Genetic differences

It is possible to imagine a number of genetically based differences of this sort. Some people might, for instance, be naturally able to focus more intently and for longer periods of time than others; since deliberate practice depends on being able to focus in this way, these people might be naturally able to practice more effectively than others and thus benefit more from their practice.

What skillto develop at school

fulfilling. On the flip side, of course, the children who get more attention and praise from their teachers and coaches and more support and encouragement from their parents do end up developing their abilities to a much greater degree than the ones who were told never to try — thus convincing everyone that their initial appraisals

Praise is important!

that is, that children with a higher spatial intelligence can learn to do basic math more quickly than others. Recent research has shown that children who have had experience playing linear board games with counting steps before they start school will do better in math once they are in school.51

Research on msth

For instance, it has always been surprising to me when I talk to fulltime athletes and their coaches how many of them have never taken the time to identify those aspects of performance that they would like to improve and then design training methods aimed specifically at those things. In reality, much of the training that athletes do — especially athletes in team sports — is carried out in groups with no attempt to figure out what each individual should be focusing on.

What aspects of their performace must theh specifically improve on?

As we saw in chapter 3, 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.

Build smill by doing something