Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

If you find yourself at a point where you are no longer improving quickly or at all, don’t be afraid to look for a new instructor. The most important thing is to keep moving forward.

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

There was focus but no joy. This is a key to getting the maximum benefit out of any sort of practice, from private or group lessons to solitary practice and even to games or competitions: whatever you are doing, focus on it.

Researchers who have studied long-distance runners have found that amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running,14 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.

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.

Of course, you have to be careful about the advice — the Internet offers just about everything except quality control — but you can get some good ideas and tips, try them out, and see what works best for you.

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.

studying a piece of art by a master, attempting to reproduce it from memory, and then comparing the finished product with the original in order to discover the differences and correct them.

Cal Newport suggested something similar for improving research paper writing skills.

When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid — or at least steady — improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some sort of implacable limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.

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 power of this technique is that it targets those specific problem areas that are holding you back rather than trying this and that and hoping that something works.

This sort of circular thinking — “The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing”— is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.

All of the students in the study — the good students, the better, and the best — spent about the same amount of time each week on leisure activities, but the best students were much better at estimating how much time they spent on leisure, which indicates that they made more of an effort to plan their time. Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted.

More generally, look for anything that might interfere with your training and find ways to minimize its influence. If you’re likely to be distracted by your smartphone, turn it off. Or better yet, turn it off and leave it in another room.

If you’re not a morning person and you find it particularly difficult to exercise in the morning, move your run or your exercise class to later in the day when your body won’t fight you so much. I’ve noticed that some people who have difficulty getting started in the morning don’t get enough sleep. Ideally you should wake up by yourself (that is, without an alarm to wake you) and feel refreshed when you do. If that’s not the case, you mi...

The motivation must, of course, be a desire to be better at whatever it is you are practicing. If you don’t have that desire, why are you practicing? But that desire may come in different forms.

Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends’ compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.

Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don’t feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and — particularly for people shooting to become expert performers — that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality.

Perhaps the most important factor here, though, is the social environment itself. Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions — the other members of your orchestra or your baseball team or your chess club — you have a built-in support system. These people understand the effort you’re putting into your practice, they can share training tips with you, and they can appreciate your victories and commiserate with you over your difficulties. They count on you, and you can count on them.

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.

The parents of children destined for more intellectual pursuits — such as the future mathematicians and future neurologists — were more likely to discuss intellectual topics with their kids, and they emphasized the importance of school and learning. In this way, the parents — at least the parents of children who would go on to be experts — shaped the interests of their children.

Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn’t introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general. They encouraged their children’s curiosity, and reading was a major pastime, with the parents reading to the children early on, and the children reading books themselves later. They also encouraged their children to build models or science projects — activities that could be considered educational — as part of their play.

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.

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.

the chess players who were devoted enough to the game to take it to a level beyond playing in their school chess club — there was a tendency for the ones with lower IQs to have engaged in more practice. We don’t know why, but we can speculate: All of these elite players were committed to chess, and in the beginning the ones with higher IQs had a somewhat easier time developing their ability. The others, in an effort to keep up, practiced more, and having developed the habit of practicing more, they actually went on to become better players than the ones with higher IQs, who initially didn’t feel the same pressure to keep up. And here we find our major takeaway message: In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.

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.

since we know that practice is the single most important factor in determining a person’s ultimate achievement in a given domain, it makes sense that if genes do play a role, their role would play out through shaping how likely a person is to engage in deliberate practice or how effective that practice is likely to be.

Coaches can’t really tell how old the various child hockey players are; all they can see is who is doing better and thus, by inference, who appears to be more talented. Many coaches will tend to treat the more “talented” players with more praise and better instruction and to give these players more opportunities to play in games. And these players will be viewed as more talented not just by the coach but also by the other players. Furthermore, these players might be more willing to practice more because they are told that they have the promise of playing at very high levels, even professionally.

But if math works the same way as chess, then we have lost a whole collection of children who might eventually have become quite accomplished in these areas if only they hadn’t been labeled as “no good at math” in the very beginning. 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.

Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills; knowledge should never be an end in itself. Nonetheless, deliberate practice results in students picking up quite a lot of knowledge along the way.

Students who develop mental representations can go on to generate their own scientific experiments or to write their own books — and research has shown that many successful scientists and authors started their careers at a young age in just this way. The best way to help students develop their skills and mental representations in an area is to give them models they can replicate and learn from,