Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has made a career studying the fastest way to get good at something, a model he calls deliberate practice. It works by deliberately putting people in situations at the limit of their abilities, where they are constantly practicing increasingly difficult skills and receiving consistent real-time feedback. As Ericsson noted in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
