“To learn requires intense concentration. This idea turns out to be ahead of its time. In reflecting on the life of the mind in the 1920s, Sertillanges uncovered a fact about mastering cognitively demanding tasks that would take academia another seven decades to formalize. This task of formalization began in earnest in the 1970s, when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice. Ericsson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim: “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable… Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”