Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise explores how humans develop skills and the process by which peak performers in music, athletics, and countless other fields develop their abilities. While it may seem as though figures like Chopin, Beethoven, or Roger Federer rely solely on an innate talent that makes their extraordinary feats seem effortless, what they do actually requires a great deal of effort. Indeed, the secret to their success was practice. They practiced a lot and they practiced the right way.
Most of us think of “practice” as the simple repetition of a task. And, to be sure, this kind of practice will yield some results. If you’re learning how to play tennis, for example, you’ll probably be able to iron out your most embarrassing mistakes and figure out how to serve the ball somewhat competently. But this approach actually stunts your learning. Once you reach your accepted level of performance, you’ll plateau and stop improving. To truly improve, you need to change how you practice.
Purposeful practice is distinct from merely repetitive practice in a few specific ways.
For example, research has shown that doctors who have been practicing for 30 years actually do worse on certain measures of performance than their colleagues who are only a few years out of medical school. This is because the senior doctors aren’t engaging in purposeful practice. Most of their day-to-day activities keep them squarely in their comfort zone: they aren’t being challenged at all.
Purposeful practice can be remarkably effective. Anders Ericsson, author of Peak, once conducted an experiment to see how many digits a test subject, named Steve, would be able to memorize and recite in a numerical string. At first, Steve couldn’t memorize strings longer than nine digits. It seemed that he had reached some sort of natural plateau.
The author decided to try purposeful practice to help Steve push through this barrier. He would present Steve with five-digit strings: if Steve repeated it back correctly, the author would add one more digit to the string to make it six digits. If Steve got it wrong, the author would drop the length of the string by two digits. And it worked: in a few days, Steve managed to memorize an 11-digit sequence, two better than his previous record. After hundreds of sessions, Steve was able to successfully recite back 82 digits!
Truly effective practice goes a step beyond purposeful practice, to deliberate practice. Working hard and pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, by themselves, are not enough. Deliberate practice builds on the principles of purposeful practice, but it applies them in a systematic, rigorous framework that leads to the kind of performances we see from acknowledged experts. Unlike purposeful practice, deliberate practice isn’t about fulfilling your potential—it’s about building it, making possible what was once impossible.
With deliberate practice, you are working with highly developed and well-accepted training methods that have been proven effective in getting results. These methods have been honed and perfected by those who came before you into a near-science. With purposeful practice, if you push yourself, you might see improvement. With deliberate practice, you’ll become an expert.
There are a few key features of deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is how experts become experts. In a study of violin students at the Berlin University of the Arts, a team of researchers set out to determine whether the best performances were the product of deliberate practice or innate talent. Given the extreme difficulty of playing the violin, it requires a great deal of solitary practice time to master the instrument. It is crucial to practice outside of scheduled sessions with one’s teacher. While acknowledging that it wasn’t fun, the students saw practice as being crucial to their development as musicians, so they kept to it.
The researchers found that the only major difference between the students they had deemed “good,” “better,” and “best” was how much time they devoted to solitary, deliberate practice. They calculated that the “good” students would practice an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they turned 18; the “better” students would practice an average of 5,301 hours; and the “best” students would practice an average of 7,410 hours. There were no shortcuts to becoming an excellent violinist. All of the top achievers had devoted several thousand hours of practice to the instrument: none of them were “prodigies” who simply surpassed their peers without putting in any practice.
There are no big leaps or breakthroughs with deliberate practice. What looks to an observer like a sudden leap forward is actually just the last in a series of baby steps.
Critically, deliberate practice depends on effective mental representations, which show you how to do your task properly and correct yourself when you make mistakes. Mental representations are templates that correspond to objects, ideas, or anything else that the brain might be thinking about.
You may not realize it, but you use mental images every day. Think about a famous image, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. When someone mentions it, you can “see” the painting in your mind’s eye—this is a mental representation. Mental representations are key to memory, pattern recognition, and all the other highly developed abilities needed to be a top-ranked pitcher, chess player, or pianist, providing meaning and context that aids us as we assimilate and process information.
A key part of forming good mental representations is the ability to recognize patterns where others see only random and formless data. Most of us are only seeing a collection of trees: experts see the forest.
In one experiment, soccer players were shown video footage from a soccer match and then asked to predict what was going to happen next on the field. The results showed that the more accomplished players were more accurate in their predictions of what the next move would be than were the less accomplished players participating in the experiment. The better players were able to take a full assessment of the conditions on the field and see patterns that enabled them to predict what the optimal next move would be. They had a mental representation of which players’ movements mattered the most, to whom they ought to pass the ball, and so on.
Deliberate practice and mental representations reinforce one another: the more skilled or knowledgeable you become in a given subject through deliberate practice, the more effective your mental representations will be—and vice versa.
The story of Russian chess master Alexander Alekhine shows how mental representations can drive extraordinary performance. He was one of the world’s best in “blindfold” chess—a version of the game in which one of the players does not have the board in front of them, and must make all their moves and strategic calculations from memory. Through his mental representations, Alekhine had developed the ability to visualize the entire chessboard in his memory and move the pieces around in his head.
Alekhine’s aptitude for blindfold chess grew out of his extensive, deliberate practice in standard, non-blindfold chess. Like many chess masters, his abilities in blindfold chess were a product of the years of experience he had in the game: because he knew it so well, he had the ability to draw an extraordinary mental representation of a chessboard.
While it’s true that applying the principles of deliberate practice is most effective in fields like classical music and chess, you shouldn’t take that to mean that you can’t apply them anywhere else. Deliberate practice can improve your performance and that of your organization, in whatever field you’re in.
But it’s only possible if you and your organization let go of the idea that individual ability is solely determined by genetic characteristics. This belief isn’t true: deliberate practice matters much more than raw talent or ability. Indeed, apart from people who suffer from severe physical or mental limitations, with the right practice, just about anyone can improve in any area they choose. You also have to recognize that it’s about more than just repetition or hard work. Simply “trying harder,” by itself, will not yield the desired results. There’s usually a right way and wrong way to do something. If you’re doing something the wrong way, but “trying harder,” you won’t see much difference (and, in fact, you might make things worse by doubling down on your faulty approach).
In a regular 9-5 job, the key is to transform regular time at the office into an opportunity for learning and skill-building. This gets everyone in the company used to the idea of practicing itself—it just becomes a normal part of the business day.
Mock scenarios are particularly good for professional skill-building. They allow team members to practice over and over again, receive lots of feedback, and perfect their skills without the usual costs of failure. These sorts of simulation programs have proven particularly effective in medicine.
In diagnosing breast cancer, for example, radiologists are tasked with interpreting x-rays to determine whether cancerous cells are present or not. But they’re rarely ever told if their analysis was correct, as the results are typically sent to the patient’s personal doctor. Based on what we know about the need for feedback, this is not a recipe for improved performance. One way to correct this was establishing a digital library of past mammogram images to use as a training tool for radiologists, allowing them to look at the images to determine whether or not they represented the tissue of a patient who had cancer—and receive immediate feedback on the accuracy of their analysis.
The least effective medical training programs, meanwhile, were those focused on didactic or knowledge-based instruction, usually involving doctors sitting at a conference and listening to a lecture. These offer little opportunity for feedback and correcting mistakes. Unfortunately, such programs are what much of the medical profession’s “continuing education” consists of.
The book offers more tips on achieving your goals with deliberate practice:
The world’s top performers usually start their training as children, continuing through adolescence and into early adulthood until true mastery is attained. As children, they are introduced to their field of interest in a fun, playful way, often by parents who are themselves highly achievement-oriented. Many future experts also have older siblings to look up to and use as models for improving their own performance. Even the great Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had his older sister, Maria Anna, who inspired him to pursue music. For people in advanced mathematics or neurology (which are fairly inaccessible to young children), the parents introduced the children to the general idea of intellectual pursuit, rather than the particular subject matter itself.
In adolescence, experts begin taking real lessons from a coach or teacher. These instructors knew how to properly motivate their young students and guide them along the path of deliberate practice. Praise from their teachers for reaching new levels of performance was a key ingredient in the early careers of these future experts.
Eventually, the motivation becomes intrinsic: the students begin to enjoy the fruits of their labor and wanted to experience it more. They relish being seen as swimmers or a tennis players or a musician. It becomes a major part of their identity and they begin to seek out the best possible teachers they can find—even if that means replacing their old ones. This often entails major personal and financial commitment, investing enormous sums of money in training and moving around the country to receive instruction at elite institutions.
There are some clear benefits to starting your training at a young age—young people have relatively few time constraints to interfere with their training, as well as a more flexible skeletal structure and greater resistance to injury (for those pursuing athletic fields). They also have more gray matter, the tissue that connects neurons in the brain. This enhances learning and may explain why it is easier, for example, for children to learn a second language than it is for adults.
It is not the case, however, that adults are incapable of mastering new skills later in life. Remember, all experts put in an enormous investment of time in deliberate practice to get to where they did. They may have had some innate talent or ability, but the discipline and willingness to practice counted for far more. None of them were “prodigies” or “naturals” who simply succeeded without having to train. And deliberate practice is something that everyone can do.
There exists a highly deterministic idea that your abilities are limited by your genetic characteristics. This is the old idea about “natural” talent: some people simply have it, and others don’t. It shows up in the defeatist statements people make when they don’t immediately achieve what they set out to: “I can’t manage people,” “I’m just not that creative,” or “I’m just not a math person.” We know this isn’t true: except for people who suffer from severe physical or mental limitations, with the right practice, just about anyone can improve in any area they choose.
The idea of prodigies—people born with natural talent that enables them to excel in a particular field with comparatively little effort—is, likewise, largely a myth borne of ignorance about how deliberate practice works. The idea of prodigies can actually be quite harmful. Accepting that there are those who simply have natural talent and others who don’t might discourage people from even trying to fulfill their dreams: “I’m not good at this, so why bother?”
And it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—people who develop the idea that they’re “bad” at something never practice, and, therefore, never get good at it. Meanwhile, children who show early promise tend to be lavished with attention and praise from teachers and parents and receive more training and resources to help them develop their skills than children who struggle. The “gifted” students don’t possess some innate ability that others don’t, they’re just given more of an opportunity to develop. This has deprived the world of the talents of countless people who were deemed at an early age to be “no good” at something.
Even Mozart, often regarded as the very embodiment of a musical prodigy, relied on practice far more than raw talent. His father, Leopold, began his son’s training before the boy was even four—ample time for the young Mozart to soak up important hours of deliberate practice in his formative years. Moreover, his early childhood compositions, the supposed evidence of his unprecedented genius, have now been found to have been written in his father’s handwriting—a clue that perhaps the elder Mozart played a larger role in this stage of his son’s career than history cares to remember.
Through embracing the principles of deliberate practice and applying them to every area of human endeavor (not just chess or music), we could create a far more prosperous and happy world, one with profound implications for technology, healthcare, public service, and countless other fields. The lesson is clear. Fulfill your untapped potential. Work hard and practice to take control of your life and become whatever it is you wish to be. Your future is entirely in your hands.
We are in awe of the world’s peak performers in music, athletics, and countless other fields. People like tennis star Roger Federer, Olympic vaulter McKayla Maroney, or history’s brilliant composers like Beethoven, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff seem to us to be otherworldly figures, overflowing with an almost divine talent. Surely these individuals must be in possession of some rare gift, some innate spark that the rest of us simply don’t have.
But that isn’t the case at all. How did these people become so good at what they do? The answer may seem banal, but it’s true: they practiced. They practiced the right way, they practiced with the right people, and they practiced a lot. Moreover, across all these fields, the principles of effective practice are the same, because they involve the same mental processes. The specific techniques may differ, but the basic process of challenge and improvement is the same: ballerinas and laparoscopic surgeons both become great using the same basic process. And because we can look to the great achievers of the past and present and study their success, we have a blueprint: we, too, can achieve new heights of performance.
We’ve all heard the phrase “practice makes perfect.” The more you work at something, the better you’ll get at it. But is this true of all kinds of practice? Will mere repetition of the same task over and over again really improve your abilities? Or is there a certain kind of practice that truly challenges you to reach greater and greater heights of achievement, one that unlocks your true potential?
Most of us think of “practice” as the simple repetition of a task. And, to be sure, this kind of practice will yield some results. If you’re learning how to play tennis, for example, you’ll probably be able to iron out your most embarrassing mistakes and figure out how to serve the ball somewhat competently. You can go out and play tennis with your friends and be able to hold your own (or at least not embarrass yourself). But still, some weaknesses in your tennis skills persist and certain elements of the game elude you.
For most people in most fields, this level of performance is good enough. They don’t push themselves to achieve beyond this point. They have a general idea of what they want to achieve, practice until they reach an acceptable level, and consider themselves to have “learned” it. But this approach actually stunts your learning. Once you reach your accepted level of performance, you’ll plateau and stop improving. Without changing your practice routine, you’ll never improve.
Crucially, it’s not about mere repetition or devoting more time to the task. Once you’ve reached your accepted level of performance, additional years of merely repetitive practice don’t help. An average driver who’s been driving for five years is no better than her counterpart who has 20 years of driving experience. At this point, you receive diminishing returns on your practice. To truly improve, you need to change how you practice. It’s not just about practice: it’s about purposeful practice.
Purposeful practice has four distinct components that distinguish it from merely repetitive practice.
The effects of purposeful practice can be nothing short of remarkable. Evidence shows that the actual structure and function of the human brain change in response to the right type of mental training, just as muscles change and grow in response to physical exercise. MRIs show that the brains of people with particular skills look very different from those of people without those skills.
One experiment at the University of Alabama showed that the region of the brain controlling the left hand was significantly larger in violin, cello, and guitar players (for whom control of the fingers on the left hand is vitally important) than it was in non-musicians. In fact, the string players’ brains had adapted to the years of purposeful practice by converting a portion of the brain normally reserved for controlling the palm into one solely dedicated to the left fingers.
Why does this method of practice work? Because it challenges homeostasis. This is the level of stress or exertion to which your body is accustomed. The principle is well-understood by physical trainers: to really see those gains at the gym, you need to exert your muscles and cardiovascular system to the point where your body can no longer maintain homeostasis. Once this happens, your body adapts to reach homeostasis at a new level.
By pushing your body hard enough and long enough, you “trick” it into using its desire for homeostasis to your advantage. Over time, your body will change in ways that enable you to run that extra mile or lift that extra 50 pounds.
Much the same principle applies to the human brain. The more you push yourself, the more the structure and chemistry of your brain will adapt to meet the new challenges. Of course, just like in the gym, you can’t push yourself too hard—that will only lead to burnout. But by forcing yourself to go just beyond your comfort zone, you can begin to trigger remarkable structural changes. It is in this sweet spot beyond your comfort zone that your brain can change most quickly and effectively. This is what underlies purposeful practice. A few examples of purposeful practice in action will show just how powerful it can be.
Anders Ericsson, author of Peak, once conducted an experiment at Carnegie Mellon University, the purpose of which was to measure the capability of human memory and the effect of practice on improving memory. The test subject, an undergraduate named Steven, was read a series of digits, which he was then asked to repeat back to the author.
The results were remarkably consistent at first: Steven was fairly successful at memorizing eight-digit number strings, mediocre with nine-digit strings, and totally unsuccessful with ten-digit strings. It seemed that he had reached some sort of natural plateau, a sharp mental barrier than prevented him from memorizing any more than nine numbers.
Ericsson decided to try a different approach, with a new method of training. He would present Steve with five-digit strings: if Steve repeated it back correctly, Ericsson would add one more digit to the string to make it six digits. If Steve got it wrong, Ericsson would drop the length of the string by two digits. This approach kept Steve constantly challenged, asking him each time to slightly outperform his previous best performance. This was purposeful practice in action: a well-defined goal, with each baby step along the way challenging the learner a bit more.
And it worked: in a few days, Steve managed to memorize an 11-digit sequence, two better than his previous record. He had smashed through the barrier: the “natural” ceiling had proved to be an illusion. As the author continued with this training method, Steve’s memory continued to improve and reach new heights: after hundreds of sessions, Steve was able to successfully recite back 82 digits! Throughout, he was motivated by the positive feedback he received from the author and the team of co-researchers, as well as his own intrinsic desire to challenge himself and achieve new levels of performance.
To become a licensed cab driver in London, one must pass a series of tests, believed to be among the most difficult in the world to pass. The tests measure “The Knowledge,” everything that a London cabbie is required to know, including every street, park, monument, government office, hospital, place of worship, museum, hotel, restaurant, and general point of interest. They must know the fastest route to get to any of these places from any other place within the giant metropolis. Needless to say, mastering “The Knowledge” is an extraordinary feat, one that tests the limits of human memory.
How do they achieve this? Through purposeful practice. They must first master a list of 320 journeys (trips between two points within the city), memorizing the location of every conceivable landmark or point of interest along each journey and finding the optimal route from the beginning to the endpoint. But this is only the start. The successful candidates continue to challenge themselves, finding new journeys and adding more buildings and landmarks to their memory.
One experiment showed that the hippocampus—the part of the brain engaged in spatial navigation—is larger in London cab drivers than it is in non-cab drivers. The same experiment showed that, before they completed their training, applicants to the taxi program had similarly sized hippocampi as individuals who had never applied to become taxi drivers. Drilling down even further, the research showed that successful applicants who had managed to become licensed taxi drivers had larger hippocampi than both the unsuccessful applicants and those who had never entered the program at all. This proved that there was something about the process of gaining “The Knowledge” that altered the structure and capabilities of the drivers’ brains.
Think about how to improve your performance with better practice.
Have you ever trained for a long period of time to achieve a particular milestone? Describe the situation in a few sentences.
What methods did you use to try to improve? How did you practice? Explain how effective (or ineffective) you found these methods to be.
Based on what you’ve read, how would you have restructured your practice routine to achieve more significant progress? (Remember the keys to purposeful practice: 1) well-defined, specific goals, 2) complete focus, 3) feedback, 4) stepping out of your comfort zone.)
Today, to what skill are you most interested in applying purposeful practice? How would you change what you’re currently doing to practice better?
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. We strive to find order, coherence, and narrative amid the jumble of information we are confronted with every day. By giving the world meaning, we are able to process and make sense of what would otherwise be a baffling barrage of inputs and sensations. We know what flowers or blades of grass are when we encounter them because we have set ideas of what those things are. It is through harnessing the power of these mental representations that you can begin to unlock the vast, untapped potential of your mind.
We see this with verbal memory. It is very difficult to memorize a random jumble of words. But when these same words are arranged into a grammatical and logically coherent sentence, most people are able to easily recite it back. This is because the sentence gives us a mental representation of the content within it: it provides context and meaning, which aids in memory. This ability to recognize meaningful patterns underlies the success of some of the world’s peak performers.
What are mental representations? At their most basic, mental representations are templates that correspond to objects, ideas, or anything else that the brain might be thinking about. You may not realize it, but you use mental images every day. Think about a famous image, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. When someone mentions it, you can “see” the painting in your mind’s eye—this is a mental representation. They are pre-existing patterns that are held in long-term memory, enabling us to overcome the limitations of short-term memory.
Mental representations provide meaning and context that aids us as we assimilate and process information. Language itself is a complex network of mental representations, with words (which are abstract) representing real-world things. A word like dog, when a child first hears it, means nothing: it’s just a catch-all label for something that shares a set of common characteristics (i.e., dogs are furry, they walk on all fours, and pant).
(Shortform note: Mental representations are closely related to the psychological concept of schemas, which are cognitive shortcuts that help us interpret and organize information. If we stick with the “dog” example, schemas explain why young children who are just learning to use language might call a cat a “dog”: they have developed a schema which tells them that dogs have fur and walk on all fours, thus they might put all such phenomena into their “dog” schema.)
But when the child learns more about dogs, she incorporates all this information into the word. When she hears it spoken, she no longer needs to search her memory to find all the relevant information about dogs: she has developed a full mental representation of what they are.
The key to peak performance is developing efficient and effective mental representations. But they are highly context-specific. The mental representations used by chess masters to envision the board and map out their opponents’ possible moves wouldn’t translate to a completely different game, like basketball. There are no “general skills.” When you practice, you are getting better at a specific thing: you’re becoming a better pole vaulter or basketball player, not a better all-around athlete.
Top performers are so good at what they do because they have superior mental representations. Years of practice have changed the circuitry in their brains, enabling them to create highly detailed and effective mental representations, aiding in memory, pattern recognition, and all the other highly developed abilities needed to be a top-ranked pitcher, chess player, or pianist.
A key part of forming good mental representations is the ability to recognize patterns where others see only random and formless data. Most of us are only seeing a collection of trees: experts see the forest.
In one experiment, the author and some colleagues showed soccer players video footage from a soccer match and then asked them to predict what was going to happen next on the field. The results showed that the more accomplished players were more accurate in their predictions of what the next move would be than were the less accomplished players participating in the experiment. The better players were able to take a full assessment of the conditions on the field and see patterns that enabled them to predict what the optimal next move would be. They had a mental representation of which players’ movements mattered the most, to whom they ought to pass the ball, and so on.
The same mental representations allow the most effective quarterbacks in American football to lead their teams to victory. They spend a great deal of time analyzing the video from previous games and from opponent’s games, seeking out patterns of play that will provide valuable information for the next match on the gridiron. This practice enables the quarterback to have a full picture of events on the field and allows him to make good decisions quickly.
This is because people have better mental representations—and therefore, greater comprehension—of subjects in which they are already knowledgeable. To someone who doesn’t understand soccer or American football, the action on the field seems like just a jumble of players running around. But to a skilled player, the play on the field fits into a neat pattern, from which they can make accurate judgments and predictions.
Indeed, skill/knowledge and mental representations reinforce one another: the more skilled or knowledgeable you are in a given subject, the more effective your mental representations will be, and vice versa.
The story of Russian chess master Alexander Alekhine shows how mental representations can drive extraordinary performance. In 1924, Alekhine played simultaneous games of chess against 26 opponents over a 12-hour period. He won 16, lost five, and played to a draw in another five. This record was remarkable, given how many factors he had to keep in mind at once—26 boards, 832 individual pieces, and 1,664 individual squares. This was “blindfold” chess: a game in which one of the players does not have the board in front of them, and must make all their moves and strategic calculations from memory.
How could this be possible? Through mental representations. Alekhine had developed the ability to visualize the entire chessboard in his memory and move the pieces around in his head. Interestingly, becoming a blindfold chess master was never his main focus. He had an early interest in chess as a child and had been purposefully practicing the game his entire life, taking on greater challenges and defeating stronger and stronger opponents.
Alekhine’s aptitude for blindfold chess grew out of this purposeful practice in standard, non-blindfold chess. Like many chess masters, his abilities in blindfold chess were a product of the years of experience he had in the game: because he knew it so well, he had the ability to draw an extraordinary mental representation of a chessboard in his mind and game out all the possible moves and countermoves he and his opponent could make—without even looking at the board.
Effective mental representations also explain much of the difference between good writers and mediocre ones. Most adults write during the course of a normal day, whether it’s a business memo or an email or a social media post. But expert writers employ very different methods from novices. Most novice writers simply write down all their ideas on a topic onto the page, with little organization or logic. It’s called “knowledge telling,” because it’s mainly just telling the reader whatever is in your head.
This is not what expert writers do. Experts, instead, employ mental representations. They start with an idea of what they want a piece of writing to accomplish, as well as the concepts and ideas they want to explore. Then, they sketch out or outline the basic skeletal structure of what they want to write. From there, they fill in the details and finer points within that outline.
Crucially, they also update or modify that outline when it proves to be ineffective. Indeed, this is a hallmark of all experts and peak performers. They constantly monitor and evaluate their performances, so that they can adjust their mental representations to make them more effective.
Mental representations aren’t just the results of expertise, as in the case of Alexander Alekhine. They are also effective tools for building that expertise in the first place. One study of beginner music students showed just how effective mental representations can be.
The researchers were measuring the degree of improvement that each student achieved, based on the number of mistakes they made on their instrument from one practice session to the next. There was some variety in the students’ performances—some continuously improved, while others seemed to reach plateaus, where they made the same mistakes repeatedly. As all of the students were clearly motivated to improve, the researchers concluded that the difference was in the quality of their mental representations: how effectively they “heard” the musical pieces in their minds.
The internationally known pianist Gabriela Imreh has a similar process when she is trying to master a new piece of music. She develops an “artistic image” of the piece, a representation of what it ought to sound like when she plays it. She derives this “artistic image” from reading the sheet music. After she creates her mental representation, she does the hard work of playing the piece until it fits the “image” of it in her head.
Having such a mental image also gives her a complete “roadmap” of the music, which enables her to experiment spontaneously with it and add her own interpretations, because she knows she can always find her way “back.” Like the London cabbies, her extensive knowledge and mental representation gives her the ability to not only perform the basic task, but also to add new variations and points of connection.
In the first chapter, we talked about purposeful practice: reaching new levels of performance by pushing yourself just beyond your comfort zone. But truly effective practice is more complicated than that. You need to go a step beyond even purposeful practice. You need to embrace deliberate practice.
Truly effective practice goes a step beyond purposeful practice, to deliberate practice. Working hard and pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, by themselves, are not enough. Deliberate practice builds on the principles of purposeful practice, but it applies them in a systematic, rigorous framework that leads to the level of performance we see from experts. Unlike purposeful practice, deliberate practice isn’t about fulfilling your potential—it’s about building it, making possible what was once impossible.
With deliberate practice, you are working with highly developed and well-accepted training methods that have been proven effective in getting results. These methods have been honed and perfected by those who came before you into a near-science. With purposeful practice, if you push yourself, you might see improvement. With deliberate practice, you’ll become an expert. There are a few key features of deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is defined by five characteristics that separate it from purposeful practice.
Thus, for deliberate practice to be effective, it’s best to employ it in the right field. Some pursuits, like playing in a rock band, are too subjective. There’s no clear definition of what constitutes a “good” or “great” band. There’s no clear-cut way to measure performance.
It’s also a slow, iterative process. Contrary to popular belief, there are no big leaps or breakthroughs. It’s grinding and painstaking, with progress being made in a series of little steps. What looks to an observer like a sudden leap forward is actually the last in a series of baby steps.
Critically, it depends on effective mental representations, which show you how to do your task properly and correct yourself when you make mistakes. And, as we’ve seen, mental representations and improved performance form a virtuous circle: the better you get, the more fleshed-out and detailed your mental representations will be, which, in turn, gives you the tools to improve even more.
Anders Ericsson studied the development of musical ability in violinists at the Berlin University of the Arts. He and his team of researchers grouped the students into three categories of ability: broadly speaking, they were “best,” “better,” and “good.” The purpose of the experiment was to try to understand what separated the outstanding musicians from those who were simply “good.” Was it a matter of innate talent, or was it a product of deliberate practice?
Given the extreme difficulty of playing the violin, it requires a great deal of solitary practice time to master the instrument. It is crucial to practice outside of scheduled sessions with one’s teacher. The students were honest with the researchers: the intensive solo practice sessions weren’t fun. It would have been much more pleasurable devoting that time to something else. But they saw practice as being crucial to their development as musicians, so they kept at it.
The researchers found that the only major difference among the three groups was how much time they devoted to solitary, deliberate practice. They calculated that the “good” students would practice an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they turned 18; the “better” students would practice an average of 5,301 hours; and the “best” students would practice an average of 7,410 hours.
There were no shortcuts to becoming an excellent violinist. All of the top achievers had devoted several thousand hours of practice to the instrument: none of them were “prodigies” who simply surpassed their peers without putting in any practice. The quality of practice was also crucial: the students were not merely repeating the same exercises over and over in their practice sessions. Instead, they were employing the principles of deliberate practice—precise goals, competitive focus, and operating within a time-tested training regimen based on the best practices of centuries of accumulated knowledge in the field.
If we look back to Steve’s experience with memorizing numbers, we’ll recall that he used purposeful practice. And, to be sure, it was very effective in getting him to memorize far larger strings of digits than he had been able to before: he went from being stuck at nine to memorizing an 82-digit sequence.
But the world’s best digit memorizers have performances that far outshine Steve’s. Feng Wang of China, for example, has proven able to recall up to 300 digits! How is this possible? Feng is using deliberate practice, applying the known techniques of the world’s greatest digit memorizers.
In his case, the technique is about developing a mental representation for all 100 possible pairs of two digits from 00 to 99. Each of these pairs represents some symbol or object. For example, 63 is a banana and 89 is a monk. He is thus able to break down long strings of numbers into more meaningful, context-specific chunks of information, which aids in memorization. He then places them in a specific location within his mental map (a pot, let’s say). Thus, the four-digit string “6389” isn’t a meaningless jumble of numbers, it’s “banana” and “monk,” and when he retrieves them from his mental map, it’s “There is a banana in the pot; the monk splits the banana.”
But what if you want to improve in a field that doesn’t quite have the same clear-cut standards for excellent performance that a field like classical music does? How do you find the experts after which you should model your training?
If this is the case, try to get as close as you can to finding who the experts are in your field. Although it is subjective and therefore liable to error, you can usually start with identifying people who have been acknowledged as exceptional by their peers. For example, while there are no defined criteria for what makes a good screenwriter, people whose work has been critically acclaimed and commands the respect of people who are knowledgeable about the field would be reasonably good candidates to consider as experts.
Once you’ve identified your experts (or at least the next best thing), you should investigate how they achieved their level of performance. Again, this may be difficult because of the important role that we know mental representations play in achieving this level of mastery. Because it’s such an internal process, it’s difficult for an outsider to learn about someone else’s mental representations simply by observing that person. Moreover, one expert’s mental representations may be very different from another’s.
But if you can’t unlock their precise mental representations, you can usually study how they train. You may not be able to know exactly what they’re thinking, but you can certainly find out what they’re doing. Hone in on the things they’re doing differently from everyone else and try to replicate it. If you see that it’s working, great, keep doing it! If it’s proving to be ineffective, try something else.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become great in essentially every field of human endeavor. It’s appealing because it’s simple to remember and posits an easy cause-and-effect relationship.
But it isn’t true: it’s a gross oversimplification of the accepted research on the effects of deliberate practice. What Gladwell did was extrapolate the data that Anders Ericsson (the author of Peak) compiled from the study of the violin students, which we discussed earlier in this summary. If you’ll recall, the results of that study showed that the best violin students would practice around 7,400 hours by the time they turned 18—Gladwell simply extended that rate of practice to the age of 20 to get the 10,000 hours figure, because it was a nice, round number.
But there’s nothing particularly significant about the figure of 10,000 hours. Moreover, the number (if there can even be said to be such a number) varies greatly from field to field. Digit-memorization at the level of a Feng Wang takes far fewer hours of practice than becoming a concert violinist.
Also, Gladwell’s figure treats “practice” as monolithic: he makes no distinction between different kinds of practice. But as we’ve seen, quality of practice matters more than quantity. Sitting in your room and merely repeating the same lesson over and over again for a set number of hours is far different from true deliberate practice, which makes use of clear goals and effective mental representations, in which you address weaknesses and make specific improvements. Not all practice is created equal.
(Shortform note: We believe that Ericsson misconstrued Malcolm Gladwell’s point. In Outliers, Gladwell was arguing that if 10,000 hours of practice are required to achieve mastery, only the privileged have the resources, free time, and parental support to devote to practice, especially as children. Gladwell’s focus wasn’t on the particular number of hours or the type of practice. Read more in our summary of Outliers.)
So far, we’ve been analyzing the performances of individuals in elite or esoteric fields—classical music, blindfold chess, digit memorization. Obviously, most of us aren’t trying to be orchestra musicians, chess masters, or digit memorization champions. But you can apply the principles of deliberate practice and mental representations to many everyday fields to improve your performance. In time, you can improve to the point where you can train others and bring them up to your level of performance—strengthening your entire organization.
Improvement is only possible if you and your organization let go of some popular myths about practice and human importance.
The first is the highly deterministic idea that your abilities are limited by your genetic characteristics. This is the old idea about “natural” talent: some people simply have it, and others don’t. It shows up in the defeatist statements people make when they don’t immediately achieve what they set out to: “I can’t manage people,” “I’m just not that creative,” or “I’m just not a math person.” We know this isn’t true: outside of people who suffer from severe physical or mental limitations, with the right practice, just about anyone can improve in any area they choose.
The second myth is the Gladwell-inspired idea that if you do something enough times, or for long enough, that you’ll automatically improve. But this is just a naive form of practice: repeating the same thing in the same way over and over again is hardly a recipe for success, no matter how many times you do it. While no one would deny the importance of hard work, this is far from being the only part of the equation. Simply “trying harder,” by itself, will not yield the desired results. There’s usually a right way and wrong way to do something. If you’re doing something the wrong way, but “trying harder,” you won’t see much difference (and, in fact, you might make things worse by doubling down on your faulty approach).
Most people engaged in business or regular 9-5 jobs don’t devote outside time to honing their skills, the way an aspiring violinist or chess master might. The key, then, is to use that time at the office and transform it into an opportunity for learning and skill-building. One company, Blue Bunny Ice Cream, used its regular meetings between regional sales managers and the senior sales manager to stage role-playing exercises, in which the regional sales manager practices making their pitch to a customer and receives feedback on their approach. This not only helps refine the skills needed for the next call with a customer, but it also gets everyone in the company used to the idea of practicing itself—it just becomes a normal part of the business day.
A good way to employ purposeful practice in the professions is to allow people to practice their skills in a mock scenario. They can practice over and over again, receive lots of feedback, and perfect their skills without the usual costs of failure.
The U.S. Navy’s Top Gun Program was established in this spirit, allowing fighter pilots to hone their shooting skills in a simulated environment (without actual missiles or bullets) and push themselves right up to the edge of failure, without having to worry about actually killing or dying, as they might in a typical air battle. The program was a great success, substantially increasing the “kills-per-engagement” statistics of the pilots who participated in the program.
These sorts of simulation programs are particularly effective in fields where there is a real life-and-death cost of failure. You want professionals to be able to practice effectively and frequently, without the training itself carrying the potentially severe costs of failure. Military technique is one such field. Another is medicine.
In diagnosing breast cancer, radiologists are tasked with interpreting x-rays to determine whether or not cancerous cells are present. Their task is made all the more difficult by the fact that they seldom receive effective feedback on their diagnoses. Cancer is typically present in only a very small percentage of mammograms—four to eight out of every thousand.
And even when a radiologist does identify cells that might be cancerous, those results are usually sent to the patient’s personal doctor; the radiologist isn’t usually told what the final results of the biopsy are, so they don’t know if their analysis was correct or not. Based on what we know about how deliberate practice works, this is not a recipe for improved performance. And the evidence does indeed suggest that radiologists typically don’t improve with more experience.
Anders Ericsson suggested a way to correct this, by establishing a digital library of past mammogram images from patients whose subsequent medical history was known—whether or not they ultimately developed breast cancer, and if they did, how the disease progressed. This library could then be turned into a training tool for radiologists, in which they could look at the images to determine whether or not they represented the tissue of a patient who had cancer—and receive immediate feedback on the accuracy of their analysis. Such a program has been set up for radiologists in Australia, as well as a similar one in New York for pediatric ankle x-rays. Happily, these programs have proven successful in increasing the accuracy of the doctors’ diagnoses.
Simulative training modules could be applied across a wide variety of fields, from tax accountants to government intelligence analysts. They could be tailored to suit the needs or challenges of different fields and even different individual practitioners. They could be designed to address the most common and dangerous errors, training practitioners to focus their energies on those and develop effective mental representations for overcoming them.
Deliberate practice is about action—what you’re able to do is more important than what you know. Indeed, this gets at the heart of what makes deliberate practice unique: it’s about building skills, not knowledge. This sets it apart from most other theories of teaching, which place their emphasis on knowledge, which is much easier to impart to students than skill-building. But deliberate practice gives primacy to improving actual performance.
The lack of skills-oriented deliberate practice has real consequences, particularly in the medical field. Much of the education future doctors receive in medical school, internships, and residencies is purely knowledge-based. This process alone can take up to 15 years. And while the knowledge they gain through these years of schooling is undoubtedly important, little of this education is focused on the actual practice of medicine—only comparatively late in this process will they receive clinical training and experience.
Once they become full-fledged doctors, they are deemed to have received all the training and skills they need to treat patients and can begin practicing medicine. But their practice of medicine is usually routine and undifferentiated: they are doing the same tasks over and over again, receiving little feedback, and not engaging in much that will actually teach them new skills or challenge them to refine existing ones.
Therefore, it is unsurprising that one study found increased experience in practicing medicine to have no positive effect on performance—in fact, older doctors were less knowledgeable and performed worse than younger doctors with fewer years of experience. Clearly, the “practice” that medical professionals receive in the course of their day-to-day work is ineffective. Another study, at the University of Toronto, found that the most impactful programs for sharpening and developing the skills of practicing doctors were those featuring some sort of interactive component—role-play, simulation, discussion groups, and hands-on clinical training.
The least effective programs, meanwhile, were those focused on didactic or knowledge-based instruction, usually involving doctors sitting at a conference and listening to a lecture. These offer little opportunity for feedback and correcting mistakes. Unfortunately, such programs are what much of the medical profession’s “continuing education” consists of.
We can see these principles in action in a study that examined the performances of surgeons specializing in the treatment of prostate cancer. The results confirmed the value of hands-on practice. Relatively inexperienced surgeons saw cancer reappear in their patients at nearly double the rate of surgeons with more experience. The specific experience gained in performing hundreds or even thousands of prostatectomies had honed the expert surgeons’ skills to the point where there was a marked difference in their patients’ health outcomes.
The clear benefits of practical experience in a field like surgery, which requires the utmost precision of technique, are obvious. One study of laparoscopic surgeons attempted to discover what their thought processes were when they made their decisions in the course of surgery. The actual surgery rarely went exactly according to plan—there were always unexpected developments that arose during the course of the procedure that required the surgeons to think on their feet, come up with alternatives, and reevaluate their approach. Their mental representations were critical: having a complete mental map of the surgery enabled these practitioners engage in adaptive thinking and come up with creative solutions.
Training programs in such fields should be based in deliberate practice, helping surgeons attain expert status as quickly as possible. Such endeavors should also make an effort to understand the mental representations used by the acknowledged experts in a field.
Although there are many conceivable measures by which a surgeon’s performance might be measured, it is certainly possible to identify at least those surgeons whose performances and results are consistently better than those of their peers.
Although the details of their responses were specific to the context of laparoscopic surgery, the main takeaways are universally applicable—the surgeons developed mental representations or roadmaps of the environment inside the patient’s body, recognized unexpected situations, evaluated possible responses to those situations, and selected the best one. Adaptive thinking is critical, but it can only come from the experience and skill-building that deliberate practice and effective mental representations produce.
Most of us have dreams. Some people would like to become experts in golf and make the PGA Tour. Others want to master the Japanese martial art of karate and attain black belt status. And most of us are dissuaded from pursuing those dreams because we have bought into the idea that we just aren’t good enough or don’t have the natural talent to perform at these levels.
But this notion is false. Through deliberate practice, you can take control of your life and fulfill your untapped potential.
The first step is to find a good teacher. Deliberate practice requires structure and feedback—you need someone who is well-versed in your field who can point out when you’re making mistakes and devise a practice regimen that will push and challenge you. And remember, the best teachers are not always themselves the best performers. Indeed, many experts make terrible teachers.
(Shortform note: We see this in sports all the time, with great players who prove to be utter flops as coaches. Wayne Gretzky, for example, is widely regarded as the greatest player ever to play in the National Hockey League. But he was a disappointment as a coach, posting a decidedly mediocre .436 win percentage over four seasons as head coach of the Phoenix Coyotes.)
When looking for your teacher, try to avoid overly subjective criteria (online ratings sites like ratemyprofessors.com, for example, are notorious for being biased in favor of teachers who are fun, personable, or physically attractive, rather than effective teachers). You should find someone who has established skills and a strong background in the field you wish to pursue, and one who will help you develop your own mental representations and focus on the specific areas in which you need the most improvement. You may also need to switch teachers at some point, especially if you notice that you have stopped improving.
If you don’t have a teacher, can’t find one, or can’t afford one, you can still apply most of the principles of deliberate practice to your routine. Try to do something that you’re currently unable to do, take yourself out of your comfort zone, and practice it again and again—not through unthinking repetition, but with a keen focus on exactly how you’re doing it and where you’re specifically coming up short. The Internet can be a great tool for finding the most effective training techniques in most disciplines. If we look at the example of Benjamin Franklin, we see how effective this approach can be—even without a teacher.
Benjamin Franklin, the renowned 18th- century polymath and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, taught himself to become an effective and skilled writer without the aid of a teacher because he was intensely focused and disciplined in the pursuit of this goal. He had been inspired by the quality of prose in a British magazine he read, and he wanted to perfect his own writing. Without access to a teacher, he put the principles of deliberate practice into action all on his own.
His method was to try to replicate the sentences and paragraphs in the magazine after they had left his short-term memory. To help himself, he wrote short summaries of the magazine’s content, so he could be reminded of the meaning of each sentence. His goal was never to reproduce the work of the magazine word-for-word. Rather, Franklin was attempting to create his own articles in his own words that were just as detailed, witty, and skillfully written as the original.
When he compared his work to the original, he would identify common instances where his writing fell short, and refine this practice technique to focus on those particular weaknesses. In this way, he acted as his own teacher, giving himself feedback and perfecting his deliberate practice regimen.
For example, he found that one of his shortcomings was his immediate vocabulary—it wasn’t as large or extensive as the writers of the magazine. He knew all the words they used, but never had all of them in his mind, at his immediate disposal. To correct this, he added a new component to his deliberate practice regimen. He transformed the articles from prose to poetic verse, reasoning that the rhyming and metric demands of poetry would force him to use a greater variety of words. Then, once he had forgotten the original phrasing of the article, he would translate his poems back to prose in his own words.
Focus and engagement are key. Remember, if your mind is wandering elsewhere, you’re not truly engaging in deliberate practice and you’ll be unlikely to see any improvement. To really tap into your potential, your practice sessions away from your teacher will be intensive, rigorously focused, and unfortunately, not always fun—you probably won’t become a chess master by playing friendly, non-competitive matches in the park; you’re not going to become a bowling pro by heading to the bowling alley with your friends once a week. Short, intense training sessions with clear goals are the most effective way to quickly develop new skills.
Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin attributes her success to this sort of intense focus. She used to spend hours and hours every week practicing her strokes, but would often become bored and distracted by the repetitive nature of what she was doing—because she wasn’t engaged in deliberate practice. She was just mindlessly performing the same moves over and over again, instead of developing a mental representation of what her body felt like when she performed a “perfect” stroke and honing her technique until she fulfilled that mental ideal.
This realization inspired Coughlin to alter her practice regimen. Her sessions would now be focused on building specific skills, instead of working toward a vague overall “improvement.” She began cutting the excess time from her practices and used the remaining time to rigorously focus on improving her form. As with all deliberate practice, focus and quality are far more important than repetition and quantity.
How do you remain motivated throughout a long and intensive deliberate practice regimen? How do you avoid succumbing to the mental and physical exhaustion and just giving up? Deliberate practice is highly effective, but can be grueling—many people simply cannot maintain focus and discipline, especially when they reach temporary plateaus (which are usually a cue to intensify and up the ante with their practice regimen) or don’t see immediate performance improvement.
Is it simply that the people who maintain deliberate practice just enjoy it more? Not if you believe the results of a study of Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants. According to that study, the contestants didn’t like studying at all. What distinguished the best spellers, in fact, was their ability to stick to the task despite the unappealing nature of spelling practice. So why did they keep doing it? Because they had the motivation to do so.
Motivativation itself, of course, varies greatly from person to person. For some, it’s entirely intrinsic: they just have an intense desire to be a track runner, a violinist, a chess master. For others, it’s more grounded in immediate or material goals, i.e., they want to improve their public speaking skills so they can advance in their career and earn more money.
Sometimes, seeing the improvement itself can be a powerful motivator—you see that you’re getting better and want to push yourself harder to improve even more. This convinces you that you can succeed, which inspires you to keep going.
The evidence argues against what many people believe—that there is an ingrained or natural quality of “grit” or “stick-to-itiveness.” People who are experts are usually experts in one particular field: they were motivated to practice and excel in one pursuit that interested or motivated them, not in all endeavors. Chess masters who apply rigorous deliberate practice to reach the pinnacle of performance in their field don’t usually apply that same discipline to other things, like swimming or karate. This situational dependence renders the idea of a generic “willpower” trait highly dubious.
Moreover, belief in such a trait leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy: your unwillingness to practice leads you to conclude that you lack the necessary willpower, which causes you to further avoid practice, which means you don’t improve. It leads to defeatism and an unwillingness to try.
One good way to reduce the desire to quit is to set aside allotted time each day, devoted solely to deliberate practice, with full concentration—and that means turning off the computer, smartphone, TV, or anything else that can be a distraction. An hour is usually a good amount of time, as it’s hard to maintain concentration for longer than that and you’ll experience burnout if you push yourself too hard.
Clear your schedule so that there is nothing else to do during this time other than practice—the Berlin violin students we saw earlier used the early morning for their practice sessions, a time when they had nothing else to do. This sort of time management limits the temptation of other activities, while also ensuring that your practice sessions don’t consume other aspects of your life.
Belief in one’s own abilities may be the most powerful motivator of all. The Swedish middle-distance runner Gunder Hägg was trained, in part, by his father. As a boy, young Gunder would run through the woods near the family’s home, while his father would time his results. What the boy didn’t know was that his father would tell him that his times were far better than they actually were: if Gunder really completed the run in 5 minutes and 50 seconds, his father would tell him that his finishing time was 4 minutes and 50 seconds.
In his autobiography, written after he had become one of Sweden’s most famous athletes, Gunder cited his father’s ruse as a key motivator. He believed that he had a bright future as a runner, so he was inspired and motivated to work harder and harder to beat his previous records.
Motivation can also be extrinsic, fueled by a desire for praise and recognition from others. If this is what motivates you, you should surround yourself with people who will support you in your pursuits. If we return to the example of the Berlin violin students from Chapter 2, it’s no coincidence that these top achievers were spending their time with fellow music students. It was mutually reinforcing, as the students appreciated and encouraged one another’s passion for music.
In the same spirit, Benjamin Franklin formed an intellectual club, called the “Junto” in his home city of Philadelphia. Members of the Junto were the city’s leading thought leaders across a wide variety of fields. In their meetings, members would discuss the leading intellectual topics of the day. They benefited from debating and conversing with some of the finest minds of the era. Everyone was focused on self-improvement and intellectual growth. Franklin applied deliberate practice to the Junto as well, challenging himself to ask at least one interesting question each week—even if the topic was one in which he wasn’t already well-versed.
Think about how you can more effectively use the principles of deliberate practice.
What are your biggest sources of distraction when you’re trying to practice?
Based on what you’ve read, what strategies can you employ to block out these distractions and maintain focus on your practice?
What is your biggest motivator as you pursue your goals?
Knowing what you now know about deliberate practice, what changes can you make in your life to ensure that you receive more of the reinforcement and motivation that is most effective for you?
How do the world’s top performers do what they do? In this chapter, we’re going to examine what is required to fully tap into the potential of the human mind and body. This is usually a process that people begin when they’re still children, continuing through adolescence and into early adulthood until true mastery is attained. But expert performers don’t just stop when they reach a certain level of skill. They keep going, constantly striving to improve their practice routines in the quest to get better and better.
In a study at the University of Chicago, one researcher looked at top achievers in music, swimming, tennis, mathematics, neurology, and sculpture. He found that they had common childhood experiences which exerted a meaningful impact on their subsequent records of achievement.
As children, they had all been introduced to their field of interest in a fun, playful way. Their parents provided them the time, attention, and encouragement to engage with it further. Indeed, the study found that the parents themselves were likely to be highly achievement-oriented. Crucially, the parents supplemented the child’s initial curiosity-driven motivation with praise.
The children at this stage didn’t engage in deliberate practice—yet. But they did creatively come up with activities that incorporated some elements of training. The hockey great Mario Lemieux, for example, regularly skated around with his two older brothers on a makeshift “rink” in the basement of the family home (using a bottle cap as a puck and kitchen spoons as hockey sticks). Like Lemieux, many future experts had older siblings to look up to and use as models for improving their own performance. Even the great Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had his older sister, Maria Anna, who inspired him to pursue music.
For people who went on to dominate in fields like advanced mathematics or neurology (which, unlike chess, music, or hockey, are fairly inaccessible to young children), the parents introduced the children to the general idea of intellectual pursuit, rather than the particular subject matter itself. They also encouraged the children to build models or conduct science projects as part of their play.
With this foundation in early childhood, the study found that the future experts then took it to the next level, taking real lessons from a coach or teacher. These instructors knew how to properly motivate their young students and guide them along the path of deliberate practice. Praise from their teachers for reaching new levels of performance was a key ingredient in the early careers of these future experts.
Parents still played an important role in this stage of development. They sometimes exerted harsh pressure on their children to maintain their practice schedule—threatening to cut off piano lessons or not take the child to their swim lessons unless they committed to deliberate practice at home.
Eventually, the encouragement of parents and teachers yielded to more intrinsic, self-directed motivation: the students began to enjoy the fruits of their labor and wanted to experience it more. They relished being seen as a swimmer or a tennis player or a musician. It became a major part of their identity and self-conception. They also began to seek out the company of people with similar interests and motivations, while also looking for the best teachers they could find.
As they got even older, the future experts truly committed to their field, being willing to pay high prices and endure difficult sacrifices to pursue their dreams. In seeking out the best coaches, many of them moved to other parts of the country. Elite tennis players, for example, make significant financial investments in their training—the IMG Academy in Florida charges in excess of $70,000 for tuition, room, and board.
One of the main benefits of starting young is the fact that children and adolescents have fairly few time constraints that inhibit their ability to commit lots of hours to purposeful practice. Outside of school, their time is fairly unlimited, as opposed to adults, who must juggle the responsibilities of work and family.
This is the main barrier adults face, not physical or mental limitation. Nevertheless, there are some limitations that come with age, which can’t be surmounted, no matter how much deliberate practice one devotes to overcoming them. Physical performance, for example, tends to peak around age 20. After that point, flexibility decreases and muscles become more prone to injury. Moreover, some physical skills can’t be developed past a certain age, because skeletal structure is already set in place. Thus, if you start training to become an Olympic swimmer at age 50, you probably won’t succeed.
Similarly, researchers have found that the corpus callosum, a part of the brain that serves as a communication path between the right and left hemispheres, is significantly larger in adult musicians who started practicing before the age of seven—and smaller in both non-musicians and musicians who first picked up their instruments after this age.
Or we can look at gray matter, the tissue that connects neurons in the brain. The brain has the most gray matter during adolescence, after which it begins to diminish. Thus, a two-year-old child has about 50 times as many synapses (junctions between brain cells, which enhance learning) as an adult. But people who have learned a second language have been found to have retained more gray matter—and this is even more true for people who became bilingual early in life.
It is not the case, however, that adults are incapable of mastering new skills later in life.
Even as an adult, you can achieve expertise if you’re willing to put in the deliberate practice to do so. And deliberate practice is something that everyone can do.
Perfect pitch—the ability to recognize any note on the musical scale without using a reference note—is thought to be either a rare talent that some are simply born with, or a skill that can only be perfected if one starts in childhood. As the example of Paul Brady shows, both notions are false.
Brady was a 32-year-old man who decided that he wanted to learn perfect pitch, a skill that had eluded him throughout his life. He worked with a tone generator, a computer program that produced random pure tones (unlike the notes on a piano, which produced multiple frequencies).
At first, he practiced with the C note, reasoning that he could use that note as a base from which to recognize all the other notes on the scale. Brady stuck to the principles of deliberate practice, setting aside time each day to work on his project. The software was likewise written with these ideals in mind—as he got better and better at identifying C, the program began generating fewer and fewer of them and producing more of the other notes. This was deliberate practice in a nutshell: pushing Brady to challenge himself more after every improvement.
And the results showed. After two months, when his wife played individual notes on the piano, Brady was able to correctly guess 37 out of 55. And those he got wrong were only off by half a note. This performance met the standard of perfect pitch. Brady had taught himself to do something that was thought to be unteachable.
One of the most enduring beliefs is the idea that some people are born with natural talent that enables them to excel in a particular field with comparatively little effort. In fact, innate characteristics play a much smaller role in determining performance than most people believe. Great performers and great performances are the product of long, careful, and deliberate practice. The idea of prodigies is revealed as being largely a myth, now that we have an understanding of how deliberate practice works.
There is usually a wide variability in the performance level of beginners in most fields. Some seem to excel easily, while others struggle at the outset. This also contributes to the idea that some people are just born with innate talent. But this is false. One study of young chess players, for example, showed that the amount of chess practice performed by a student was far more correlated with high scores than raw intelligence (as measured by IQ scores).
In fact, among the best-performing players, high IQ was negatively correlated with high scores in chess. The researchers found that the lower-IQ members of this elite group within the study were more likely to devote time to deliberate practice—and practice simply counted for far more than intelligence. The quality of mental representations that these elite players developed through deliberate practice was a far more important factor in their success than anything else, rendering other characteristics far less statistically significant.
The idea of prodigies is highly appealing. People want to believe in something magical or divine and reject the notion that so many wonderful parts of the human experience can be explained through science, reason, and observation. But while such a belief does speak to the unquenchable human need for mystery and wonder, it is actually quite limiting. Accepting that some people simply have natural talent and others don’t might discourage you from even trying to fulfill your dreams: “I’m not good at this, so why bother?”
And it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—people who develop the idea that they’re “bad” at something never practice, and, therefore, never get good at it. The opposite is also true. Children who show some early promise in music, mathematics, or athletics tend to be lavished with attention and praise from teachers and parents and receive more training and resources to help them develop their skills than children who struggle. The “gifted” students don’t possess some innate ability that others don’t, they’re just (mistakenly) given more of an opportunity to develop. This is truly tragic—the world has likely been deprived of the talents of countless people who were deemed at an early age to be “no good” at things.
And we know from our study of deliberate practice that improvement—even great improvement—in almost any field is possible for nearly everyone who is willing to stick with it and push themselves a little further after each incremental improvement. This is a far more inspiring and empowering idea than a belief in natural talent—it shows us the true power of the human body and mind.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is often regarded as the very embodiment of a musical prodigy, someone whose extraordinary artistic accomplishments at such a young age can only be explained by some inimitable talent within him. At the age of six, he was already dazzling audiences with his skills on a grand European tour in which he showcased his—allegedly— original compositions.
But Mozart had something that counted a lot more than raw talent. He had a father, Leopold, who was himself an accomplished musician and who was highly motivated to have his young son become a great figure in the annals of musical history. The elder Mozart had even written a book about teaching music to children. We know that he began his son’s training before the boy was even four—ample time for Wolfgang to soak up important hours of deliberate practice in his formative years, as he taught the young man multiple instruments, as well as how to listen to and analyze music.
Thus, the claims about Mozart’s childhood compositions are likely exaggerated. His early childhood compositions are actually written in his father’s handwriting—a clue that perhaps the elder Mozart played a larger role in this stage of his son’s career than history cares to remember. Musicologists have also discovered that these compositions were derivative, based mainly on the work of obscure composers.
In fact, they were probably training exercises that Leopold gave to his son, the best surviving evidence of Mozart’s deliberate practice. In fact, the first serious work that can be unequivocally attributed to him came when he was in his teens—after a decade of purposeful practice. Still a remarkable achievement, but not quite the child prodigy that legend has made him out to be.
People with savant syndrome are said to possess extraordinary talents, for which there is no rational explanation. Whether it is arithmetic calculation, musical proficiency, sculpture, or any other highly specific area, these individuals display an extraordinary aptitude. People with savant syndrome are usually mentally challenged in some way, often through severe autism. With such mental limitations, it often seems as if the achievements of people with savant syndrome came about without the sort of deliberate practice one would expect.
But this is not the case. Savants have worked hard and practiced to reach their level of performance, the same as everyone else. One study from the UK looked at autistic children, comparing savants and non-savants. The results showed that the savants were much more likely to be highly detail-oriented and prone to repetitive behaviors—qualities which would certainly aid in one’s ability to engage in successful deliberate practice.
One autistic savant, named Donny, is the world’s most accomplished calendar calculator—he is able to tell you the day of the week for any date (no matter how far into the future or far back into the past) and can do it faster and more accurately than anyone who’s ever been recorded. How does he do this? Through plain deliberate practice and mental representation.
Donny is fixated upon, perhaps even addicted to, dates. He has all 14 possible annual calendars memorized—the seven which correspond to each of the days of the week on which January 1 can fall, as well as the corresponding leap year calendars. Once he has these calendars memorized, it’s a matter of using this mental representation to find the date and day of the week that he is asked to retrieve. If you ask him, for example, what day of the week July 13, 1987 was, he will first determine which of the 14 calendars the year 1987 corresponds to. From there, he can use his memory of the calendars to determine the day of the week to which that date corresponds.
It is an impressive skill, to be sure, but one borne of years of deliberate practice and the development of a memory-retrieval system of mental representation (not dissimilar to Feng Wang’s digit memorization process of imagining bananas and monks). It is not a product of some inexplicable natural talent.
Clearly, deliberate practice has the potential to unleash the full power of human ability. This could have world-changing implications across every field of human endeavor. So how do we start putting it into practice?
We should start with education. Unlike chess, athletics, or music, everyone is affected by the quality of education they receive. Improvements in education—training people to be more effective teachers and showing them how to teach the principles of deliberate practice to their students—could have a powerful effect. The key is focusing teaching on the acquisition of skills rather than the accumulation of knowledge. What you do matters more than what you know.
This should be the basis of the lesson plans that teachers draw up for their students. Crucial to all of this is the development of effective mental representations and a conceptual, holistic understanding of the subject matter.
One experiment examined the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching physics to college freshmen. The experimental group of students participated in a training module that focused on student-led discussion groups, in which the students discussed and debated physics questions amongst each other. The researchers found that students who participated in this module were much more active participants in class than students who were taught through a traditional lecture-and-test program. This was because students in the experimental group had to use their physics knowledge. They were engaging in deliberate practice and forming mental representations, whereas students in the traditional program were only gaining knowledge, not the skills to apply it. Students in the experimental group demonstrated a better understanding of the core concepts of physics, which also enabled them to perform far better than their peers on tests.
Moreover, teaching skills through deliberate practice is not mutually exclusive with knowledge. As the students practice applying their skills, they will gain new knowledge along the way. Teaching students how expertise works and how they can direct much of their own skill-building through purposeful practice is one of the most fulfilling lessons we can impart to them.
Through embracing these principles, we could create a far more prosperous and happy world, one in which everyone honed their skills to reach the same level of elite performance as a Mozart or Alekhine. It would have an enormously positive impact on technology, healthcare, public service, and countless other fields. The lesson is clear. Fulfill your untapped potential. Work hard and practice to take control of your life and become whatever it is you wish to be. Your future is entirely in your hands.
Think about the main takeaways from Peak.
Briefly explain why the belief in “natural talent” can be destructive and harmful.
How does deliberate practice differ from what most people think of as “practice?”
Have you ever been told you couldn’t do something because you weren’t talented enough? Briefly describe the situation.
Based on what you’ve read, do you accept the idea that you lack the talent to do something you want to do? Explain why or why not.