PEAK by Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

• But since the 1990s brain researchers have come to realize that the brain—even the adult brain—is far more adaptable than anyone ever imagined, and this gives us a tremendous amount of control over what our brains are able to do. In particular, the brain responds to the right sorts of triggers by rewiring itself in various ways. New connections are made between neurons, while existing connections can be strengthened or weakened, and in some parts of the brain it is even possible for new neurons to grow.
• We can’t yet identify exactly which circuits those are or say what they look like or exactly what they do, but we know they must be there—and we know that they are the product of the training, not of some inborn genetic programming.
• This loss is part of a broader phenomenon—that is, that both the brain and the body are more adaptable in young children than in adults, so there are certain abilities that can only be developed, or that are more easily developed, before the age of six or twelve or eighteen. Still, both the brain and the body retain a great deal of adaptability throughout adulthood, and this adaptability makes it possible for adults, even older adults, to develop a wide variety of new capabilities with the right training.
• Over my years of studying experts in various fields, I have found that they all develop their abilities in much the same way that Sakakibara’s students did—through dedicated training that drives changes in the brain (and sometimes, depending on the ability, in the body) that make it possible for them to do things that they otherwise could not.
• But the clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of “gifted” people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.
• But we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones.
• Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential.
• The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.
• More than two decades ago, after studying expert performers from a wide range of fields, my colleagues and I came to realize that no matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles. We named this universal approach “deliberate practice.”
• Today deliberate practice remains the gold standard for anyone in any field who wishes to take advantage of the gift of adaptability in order to build new skills and abilities, and it is the main concern of this book.
• There are some inherited physical characteristics, such as height and body size, that can influence performance in various sports and other physical activities and that cannot be changed by practice.
• Some genetic factors may influence a person’s ability to engage in sustained deliberate practice—for instance, by limiting a person’s capability to focus for long periods of time every day.
• And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these “expert performers,” to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.
• The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible.
• There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named “deliberate practice” back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.
• We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn, from baking a pie to writing a descriptive paragraph. We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic. And there’s nothing wrong with that. For much of what we do in life, it’s perfectly fine to reach a middling level of performance and just leave it like that.
• But there is one very important thing to understand here: once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving.
• But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.
• Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call “naive practice,” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.
• Purposeful practice is, as the term implies, much more purposeful, thoughtful, and focused than this sort of naive practice. In particular, it has the following characteristics:
• Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.
• Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
• Break it down and make a plan:
• The key thing is to take that general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.
• Purposeful practice is focused.
• You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
• Purposeful practice involves feedback.
• You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.
• Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback—either from yourself or from outside observers—you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.
• Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.
• This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
• Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be able to do it. Finding ways around these barriers is one of the hidden keys to purposeful practice.
• Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.” It is a technique issue, in other words.
• The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them.
• And sometimes it turns out that a barrier is more psychological than anything else.
• Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles—points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through.
• One caveat here is that while it is always possible to keep going and keep improving, it is not always easy. Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is hard work, and it is generally not fun.
• Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.
• So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
• There is an important lesson here: Although it is generally possible to improve to a certain degree with focused practice and staying out of your comfort zone, that’s not all there is to it. Trying hard isn’t enough. Pushing yourself to your limits isn’t enough. There are other, equally important aspects to practice and training that are often overlooked.
• You don’t develop a six-pack on your forehead. And because you can’t see any changes in your brain, it’s easy to assume that there really isn’t much going on.
• In short, the human body is incredibly adaptable. It is not just the skeletal muscles, but also the heart, the lungs, the circulatory system, the body’s energy stores, and more—everything that goes into physical strength and stamina. There may be limits, but there is no indication that we have reached them yet.
• occurs. If you practice something enough, your brain will repurpose neurons to help with the task even if they already have another job to do.
• The human body has a preference for stability.
• This is the general pattern for how physical activity creates changes in the body: when a body system—certain muscles, the cardiovascular system, or something else—is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis.
• This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.
• If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.
• This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.
• One major difference between the body and the brain is that the cells in the adult brain do not generally divide and form new brain cells.
• Even in the case of what we usually think of as purely “physical skills,” such as swimming or gymnastics, the brain plays a major role because these activities require careful control of the body’s movements, and research has found that practice produces brain changes.
• Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.
• A second detail worth noting is that developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area.
• Finally, the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away.
• Strength fades. Speed diminishes. Endurance wilts. And something similar is true with the brain.
• The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.”
• “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.
• The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone.
• With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt.
• Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters. You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis—not the amount of time spent playing chess with others—is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability.
• A master who examines a chess position sees a collection of chunks that are interacting with other chunks in still other patterns.
• there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
• What exactly is being changed in the brain with deliberate practice? The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.
• In pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well developed mental representations. In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees.
• Again, better mental representations lead to better performance.
• For the experts we just described, the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it. The same is true for all experts—and most of us are experts at something, whether we realize it or not.
• The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.
• More generally, mental representations can be used to plan a wide variety of areas, and the better the representation, the more effective the planning.
• The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.
• The key change that occurs in our adaptable brains in response to deliberate practice is the development of better mental representations, which in turn open up new possibilities for improved performance.
• Indeed, any expert in any field can be rightly seen as a high-achieving intellectual where that field is concerned.
• In every area, some approaches to training are more effective than others.
• if there is no agreement on what good performance is and no way to tell what changes would improve performance, then it is very difficult—often impossible—to develop effective training methods.
• If you don’t know for sure what constitutes improvement, how can you develop methods to improve
• The improvement of skills and the development of training techniques move forward hand in hand, with new training techniques leading to new levels of accomplishment and new accomplishments generating innovations in training.
• Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve.
• The other crucial finding was that there was only one major difference among the three groups. This was the total number of hours that the students had devoted to solitary practice.
• you generally find that the best performers are those who have spent the most time in various types of purposeful practice.
• No matter which area you study—music, dance, sports, competitive games, or anything else with objective measures of performance—you find that the top performers have devoted a tremendous amount of time to developing their abilities.
• The improvement in performance generally has gone hand in hand with the development of teaching methods, and today anyone who wishes to become an expert in these fields will need an instructor’s help.
• In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field.
• Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
• With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and practice that is both purposeful and informed.
• Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.
• In short, deliberate practice is characterized by the following traits: Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed. Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training. Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice. Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly. Such self-monitoring requires effective mental representations. Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. They show the right way to do something and allow one to notice when doing something wrong and to correct it. Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.
• This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.
• In determining who the experts are, the ideal is to use some objective measure to separate the best from the rest.
• subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases.
• In many fields, people who are widely accepted as “experts” are actually not expert performers when judged by objective criteria.
• Research has shown that the “experts” in many fields don’t perform reliably better than other, less highly regarded members of the profession—or sometimes even than people who have had no training at all.
• Contrary to expectations, experience doesn’t lead to improved performance among many types of doctors and nurses.
• The lesson here is clear: be careful when identifying expert performers. Ideally you want some objective measure of performance with which to compare people’s abilities. If no such measures exist, get as close as you can.
• Remember that the ideal is to find objective, reproducible measures that consistently distinguish the best from the rest, and if that ideal is not possible, approximate it as well as you can.
• Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start.
• If you find that something works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, stop.
• This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers.
• Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities—usually done alone—that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.
• altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.
• As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop.
• Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline.
• If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is.
• One benefit of “learning while real work gets done” is that it gets people into the habit of practicing and thinking about practicing.
• One of the major challenges facing anyone trying to apply the principles of deliberate practice is figuring out exactly what the best performers do that sets them apart.
• In the early days of the Top Gun project, no one stopped to try to figure out what made the best pilots so good. They just set up a program that mimicked the situations pilots would face in real dogfights and that allowed the pilots to practice their skills over and over again with plenty of feedback and without the usual costs of failure. That is a pretty good recipe for training programs in many different disciplines.
• One of the implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your job.
• This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach.
• Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge.
• Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.
• When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
• It is not just the medical profession that has traditionally emphasized knowledge over skills in its education. The situation is similar in many other professional schools, such as law schools and business schools. In general, professional schools focus on knowledge rather than skills because it is much easier to teach knowledge and then create tests for it.
• The general argument has been that the skills can be mastered relatively easily if the knowledge is there.
• But over the long term I believe the best approach will be to develop new skills-based training programs that will supplement or completely replace the knowledge-based approaches that are the norm now in many places. This strategy acknowledges that because what is ultimately most important is what people are able to do, training should focus on doing rather than on knowing—and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area.
• Once you have identified people who consistently perform better than their peers, the next step is to figure out what underlies that superior performance.
• Given the expense of private instruction, people will often try to make do with group lessons or even YouTube videos or books, and those approaches will generally work to some degree. But no matter how many times you watch a demonstration in class or on YouTube, you are still going to miss or misunderstand some subtleties—and sometimes some things that are not so subtle—and you are not going to be able to figure out the best ways to fix all of your weaknesses, even if you do spot them.
• one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.
• First, while a good teacher does not have to be one of the best in the world, he or she should be accomplished in the field. Generally speaking, teachers will only be able to guide you to the level that they or their previous students have attained.
• If you’re a flat-out beginner, any reasonably skilled teacher will do, but once you’ve been training for a few years, you’ll need a teacher who is more advanced.
• Many accomplished performers are terrible teachers because they have no idea how to teach.
• you may need to change teachers as you yourself change.
• 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.
• If you want to improve in chess, you don’t do it by playing chess; you do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games.
• Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
• 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.
• Learning to engage in this way—consciously developing and refining your skills—is one of the most powerful ways to improve the effectiveness of your practice.
• Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster.
• 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.
• The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better.
• Some of the most challenging skills to practice, for instance, are those that involve interacting with other people.
• It does no good to do the same thing over and over again mindlessly; the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.
• 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.
• We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat—over and over again.
• Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.
• 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.
• the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way.
• Most typists can increase their typing speed by 10–20 percent simply by focusing and pushing themselves to type faster.
• Any reasonably complex skill will involve a variety of components, some of which you will be better at than others. Thus, when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back.
• 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.
• So that’s the problem in a nutshell: purposeful practice is hard work. It’s hard to keep going, and even if you keep up your training—you go to the gym regularly, or you practice the guitar for a certain number of hours every week—it’s hard to maintain focus and effort, so you may eventually stop pushing yourself and stop improving.
• In fact, if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute. People generally find it much easier to push themselves in some areas than in others.
• Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact:
• once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about:
• Motivation is quite different from willpower. We all have various motivations—some stronger, some weaker—at various times and in various situations. The most important question to answer then becomes, What factors shape motivation?
• As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration.
• When you quit something that you had initially wanted to do, it’s because the reasons to stop eventually came to outweigh the reasons to continue. Thus, to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.
• For purposeful or deliberate practice to be effective, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and maintain your focus, but those are mentally draining activities.
• Expert performers do two things—both seemingly unrelated to motivation—that can help.
• The first is general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy.
• The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour.
• If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.
• The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it’s not as hard to keep going.
• 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.
• if you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.
• One of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation is social motivation.
• One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors.
• One of the best bits of advice is to set things up so that you are constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement, even if it is not always major improvement. Break your long journey into a manageable series of goals and focus on them one at a time—perhaps even giving yourself a small reward each time you reach a goal.
• 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.
• One of the hallmarks of expert performers is that even once they become one of the best at what they do, they still constantly strive to improve their practice techniques and to get better.
• Simply by interacting strongly with their children, parents motivate their children to develop similar interests.
• Parents of small children can motivate them with praise and rewards, among other things, but eventually that will not be enough. One way that parents and teachers can provide long-term motivation is to help the children find related activities that they enjoy.
• Helping children develop mental representations can also increase motivation by increasing their ability to appreciate the skill they are learning.
• expertise in some fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn’t start training as a child. Understanding such limitations can help you decide which areas you might wish to pursue.
• In the general population physical performance peaks around age twenty. With increasing age we lose flexibility, we become more prone to injury, and we take longer to heal. We slow down.
• Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their twenties.
• Much of the age-related deterioration in various skills happens because people decrease or stop their training; older people who continue to train regularly see their performance decrease much less.
• The human body is growing and developing through adolescence up to the late teens or early twenties, but once we hit twenty or so, our skeletal structure is mostly set, which has implications for certain abilities.
• The body and the brain both are more adaptable during childhood and adolescence than they are in adulthood, but in most ways they remain adaptable to some degree throughout life.
• The general lesson is that we can certainly acquire new skills as we age, but the specific way in which we acquire those skills changes as we get older.
• research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place.
• Creativity will always retain a certain mystery because, by definition, it generates things that have not yet been seen or experienced. But we do know that the sort of focus and effort that give rise to expertise also characterize the work of those pioneers who move beyond where anyone has been before.
• That’s how it always is. The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward, to do things that others have not. And once a pathfinder shows how something can be done, others can learn the technique and follow. Even if the pathfinder doesn’t share the particular technique, as is the case with Richards, simply knowing that something is possible drives others to figure it out.
• Progress is made by those who are working on the frontiers of what is known and what is possible to do, not by those who haven’t put in the effort needed to reach that frontier.
• Expert performers develop their extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step by step in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts. Various sorts of practice can be effective, but the most effective of all is deliberate practice.
• People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because, for whatever reasons, they stopped practicing—or never started.
• There are always obvious differences in how quickly different people pick something up.
• 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.
• 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.
• Generally speaking, in almost any area of education the most useful learning objectives will be those that help students develop effective mental representations.
• The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job.