Anders Ericsson

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.

from a relatively new area of psychology that can be best described as “the science of expertise.”

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.

The reality is, however, that all of these things—managing, selling, teamwork—are specialized skills, and unless you are using practice techniques specifically designed to improve those particular skills, trying hard will not get you very far.

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 particular such approach is what Art calls “learning while real work gets done.”

Does it push people to get outside their comfort zones and attempt to do things that are not easy for them? Does it offer immediate feedback on the performance and on what can be done to improve it? Have those who developed the approach identified the best performers in that particular area and determined what sets them apart from everyone else?

Experience in other wars had shown that pilots who had won their first dogfight were much more likely to survive their second, and that the more dogfights a pilot fought and survived, the more likely he was to win the next one. Indeed, once a pilot had won twenty dogfights or so, he had almost a 100 percent chance of winning the next one and the one after that.

We know now from studies of deliberate practice that the pilots learned best when they were pushed out of their comfort zones.

if you follow the principles of deliberate practice you can develop ways to identify the top performers in a field and train other, lesser performers and bring them up closer to that top level.