¡°This book is a breakthrough, a lyrical, powerful, science-based narrative that actually shows us how to get better (much better) at the things we care about.¡± ?Seth Godin, author of LINCHPIN
¡°Most ¡°important¡± books aren¡¯t much fun to read. Most fun books aren¡¯t very important. But with Peak, Anders Ericsson (with great work from Robert Pool) has hit the daily double. After all, who among us doesn¡¯t want to learn how to get better at life? A remarkable distillation of a remarkable lifetime of work.¡± ?Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of FREAKONOMICS and SUPERFREAKONOMICS
¡°Ericsson¡¯s research has revolutionized how we think about human achievement. He has found that what separates the best of us from the rest is not innate talent but simply the right kind of training and practice. If everyone would take the lessons of this book to heart, it could truly change the world.¡± ?Joshua Foer, author of MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN
¡°Conventional wisdom conveys we have to make do with what we¡¯re born with, but, as Ericsson and Pool prove here, we all have the potential to be truly extraordinary if we apply the principles of deliberate practice. Learn how in this amazing guide!¡± ?Marshall Goldsmith, author of TRIGGERS
"This is an empowering, encouraging work that will challenge readers to reach for excellence.¡± ?Publishers Weekly
¡°[Ericsson] makes a strong case that success in today's world requires a focus on practical performance, not just the accumulation of information. Especially informative for parents and educators in preparing children for the challenges ahead.¡± ?Kirkus Reviews
¡°The science of excellence can be divided into two eras: before Ericsson and after Ericsson. His groundbreaking work, captured in this brilliantly useful book, provides us with a blueprint for achieving the most important and life-changing work possible: to become a little bit better each day.¡± ?Dan Coyle, author of THE TALENT CODE
¡°Wonderful. I can¡¯t think of a better book for a popular audience written on any topic in psychology.¡± ?Daniel Willigham, professor of Psychology at University of Virginia and author of WHY DON'T STUDENTS LIKE SCHOOL
"Conventional wisdom conveys we have to make do with what we¡¯re born with, but, as Ericsson and Pool prove here, we all have the potential to be truly extraordinary if we apply the principles of deliberate practice. Learn how in this amazing guide!" -- Marshall Goldsmith, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller TRIGGERS
1: The Power of Purposeful Practice
In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. ¡°There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits,¡± he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. ¡°With nine digits especially, it¡¯s very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use-you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn¡¯t matter what I use-it seems very difficult to get.¡±
Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers. I would read him a series of digits at a rate of about one per second-¡°Seven . . . four . . . zero . . . one . . . one . . . nine . . .¡± and so on-and Steve would try to remember them all and repeat them back to me once I was done. One goal was simply to see how much Steve could improve with practice. Now, after four of the hour-long sessions, he could reliably recall seven-digit strings-the length of a local phone number-and he usually got the eight-digit strings right, but nine digits was hit or miss, and he had never managed to remember a ten-digit string at all. And at this point, given his frustrating experience over the first few sessions, he was pretty sure that he wasn¡¯t going to get any better.
What Steve didn¡¯t know-but I did-was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right. Decades of research had shown that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory, which is the type of memory the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time. If a friend gives you his address, it is your short-term memory that holds on to it just long enough to write it down. Or if you¡¯re multiplying a couple of two-digit numbers in your head, your short-term memory is where you keep track of all the intermediate pieces: ¡°Let¡¯s see: 14 times 27 . . . First, 4 times 7 is 28, so keep the 8 and carry the 2, then 4 times 2 is 8 . . .¡± and so on. And there¡¯s a reason it¡¯s called ¡°short-term.¡± You¡¯re not going to remember that address or those intermediate numbers five minutes later unless you spend the time repeating them to yourself over and over again-and thus transfer them into your long-term memory.
The problem with short-term memory-and the problem that Steve was coming face-to-face with-is that the brain has strict limits on how many items it can hold in short-term memory at once. For some it is six items, for others it may be seven or eight, but the limit is generally about seven items-enough to hold on to a local phone number but not a Social Security number. Long-term memory doesn¡¯...t have the same limitations-in fact, no one has ever found the upper limits of long-term memorybut it takes much longer to deploy. Given enough time to work on it, you can memorize dozens or even hundreds of phone numbers, but the test I was giving Steve was designed to present digits so fast that he was forced to use only his short-term memory. I was reading the digits at a rate of one per second?too fast for him to transfer the digits into his long-term memory-so it was no surprise that he was running into a wall at numbers that were about eight or nine digits long.
Still, I hoped he might be able to do a little better. The idea for the study had come from an obscure paper I had discovered while searching through old scientific studies, a paper published in a 1929 issue of the American Journal of Psychology by Pauline Martin and Samuel Fernberger, two psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania. Martin and Fernberger reported that two undergraduate subjects