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this even if he was in another room and could not see the instrument being played, and he could do it not just for the violin and fortepiano but for every instrument he heard—and Mozart’s father, as a composer and music teacher, had

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.

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

no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives

The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

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,

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.

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.

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. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who’s been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who’s been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.

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 has well-defined, specific goals.

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.

You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

Purposeful practice involves feedback.

Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone.

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.

publisher of Poor Richard’s Almanack

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.”

This was a regular pattern throughout the entire memory study: Steve would improve up to a point, get stuck, look around for a different approach that could help him get past the barrier, find it, and then improve steadily until another barrier arose.

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.

the key to improved mental performance of almost any sort is the development of mental structures that make it possible to avoid the limitations of short-term memory and deal effectively with large amounts of information at once.

Maguire found that a particular part of the hippocampus—the posterior, or rear, part—was larger in the taxi drivers than in the other subjects.

whatever was responsible for the difference in the size of the posterior hippocampi was not related to the driving itself but rather was related specifically to the navigational skills that the job required

What she found would have been no surprise if she had been measuring biceps in bodybuilders, but she wasn’t—she was measuring the sizes of different parts of the brain—and so the result was startling. The volume of the posterior hippocampi had gotten significantly larger in the group of trainees who had continued their training and had become licensed taxi drivers. By contrast, there was no change in the size of the posterior hippocampi among the prospective taxi drivers who had failed to become licensed (either because they simply stopped training or because they could not pass the tests) or among the subjects who had never had anything to do with the taxi training program

Maguire’s study, which was published in 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic evidence we have that the human brain grows and changes in response to intense training.

It is possible to shape the brain—your brain, my brain, anybody’s brain—in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate training.

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. There are a few exceptions, such as in the hippocampus, where new neurons can grow, but in most parts of the brain the changes that occur in response to a mental challenge—such as the contrast training used to improve people’s vision—won’t include the development of new neurons. Instead, the brain rewires those networks in various ways—by strengthening or weakening the various connections between neurons and also by adding new connections or getting rid of old ones.

Recent studies have shown that learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned.

practicing the piano as a child will lead to certain neurological advantages that you just can’t match with practice as an adult.

chess masters don’t develop some incredible memory for where individual pieces sit on a board. Instead, their memory is very context-dependent: it is only for patterns of the sort that would appear in a normal game.

The way that grandmasters process and make sense of chess positions is an example of a mental representation. It is their way of “seeing” the board, and it’s quite different from how a novice would see the same board.

mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting

essence these representations are preexisting patterns of information—facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on—that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations. The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory

What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.

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.

This is a major advantage of highly developed mental representations: you can assimilate and consider a great deal more information at once.

Relatively few of us climb rocks or perform surgeries, but almost everyone writes, and the process of writing offers us an excellent example of how mental representations can be used in planning.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations,

There was a steady interplay between the writing of the book and our conceptualization of the topic, and as we looked for ways to make our messages clearer to the reader, we would come up with new ways to think about deliberate practice ourselves. Researchers refer to this sort of writing as “knowledge transforming,” as opposed to “knowledge telling,” because the process of writing changes and adds to the knowledge that the writer had when starting out.

the relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practice to hone your skill.

In the most highly developed fields—the ones that have benefited from many decades or even centuries of steady improvement, with each generation passing on the lessons and skills it has learned to the next—the approach to individualized practice is amazingly uniform. No matter where you look—musical performance, ballet, or sports such as figure skating or gymnastics—you will find that training follows a very similar set of principles.

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

, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance

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.

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.

you are trying to identify the best performers in an area that lacks rules-based, head-to-head competition or clear, objective measures of performance (such as scores or times), keep this one thing at the front of your mind: subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases

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

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. For example, in areas where a person’s performance or product can be observed directly—a screenwriter, say, or a programmer—the judgment of peers is a good place to start,

good rule of thumb is to seek out people who work intimately with many other professionals, such as a nurse who plays a role on several different surgery teams and can compare their performance and identify the best

Then look for those people who score highest in the areas you believe are key to superior performance. 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.

next step is to figure out specifically what they do that separates them from other, less accomplished people in the same field, and what training methods helped them get there

Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance.

a good teacher can give you valuable feedback you couldn’t get any other way. Effective feedback is about more than whether you did something right or wrong. A good math teacher, for instance, will look at more than the answer to a problem; he’ll look at exactly how the student got the answer as a way of understanding the mental representations the student was using. If needed, he’ll offer advice on how to think more effectively about the problem.

Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work, and it is generally a decade or more between a scientist’s first publication and his or her most important publication—and this is in addition to the years of study before that first published research.

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.

The deliberate-practice mindset offers a very different view: anyone can improve, but it requires the right approach. 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.

For anyone in the business or professional world looking for an effective approach to improvement, my basic advice is to look for one that follows the principles of deliberate practice: 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? Is the practice designed to develop the particular skills that experts in the field possess? A yes answer to all those questions may not guarantee that an approach will be effective, but it will certainly make that much more likely.

Indeed, using libraries of mammograms to train radiologists is a kind of simulation. But there are many more areas where this concept could be put to use. One could imagine, for instance, creating a library of case studies designed to help tax accountants hone their skills in certain specialties, or to help intelligence analysts improve their abilities to interpret what is happening in a foreign country.

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. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something—solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay—the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it

when referring to improving performance in a professional or business setting, the right question is, How do we improve the relevant skills? rather than, How do we teach the relevant knowledge?  

stop in the middle and quiz people

Geoff Colvin’s book Talent Is Overrated

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.

Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.

Researchers who have studied long-distance runners have found that amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running, while elite long-distance runners remain attuned to their bodies so that they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race.

He came up with a series of clever techniques aimed at teaching himself how to write as well as the writers of The Spectator.

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. Real life—our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies—seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities. Franklin did it with his exercises, each focused on a particular facet of writing. Much of what a good teacher or coach will do is to develop such exercises for you, designed specifically to help you improve the particular skill you are focused on at the moment. But without a teacher, you must come up with your own exercises.

Despite the first word in the term “mental representation,” pure mental analysis is not nearly enough. 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

everyone who faces a plateau: the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way

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. The question is, Which ones? To figure that out, you need to find a way to push yourself a little—not a lot—harder than usual.

there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general “willpower” that can be applied in any situation. There is no indication, for example, that the students who had enough “willpower” to study countless hours for the national spelling bee would show the same amount of “willpower” if they were asked to practice the piano or chess or baseball. In fact, if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute

there is no more scientific evidence for the existence of individual genes that determine willpower than there is for the existence of genes that are necessary for succeeding in chess or piano-playing.

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.

Maintaining the motivation that enables such a regimen has two parts: reasons to keep going and reasons to stop. 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

Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted.

If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.

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. Open that door.