The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle takes a look at extraordinary performers and describes how they became so extraordinary in the first place. Over the course of 18 months, Coyle visited nine so-called talent hotbeds – places that produce Everest-size amounts of talent. When he investigated those hotbeds in detail, he found that they all shared […]
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Anders Ericsson is the world’s leading scientist on elite performance and deliberate practice. His research involves finding expert performers who can reliably do things that others can’t, and then figuring out how they’re able to do it. Peak is the result of more than three decades of research. The book is packed with fascinating studies, eye-opening facts, […]
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Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career studying star athletes, memory mavens, violin virtuosos, and chess champions. His work involves identifying people who can do something better than their peers and then figuring out why they are able to do that. In his decades of research, Ericsson has identified a core set of principles […]
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Is there any skill you would like to improve? Public speaking? Writing? Reading? Dancing? Singing? Cooking? Playing tennis? Meeting new people? Making better decisions? Well, you can. As our recent discussions on expert performance have shown, humans possess the capacity to improve their performance in any area of life if they train in the right way. The most advanced […]
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As discussed in our latest article, deliberate practice is the most effective method for developing and improving skills rapidly. Unfortunately, despite reading multiple books and scientific papers on the topic, I have found it difficult to fully grasp what deliberate practice looks like in the real world. In an attempt to better understand the nuances of […]
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Benjamin Franklin is widely regarded as the most accomplished man of his time. He was a diplomat, inventor, scientist, and writer whose words are still read to this day. One could assume Franklin was naturally gifted at the intellectual skills that made him as successful as he was. However, that would be far from the […]
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Sam Snead was one of the greatest golf players of all time. His success was attributed to natural talent; people literally called him the best natural player ever. Snead himself didn’t agree. In an interview with Golf Digest, he said, “People always said I had a natural swing. They thought I wasn’t a hard worker. But […]
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Greatness isn’t born. It’s made. It’s the story of practice, not talent. That’s what we concluded in our previous article, in which we looked at the differences between elite performers and the rest. Decades of research concluded it all came down to one thing: the amount of quality practice an individual had accumulated over their lifetime. The Greats […]
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In 1993, Anders Ericsson arrived at the Music Academy of West Berlin to study violinists. His goal: Figure out why the best violinists are better than the rest. To this end, he asked the academy’s music professors to identify three sets of violin players.Best violinists – the most elite students who had the potential for careers as […]
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Several studies have reported that US adults and teenagers check their phone up to 150 times a day, or every six to seven minutes that they’re awake. In the UK, a study showed that more than half of all adults and two-thirds of young adults and teens do not go one hour without checking their […]
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