Deliberate Practice Archives

Category Archives for Deliberate Practice

10 Things Elite Athletes, Musicians, and Intellectuals Do Differently

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 […]

How to Succeed at Anything You Want, Using the Principles of Deliberate Practice

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 […]

14 Real World Examples of Deliberate Practice in Action

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 […]

The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice

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 […]

The Myth of Natural Talent: Prodigies, Savants, and the Real Role Inborn Qualities Play in Elite Performance

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 […]

The Road to Greatness: 3 Steps from Child to Best in the World

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 […]

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule & What Really Separates the Best From the Rest

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 […]