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Practice is not enough — here is what actually builds expertise

Anders Ericsson spent thirty years studying world-class performers and found that hours of practice matter far less than the specific kind of practice involved.

The most influential idea in Anders Ericsson's career is also one of the most consistently misunderstood. His research on expert performance produced the insight that was later popularised as the ten-thousand-hour rule — but Ericsson himself was at pains to point out that the rule, as usually stated, is wrong. It is not simply hours that build expertise; it is a specific, demanding form of practice that most people engaged in a skill are not actually doing.

Ericsson calls it deliberate practice, and it has several defining features. It takes place just outside the current comfort zone — at a level of difficulty that requires genuine effort but is not so hard as to be impossible. It involves immediate, specific feedback. It requires full concentration; you cannot deliberate-practice while doing something else. And it targets particular weaknesses rather than rehearsing what you already do well.

The contrast with ordinary practice is sharp. A pianist who runs through their favourite pieces for an hour is not engaged in deliberate practice. A pianist who isolates a difficult passage, plays it repeatedly with specific attention to the technical problem, and adjusts based on each attempt — that is deliberate practice, and it is exhausting, which is partly why experts typically cannot sustain it for more than a few hours a day.

Ericsson also introduces the concept of mental representations — the rich internal models that experts carry for their domain, which allow them to perceive patterns, anticipate what comes next, and identify errors that novices cannot see. Expertise is partly a matter of building these representations, and deliberate practice is the mechanism by which they are constructed and refined.

The book is both a careful account of what Ericsson's research actually shows and a guide to applying it. It will interest anyone who has tried to get better at something and found that simply putting in time was not producing the improvement they expected.

Based on the work of

Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool

Anders Ericsson, psychologist (Florida State); Robert Pool, science writer

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise · 2016

Ericsson co-wrote Peak to correct widespread misreadings of his own research and present his findings in authoritative, accessible form.

Read the original on Bookshop.org

Fact-checked · AI can err — read the source

The ten-thousand-hour figure came from Ericsson's original study but the sample was small; he consistently argued the hours mattered less than the quality of practice, not that a specific total was required.

AI-summarised · always labelled (EU AI Act, Art. 50).

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