Quotes from Anders Ericsson

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

keep this one thing at the front of your mind: subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases.

With practice, you began to recognize entire words by themselves. C-A-T became simply cat, thanks to a mental representation that encoded the pattern of the letters in that word and associated that pattern with both the sound of the word and the idea of a small, furry animal that meows and often doesn't get along well with dogs. Along

Most importantly, it is a gift that every one of us is born with and can, with the right approach, take advantage of.

Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people

I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers. None of them ever quit on me. 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 thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to

The reason that most people don't possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn't because they don't have the capacity for them, but rather because they're satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of "good enough.

most traits that play a role in expert performance can be modified by the right sort of practice,

one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing. The