Quotes from Anders Ericsson

meaning aids memory.

The clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon only a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training. The study has completely rewritten our understanding of perfect pitch.

In short, perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift

if there is no agreement on what good performance is and no way to tell what changes would improve performance, then it is very difficult—often impossible—to develop effective training methods.

abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. So

Learning isn't a way of reaching one's potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential. And this is true whether our goal is to become a concert pianist or just play the piano well enough to amuse ourselves, to join the PGA golf tour or just bring our handicaps down a few strokes.

Learning isn't a way of reaching one's potential but rather a way of developing it. We

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.

Steve's performance illustrates a key insight from the study of effective practice: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

We can shape our own potential. Art

Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you're going wrong.

as the number of bytes in your random-access memory (RAM)

In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial

Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training

Similarly—and more in line with the sorts of factors that may play a role in acquiring skills with practice—nine-month-old infants who paid more attention to a parent as that parent was reading a book and pointing to the pictures in the book grew up to have a much better vocabulary at five years of age than infants who paid less attention.

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. This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who wishes to improve—but it is still just a start.

One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritize their practice.

perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.

The first step toward enhancing performance in an organization is realizing that improvement is possible only if participants abandon business-as-usual practices. Doing so requires recognizing and rejecting three prevailing myths.

They had been pushed out of their comfort zone, and the muscles responded by getting strong enough to establish a new comfort zone. Homeostasis had been reestablished.

If all you want to do is to safely drive your car from point A to point B or to play the piano well enough to plink out "Für Elise," then this approach to learning is all you need.

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.

TEACHER: How many times did you play it? STUDENT: Ten or twenty. TEACHER: How many times did you play it correctly? STUDENT: Umm, I dunno . . . Once or twice . . . TEACHER: Hmm . . . How did you practice it? STUDENT: I dunno. I just played it. This is naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math problems and tried to solve them.