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M
alcolm Gladwell made Anders Erics-
son famous—or, at least, his research
work. A professor of psychology at
Florida State University, Ericsson con-
ducted the study of violinists that the best-selling
journalist glamourized in his book Outliers, im-
printing on our consciousness that 10,000 hours of
practice will make you a master at whatever task
you devote such attention to.
If you bowl, after 10,000 hours, you will be an
expert. If you golf, give it 10,000 hours. It follows
that 10,000 hours should turn you into a virtuoso at
work. It’s a neat, simple and tantalizing formula. It’s
also wrong. But it—and Ericsson’s many studies—
point the way to how to achieve peak performance
and, as the subtitle of his new book puts it, “master
almost anything.” Unfortunately, management is
one of the exceptions Ericsson highlights but even
then he does offer useful advice.
Ericsson has spent a lifetime studying and work-
ing with peak performers. Why was Mozart so ad-
ept a composer? When seven digits are considered
the norm for us to remember, how can some people
recall a string of hundreds of digits? What makes a
violin virtuoso?
Our tendency has been to assume it’s natural.
Something innate allows them to achieve such
success. Mozart, for example, was a child prodigy.
But in
Peak
, written with journalist Richard Pool,
Ericsson looks at Mozart, tennis star Roger Federer,
gymnast McKayla Maroney, chess grandmasters
who can play several dozen games simultaneously,
blindfolded, and determines their skill is not innate
but developed.
He points out that perfect pitch was assumed
to be something you are born with. However, he
notes that a good deal of research shows everyone
with perfect pitch began musical training at a very
young age, usually three to five years old. “But if
perfect pitch is an innate ability, something that
you are either born with or not, then it shouldn’t
make a difference whether you receive musical
training as a child. All that should matter is that you
get enough musical training—at any time in your
life—to learn the names of the notes,” he writes. As
well, perfect pitch is more common in people who
speak a tonal language such as Mandarin, Vietnam-
ese, and several other Asian languages, in which
the meaning of words is dependent on tone. So not
innate, but learned.
To be successful, he argues, we need a growth
mindset—a belief that more is achievable—and the
determination to shape our brain to learn, and per-
fect, the new skills required. Adult pianists have
more white matter in certain regions of the brain
than non-musicians, with the difference resulting
from practice in childhood. London taxicab drivers,
who must travel the complex roadway structure
of that British city, have a larger rear part of the
hippocampus than the average person, the hippo-
campus being crucial to special navigation. We can
similarly develop our minds—and abilities.
Experts perceive patterns in their field better
than others. A chess grandmaster has an edge be-
cause he or she can glance at the board and see
how the game will play out under different situa-
tions. These patterns, or mental representations as
Ericsson calls them, result from years of practice
that changed the neural circuitry of their brains.
“In pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert
performance is the ability to see patterns in a col-
lection of things that would seem random or con-
fusing to people with less developed mental rep-
resentations. In other words, experts see the forest
when everyone else see only trees,” he says.
But it doesn’t come in 10,000 hours. That number
was an average from a study of violinists at age
20, with half of them not attaining that number of
hours. Ericsson notes that Gladwell could have just
as easily chosen age 18, when the figure was 7,400.
But 10,000 is a nice round number, the researcher
notes. But at age 18 or 20 they weren’t experts—
they still had a way to go. Competitions tend to
be won at age 30, when the musicians have put in
20,000 to 25,000 hours of practice.
He worries that many people have interpreted
the 10,000-hour rule, as it is commonly called, as
a promise that almost anyone can become an ex-
pert in a given field by putting in 10,000 hours of
practice. But nothing in his work shows that. There
were no randomized studies from which such an
interpretation could be drawn.
“Gladwell did get one thing right, and it’s worth
repeating because it’s crucial: Becoming accom-
plished in any field in which there is a well-estab-
lished history of people working to become experts
The Leader’s Bookshelf
Harvey Schachter
Peak
By Anders
Ericsson and
Robert Pool,
Viking, 307
pages, $26.75
24
/ Canadian Government Executive
// October 2016