Ericsson has studied experts in their respective domains for over thirty years in order to understand what makes them exceptional.
Ericsson explores perfect pitch - it was believed for over two hundred years that perfect pitch was innate.
However, there were suspicious correlations:
Almost everyone who had perfect pitch had musical training early in childhood.
More frequent among those who speak a tonal language such as Mandarin or Vietnamese.
Psychologist Ayako Sakakibara published a study in 2014, in which she successfully trained twenty-two children (all who completed training) to develop perfect pitch.
Ericsson argues that the real "gift" that experts have is the ability to train, study and improve at their craft rather than just genetic talent.
Ericsson and his colleagues have published several books on the topic and coined the phrase "deliberate practice".
Chapter 1 - Notes (Completed on )
Ericsson was training Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, to memorize a sequence of digits. Steve got up to eight and was about to give up.
Ericsson trained Steve for more than two years and Steve was able to break past his limitations. After two hundred training sessions, Steve was able to recite eighty-two digits.
Ericsson gives many examples of the rise of extraordinary performance:
Olympic marathon time in 1908 was 2 hours, 55 minutes and 18 seconds. At the time of writing the book, the record was 2 hours, 2 minutes and 57 seconds.
1908 Olympics featured a double somersault that was considered risky at the time, but today it is an "entry-level" dive and modern dives are much more complex.
In 1973, the world record for reciting digits of pi was 511. This grew to 10,000 -> 70,000 -> 100,000.
Ericsson argues that the rise in performance and ability was because of more practice and better training methods, rather than a genetic improvement.
Ericsson defines "purposeful" practice to be different than naive practice (doing the activity over and over again). Purposeful practice requires motivation, feedback, getting out of your comfort zone, goals and attention.
There are limits to purposeful practice - Ericsson gives an example of another student whose memorization method capped at 20 digits, while a different student who employed Steve's techniques hit 100 digits.