Peak

US: Houghton Mifflin, 2016. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting.The spine remains undamaged. For the first time in decades of groundbreaking research, the inventor of t he 10,000-hour rule explains his techniques for developing mastery of any s kill We live in a world full of people with extraordinary abilities. Consider wh at Roger Federer can do with a tennis ball, or Connor McDavid with a puck. There are chess grandmasters who can play several dozen different games sim ultaneously--while blindfolded--and a seemingly unending supply of young mu sical prodigies who would have astonished aficionados a century ago. We are dramatically better at just about everything than we were just a generatio n ago. We assume, though, that these peak performers are the lucky ones, the ones with a gift. That's only partly true. The fact is we are all lucky. We all have that gift. As Ericsson's whole career has shown, with the proper pract ice, we are "all" capable of extraordinary feats. On the surface, the techniques that chess players use to develop their skil ls seem quite different from the methods soccer players use to perfect thei r games, which in turn seem quite different from how pianists improve their playing. But at a deeper level, they are all variations on a single fundam ental approach to learning, what Ericsson, a world-renowned researcher, has named "deliberate practice": a simple, yet powerful system for enhancing l earning. This approach to expertise has the potential to revolutionize how we think about every sort of education and training. We are not limited by an endowment of na.