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The Road To Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games
Excellence and the highest levels of performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games have always been an object of fascination to both scientists and lay people. Only during the last 20 years have scientists studied these levels of performance in the laboratory in order to identify their mediating mechanisms. Contrary to the common belief that innate talents are the critical factors for exceptional performance, investigators have found that acquired skills, knowledge, and physiological adaptations in response to intense practice are the primary mechanisms, mediating the highest levels of performance.
This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues.
EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.
This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues.
EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.
369 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1996
24 people are currently reading
1483 people want to read
About the author
K. Anders Ericsson
25 books434 followersK. Anders Ericsson (born 1947) is a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who is internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.
Currently, Ericsson studies expert performance in domains such as medicine, music, chess, and sports, focusing exclusively on extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one's comfort zone) as a means of how expert performers acquire their superior performance. Critically, Ericsson's program of research serves as a direct complement to other research that addresses cognitive ability, personality, interests, and other factors that help researchers understand and predict deliberate practice and expert performance
Currently, Ericsson studies expert performance in domains such as medicine, music, chess, and sports, focusing exclusively on extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one's comfort zone) as a means of how expert performers acquire their superior performance. Critically, Ericsson's program of research serves as a direct complement to other research that addresses cognitive ability, personality, interests, and other factors that help researchers understand and predict deliberate practice and expert performance
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 26, 2018
To anyone without a serious personal or professional interest in the study of the development of expertise: Don’t read this book, at least not in full. Pick up something else, something more reader-friendly. I recommend K. Anders Ericsson’s Peak, Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, or even Robert Greene’s Mastery. In this volume, you’re going to be sifting through detailed explanations of research protocols and experiment models to find the occasional golden egg of applicable or interesting advice, which really boils down to these main principles anyway:
1. Deliberate practice is focused and effortful (and, I should add, not necessarily incompatible with Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” concept, something that Ericsson’s certainly back-tracked on since the publication of The Road to Excellence).
2. A professional authority provides you with guided feedback on your performance.
That’s it, really. That’s the main gist of it.
Regardless, if you insist on reading it anyway, I’m going to provide you with a quick guide.
First, some background: When I was a sophomore in high school, I emailed K. Anders Ericsson, asking for research on how to use deliberate practice to improve my writing skills, and, to my surprise, he actually emailed me back with a couple early drafts of studies that were mentioned in this book. I talk more about my experience here, in my review for Peak.
If you’re an athlete, coach, doctor, chess player, or “creative,” looking to improve your craft, then this is how I – a writer and avid reader – went about “reading” this volume: I skipped most of it. There’s a good chunk of the book that you could consider universally applicable; the rest is pretty domain-specific. You can’t really go wrong if you read these sections:
Beyond that, pick and choose the other sections that are relevant to your domain of expertise. For me, that was “Expertise in Reading” and “Creative Expertise: A Life-Span Developmental Perspective.”
On to the actual review.
The main issue I had with The Road to Excellence is the price-tag. It costs $60 on Amazon, and maybe that’s to be expected for a highly technical book designed for masters students, PhD candidates, and field experts who are already so used to college textbook inflation that they would only be mildly surprised to find that a professor wanted him to sacrifice a puppy dog in exchange for the latest edition of his autobiography. Still, it's $60, and that’s a lot of money for me. I could’ve taken me and all my friends (literally all of them; I’m not very popular) for a nice dinner at Olive Garden for $60, but instead I chose to buy this book. That’s dedication, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the real road to excellence.
The second biggest issue I had with it is the fact that almost none of the authors rewrote their section introduction for the volume. Instead, they compiled their notes from the “The Acquisition of Expert Performance” conference in Wakulla Springs. The only exception is the chapter on creative expertise, which was specifically written for The Road to Excellence.
With that said, you’ll probably walk away with different observations than me. Maybe for you, a doctor, this book would prove more helpful than for me, a writer. It’s like one of those choose-your-own-adventure books.
Some interesting things I noticed:
From the study on reading, there are people who frequently read (whether for their job or for leisure) who score in the 49th percentile of comprehension while some non-readers score well into the 90th percentile. I think that’s absolutely fascinating. People who read millions of words a year are being outperformed by people who claim to not read at all (“alliterates”). It speaks to the truly complex nature of written communication – and perhaps introduces some problems in applying deliberate practice to the skill. One thing’s for sure: Most of the authors in this volume will NOT attribute that difference to hereditary factors, or talent, even though it seems to be a shining example of it. Regardless, I think the frequent readers who scored low in their comprehension tests didn’t have all the guidance they could have, and that it really suggests they didn’t have proper instruction growing up. Beyond speed reading courses that don’t work, there aren’t very many, if any, advanced reading courses that will give them the tools they need to remember more of what they read. There’s an opening in the market for the man who can get people to realize they’re poor readers AND offer a solution that doesn’t involve reading War and Peace in six seconds flat.
Sternberg’s dissenting opinion, “The Costs of Expertise,” at the end of the volume is (perhaps purposely) awful – not because his piece doesn’t raise good counterarguments; it does. Rather, his counterarguments contain weak reasoning that beg the same questions that the researchers purport to answer in the volume. For instance, here’s what Sternberg had to say about Mozart: “Why was Mozart so damn good?” (“Damn…” apparently forgetting this is a staunch academic work). “Did Einstein practice thinking a lot? What made Picasso so good so young? ... The practice view cannot begin to account for the success of extraordinary achievers in the creative domains, and as far as I can tell, its exponents have not made a serious effort to do so … What Mozart did as a child most musical experts will never do nor be able to do in their lifetimes, even after they have passed many times over the amount of time Mozart possibly could have had for deliberate practice as a child.” The problem is that’s exactly what Ericsson set out to do, and he provides evidence in the first chapter of the volume for modern musical prodigies who have not only “done what Mozart did,” but also, with the help of modern instruction, objectively surpassed his technical skill, a finding that’s summarized on page 32. If you’re going to attack a person’s arguments, attack the evidence; don’t just say “it doesn’t make sense.” Science isn’t a big fan of common sense. Ask the people who still think the earth is flat because their “eyes and ears” seemingly confirm it.
Again, that’s not to say that I’m claiming any of these studies are objectively right, or that I even agree with the premise that deliberate practice is the main factor in skill acquisition. I just think that if you’re going to write a dissenting opinion, you should take the time to stay up to date on the literature.
With that said, this volume’s twenty years old and probably hilariously outdated.
There are other things, like the "equal odds rule" that, in essence, groundbreaking creative works are most closely positively correlated with productivity, but Simonton seemed to barely be convinced by his own data, so I'm not even going to talk about it.
Altogether interesting, but not worth the money.
1. Deliberate practice is focused and effortful (and, I should add, not necessarily incompatible with Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” concept, something that Ericsson’s certainly back-tracked on since the publication of The Road to Excellence).
2. A professional authority provides you with guided feedback on your performance.
That’s it, really. That’s the main gist of it.
Regardless, if you insist on reading it anyway, I’m going to provide you with a quick guide.
First, some background: When I was a sophomore in high school, I emailed K. Anders Ericsson, asking for research on how to use deliberate practice to improve my writing skills, and, to my surprise, he actually emailed me back with a couple early drafts of studies that were mentioned in this book. I talk more about my experience here, in my review for Peak.
If you’re an athlete, coach, doctor, chess player, or “creative,” looking to improve your craft, then this is how I – a writer and avid reader – went about “reading” this volume: I skipped most of it. There’s a good chunk of the book that you could consider universally applicable; the rest is pretty domain-specific. You can’t really go wrong if you read these sections:
Preface.
The Acquisition of Expert Performance: An Introduction to Some of the Issues by K. Anders Ericsson
The Childhoods and Early Lives of Geniuses
Changing the Agency for Learning: Acquiring Expert Performance
Costs of Expertise
Bonus: Perceptual and Memory Processes in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
Beyond that, pick and choose the other sections that are relevant to your domain of expertise. For me, that was “Expertise in Reading” and “Creative Expertise: A Life-Span Developmental Perspective.”
On to the actual review.
The main issue I had with The Road to Excellence is the price-tag. It costs $60 on Amazon, and maybe that’s to be expected for a highly technical book designed for masters students, PhD candidates, and field experts who are already so used to college textbook inflation that they would only be mildly surprised to find that a professor wanted him to sacrifice a puppy dog in exchange for the latest edition of his autobiography. Still, it's $60, and that’s a lot of money for me. I could’ve taken me and all my friends (literally all of them; I’m not very popular) for a nice dinner at Olive Garden for $60, but instead I chose to buy this book. That’s dedication, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the real road to excellence.
The second biggest issue I had with it is the fact that almost none of the authors rewrote their section introduction for the volume. Instead, they compiled their notes from the “The Acquisition of Expert Performance” conference in Wakulla Springs. The only exception is the chapter on creative expertise, which was specifically written for The Road to Excellence.
With that said, you’ll probably walk away with different observations than me. Maybe for you, a doctor, this book would prove more helpful than for me, a writer. It’s like one of those choose-your-own-adventure books.
Some interesting things I noticed:
From the study on reading, there are people who frequently read (whether for their job or for leisure) who score in the 49th percentile of comprehension while some non-readers score well into the 90th percentile. I think that’s absolutely fascinating. People who read millions of words a year are being outperformed by people who claim to not read at all (“alliterates”). It speaks to the truly complex nature of written communication – and perhaps introduces some problems in applying deliberate practice to the skill. One thing’s for sure: Most of the authors in this volume will NOT attribute that difference to hereditary factors, or talent, even though it seems to be a shining example of it. Regardless, I think the frequent readers who scored low in their comprehension tests didn’t have all the guidance they could have, and that it really suggests they didn’t have proper instruction growing up. Beyond speed reading courses that don’t work, there aren’t very many, if any, advanced reading courses that will give them the tools they need to remember more of what they read. There’s an opening in the market for the man who can get people to realize they’re poor readers AND offer a solution that doesn’t involve reading War and Peace in six seconds flat.
Sternberg’s dissenting opinion, “The Costs of Expertise,” at the end of the volume is (perhaps purposely) awful – not because his piece doesn’t raise good counterarguments; it does. Rather, his counterarguments contain weak reasoning that beg the same questions that the researchers purport to answer in the volume. For instance, here’s what Sternberg had to say about Mozart: “Why was Mozart so damn good?” (“Damn…” apparently forgetting this is a staunch academic work). “Did Einstein practice thinking a lot? What made Picasso so good so young? ... The practice view cannot begin to account for the success of extraordinary achievers in the creative domains, and as far as I can tell, its exponents have not made a serious effort to do so … What Mozart did as a child most musical experts will never do nor be able to do in their lifetimes, even after they have passed many times over the amount of time Mozart possibly could have had for deliberate practice as a child.” The problem is that’s exactly what Ericsson set out to do, and he provides evidence in the first chapter of the volume for modern musical prodigies who have not only “done what Mozart did,” but also, with the help of modern instruction, objectively surpassed his technical skill, a finding that’s summarized on page 32. If you’re going to attack a person’s arguments, attack the evidence; don’t just say “it doesn’t make sense.” Science isn’t a big fan of common sense. Ask the people who still think the earth is flat because their “eyes and ears” seemingly confirm it.
Again, that’s not to say that I’m claiming any of these studies are objectively right, or that I even agree with the premise that deliberate practice is the main factor in skill acquisition. I just think that if you’re going to write a dissenting opinion, you should take the time to stay up to date on the literature.
With that said, this volume’s twenty years old and probably hilariously outdated.
There are other things, like the "equal odds rule" that, in essence, groundbreaking creative works are most closely positively correlated with productivity, but Simonton seemed to barely be convinced by his own data, so I'm not even going to talk about it.
Altogether interesting, but not worth the money.
March 1, 2017
An academic book collecting a series of articles about the nature of the acquisition of expert performance, and good as long as that's what you're expecting! Doesn't really have strategies to translate that into deliberate practice in your field, which is what I was hoping for.
October 11, 2022
A bit dry, collection of academic studies, however a very interesting topic. I’ve always been super interested in studying experts and people who are truly excellent. The deliberate practice vs innate talent debate on sports, musical expertise, math, or chess was pretty much what you would expect, with good points on both sides. I found the chapters on reading, lifetime contributions, and childhood prodigies/geniuses particularly interesting. Statistical study on experts is quite difficult though because there is so much survivorship bias and correlation but not causation. Still inspiring though!
April 2, 2017
very technical, academic style
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews