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 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 book examines how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. Leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvements 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.
