Sublime

K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, found that outstanding performance isn't a result of natural talent. Rather, it is a result of hard work in the form of deliberate practice.

K. Anders Ericsson. He was a psychology professor at Florida State University and the author of an article titled “Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born.”

It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice.

Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.

The ultimate goal of practice is to reach a state of what K. Anders Ericsson calls “eminent performance,” when a person goes “beyond the knowledge of their teachers to make a unique innovative contribution to their domain.

In any area, not just musical performance, the relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practice to hone your skill.

We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.

The key change that occurs in our adaptable brains in response to deliberate practice is the development of better mental representations, which in turn open up new possibilities for improved performance.