Find your ‘peak’ with the science of expertise

Talent matters. In the equation behind success, it’s the part that gets all the glory. But the most crucial factor is training – and most of us don’t do it right.

Bad training (or “naive practice”) can be summed up by one harmful attitude: “Just do it.” This idea that you lean more about something the more you do it sounds logical. But the problem is that without a clear goal, without proper guidance, repetition doesn’t get you anywhere.

A common myth about skill: your ability is shaped by innate talent. Wrong. Perfect pitch (for example) is not a gift from God. Anyone can develop it through the right exposure and training. The ability to stick with that process is the real gift.

Purposeful practice is defined by: well-defined goals, external guidance, meaningful feedback, the ability to break tasks down into baby steps, and a willingness to experiment outside your comfort zone.

Once we reach a “good enough” level at anything, even purposeful practice levels off. Our abilities diminish without sustained efforts to improve. One hack: Tell yourself you can give up only after overcoming a plateau from a different direction (you’ll probably stick with it).

Deliberate practice is the pinnacle of training. It's about taking a step up by maintaining motivation and full focus. Find a teacher who’s a good match for your experience, who can get you in the right mindset, and who will assign homework. If you stop improving, it’s time to find a new teacher.

Not every field has accessible coaches or standardized training methods. So what then? Define what constitutes a top performance in this area and reverse engineer that. Seek to improve even further by following the 3 Fs: Focus, Feedback, Fix it.

Skills are based on patterns of information called mental representations. This is key to deliberate practice. They’re basically conceptual shortcuts that let you process lots of info quickly. You build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and then trying over and over.

Good training rewires the brain by building better mental representations in your long-term memory. The quality and quantity of these representations are what separates experts from those who are merely “good enough”.

Bottom line: Lack of ability isn’t why most people fail to excel. It’s satisfaction with their comfort zone. Getting out of it requires training based on sustained focus and motivation. This rewires your neurochemistry and primes you to overcome every plateau from a new direction.