The Road to Excellence

by Ericsson, K. Anders

• ISBN13: 9780805822328
• ISBN10: 0805822321
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-06-01
• Publisher: Lawrence Erlbau

Summary

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 howelite 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
References	p. x
The Acquisition of Expert Performance: an Introduction to Some of the Issues	p. 1
Acknowledgments	p. 44
References	p. 44
The Role of Practice and Coaching in Entrepreneurial Skill Domains: an International Comparison of Life-Span Chess Skill Acquisition	p. 51
References	p. 79
Acknowledgments	p. 79
Deliberate Practice in Sports: What is It Anyway?	p. 81
Acknowledgments	p. 105
References	p. 105
The Acquisition of Musical Performance Expertise: Deconstructing the "Talent" Account of Individual Differences in Musical Expressivity	p. 107
References	p. 124
The Acquisition of Medical Expertise in Complex Dynamic Environments	p. 127
Acknowledgments	p. 162
References	p. 162
Perceptual and Memory Processes in the Acquisition of Expert Performance: the Epam Model	p. 167
References	p. 186
Expertise in Reading	p. 189
Acknowledgments	p. 219
References	p. 220
Creative Expertise: a Life-Span Developmental Perspective	p. 227
References	p. 248
The Childhoods and Early Lives of Geniuses: Combining Psychological and Biographical Evidence	p. 255
References	p. 270
The Rage to Master: the Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts	p. 271
References	p. 298
Acknowledgments	p. 298
Changing the Agency for Learning: Acquiring Expert Performance	p. 303
Acknowledgments	p. 310
Acknowledgments	p. 311
Expert Performance and the History of Science	p. 313
References	p. 319
Capturing Expertise in Sports	p. 321
References	p. 334
Laboratory Experimentation on the Genesis of Expertise	p. 337
Acknowledgments	p. 344
References	p. 345
Costs of Expertise	p. 347
Acknowledgments	p. 353
References	p. 353
Author Index	p. 355
Subject Index	p. 365
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