The Making of an Expert

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The Making of an Expert

by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and

Edward T. Cokely

New research shows that outstanding performance is the product of years of deliberate practice and coaching, not of any innate talent or skill.

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by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and

Edward T. Cokely

harvard business review managing for the long term julyaugust 2007 page 1

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New research shows that outstanding performance is the product of years of deliberate practice and coaching, not of any innate talent or skill.

Thirty years ago, two Hungarian educators,Lszl and Klara Polgr, decided to challengethe popular assumption that women dontsucceed in areas requiring spatial thinking,such as chess. They wanted to make a pointabout the power of education. The Polgrs ho-meschooled their three daughters, and as partof their education the girls started playingchess with their parents at a very young age.Their systematic training and daily practicepaid off. By 2000, all three daughters hadbeen ranked in the top ten female players inthe world. The youngest, Judit, had become agrand master at age 15, breaking the previousrecord for the youngest person to earn that ti-tle, held by Bobby Fischer, by a month. TodayJudit is one of the worlds top players and hasdefeated almost all the best male players.

Its not only assumptions about gender dif-ferences in expertise that have started to crum-ble. Back in 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professorof education at the University of Chicago, pub-lished a landmark book, Developing Talent inYoung People, which examined the critical fac-

tors that contribute to talent. He took a deepretrospective look at the childhoods of 120elite performers who had won internationalcompetitions or awards in elds ranging frommusic and the arts to mathematics and neurol-ogy. Surprisingly, Blooms work found no earlyindicators that could have predicted the virtuo-sos success. Subsequent research indicatingthat there is no correlation between IQ and ex-pert performance in elds such as chess, music,sports, and medicine has borne out his nd-ings. The only innate differences that turn outto be signicantand they matter primarily insportsare height and body size.

So what does correlate with success? Onething emerges very clearly from Blooms work:All the superb performers he investigated hadpracticed intensively, had studied with devotedteachers, and had been supported enthusiasti-cally by their families throughout their devel-oping years. Later research building onBlooms pioneering study revealed that theamount and quality of practice were key fac-tors in the level of expertise people achieved.




Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidenceshowed that

experts are always made, not born

.These conclusions are based on rigorous re-search that looked at exceptional performanceusing scientic methods that are veriable andreproducible. Most of these studies were com-piled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertiseand Expert Performance, published last year byCambridge University Press and edited by K.Anders Ericsson, one of the authors of this arti-cle. The 900-page-plus handbook includes con-tributions from more than 100 leading scien-tists who have studied expertise and topperformance in a wide variety of domains: sur-gery, acting, chess, writing, computer program-ming, ballet, music, aviation, reghting, andmany others.

The journey to truly superior performance isneither for the faint of heart nor for the impa-tient. The development of genuine expertiserequires struggle, sacrice, and honest, oftenpainful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts.It will take you at least a decade to achieve ex-pertise, and you will need to invest that timewisely, by engaging in deliberate practicepractice that focuses on tasks beyond your cur-rent level of competence and comfort. You willneed a well-informed coach not only to guideyou through deliberate practice but also tohelp you learn how to coach yourself. Aboveall, if you want to achieve top performance asa manager and a leader, youve got to forgetthe folklore about genius that makes manypeople think they cannot take a scientic ap-proach to developing expertise. We are here tohelp you explode those myths.

Lets begin our story with a little wine.

What Is an Expert?

In 1976, a fascinating event referred to as theJudgment of Paris took place. An English-owned wineshop in Paris organized a blindtasting in which nine French wine expertsrated French and California winestenwhites and ten reds. The results shocked thewine world: California wines received thehighest scores from the panel. Even more sur-prising, during the tasting the experts oftenmistook the American wines for French winesand vice versa.

Two assumptions were challenged that day.The rst was the hitherto unquestioned superi-ority of French wines over American ones. Butit was the challenge to the secondthe as-

sumption that the judges genuinely possessedelite knowledge of winethat was more inter-esting and revolutionary. The tasting suggestedthat the alleged wine experts were no more ac-curate in distinguishing wines under blind testconditions than regular wine drinkersa factlater conrmed by our laboratory tests.

Current research has revealed many otherelds where there is no scientic evidence thatsupposed expertise leads to superior perfor-mance. One study showed that psychothera-pists with advanced degrees and decades of ex-perience arent reliably more successful intheir treatment of randomly assigned patientsthan novice therapists with just three monthsof training are. There are even examples of ex-pertise seeming to decline with experience.The longer physicians have been out of train-ing, for example, the less able they are to iden-tify unusual diseases of the lungs or heart. Be-cause they encounter these illnesses so rarely,doctors quickly forget their characteristic fea-tures and have difculty diagnosing them. Per-formance picks up only after the doctors un-dergo a refresher course.

How, then, can you tell when youre dealingwith a genuine expert? Real expertise mustpass three tests. First, it must lead to perfor-mance that is consistently superior to that ofthe experts peers. Second, real expertise pro-duces concrete results. Brain surgeons, for ex-ample, not only must be skillful with their scal-pels but also must have successful outcomeswith their patients. A chess player must be ableto win matches in tournaments. Finally, trueexpertise can be replicated and measured inthe lab. As the British scientist Lord Kelvinstated, If you can not measure it, you can notimprove it.

Skill in some elds, such as sports, is easy tomeasure. Competitions are standardized sothat everyone competes in a similar environ-ment. All competitors have the same start andnish lines, so that everyone can agree on whocame in rst. That standardization permitscomparisons among individuals over time, andits certainly possible in business as well. In theearly days of Wal-Mart, for instance, Sam Wal-ton arranged competitions among store man-agers to identify those whose stores had thehighest protability. Each store in the Nord-strom clothing chain posts rankings of its sales-people, based on their sales per hour, for eachpay period.

K. Anders Ericsson

([email protected]) is the Conradi Eminent Scholar of Psychology at Florida State University, in Tallahassee. Michael J. Prietula ([email protected]) is a profes-sor at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, in Atlanta, and visit-ing research scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, Florida. Edward T. Cokely ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin.




Nonetheless, it often can be difcult to mea-sure expert performancefor example, inprojects that take months or even years tocomplete and to which dozens of individualsmay contribute. Expert leadership is similarlydifcult to assess. Most leadership challengesare highly complex and specic to a given com-pany, which makes it hard to compare perfor-mance across companies and situations. Thatdoesnt mean, though, that scientists shouldthrow up their hands and stop trying to mea-sure performance. One methodology we use todeal with these challenges is to take a repre-sentative situation and reproduce it in the lab-oratory. For example, we present emergencyroom nurses with scenarios that simulate life-

threatening situations. Afterward, we com-pare the nurses responses in the lab with ac-tual outcomes in the real world. We havefound that performance in simulations in med-icine, chess, and sports closely correlates withobjective measurements of expert perfor-mance, such as a chess players track record inwinning matches.

Testing methodologies can be devised forcreative professions such as art and writing,too. Researchers have studied differencesamong individual visual artists, for instance, byhaving them produce drawings of the same setof objects. With the artists identities con-cealed, these drawings were evaluated by artjudges, whose ratings clearly agreed on the art-ists prociency, especially in regard to techni-cal aspects of drawing. Other researchers havedesigned objective tasks to measure the supe-rior perceptual skills of artists without the helpof judges.

Practice Deliberately

To people who have never reached a nationalor international level of competition, it mayappear that excellence is simply the result ofpracticing daily for years or even decades.However, living in a cave does not make you ageologist. Not all practice makes perfect. Youneed a particular kind of practicedeliberatepracticeto develop expertise. When mostpeople practice, they focus on the things theyalready know how to do. Deliberate practice isdifferent. It entails considerable, specic, andsustained efforts to do something you cant dowellor even at all. Research across domainsshows that it is only by working at what youcant do that you turn into the expert you wantto become.

To illustrate this point, lets imagine you arelearning to play golf for the rst time. In theearly phases, you try to understand the basicstrokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes(like driving the ball into another player). Youpractice on the putting green, hit balls at adriving range, and play rounds with otherswho are most likely novices like you. In a sur-prisingly short time (perhaps 50 hours), youwill develop better control and your gamewill improve. From then on, you will work onyour skills by driving and putting more ballsand engaging in more games, until yourstrokes become automatic: Youll think lessabout each shot and play more from intu-

Things to Look Out for When Judging Expertise

Individual accounts of expertise are

often unreliable.

Anecdotes, selective recall, and one-off events all can present insufcient, often misleading, examples of expertise. There is a huge body of lit-erature on false memories, self-serving biases, and recollections altered as a re-sult of current beliefs or the passage of time. Reporting is not the same thing as research.

Many people are wrongly believed to

possess expertise.

Bear in mind that true expertise is demonstrated by mea-surable, consistently superior perfor-mance. Some supposed experts are su-perior only when it comes to explaining why they made errors. After the 1976 Judgment of Paris, for example, when California wines bested French wines in a blind tasting, the French wine ex-perts argued that the results were an aberration and that the California reds in particular would never age as well as the famous French reds. (In 2006, the tasting of the reds was reenacted, and California came out on top again.) Had it not been for the objective results from the blind tastings, the French wine ex-perts may never have been convinced of the quality of the American wines.

Intuition can lead you down the gar-

den path.

The idea that you can improve your performance by relaxing and just trusting your gut is popular. While it may be true that intuition is valuable in routine or familiar situations, informed intuition is the result of deliberate prac-tice. You cannot consistently improve your ability to make decisions (or your intuition) without considerable practice, reection, and analysis.

You dont need a different putter.

Many managers hope that they will sud-denly improve performance by adopting new and better methodsjust as golf players may think that they can lower their scores with a new and better club. But changing to a different putter may increase the variability of a golfers shot and thus hinder his or her ability to play well. In reality, the key to improving ex-pertise is consistency and carefully con-trolled efforts.

Expertise is not captured by knowl-

edge management systems.

Knowledge management systems rarely, if ever, deal with what psychologists call knowledge. They are repositories of images, docu-ments, and routines: external data that people can view and interpret as they try to solve a problem or make a decision. There are no shortcuts to gaining true expertise.




ition. Your golf game now is a social outing, inwhich you occasionally concentrate on yourshot. From this point on, additional time onthe course will not substantially improve yourperformance, which may remain at the samelevel for decades.

Why does this happen? You dont improvebecause when you are playing a game, youget only a single chance to make a shot fromany given location. You dont get to gure outhow you can correct mistakes. If you were al-lowed to take ve to ten shots from the exactsame location on the course, you would getmore feedback on your technique and start toadjust your playing style to improve your con-trol. In fact, professionals often take multipleshots from the same location when they trainand when they check out a course before atournament.

This kind of deliberate practice can beadapted to developing business and leadershipexpertise. The classic example is the casemethod taught by many business schools,which presents students with real-life situa-tions that require action. Because the eventualoutcomes of those situations are known, thestudents can immediately judge the merits oftheir proposed solutions. In this way, they canpractice making decisions ten to 20 times aweek. War games serve a similar training func-tion at military academies. Ofcers can analyzethe trainees responses in simulated combatand provide an instant evaluation. Such mockmilitary operations sharpen leadership skillswith deliberate practice that lets trainees ex-plore uncharted areas.

Lets take a closer look at how deliberatepractice might work for leadership. You oftenhear that a key element of leadership andmanagement is charisma, which is true. Beinga leader frequently requires standing in frontof your employees, your peers, or your boardof directors and attempting to convince themof one thing or another, especially in times ofcrisis. A surprising number of executives be-lieve that charisma is innate and cannot belearned. Yet if they were acting in a play withthe help of a director and a coach, most ofthem would be able to come across as consid-erably more charismatic, especially over time.In fact, working with a leading drama school,we have developed a set of acting exercises formanagers and leaders that are designed to in-crease their powers of charm and persuasion.

Executives who do these exercises have shownremarkable improvement. So charisma can belearned through deliberate practice. Bear inmind that even Winston Churchill, one of themost charismatic gures of the twentieth cen-tury, practiced his oratory style in front of amirror.

Genuine experts not only practice deliber-ately but also think deliberately. The golfer BenHogan once explained, While I am practicing Iam also trying to develop my powers of con-centration. I never just walk up and hit theball. Hogan would decide in advance wherehe wanted the ball to go and how to get itthere. We actually track this kind of thoughtprocess in our research. We present expert per-formers with a scenario and ask them to thinkaloud as they work their way through it. Chessplayers, for example, will describe how theyspend ve to ten minutes exploring all the pos-sibilities for their next move, thinking throughthe consequences of each and planning out thesequence of moves that might follow it. Weveobserved that when a course of action doesntwork out as expected, the expert players willgo back to their prior analysis to assess wherethey went wrong and how to avoid future er-rors. They continually work to eliminate theirweaknesses.

Deliberate practice involves two kinds oflearning: improving the skills you already haveand extending the reach and range of yourskills. The enormous concentration required toundertake these twin tasks limits the amountof time you can spend doing them. The famousviolinist Nathan Milstein wrote: Practice asmuch as you feel you can accomplish with con-centration. Once when I became concerned be-cause others around me practiced all day long,I asked [my mentor] Professor Auer how manyhours I should practice, and he said, It reallydoesnt matter how long. If you practice withyour ngers, no amount is enough. If you prac-tice with your head, two hours is plenty.

It is interesting to note that across a widerange of experts, including athletes, novelists,and musicians, very few appear to be able toengage in more than four or ve hours of highconcentration and deliberate practice at atime. In fact, most expert teachers and scien-tists set aside only a couple of hours a day, typi-cally in the morning, for their most demandingmental activities, such as writing about newideas. While this may seem like a relatively

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.




small investment, it is two hours a day morethan most executives and managers devote tobuilding their skills, since the majority of theirtime is consumed by meetings and day-to-dayconcerns. This difference adds up to some 700hours more a year, or about 7,000 hours morea decade. Think about what you could accom-plish if you devoted two hours a day to deliber-ate practice.

Its very easy to neglect deliberate practice.Experts who reach a high level of performanceoften nd themselves responding automati-cally to specic situations and may come torely exclusively on their intuition. This leads todifculties when they deal with atypical or rarecases, because theyve lost the ability to ana-lyze a situation and work through the right re-sponse. Experts may not recognize this creep-ing intuition bias, of course, because there isno penalty until they encounter a situation inwhich a habitual response fails and maybeeven causes damage. Older professionals with agreat deal of experience are particularly proneto falling into this trap, but its certainly not in-evitable. Research has shown that musiciansover 60 years old who continue deliberatepractice for about ten hours a week can matchthe speed and technical skills of 20-year-old ex-pert musicians when tested on their ability toplay a piece of unfamiliar music.

Moving outside your traditional comfortzone of achievement requires substantial mo-tivation and sacrice, but its a necessary disci-pline. As the golf champion Sam Snead onceput it, It is only human nature to want topractice what you can already do well, sinceits a hell of a lot less work and a hell of a lotmore fun. Only when you can see that delib-erate practice is the most effective means tothe desired endbecoming the best in youreldwill you commit to excellence. Snead,who died in 2002, held the record for winningthe most PGA Tour events and was famousfor having one of the most beautiful swings inthe sport. Deliberate practice was a key to hissuccess. Practice puts brains in your muscles,he said.

Take the Time You Need

By now it will be clear that it takes time to be-come an expert. Our research shows that eventhe most gifted performers need a minimumof ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense train-ing before they win international competi-

tions. In some elds the apprenticeship islonger: It now takes most elite musicians 15 to25 years of steady practice, on average, beforethey succeed at the international level.

Though there are historical examples of peo-ple who attained an international level of ex-pertise at an early age, its also true that, in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, peo-ple could reach world-class levels more quickly.In most elds, the bar of performance has risensteadily since that time. For instance, amateurmarathon runners and high school swimmerstoday frequently better the times of Olympicgold medalists from the early twentieth cen-tury. Increasingly stiff competition now makesit almost impossible to beat the ten-year rule.One notable exception, Bobby Fischer, didmanage to become a chess grand master in justnine years, but it is likely that he did so byspending more time practicing each year.

Many people are naive about how long ittakes to become an expert. Leo Tolstoy onceobserved that people often told him theydidnt know whether or not they could write anovel because they hadnt triedas if theyonly had to make a single attempt to discovertheir natural ability to write. Similarly, the au-thors of many self-help books appear to as-sume that their readers are essentially readyfor success and simply need to take a few moreeasy steps to overcome great hurdles. Popularlore is full of stories about unknown athletes,writers, and artists who become famous over-night, seemingly because of innate talenttheyre naturals, people say. However, whenexamining the developmental histories of ex-perts, we unfailingly discover that they spent alot of time in training and preparation. SamSnead, whod been called the best naturalplayer ever, told Golf Digest, People alwayssaid I had a natural swing. They thought Iwasnt a hard worker. But when I was young,Id play and practice all day, then practice moreat night by my cars headlights. My hands bled.Nobody worked harder at golf than I did.

Not only do you have to be prepared to in-vest time in becoming an expert, but you haveto start earlyat least in some elds. Your abil-ity to attain expert performance is clearly con-strained if you have fewer opportunities to en-gage in deliberate practice, and this is far froma trivial constraint. Once, after giving a talk, K.Anders Ericsson was asked by a member of theaudience whether he or any other person

It takes time to become an expert. Even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years of intense training before they win international competitions.




could win an Olympic medal if he began train-ing at a mature age. Nowadays, Ericsson re-plied, it would be virtually impossible for any-one to win an individual medal without atraining history comparable with that of to-days elite performers, nearly all of whomstarted very early. Many children simply donot get the opportunity, for whatever reason,to work with the best teachers and to engagein the sort of deliberate practice that they needto reach the Olympic level in a sport.

Find Coaches and Mentors

Arguably the most famous violin teacher of alltime, Ivan Galamian, made the point that bud-ding maestros do not engage in deliberatepractice spontaneously: If we analyze the de-velopment of the well-known artists, we seethat in almost every case the success of theirentire career was dependent on the quality oftheir practicing. In practically every case, thepracticing was constantly supervised either bythe teacher or an assistant to the teacher.

Research on world-class performers hasconrmed Galamians observation. It also hasshown that future experts need differentkinds of teachers at different stages of theirdevelopment. In the beginning, most arecoached by local teachers, people who cangive generously of their time and praise. Lateron, however, it is essential that performersseek out more-advanced teachers to keep im-proving their skills. Eventually, all top per-formers work closely with teachers who havethemselves reached international levels ofachievement.

Having expert coaches makes a differencein a variety of ways. To start with, they canhelp you accelerate your learning process.The thirteenth-century philosopher and sci-entist Roger Bacon argued that it would beimpossible to master mathematics in lessthan 30 years. And yet today individuals canmaster frameworks as complex as calculus intheir teens. The difference is that scholarshave since organized the material in such away that it is much more accessible. Studentsof mathematics no longer have to climb Ever-est by themselves; they can follow a guide upa well-trodden path.

The development of expertise requirescoaches who are capable of giving construc-tive, even painful, feedback. Real experts areextremely motivated students who seek out

such feedback. Theyre also skilled at under-standing when and if a coachs advice doesntwork for them. The elite performers we stud-ied knew what they were doing right and con-centrated on what they were doing wrong.They deliberately picked unsentimentalcoaches who would challenge them and drivethem to higher levels of performance. The bestcoaches also identify aspects of your perfor-mance that will need to be improved at yournext level of skill. If a coach pushes you toofast, too hard, you will only be frustrated andmay even be tempted to give up trying to im-prove at all.

Relying on a coach has its limits, however.Statistics show that radiologists correctly diag-nose breast cancer from X-rays about 70% ofthe time. Typically, young radiologists learnthe skill of interpreting X-rays by workingalongside an expert. So its hardly surprisingthat the success rate has stuck at 70% for a longtime. Imagine how much better radiologymight get if radiologists practiced instead bymaking diagnostic judgments using X-rays in alibrary of old veried cases, where they couldimmediately determine their accuracy. Wereseeing these kinds of techniques used moreoften in training. There is an emerging marketin elaborate simulations that can give profes-sionals, especially in medicine and aviation, asafe way to deliberately practice with appropri-ate feedback.

So what happens when you become anOlympic gold medalist, or an internationalchess master, or a CEO? Ideally, as your exper-tise increased, your coach will have helped youbecome more and more independent, so thatyou are able to set your own developmentplans. Like good parents who encourage theirchildren to leave the nest, good coaches helptheir students learn how to rely on an innercoach. Self-coaching can be done in any eld.Expert surgeons, for example, are not con-cerned with a patients postoperative statusalone. They will study any unanticipatedevents that took place during the surgery, totry to gure out how mistakes or misjudg-ments can be avoided in the future.

Benjamin Franklin provides one of the bestexamples of motivated self-coaching. When hewanted to learn to write eloquently and per-suasively, he began to study his favorite articlesfrom a popular British publication, the Specta-tor. Days after hed read an article he particu-

Real experts seek out constructive, even painful feedback. Theyre also skilled at understanding when and if a coachs advice doesnt work for them.




larly enjoyed, he would try to reconstruct itfrom memory in his own words. Then hewould compare it with the original, so he coulddiscover and correct his faults. He also workedto improve his sense of language by translatingthe articles into rhyming verse and then fromverse back into prose. Similarly, famous paint-ers sometimes attempt to reproduce the paint-ings of other masters.

Anyone can apply these same methods onthe job. Say you have someone in your com-pany who is a masterly communicator, andyou learn that he is going to give a talk to aunit that will be laying off workers. Sit downand write your own speech, and then comparehis actual speech with what you wrote. Ob-serve the reactions to his talk and imaginewhat the reactions would be to yours. Eachtime you can generate by yourself decisions, in-teractions, or speeches that match those ofpeople who excel, you move one step closer toreaching the level of an expert performer.

Before practice, opportunity, and luck can

combine to create expertise, the would-be ex-pert needs to demythologize the achievementof top-level performance, because the notionthat genius is born, not made, is deeply in-grained. Its perhaps most perfectly exempli-ed in the person of Wolfgang AmadeusMozart, who is typically presented as a childprodigy with exceptional innate musical ge-nius. Nobody questions that Mozarts achieve-ments were extraordinary compared withthose of his contemporaries. Whats often for-gotten, however, is that his development wasequally exceptional for his time. His musicaltutelage started before he was four years old,and his father, also a skilled composer, was afamous music teacher and had written one ofthe rst books on violin instruction. Like otherworld-class performers, Mozart was not bornan experthe became one.

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