K. ANDERS ERICSSON

BY MARIA MALLORY WHITE

Through more than two decades of groundbreaking scholarship, FSU psychology Professor K. Anders Ericsson has explored great feats of athletic and intellectual prowess, studying phenomenal performers across activities ranging from brain surgery to pro golf to circus acrobatics. His quest: To discover how these champions become the best of the best. In the process the university's Edward Conradi Eminent Scholar has become a champion in his own right: Fortune magazine calls Ericsson the world's most prominent expert on expertise.

Widely acclaimed as the torchbearer in the Expert Performance Movement, Ericsson's ascent to superlative status is buoyed by his contrarian view. His research refutes the conventional wisdom and everyday supposition that the top achievers among us possess extraordinary talent or aptitudes that allow them to outpace their less fortunate counterparts. Ericsson's work tells the world that, in fact, there is no mysterious genetic hard-wiring for greatness, no intrinsic tendency for talent and no natural high-performance endowments.

"The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that's different is their innate abilities. There's little evidence to support this," Ericsson has explained. "With the exception of the influence of height and body size in some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body has been shown to constrain an individual from reaching an expert level."

How, then, does Ericsson account for standouts such as Mozart, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods? Surely their prowess is evidence that they are beneficiaries of random gifts of greatness. Not so, says Ericsson, whose landmark findings attribute the expertise of such phenoms not to their inherent talents but to, in a word, practice.

It turns out practice really does breed perfection. Ericsson's distinguished research reveals that a pattern he has dubbed "deliberate practice" is what catapults individuals into the stratosphere of legendary performance.

"From the outside, it seems like talented people don't have to put in a lot of effort. They make it look so easy," said Ericsson in a recent interview. "But when you look closely, the opposite is actually true. The best performers are almost always the ones who practice the most. I have yet to find a talented person who didn't earn their talent through hard work and thousands of hours of practice."

Expertise, Ericsson argues, comes from "gradual refinements of particular aspects of performance through repetition with immediate feedback." In his assessment of classical pianists, Ericsson found that those who performed at expert levels had invested more than 10,000 hours in solitary practice by their 20th birthdays-as much as five times more than their less successful, piano-playing peers. Similar practice-makes-perfect scenarios, according to Ericsson, emerged among other musicians, chess players and athletes, as well.

Still, devoting extensive time to improving selected aspects is only part of the deliberate practice equation, Ericsson cautions. Developed within the crucible of strategic goal setting--frequently with the help of a teacher or coach--constant self-evaluation against those goals and an ongoing discipline of refining one's skills, deliberate practice far exceeds the mundane repetition of standard drills and baseline training techniques commonly employed by lower-level performers, he says.

Ericsson shared the following example with a leading national business publication:

"Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he's thinking at the time of diagnosis and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he's improving."

Other experts similarly innovate their way to extraordinary results, added Ericsson, concluding, "In general, elite performers utilize some technique that typically isn't well known or widely practiced."

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, completed his Ph. D. in psychology from University of Stockholm in 1976, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Carnegie-Mellon University. After a 12-year tenure at University of Colorado at Boulder, which included a two-year stint at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin, Ericsson joined the FSU psychology faculty in 1992 as the distinguished Conradi Scholar, the first endowed chair in the College of Arts & Sciences.

"Dr. Ericsson was critical to launching a doctoral degree program in cognitive psychology," says Janet Kistner, FSU department chair, clinical psychology. "His presence enabled us to recruit some outstanding cognitive psychologists to join our faculty, as they were eager to have opportunities to interact with Ericsson and happy to be part of a developing program in expertise."

With the November 2006 release of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," Ericsson led a team of researchers that produced this first-ever collection of academically reviewed studies of expertise and expert performance. The seminal work received enthusiastic reviews and critical accolades in the academic and mass media alike.