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we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities. There are some immutable aspects of learning that we can probably all agree on: First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it. Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. We can’t advance through middle school without some mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies. Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and diffi cult colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our dotage, we move into simpler housing while we’re still able to adapt. If you’re good at learning, you have an advantage in life. Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive. Learning Is Misunderstood ê 3 Claims We Make in This Book You may not agree with the last point, but we hope to p...

Deliberate Practice When you see stellar per for mances by an expert in any fi eld— a pianist, chess player, golfer— perhaps you marvel at what natural talent must underlie their abilities, but expert per for mance does not usually rise out of some ge ne tic predisposition or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice. If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of per for mance. What ever the fi eld, expert per for mance is thought to be garnered through the slow acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. Witness a champion chess player. In studying the positions on a board, he can contemplate many alternative...