part0009

A t 3:25 p.m. on January 15, 2009, 150 passengers and five crew members buckled their seatbelts on U.S. Airways Flight 1549 and settled in for what they expected would be an uneventful two hour flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York City to Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina. Three minutes into the flight, at 2900 feet in the air, the improbable (but not impossible) happened. A flock of Canadian geese flew into the engines of the $60 million plane, rendering both engines inoperable and turning the plane into a glider.

At that moment, pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, 57 years old, had only seconds to make a series of life-or-death decisions. When he realized he would have to land the crippled plane within minutes, he quickly assessed the situation. He decided he couldn’t safely return to LaGuardia or reach the Teterboro airport in nearby New Jersey. While co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles went through the emergency checklist, Chesley determined that his “least bad option” was to land the plane in the Hudson River, and he told the startled air traffic controller, “We’re gonna be in the Hudson.” Over the plane’s public address system, Sullenberger told the passengers the words no one wants to hear, “This is the captain. Brace yourself for impact.” With flames and smoke billowing from the left engine and the thumping sound of the disabled engines filling the air, the three flight attendants—Donna Dent, Doreen Welsh, and Sheila Dail—quickly showed the passengers how to get into position and repeated the words, “Brace for impact. Keep your head down.”

At 3:31 p.m., 208 seconds after the Airbus 320’s engines lost power, Captain Sullenberger guided the plane over the George Washington Bridge, descending at over 1000 feet per minute, and landed safely in the freezing water of the Hudson River near midtown Manhattan. The flight attendants, together with Sullenberger and Skiles, efficiently managed the evacuation. Passengers, some climbing over the seats as water began to fill the floor of the plane, streamed out onto the emergency chutes of the partially submerged plane. Some passengers quickly boarded inflatable emergency rafts. Others waited for rescue on the wings of the plane as the water filled up around their ankles and then knees. A few passengers accidentally slid, and at least one purposely jumped, into the frigid water hoping to get to safety more quickly. By 3:35 p.m. the first commuter and tourist ferries in the area arrived and started evacuating the wet and freezing passengers from the disabled plane. Within minutes the police and U.S. Coast Guard arrived on the scene.

Nearly 80 passengers were treated for minor injuries and hypothermia, five had more serious injuries, and one stayed in the hospital overnight. All were able to go home, many vowing to hug their families a bit tighter and to tell them more often that they loved them.

Today, this dramatic controlled water landing into the Hudson is considered to be the most successful emergency ditching in the history of aviation. It is the gold standard “how to” case for emergency ditchings, not only for how to land a plane in a crisis, but also for the kind of education, experience, and crew management that enables pilots, crews, and passengers to handle emergency landings.

Undoubtedly there was some luck involved at the time of the ditching. Although the weather was 12 degrees below normal, visibility was excellent (at 10 miles) and winds were calm. Less than 24 hours earlier, visibility was at only one mile when gusty winds and snow showers blew through the area. A few days later, ice started forming on the river. In addition, the landing happened during a busy afternoon when ferries and rescue personnel could arrive quickly to provide assistance, and the flight was staffed by a very seasoned crew. Sullenberger had 19,663 flight hours, and over 4,500 of those had been in Airbus 320 planes. Although this was First Officer Jeffrey Skiles’ first flight at the helm of an Airbus 320, he had 15,643 flight hours behind him and had recently been trained to fly the Airbus 320. The three flight attendants were all over 50 years old, with a combined 92 years of experience flying. The Airbus 320 was equipped with safety equipment that exceeded minimum standards.

Although all these advantages contributed to the successful ditching and rescue, they were far from sufficient to guarantee success. The precision landing in the Hudson required unwavering focus, split second decisions about where and how to land the plane, an enormous amount of skill, and outstanding crew management. Sullenberger had to decide on a course of action in seconds , and he executed his decision in less than four minutes . To give you some perspective, the amount of time between the bird strike and the safe landing of the aircraft was about the time it took you to read these first few pages of this chapter. Sullenberger had not been trained in how to manage a plane after a bird strike or how to ditch a disabled plane in water, yet his 40 years of experience paid off. He knew he had to minimize the time spent flying over heavily populated areas to limit casualties in case the landing didn’t go as planned. He knew he had to land in an area where they’d be rescued quickly, due to the 21-degree weather and icy water. He knew he had to keep the nose of the disabled plane up until the very last second to slow the plane down. He knew he had to keep the wings level on impact, or the plane might cartwheel down the river after landing. He knew he had to stay calm and depend on the rest of the crew to do their jobs so that he could stay hyper-focused on landing the plane.

We were able to exercise a kind of professional calm, but we weren’t calm at all. … I was aware of my blood pressure shooting up, my pulse spiking, my perception field narrowing because of the stress; it was actually marginally debilitating. … My blood pressure and pulse were so elevated . . . for about 10 weeks. For the first few days, I couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a time, and I couldn’t shut my brain off—all of the distracted thinking and the second-guessing, especially late at night.[ 1 ]

The way I describe this whole experience—and I haven’t had time to reflect on it sufficiently—is that everything I had done in my career had in some way been a preparation for that moment. … I felt like everything I’d done in some way contributed to the outcome—of course along with [the actions of] my first officer and the flight attendant crew, the cooperative behavior of the passengers during the evacuation, and the prompt and efficient response of the first responders in New York.[ 2 ]

Reluctant to be seen as the sole hero of US Air Flight 1549, Sullenberger accepted an invitation to attend Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration in Washington, DC, only under the condition that the other four crew members would be invited as well.

Although the successful ditching was dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson,” it was no miracle. When journalist Katie Couric asked Sullenberger if he took time to pray in the few minutes between the bird strike and the landing, Sullenberger diplomatically responded, “I would imagine somebody in back [of the plane] was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane. My focus at that point was so intensely on the landing, I thought of nothing else.” In other words, he let the other people do the praying while he was busy doing his job.[ 3 ]

And he did his job very, very well. How did Captain Sullenberger develop world-class expertise that provided him with the quick judgment, exceptional skill, and calm demeanor that he needed during the crisis? Sullenberger developed a passion for flying when he was 5 years old in Denison, Texas. At age 16 he convinced his neighbor, an experienced crop duster, to teach him how to fly, giving him 45 years and over 19,000 hours of experience as a pilot by the time he ditched the plane in the Hudson. While earning a degree in psychology at the U.S. Airforce Academy, his studies focused on the psychology of cockpit crew behavior during a crisis. He achieved the rank of Captain as a U.S. Air Force fighter and glider pilot, worked as an experienced flight instructor, and trained pilots and crews in how to respond to crises. He joined National Transportation Safety Board and U.S. Airforce committees that investigated airplane accidents, he developed safety procedures for surviving flight emergencies, and he ran his own safety consulting firm. It wasn’t only his years of experience as a pilot that served him and the other people on Flight 1549 well; it was a culmination of his years of experience used wisely .

In this chapter, you will first learn how people become experts—what separates the best from the rest. You will then learn how you can apply this knowledge to your own life. Some people will read this chapter with the goal of becoming superstars in their fields, others with the goal of becoming better at what they do in existing jobs or learning a new set of skills for unfamiliar roles. Still others will read this chapter because they want to help their children, students, or employees develop expertise that will help them achieve their goals. Regardless of your reason for learning about the development of expertise, you’ll be better able to attain your goals if you implement what you learn in this chapter.

Experts are people who have achieved the highest level of performance in their fields and have a reputation for this achievement. Researchers have been studying experts in a variety of fields for decades. They’ve studied world-class musicians, athletes, surgeons, engineers, pilots, teachers, managers, chess players, taxi drivers, and experts in many other professions. They’ve studied why some radiologists are far more accurate than others in identifying cancerous tumors, what the best surgeons do differently than other surgeons, and how elite taxi drivers’ brains differ from brains of average taxi drivers. Through hundreds of such studies, they’ve discovered what motivates experts, as well as how they think, learn, and practice. These discoveries provide useful lessons for all of us.

Experts have two advantages over most people in their areas of expertise. First, they have more knowledge in their respective areas of expertise; and, consequently, they are able to use this knowledge to make better and faster decisions in routine and non-routine situations. Second, they have superior skills in their areas of expertise, enabling them to implement these decisions in ways that consistently lead to superior performance.

How do experts gain these advantages? In most ways, experts are just like everybody else. They put their pants on one leg at a time, love their families, and have bad habits and plenty of weaknesses. When she was a law student at Harvard and Columbia, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an intellectual force to be reckoned with, yet she failed the driving exam five times before finally getting her license.

Experts, like everyone else, can forget a lot of things. Due to the normal limitations of short-term memory, they too say things like, “Where did I put my keys?”; “What did I come upstairs for?”; and “What’s the name of the person I was introduced to five minutes ago?” Due to similar normal limitations with long-term memory, they may also forget much of what they learned in class three weeks ago, how to set the clock in a car when the time changes, and how to get to the little out-of-the-way romantic restaurant they visited ten years ago. However, experts differ from non-experts because they develop effective strategies for overcoming the limitations of memory in their areas of expertise.

Long-term memory helps us remember knowledge and skills long after we first learn them. Once learned, most of us remember how to do basic arithmetic, speak one or more languages, write sentences and paragraphs, get dressed in the morning, cook at least basic meals without a recipe, ride a bike, and drive a car. We remember how to do these things because we spent a lot of time acquiring the knowledge and practicing the skills associated with these abilities, and we continue to use these capabilities almost daily throughout our lives. Through years of practice, we begin to do these activities automatically, and we forget how hard we worked to learn them.

Every time we learn something new and practice it long enough, we commit it to long-term memory in the form of mental representations that we can then draw on to accomplish our goals in routine and novel situations. A mental representation is an image we hold in our minds of what an end result should look like, the steps we should take to get that result, and how we should assess whether we reached that result. We use mental representations to navigate the mundane and complex activities of everyday life, from getting dressed in the morning to making decisions in a crisis. Throughout our lives, we create new mental representations as needed, and we expand, adapt, and toss out existing ones as we set new goals, handle changing environments, and learn new things. We learn and adapt our mental representations through education, training, and experience. The more we practice and use the skills associated with a specific mental representation (e.g., how to negotiate), the more likely we will be able to consistently use those skills competently and automatically.

Here’s a simple way to understand how we use mental representations in the more mundane areas of our everyday lives. You can probably get up from your bed and get to the bathroom in the middle of the night without turning a light on, and usually without bumping into a wall or falling, because you have a mental representation of the path from the bed to the bathroom. You can even usually get from the bed to the bathroom with nothing more than a few bumps in a pitch black hotel room that you’ve never slept in before because you’ve created a general mental representation of bed-to-bathroom-in-the-middle-of-the-night that you can use in a variety of different hotel rooms. The point here is that mental representations can help us even in situations we’ve not encountered before.

Competitive swimmer Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympic gold medal champion in history. During the course of his career, Phelps has won 23 gold medals and broken multiple world records in swimming competitions. Phelps created winning mental representations through years of purposeful practice. Phelps was 10 years old when he started working with his hometown coach, Bob Bowman, who believed that Phelps had a perfect swimmer’s physique—long arms, short legs, and a compact trunk. Bowman spent most of those years training Phelps to develop good habits and routines, not only because all successful athletes do so, but also because Phelps was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—a condition that made it challenging for him to pay attention and control his impulses and behaviors.

In his book The Power of Habit , journalist Charles Duhigg describes one of Bowman’s strategies for focusing Phelps’ energy.[ 5 ] Bowman would tell Phelps to repeatedly rehearse his routines in his mind; to mentally “replay the videotape” of the perfect race. Phelps would visualize the perfect strokes and the perfect race, not only during his practice but also as he was going to sleep at night, at which time he would count strokes, streamline his turns, and reach the finish line in his mind. Bowman even had Phelps practice laps in the dark to build Phelps’ dependence on effective routines under any situation that might come up, including failure of his goggles. Through focused practice, Bowman helped Phelps create a wide variety of winning mental representations that would help Phelps automatically perform at his best regardless of any unexpected situations.

An unexpected situation arose during the 200 meter butterfly competition at the Beijing Olympics on August 13, 2008. The day started like any other Olympic competition for Phelps. He ate his 6,000 calorie breakfast, did his 45 minute warm up in the pool, and listened to hip hop music as he squeezed into the skin-tight bodysuit he would wear during the race. Seconds before the race, as he stepped onto the starting block, he swung his arms as he always did before a race and then dove into the water. His goggles immediately began filling up with water, reducing his visibility to zero by the second lap of the race. Phelps stayed calm and replayed the tapes in his mind, just as he had practiced, counting each stroke and estimating the length of the final stroke with perfect timing. He won the competition and earned one of his eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, breaking the world record for the 200 meter butterfly.

Although we all use mental representations to get through the activities of everyday living, experts have more numerous, more varied, and more sophisticated mental representations in their areas of expertise. They develop these mental representations through years of disciplined and rigorous training. World-class surgeons use mental representations to perform life-saving surgeries, virtuoso musicians use mental representations to perform awe-inspiring concerts, expert teachers use mental representations to inspire students to achieve more than the students thought possible, and expert team leaders use mental representations to bring out the best in their teams.

Sullenberger accumulated a collection of mental representations applicable to piloting planes under a variety of conditions, routinely used these during his career as a pilot, and drew on that practice during his moment of crisis above the Hudson. In an interview after the crash he said, “I made deposits throughout my life in educating, training, and experience. The balance in that account was sufficient, and I could make a sudden large withdrawal.”[ 6 ] In his autobiography he writes, “Before I go to work, I build a mental model of my day’s flying. I begin by creating that ‘situational awareness’ so often stressed when I was in the Air Force.”[ 7 ] Sullenberger explains that situational awareness means that pilots must be able to “create and maintain a very accurate real-time mental model of reality.” In his years investigating airplane accidents, he found that pilots ran into the most difficulty when they “lost the picture,” meaning that they misread the situation and, consequently, made a fatal error.

On routine flights, Sullenberger regularly checked the weather at the airport he was leaving from as well as at the airport where he would be landing, and he anticipated the best route and altitude for avoiding turbulence to give passengers a smoother ride. Sullenberger attributes some of his success in landing the disabled plane on the Hudson to his many years of paying close attention to what he called “energy management.” In his words:

Mental representations, whether simple or complex, are made up of many different pieces of knowledge and skills. Researchers call these small bits of knowledge and skills chunks . We create mental representations by stringing together chunks of knowledge into meaningful patterns that we use to make sense of situations and take action. One benefit of chunking is that it’s easier to learn and remember small pieces of information. For example, it’s hard to remember a long string of numbers like 8001550199, but it becomes easier if we break the numbers down into chunks such as 800-155-0199. Chunking is how we remember phone numbers, passwords, and mathematical equations, as well as dance moves, phrases in a new language, and how to do our jobs.

Another benefit of chunking is that it’s easier to mix and match small chunks of information and skills to create a variety of mental representations appropriate to any given situation. Writers turn isolated words into beautiful prose. Musicians turn isolated musical notes into symphonies. Ballerinas turn precise movements into exquisite ballets. Surgeons turn independent surgical procedures into life-saving surgeries. Accomplished swimmers turn individual strokes, kicks, and turns into winning races. Words, musical notes, dance movements, surgical procedures, and swim strokes mean little until they are strung together into a meaningful and memorable whole.

Experts have more chunks in their respective areas of expertise than most people have, and they’re able to link these chunks together in a variety of ways to help them make better decisions and take more efficient actions. In studies of the differences between novice and master chess players, researchers have found that novice chess players focus on individual pieces, whereas experts focus on patterns on the board. Novice chess players focus on the next move, whereas expert chess players think several moves ahead and anticipate various outcomes of each of the moves. Master chess players store about 50,000 chunks of chess-related information in their long-term memory, and they use this information to quickly make sense of the chess board and efficiently strategize their moves.[ 9 ]

Having numerous chunks of information helps experts improvise and innovate. World-class cellist YoYo Ma, who has been honored with the National Medal of the Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and numerous Grammys, says that he learned at a young age that he gets bored when he focuses on performing perfectly. His favorite performances are those in which he stops focusing on the technical aspects of the performance and instead focuses “on the expression rather than perfection.” In an interview, Ma said that he sometimes enjoys the moments on stage that he hadn’t prepared for, such as when a string breaks, because it gives him an opportunity to improvise and create “something living” in the moment.[ 10 ] The most effective parents, teachers, engineers, and leaders not only know more, they also improvise more.

• Sense making : Experts understand situations in their areas of expertise more deeply, more accurately, and with greater sophistication. They are able to efficiently arrange seemingly isolated details into patterns that are transferrable to a variety of routine and non-routine situations, and they are better at organizing and recalling information.

• Decision making : Because their sophisticated sense-making capabilities enable them to mentally rehearse a variety of potential strategies and outcomes, experts can prioritize incoming information, make relevant trade-offs associated with different alternatives, predict outcomes of various choices, identify the plan that’s most likely to succeed, make back-up plans in case the initial plan doesn’t work, and improvise on the spot. They process all of this more quickly, leading to better decisions in real time.

So when you say you want to be an expert in a field, you’re saying that you want to be a really good chunker—someone who has a lot of chunks of information you can turn into mental representations that will help you consistently handle routine and non-routine situations calmly, efficiently, and successfully.

Researchers have discovered that the brains of many experts are wired differently than the brains of amateurs and average performers. When the brain activity of pilots was monitored during simulations of plane landings during bad weather, more experienced pilots made fewer eye movements than the novices or average performers when looking at instruments in the cockpit and at visual markers on the runway. Experienced pilots also took less time to decide where and how to land the plane once they made sense of what they were seeing because they tend to be more selective in searching for information and more efficient at organizing what they see. When comparing the brains of the expert, average and novice pilots, researchers found “lower functional brain activity in pilots with high aviation expertise during decision making.”[ 11 ] In other words, complicated decision making is less taxing on the brains of experts than on the brains of others because they’ve gone through the motions so many times that they don’t have to think about every step that needs to be taken and can concentrate on the most critical issues.

The brains of experts not only act differently, they also look different than the brains of average and novice performers. A set of studies at University College London explored the following question: What do scrub jays, squirrels, and expert London taxi drivers have in common that most of us don’t have?

Let’s begin with what scrub jays and squirrels have in common. They both need above average spatial awareness to survive. Scrub jays and squirrels hide their food in different locations and need to find it again months later to avoid starvation. Birds and mammals that play hide and seek with food have larger posterior hippocampi in their brains than those that don’t hide food because the hippocampus plays a central role in long-term memory and spatial navigation. Humans also have two seahorse-shaped hippocampi located at the front of each side of their brains. The posterior of the hippocampus (the tail of the seahorse shape) acts as a cognitive map without which we would not know where we are, where we’ve been, or how to get to where we want to go.

Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues wanted to know if human brains—as with those of scrub jays and squirrels—change when humans acquire and remember vast amounts of information related to spatial navigation.[ 12 ] The researchers studied the world famous London taxi cab drivers because these superstar cabbies have to learn and retain in memory vast amounts of knowledge about the streets, landmarks, and routines of London’s city streets. London streets are among the most complicated in the world and are notoriously difficult to navigate. The street layout in London has been described as being “a preposterously complex tangle of veins and capillaries, the cardiovascular system of a monster”[ 13 ] and “more like a tangle of yarn that a preschooler glued to construction paper than a metropolis designed with architectural foresight.”[ 14 ]

London taxi drivers must be able to figure out the fastest route to get customers from point A to point B through a mind-boggling labyrinth of 25,000 streets, navigating through constant obstacles caused by construction, congestion, and one-way streets. In addition to being intimately acquainted with the dizzying tangle of roads, London taxi drivers also need to know the locations of tourist attractions, theatres, pubs, restaurants, shops, offices, government buildings, schools, parks, places of worship, hospitals, and cemeteries. Any location a customer might ask for, with or without a specific street address, is fair game .

Maguire and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of the most experienced taxi drivers to those of average taxi drivers and people who don’t drive taxis. They found that the most experienced taxi drivers had larger posterior hippocampi than the others, meaning that the longer someone worked as a taxi driver, the larger the posterior hippocampi were. Also, the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampi were larger than those of bus drivers. This makes sense because bus drivers navigate the same routes every day, whereas taxi drivers have to learn multiple routes and landmarks and all their variable conditions, which requires more of the complex memory and navigational skills that are stored in the posterior hippocampi.

Although these studies demonstrated that the brains of experienced taxi drivers differ from those of other people, the researchers hadn’t yet established the cause and effect relationship. Were people with larger posterior hippocampi more likely to want to be expert taxi drivers for some reason, or did expert taxi drivers develop larger posterior hippocampi as a consequence of their extensive training and experience? To find out, Maguire and her colleagues decided to compare the brains of superstar London taxi drivers who completed a rigorous training program specific to London called “The Knowledge” with the brains of those who never took or completed the program. The researchers selected people of similar age, intelligence, and education, and they used MRIs to measure these peoples’ hippocampi at the beginning of the study and four years later.

As in many fields, the most elite experts are the best of the best who can demonstrate that they have accumulated knowledge and abilities that are a cut above other experts. To become a licensed driver of a black cab in London, hopefuls must endure two to four years of grueling training in a course called “The Knowledge,” followed by multiple exams that are designed to assess aspiring black-cab taxi drivers’ intimate and extensive knowledge of London streets and landmarks. To pass the exams, the taxi drivers who aspire to be among the finest in London have to memorize 25,000 streets, 320 routes, and the locations of at least 20,000 well-known and obscure landmarks. They must also be able to calculate the fastest and most direct routes from A to B without using maps or a GPS (Global Positioning System) to help them navigate. They have to keep all that information in their brains. Throughout London, you can sometimes see aspiring elite taxi drivers on scooters, stopping at landmarks and taking notes in their efforts to etch the various potential destinations and routes in their brains. The Knowledge examiners are viewed as tough but fair, with one fondly nicknamed “the smiling assassin” because of the difficulty of his test routes.[ 15 ]

Seventy percent of the taxi experts-in-training quit The Knowledge before taking the exams. Although an aspiring taxi driver can take The Knowledge exams as many times as he or she desires, only about 50% of those who choose to take the exams successfully complete them—about the same number who succeed at becoming a member of the elite U.S. Navy Seals. For those who pass, the rewards are many. Only those who pass The Knowledge exams can drive the famous black cabs of London. They are also more likely to earn salaries that can move them solidly into the middle class. They get to set their own hours, giving them more flexibility and work-life balance, and they are not at the beck and call of cab dispatchers who control the routes and may play favorites.

Although there was no difference in the hippocampi of the study participants at the beginning of the study, four years later those who passed The Knowledge exams had larger posterior hippocampi than those who never took the training, never completed the training, or failed the exam. The researchers concluded that the rigor of the training itself created changes to the part of the brain responsible for long-term memory and spatial awareness.

In other studies, neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot and her colleagues found that the navigational strategies people use throughout their lives can change the amount of gray matter in their hippocampi.[ 16 ] The researchers identified two ways that people get from place to place. Some people use a spatial strategy. This means that they build cognitive maps in their minds that help them understand where they are, as well as understand the distances and roads to get to different places (e.g., going from home to a new friend’s home across town). Using these internalized maps of the world around them, they can improvise and figure out shortcuts to get somewhere quickly or alternative routes to get around traffic jams. Other people get around by what the researchers call a stimulus-response strategy. This is similar to going on autopilot, mindlessly making right and left turns by habit, following a list of step-by-step directions, or depending on a GPS. These people may make fewer mistakes, but they don’t develop skills in figuring out how to get from point A to B by themselves.

The researchers found that their study participants who routinely navigated on autopilot were more likely to have smaller hippocampi than those who regularly used spatial strategies (maps or other methods that require them to put in more effort to navigate their way from point A to point B). Bohbot believes that people who passively depend on habit or GPS systems don’t learn and use the complex skills associated with map reading and navigation, and they don’t tax their long-term memory to remember landmarks, turns, and street names. Bohbot argues that letting these navigation skills atrophy may be a problem because people with smaller posterior hippocampi are more likely to get dementia later in life. Bohbot said that she uses her GPS system a lot less now.[ 17 ]

Many kinds of changes in the brain have been found to be related to expertise. For example, the area of the brain related to the right index finger is larger in the brains of people with limited or no sight who read Braille. And extensive training in music, dance, and athletics can also lead to structural changes in the brain. Studies of such changes in the brain have four important findings for all of us:

Expertise matters because having an expertise that is meaningful to you and others is key to your long-term success. It’s also important because organizations and societies need experts. As citizens, we don’t want to settle for “good enough” pilots, surgeons, nurses, and engineers, and we don’t want to drive cars with flawed airbags, listen to meh concerts, tolerate mediocre managers, sit through uninspired lectures, or have our children taught by unremarkable teachers.

If you want to become an expert in a particular area, you’ll need to invest in a special kind of practice essential to developing expertise. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth the effort if it helps you achieve your goals. Experts in most fields develop their talents in similar ways, which is the topic of the next section .

Researcher Anders Ericsson calls the kind of practice that develops expertise “purposeful, deliberate practice.”[ 18 ] This special kind of practice creates the chunks of knowledge and skills that build the broad array of mental representations that sets experts apart from non-experts. It should come as no surprise that experts spend more time developing their crafts. Eleanor Maguire found that the taxi drivers who passed The Knowledge exams put in twice as many hours of studying than those who didn’t pass the exams.

Ericsson and his colleagues found that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. This rule of thumb has applied to superstar musicians, mathematicians, athletes, as well as experts in many other professions. Although the 10,000 hour rule has been debated—for example, some researchers argue that the number of hours needed to become an expert differs based on the knowledge and skills required in different areas such as games, sports, music, and professions—researchers generally agree that people who become experts practice much more often than those who don’t.

However, people with world-class skills don’t just practice harder and longer than others to learn their respective crafts; they also practice better , in a more focused and strategic way. It’s the quality as well as the quantity of hours of practice and experience that turns someone into an expert. To put the importance of quality of practice into perspective, consider how much time and money people, organizations, and societies spend on education and experience. Billions of dollars are spent every year on leadership development programs globally. On average, undergraduate students in the U.S. graduate from public and nonprofit colleges with nearly $30,000 in debt. More than 50% of U.S. salaried employees say they work more than 40 hours each week (with 25% saying they work more than 60 hours each week).[ 19 ] With all this time and money going into education and experience, you would think that we’d have more experts than we know what to do with.

Merely sitting through classes or leadership development programs does not count as learning, however, and schlepping through long days at work for many years does not count as experience. To become outstanding in a particular area of expertise requires that you engage in focused, intensive, and organized practice, day after day and year after year. It requires delayed gratification and a lot of willpower. That’s why most people settle for good enough. Good enough is OK in many areas of our lives, but it’s not OK if people are depending on us to do our jobs with a high level of expertise.

Purposeful practice is hard to do because it requires a lot of willpower. People who have developed their willpower are able to resist short-term temptations so that they can achieve their long-term goals. Researcher Roy Baumeister and his colleagues warn that it can be challenging to maintain our willpower, so we have to use it wisely.[ 20 ] If we use a lot of willpower in one area, we’ll have less available to use in another area. That’s why people who are experts in one area are often mediocre in several other areas. It’s also why many successful people do their hardest work early in the day, before the distractions of the day kick in and their willpower is depleted.

Maintaining willpower can be hard because controlling our impulses can get quite exhausting, day after day, week after week, year after year. Baumeister says that most of us spend at least three hours each day using willpower to control our impulses. We get up early when we’d rather sleep in longer. We eat salad when we’d rather have a slice of pizza loaded with fatty toppings. We go to work when we’d rather be at the beach. We work on the mundane aspects of our jobs when we’d rather be enjoying the more interesting parts. We nod and smile when we’d rather exclaim, “What were you thinking?” or “I can’t believe you said that!” It’s quite impressive how much effort we put into controlling ourselves every day. Using our willpower to control our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors makes us more effective (and socially appropriate) in many situations, but it also wears us out. That’s why purposeful practice is so difficult.

You can develop your ability to manage your willpower more effectively through a variety of strategies. For example, you can develop habits so that you don’t wear yourself out making so many decisions each day. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, wears the same color T-shirts (grey) and sweatshirts (dark grey) most of the time. He says he wants to save his energy for the more important decisions he has to make every day. Similarly, you can manage the environment around you so that you don’t have to engage your willpower. For example, you can keep unhealthy foods out of the house so you don’t have the option to eat them at home, or you can install an app that won’t let you search the Internet when you should be working. We’ll discuss these strategies, as well as others for increasing your willpower, in the last chapter of the book when you will have an opportunity to create your action plan.

To commit to the rigors of intensive practice, you need to sincerely believe that your long-term goal is worth the time, toil, and sacrifice it requires. Although most people stop practicing once the practice gets too difficult or is no longer enjoyable, you have to continue to practice to develop outstanding talent. People who succeed at this do so because they are determined to succeed at something they care about, not because the practice is easy or enjoyable. You are more likely to stay committed to your goals if you can connect them to making a positive difference in the world, such as contributing to the well-being of others. In order for your goals to inspire you to stay the course, they need to be achievable and aligned with your values, and instill in you a sense of pride. You also need to be able to see your progress toward the greater purpose.

To become an expert, you need to have a mental representation in your mind about what expertise looks like. To do this, watch experts in action in your desired area of expertise and figure out what they do better than novice or average performers. What makes them special? What knowledge and skills do they have that makes them stand out from others, and how did they develop these? What degrees, certificates, and awards do they have?

When I was starting out teaching, I sat in on the classes of some of the best teachers at the business school. I paid attention to the techniques they used to engage the students and the strategies they used to organize their materials. I went to workshops and read books about how to become a teacher who can inspire others. Over time, of course, I developed my own style and strategies. But to this day I still use some of what I learned from watching expert teachers early in my career, and I still sit in on other professors’ classes to learn from their teaching approaches .

Work backwards from your long-term goals and identify the specific knowledge, skills, experiences, and credentials you will need. Assess the knowledge, skills, experiences, and credentials you already have. Once you’ve identified the gap between what you currently have and what you need, create your step-by-step strategy. This involves two steps. First, you’ll need to break your goals down into smaller chunks of knowledge and skills because chunking allows you to turn an ambitious goal into a set of achievable steps. What specific knowledge and skills do you need to learn? Second, you’ll need to develop a plan for learning and practicing each of these chunks until you master them all. It will be most effective if you begin with the fundamental skills and build from there. Learning each chunk of knowledge and skill on its own may not feel that impactful, but as Ericcson says, “progress comes as a series of baby steps, none very impressive on its own, but they can add up to an incredible journey.”[ 22 ]

2. Give your full attention to the task each time you practice. Ericsson says, “It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period.”[ 23 ] Many experts engage in concentrated practice for only two to five hours each day. In one study, Ericsson asked expert, average, and least accomplished violinists to keep a log of the time they spent practicing each week. He found that the violinists said they spent the same amount of time practicing, but the most accomplished violinists used their time in a more focused way than the others. The good news is that practicing for just two hours each day in a focused way for ten years adds up to 7300 hours of deliberate practice. The better news is that many experts take naps to rejuvenate after their intensive practice.

3. Once you’ve reached a high level of competence in a precise area, push yourself on to the next chunk, even if doing so means that you’ll make more errors. Doing the same kind of practice of the same skill over and over again may feel comfortable, but it will not increase your abilities. Competition skaters, for example, fall more during practice than average skaters because they set more difficult challenges for themselves. Failure is part of the learning process because making mistakes helps people understand what skills they don’t yet have. Nobel laureate Niels Bohr defined an expert as a person who has, through painful experience, "made all the mistakes that can be made, in a narrow field.” Ericsson says the most learning happens “at the edge of one’s comfort zone.”[ 24 ] Leadership researchers Scott DeRue and Ned Wellman found that the best way to learn leadership is to create optimal challenges. If a challenge is too hard, it can be overwhelming to the point that it is disheartening and nothing can be learned. If the task is too easy, it offers no opportunity for new learning.[ 25 ]

4. Get a coach. Experts often have coaches, particularly early in their careers, who help them develop their learning goals and optimal challenges. A coach can motivate you to push yourself harder than you would on your own. Over time, many experts-in-training internalize the ability to develop stretch goals and stay motivated, even without the coach.

Decide how you will assess whether you’ve achieved optimal performance in a specific area. One way is to create “SMART” goals for every chunk you want to develop. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time bound. SMART goals are small wins that, when taken together, lead to big changes.

Specific means that you’ve identified a clear and unambiguous area of improvement you want to develop. Saying that you want to get healthy wouldn’t be specific. Saying that you want to eat more fruits and vegetables wouldn’t be specific. Saying that you will eat the equivalent of five cups of fruits or vegetables every day would be specific.

Measurable means that you’ve established concrete criteria for assessing when you’ve achieved the standard of quality you want to achieve for each chunk of knowledge or skill you want to develop. Clear quality standards are important because they help you self-correct along the way before bad habits become etched in and harder to change.

Attainable means that you can realistically achieve progress toward your goal. Remember that optimal challenges are those that aren’t too easy, but they’re not overwhelming to the point that you can’t make any progress toward your goal. Said another way, you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew.

Relevant means that the knowledge and skill you want to master fits with your short and long-term plan to become an expert in your area. It’s easy to go off track and start focusing on developing knowledge and skills that may be interesting but not central to the expertise you need to develop to become an expert in your desired area.

Developing expertise isn’t easy, but it’s certainly more achievable if you have a plan. If you look at the history of anyone who is a known expert, you’ll find that he or she engaged in purposeful, deliberate practice. Chris Rock has achieved the pinnacle of success in the field of stand-up comedy. Although he is known primarily for his comedy, he is also a writer, actor, director, and producer. He has won multiple Emmys and Grammys and has hosted the Academy Awards, as well as the New Year’s Eve celebration in New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 2007. Rock makes his standup comedy routines look easy, despite the years of purposeful, deliberate practice that goes into each of his routines.

For Mr. Rock . . . being gifted is really just about doing the things that make it look easy. … For many months he has been piecing together his act in clubs in New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Las Vegas. Comedy bit by comedy bit, he has built two hours of material one minute at a time, culling the belly laughs from the bombs. For him, the 18 warm up shows he did at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, N.J., preparing for the tour are more important than his three Emmys.

Vinnie Brand, owner of the Stress Factory, said that Rock “worked on his material, over and over, cutting and trimming, until by the last show you could not believe what he put together.”[ 26 ]

Expertise has its costs. Once you develop expertise in a particular area, it can be harder to change to a new set of skills if the environment changes. Psychologists Peter Frensch and Robert Sternberg conducted a study comparing expert and novice bridge players’ performances.[ 27 ] The bridge players competed against a computer. When the rules of the game were the same as traditional bridge, the experts outperformed the novices. But when the researchers changed the fundamental rules of the game, the novices beat the experts. Entrenched in their old ways of thinking and acting, it was harder for the experts to make sense of the game and adjust their practices to the new set of rules. When the rules change, doing more of the same, and doing it faster, won’t necessarily help you in the new game.

The lesson from this study is that you need to stay alert to ensure that your expertise can adapt as the environment changes. For example, the superstar London taxi drivers are now competing with Uber. Will potential customers pay higher rates for London’s finest who drive comfortable high-end cabs and who know the fastest and safest way to get from point A to B, or will they choose to ride with Uber drivers who drive less impressive cars and depend on GPSs? As you develop your expertise, you’ll need to prepare for the possibility that some of the methods that are key to your current expertise may become dated, obsolete, or even flawed. A renowned physician once addressed a graduating class of bright-eyed new physicians. He began his commencement address by saying, “I have some bad news and some worse news. The bad news is that half of what you learned here isn’t true. The worse news is that we don’t know which half.” The point is that the world is changing and you’ll need to continuously adapt your knowledge and skills in response if you want to stay relevant and impactful.

Another risk of becoming an expert is that becoming an expert in an area comes with significant opportunity cost. Sullenberger acknowledges that the years of training and travel involved in becoming an expert pilot cost him time with his wife and two daughters over the years; time that he can never make up. A final risk is that of becoming overly dependent on your area of expertise to the point of failing to develop other skills essential to your success. For example, you may be the most competent engineer in your field, but—as you’ll see in the chapters that follow—you may not get very far if you’re also the most undependable or annoying one.