Bill showed a graph of one of the participants in our research, a college student named Steve Faloon.1 In the first trial, Steve, or SF as he was known in our published article in the prestigious journal Science (Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980), performed like most adults, recalling seven digits. Over a series of testing sessions, however, his performance improved, surpassing not only the assumed limit but the world record. As recounted in my coauthored bookPeak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise (Ericsson & Pool, 2016), with a few hundred hours of training, Steve was eventually able to recall sequences of more than 80 randomly presented digits! Other subjects followed, with one eventually managing to recall over 100 digits.

Most memorable to me were the surprise and excitement in the audience. To be sure, some doubted the findings. Others suggested we’d merely lucked out, recruiting a naturally “gifted” person. A few accepted the results but questioned their significance. I remember one well-known cognitive scientist asking, “Who cares about improving one’s memory for random digits?”

Still, many were and have remained interested, in particular, about the changes in SF’s thought processes that accompanied his progress. The most general insight emerging from this research was that ability could be signifi- cantly extended by presenting tasks just beyond an individual’s performance level, giving immediate feedback, and then allowing time to reflect and prob- lem solve before proceeding with further attempts to improve. In time, we would call this process purposeful practice. When a teacher and coach agreed to monitor and guide each individual trainee to engage in particular training tasks, the improvements were greater and more predictable. This type of train- ing we termed deliberate practice.

Over the years, I’ve met people who think our research shows anyone can achieve anything. Even some researchers appear to believe this is our per- spective (cf. Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014). Nothing could be fur- ther from the truth. What we actually found is scientific evidence about howsome achieve amazing results: a map, so to speak, of the types of training activities and encoding (memory) methods that others can follow to obtain similar, specific exceptional performances. Of note is the word specific in the previous sentence: One critical finding from our studies is that expertise is domain specific. Participants in our digit span studies, for example, did not exhibit superior memories on other, seemingly related tasks, such as recalling letters and geometric symbols. Nonetheless, the general principle remains true: To improve, memory processes, mental representations, and expanded working memory have to be developed for each particular skill domain.

Decades later, numerous studies conducted by different researchers docu- ment that engagement in extended practice tailored to the specific task and individual learner can lead to improvement across a wide range of human activities, including music, ballet, gymnastics, chess, the word game Scrabble®, radiology, and education (Ericsson et al., 2018). To be sure, some remain skep- tical. I’ve met experienced professionals from a variety of performance domains, for instance, who seriously doubt their ability to improve meaning- fully beyond their present level. When asked, many say they have reached a limit determined by their unique inheritance of genes. It’s a compelling notion, despite an overall lack of empirical support for such constraints on increases in expert performance (Ericsson, 2014). Indeed, recent studies of middle-aged identical twins provide compelling evidence of the diverse outcomes that can be achieved with an identical set of genes when the twins pursued dissimilar developmental paths and engaged in different amounts of practice (Bathgate et al., 2018).