Anders Ericsson

the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.

from a relatively new area of psychology that can be best described as “the science of expertise.”

Not surprisingly, Bloom reported that very few families could afford to have more than one child pursue this level of performance. Not only is it expensive, but it can be almost a full-time job for a parent to support the student in this pursuit—driving to and from practice during the week, providing transportation to competitions on the weekend, and so on

The most obvious performance issues are those that involve physical abilities. In the general population physical performance peaks around age twenty.

First, while the adult brain may not be as adaptable in certain ways as the brain of the child or adolescent, it is still more than capable of learning and changing.

creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time

If you teach a student facts, concepts, and rules, those things go into long-term memory as individual pieces, and if a student then wishes to do something with them—use them to solve a problem, reason with them to answer a question, or organize and analyze them to come up with a theme or a hypothesis—the limitations of attention and short-term memory kick in. The student must keep all of these different, unconnected pieces in mind while working with them toward a solution.

you don’t build mental representations by thinking about something; you build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over.

One benefit that a young student—or anyone, really—gets from developing mental representations is the freedom to begin exploring that skill on his or her own.