Anders Ericsson

Anders Ericsson was a Swedish psychologist and expertise researcher whose decades of work on deliberate practice fundamentally changed how we understand skill development.

Anders Ericsson spent most of his career at Florida State University studying how people become exceptional — not merely good — at demanding skills. His research on “deliberate practice” became one of the most cited bodies of work in applied psychology, and it was his studies that provided the empirical foundation for the “10,000 hours” concept popularized (and somewhat oversimplified) by Malcolm Gladwell.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise is Ericsson’s own account of that research, and it is a more careful and more useful book than the Gladwell-derived version that many people encountered first. His central argument is precise: what matters is not the accumulation of hours but the quality of practice — practice that operates at the edge of current ability, involves immediate feedback, and is designed to address specific weaknesses. The distinction between deliberate practice and naive repetition is one of the genuinely important ideas in the learning literature.

Ericsson is a researcher rather than a popularizer, and Peak reads accordingly — methodical, evidence-driven, and more interested in being accurate than being thrilling. Some sections covering the history of expertise research feel dense, and the practical guidance, while sound, is less vividly illustrated than in books written by professional science communicators. But the core ideas are valuable and well-founded, and readers who want to understand what the evidence actually says about skill acquisition rather than the mythology that surrounds it will find Peak essential.