succeed without the right attitude and years of practice.
More Than Mindset
Did Stephanie Fisher have the right mindset? Was she not
focused enough? Did she not believe enough? Or was there
some other thing she was lacking?
The term deliberate practice was first coined by K.
Anders Ericsson, a Swedish psychologist at the University
of Florida whose research claimed that talent is not the cause
of excellence—practice is. But not just any kind of practice,
he said—a specific kind of practice that leads to expert
performance.^10
In an era of human history in which we prize comfort
above nearly every other virtue, we have overlooked an
important truth: comfort never leads to excellence. What it
takes to become great at your craft is practice, but not just
any kind of practice—the kind that hurts, that stretches and
grows you. This kind of practice, which Ericsson called
“deliberate” and we might consider more appropriately as
“painful,” is extremely difficult. It takes place over the
course of about ten years, or ten thousand hours—
incidentally the average length of an apprenticeship. But this
is not where the practice ends; it’s just where it begins. In
other words, you don’t clock in ten thousand hours and
instantly become an expert. You have to do the right kind of