Bergman is 42, married with two kids. About eight years ago, she and an American colleague were studying what they saw as a lack of progress in their profession.

And what we can see when we look at the research is that the outcome of psychotherapy hasn't really improved over the last 40 years. And that had us puzzled, so we started looking in other directions to try and figure out why or what would make us improve. And then we came across Kaye Anderson's work

on deliberate practice. Hello, Anders. Hi, Steven. How are you? doing very well. And that is K.

Anders Ericsson. And I'm a professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

Ericsson is the man of the hour on today's show. We'll get back to him soon. It was his research on something called deliberate practice that got the Danish psychologist Suzanne Bergman excited.

I'd been plowing through all the literature on deliberate practice, but it still seems a bit abstract when you read it. It was hard for me to really understand what it felt like. So we started talking about how could we try this out on ourselves. And after discussing this for a while, we decided if we are going to study the process, it needs to be not our work because we're too close to our work to be able to see it. So we decided to pick up something else outside of our work and then apply the principles of deliberate practice.

So Bergman wanted to use deliberate practice to try to improve at something, but something personal, not a profession. What should she

When I was a kid, I had this dream of becoming a famous singer.

Her favorite singer?

It was Whitney Houston. And I will

always love you. Oh,

she was amazing. But the dream got deferred. And then life

took over. So instead I became a psychologist and had a family and had a job.

Now, however, many years later, as part of her job, Bardman thought that maybe I

should give a go and see if it was actually possible to improve my singing, improve my voice. So she got back into it.

The first thing to do was record herself to see what she sounded like. I

started using this karaoke program and I started singing, and then I started listening, and it was really horrible. Mmm.

So did that mean that Suzanne Bargmann just didn't have the tools or maybe the natural talent to be good at what she wanted to be good at? Or was there a way to become less horrible? Maybe to become even great? From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. The research psychologist Anders Ericsson has just published, along with co -author Robert a book called Peek, Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. So let's pretend for a moment that I'm skeptical off the bat and I say, well, Professor Ericsson, is there a science of expertise? That sounds like a bit of an overreach, perhaps. How do you respond to that?

Well, I think this is what what is exciting here about our work is that for the first time we really have been studying in more objective ways, pinpointing what it is that some people are able to do much better than other individuals. Among

the many and diverse expert performers that Ericsson and his colleagues have studied... Ballet

dancers, gymnasts, and all sorts of athletes. A lot of coaches. We've looked at chess experts, surgeons, doctors, teachers, musicians, taxi drivers, recreational activities like golf, and even

there's some research on scientists. Let me admit that I've been fascinated for years by Ericsson's research. I was introduced to it by this guy. Dubner, how are you doing? Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co -author. He is an economist at the University of Chicago. So Levitt, I still remember very well the day, it's maybe 10 years ago, when you called me up and you said you had a great idea for column that we were writing. And you said it was about this big Swedish psychologist that you'd met while you were on sabbatical at Stanford, I think, a fellow named Anders Ericsson. What was it about Anders and those conversations you had with him and his research that got you so

excited? He was infectious. His ideas and his enthusiasm set me on fire and it was interesting because he studied topics that I hadn't really thought could be studied like expertise and learning. The beauty of Anders, he's really an amazing academic in the sense that he just was so interested in what he did and also so interested in the truth and willing to be challenged. I do remember. I remember I had lunch with him and I immediately came back. I called you on the phone and said, we've got to write about this guy.

He's amazing. ever row, I think because it asked a very basic question. Is the thing that we all call talent perhaps grotesquely overrated?

The part that really resonated with me is the idea that absent hard work, no one is really great at anything. That's an interesting insight. We'd like to think that Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan or Taylor Swift just emerge as savant. But they don't. If you start with someone with talent, and another person who has no talent, if the person with talent works just as hard as a person without talent, almost for certain they're going to have a better outcome. So if our measure is true virtuosity, true expertise, it seems unlikely to me that this populist version of, oh, you don't have to be good, you just have to try hard. I think that's believe the other direction, which is that if you don't try hard, no matter how much talent you have, there's always going to be someone else who has a similar amount of talent who outworks you and therefore outperforms you.

Exactly. Here's Anders again. We actually find that with the right kind of training any individual will be able to acquire abilities that were previously viewed as only attainable if you had the right kind of genetic talent. Would

it be fair to that the kind of overarching thesis of your work is that this thing that we tend to call talent is in fact more an accumulation of ability that is caused by what you've labeled deliberate practice? I think that that is a nice summary here of what we're finding. For more than 30 years, Ericsson and his colleagues around the world have studied people who stand out in their field. They've conducted lab experiments and interviews. They've collected data of every sort, all in service of answering a simple question. When someone is very good at something, how did they get so good? If you can figure that out, the thinking goes, then any of us can do those strategies to also get much better at whatever we're trying to do. You don't necessarily need to have been born with a special talent, a special ability. perfect pitch or absolute pitch, that's the ability to identify or produce a particular musical note with no reference point.

It's

an incredibly rare ability. Roughly one in ten thousand people are thought to have it. And while having perfect Pitch doesn't guarantee you'll become a great musician or composer, it can be a big help. Consider one of the most acclaimed composers in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mozart is famous for his ability to actually listen to any kind of sound and actually tell you what kind of note that sound corresponded to. That seemed like a magical ability that was linked to his ability to be outstanding in composing and playing music. But Ericsson has three points to make about Mozart. The first is that Perfect

Pitch does not necessarily seem to be innate. It's teachable, although it helps to start early. As evidence, Ericsson points to research showing that perfect pitch is much more common in countries like Japan, China. In

those countries where you're actually speaking tonal languages, where the tone influences the meaning of words, it's going to be much more frequent. Meaning

people are trained from a very early age to identify pitch, yeah?

Well, that's the only way you can identify the meaning of the words, because in Mandarin, the difference between different words is just the difference in their tone. So you actually need to be able to acquire that general ability. And what people have found is that you have a very high degree of individuals who exhibit perfect pitch in those countries. It's becoming increasingly clear that that is actually something that any individual, seemingly, with the right kind of training situation, can actually acquire as long as they get the training early on, basically between 4 and 6. So

rather than perfect pitch being this incredibly rare innate ability, it is a teachable ability if you know how to teach it. Exactly.

A

second point about Mozart. Ericsson argues that as great as he was, having nothing to do with perfect pitch, that he wasn't necessarily born that way. Mozart became Mozart by starting very young and training long and hard. We may think of him today as

a freak of nature. But Ericsson says... If you compare the kind of music pieces that Mozart can play at various ages to today's Suzuki trained children, he is not exceptional. If anything, he's relatively average. Did you hear that?

Mozart, as a young musician, compared to today's good young musicians, would be relatively average. How can this be? This relates to the third point about Mozart. For his time, he was excellent. But over time, we humans generally become more excellent. Standards of excellence have risen, often a lot. In the book, Peake, Ericsson writes of a more recent example. Here, let me read you a particularly interesting paragraph. In the early 1930s, Alfred Courteau was one of the best -known classical musicians in the world and his recordings of Chopin's 24 etudes were considered the definitive interpretation. Today, teachers offer those same performances, sloppy and marred by missed notes, as an example of how not to play Chopin, with critics complaining about Courto's careless technique. And any professional pianist is expected to be able to perform the etudes with far greater technical skill and elan than quarto. Indeed, Anthony Tomassini, the music critic at the New York Times, once commented that musical ability has increased so much since quarto's time that quarto would probably not be admitted

to Juilliard now. We have similar developments in any of the sports. In order to qualify to the Boston Marathon, if you could produce that kind of time, you would be competitive at the early

Olympics. That's right. In order to just qualify to run the Boston Marathon today, a male in the 18 to 34 year old group has to have run a three hour, five minute marathon. That's only about six minutes slower than the winner of the marathon in the first modern Olympics in 1896. The current marathon world record? Two hours, two minutes, and 57 seconds. That is nearly 56 minutes faster than the Olympic gold medalist in 1896. Or consider the improvements in golf, which this year is returning to the Olympics after more than a century. In the 1900 Summer Olympics, the men played two 18 -hole rounds. The American golfer Charles won the gold medal with scores of 82 -85, which these days wouldn't get you on a good high school team in some parts of the country. Yeah, the equipment and ball have changed a lot, but still, the undeniable fact, whether it's golf or running the marathon or playing the piano, is that as a species, we have improved a lot in just about everything. How? Have we been selectively breeding for talent? Perhaps, but that is not what Andrew Erickson thinks is largely responsible. He thinks we've gotten so much better primarily because we've learned how to learn. And that if you study the people who have learned the best, and if you codify the techniques and strategies that they use, then we can all radically improve. But let me warn you, there is no magic bullet. Improvement comes only with practice. Lots and lots and lots of practice. You may have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, the idea that you need to practice for 10,000 hours to become great at something, that idea originates from the research of Anders Ericsson and his colleagues. They were studying the most accomplished young musicians at a German academy.