This book describes in detail what that “right sort of practice” is and how it can be put to work.

The details about this sort of practice are drawn from a relatively new area of psychology that can be best described as “the science of expertise.” This new field seeks to understand the abilities of “expert performers,” that is, people who are among the best in the world at what they do, who have reached the very peak of performance, and I have published several academic books on the topic, including Toward a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and Limits in 1991, The Road to Excellence in 1996, and The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance in 2006.

Those of us in the expertise field investigate what sets these exceptional people apart from everyone else. We also try to assemble a step-by-step accounting of how these expert performers improved their performance over time and exactly how their mental and physical abilities changed as they improved. More than two decades ago, after studying expert performers from a wide range of fields, my colleagues and I came to realize that no matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles.

We named this universal approach “deliberate practice.” Today deliberate practice remains the gold standard for anyone in any field who wishes to take advantage of the gift of adaptability in order to build new skills and abilities, and it is the main concern of this book.

词汇

1）be drawn from  从…中提出；来自于

2）prospect  n. 前景，景象

3）handbook  n. 手册，指南

4）investigate  v. 调查，研究

5）set…apart from… 把…与…区分开来

6）accounting  n. 记述，报告，会计

7）gold standard  黄金法则