How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field - Nat Eliason
His subject, Steve Faloon, was instructed to memorize random strings of numbers. Ericsson’s interest was in how many numbers Steve could keep in his head with consistent practice. The research and common wisdom at the time said you could only hold around 7-8 random bits of information in your head at a time, and so far, Steve was proving the research. In each session, Ericsson and Steve would sit down, and Ericsson would read him a random string of numbers at a rate of one per second. By the end of their fourth, one-hour session together, Steve could reliably recite back strings of 7 or 8 digits, but he’d struggle with 9, and never successfully remembered 10. Until he made a breakthrough. During their fifth session, Steve succeeded at remembering his first 10 digit string and followed it up with his first 11 digit string. It may seem trivial, but when the average person (including Steve at first) can only remember 7, this is a 57% improvement over average. Steve was only getting starte