Expertise Acquisition Quotes

Talent comes from experience and failure

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

In order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that if you put in 10,000 hours that you will become an expert, but there aren't any cases where someone has achieved world-class mastery without it! So the time spent at the activity is indeed the most important and influential factor.

It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.

I know what I don't know. To this day, I don't know technology, and I don't know finance or accounting.

We in Congress have the money but we don’t have the expertise.

Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

When a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with the experience winds up with the money and the person with the money winds up with the experience.

Every single person in the world could be a genius at something, if they practiced it daily for at least ten years (as confirmed by the research of Anders Ericsson and others).

The principal challenge we face is to go up the value- and domain-skill chain and build a strong consultancy front end and, also, to globalize our leadership much more.

The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text.

Practice is the path of mastery.

You can be an amateur and have a passion for something, but it takes a long time to actually become a professional, meaning that you can handle any situation.

I had a friend who was the King's surgeon in England. One day I asked him what makes a great surgeon. He replied, "What distinguishes a great surgeon is his knowledge. He knows more than other surgeons. During an operation he finds something which he wasn't expecting, recognizes it and knows what to do about it." It's the same thing with advertising people. The good ones know more. How do you get to know more? By reading books about advertising. By picking the brains of people who know more than you do. From the Magic Lanterns. And from experience.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself.

One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Our students learn more in 30 days than one could learn in 30 years without our training. To really maximize your potential as an umpire, you need to get a solid foundation as soon as you can.

No amount of learning goes to waste. It adds to building your skill set and intellect.

It's about somebody initially knowing more about it than you do but eventually you learn a lot about it yourself and practise the skills and techniques that you've been taught.

An expert is anyone who can already do what we want to do.

I hardly had any coaching until I joined Birmingham where I had Dave Watson for five years. He's one of the best and I knew how important that was for me.

One of the main strategies of the successful is that they constantly seek guidance from experts in their field.

The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.