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Over time, then, by learning more about what goes into expert performance in various fields and by creating a generation of students primed to take advantage of that, we could produce a new world, one in which most people understand deliberate practice and use it to enrich their lives and their children’s. What kind of world would that be? To begin with, it would contain far more experts in far more fields than we have today. The societal implications of this would be enormous. Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people in these professions learn to perform at the level that only the top 5 percent manage today. What would that mean for our health care, our educational system, our technology? The personal benefits could be tremendous as well. I have spoken very little of this here, but expert performers get great satisfaction and pleasure from exercising their abilities, and they feel a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment from pushing themselves to develop new skills, particularly skills that are on the very edges of their fields. It is as if they are on a constantly stimulating journey where boredom is never a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities. And those experts whose skills relate to some sort of performance—the musicians, dancers, gymnasts, and so forth—report getting great pleasure from performing in public. When everything goes well they experience a level of effortlessness similar in many ways to the psychological state of “flow” popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This gives them a precious “high” that few people other than experts ever experience.
Peak
Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
Clearly the bombing mystique had a powerful hold on the Johnson administration. Why this was so is less obvious. Two influential Democrats, George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith, had participated in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey after World War II. That study had found that Allied bombing had not only failed to cripple German war production; it had strengthened the morale of the German people. And Germany was highly industrialized. If the Air Force had failed there, certainly its chances against the economy of a backward Asian country were at best doubtful.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
If we follow conventional logic, overweight triathletes need to exercise more or eat less to lose weight. I believe that is a downright ridiculous notion. I am going to argue that the problem with the diet and health of most Americans is not fat, not sugar, not the rise of the Internet and the demise of the agrarian lifestyle. It’s wheat—or what we are being sold that is called “wheat.” You will see that what we are eating, cleverly disguised as a bran muffin or onion ciabatta, is not really wheat at all but the transformed product of genetic research conducted during the latter half of the twentieth century. Modern wheat is no more real wheat than a chimpanzee is an approximation of a human.
Wheat Belly
William Davis MD
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