Anders Ericsson Was Half Right
The missing half is why your practice isn’t transferring
It was the worst practice session of my career.
Wind coming in sideways. Ring slick from morning rain. My coach had set up a constraint that felt borderline cruel: every throw from a different starting position, different grip pressure cues, different timing emphasis. No two reps the same. No clean groove to find and lock into. Just chaos with a discus in my hand.
I was furious. This was not how you got better. Getting better meant finding the right movement, ingraining it, repeating it until it was automatic. That was the science. That was what every coach I’d ever had before understood. You drill the correct pattern until it owns you.
I threw a personal best that day by four feet.
I didn’t understand why for years. I filed it under luck, under good genetics, under “one of those sessions.” I kept searching for the perfect movement to drill. I kept trying to find the groove and live in it. And I kept wondering why my best performances always seemed to come from sessions that felt like the opposite of controlled mastery.
It took me years of studying ecological dynamics to finally understand what my body already knew.
The chaos wasn’t the obstacle.
The chaos was the teacher.
The Most Trusted Framework in Skill Acquisition
If you’ve read anything serious about getting better at something, you’ve encountered Anders Ericsson.
His research on expert performance is the scientific backbone of Outliers, the intellectual foundation of Peak, the research behind the 10,000 hour rule that has been quoted in every productivity podcast, business book, and performance coaching program for the last fifteen years.
Ericsson spent his career studying what separates world-class performers from everyone else. His conclusion was rigorous, well-documented, and genuinely important: the difference is not talent. It is not genetics. It is a specific type of practice he called deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is not just putting in hours. It has a precise definition. It requires working at the edge of your current ability on specific weaknesses identified by an expert teacher, with immediate corrective feedback, in conditions designed to isolate the target skill from the noise of full performance contexts. It means breaking the skill into components, drilling those components in controlled conditions until they are correct, and only then attempting to reassemble them.
This framework is not wrong. For certain domains, under certain conditions, it produces genuine mastery. Chess. Classical piano. Mathematical calculation. Domains with stable, rule-bound structure where the environment doesn’t change between practice and performance.
Ericsson was half right.
The half he missed is the half that matters for most of what humans actually need to learn.
What the Framework Was Built On
To understand where deliberate practice breaks down, you need to understand where it was built.
Ericsson conducted his landmark studies in chess masters, violin students at the Berlin Academy, and other domains with a specific structural property: the environment in performance is essentially identical to the environment in practice. A chessboard in competition has the same 64 squares it had in training. A concert piano responds to the same physics as the practice instrument. The performance context does not introduce information the practice context lacked.
This matters enormously, and Ericsson never adequately addressed it.
When the performance environment is stable and the practice environment can faithfully replicate it, isolating components and drilling them makes sense. You can build the correct mental representations, the term Ericsson used for what expertise actually is, and then deploy them in a context that will ask for exactly those representations.
But most human skills don’t live in stable environments.
A basketball player practices post moves against a stationary defender and then faces a 6’8” athlete reading their hips in real time. A parent learns to communicate with their teenager in calm conversations and then needs those skills at 11pm after something has gone wrong. A writer practices craft in solitude and then has to produce under deadline with an editor’s voice in their head. A discus thrower drills their approach in controlled conditions and then has to execute it in a championship with 5,000 people watching and a headwind that just shifted.
The performance environment talks back. It introduces information that was never present in the isolated practice context. And the brain, having learned a skill in isolation, suddenly discovers that the skill it built doesn’t fit the environment it’s actually in.
This is not a motivation problem. It is not a pressure problem. It is a design problem.
Ericsson built a framework for environments that don’t move. Most of us live in environments that never stop moving.
What Ecological Dynamics Reveals
James Gibson spent his career studying something most psychologists ignored: the relationship between organisms and the environments they actually inhabit.
His central insight was that perception is not a reconstruction of the world inside the brain. It is a direct pickup of information from the environment. We don’t build internal models of reality and then act on them. We perceive affordances, opportunities for action offered by the environment, and we act on those directly.
The implication for skill acquisition is radical.
If perception and action are coupled, if you see in order to move and move in order to see, then separating skill from the environment that skill will be performed in doesn’t simplify learning. It fundamentally distorts it.
Rob Gray at Arizona State has spent years testing exactly this. His research on baseball batting, basketball shooting, and other dynamic skills consistently finds the same thing: skills trained in decontextualized conditions, isolated from the perceptual information of the real performance environment, do not transfer the way deliberate practice predicts they should. The batter who drills against a pitching machine develops a swing that is calibrated to that machine. When they face a living pitcher whose release point, body language, and spin create a completely different perceptual landscape, the skill they built doesn’t map onto the environment they’re in.
Keith Davids calls this representative learning design. The practice environment must be representative of the performance environment. Not similar. Representative. The perceptual information that will guide action in performance must be present during practice, or the organism is not actually learning the skill. It is learning a version of the skill that only works in practice.
This is why your best performances often come from your messiest practice sessions.
The mess is the information.
The Bernstein Problem That Ericsson Never Solved
Nikolai Bernstein was a Soviet physiologist who spent decades studying how humans actually coordinate movement. His findings should have rewritten the framework of skill acquisition. In some fields they did. In the deliberate practice literature, they were largely ignored.
Bernstein discovered that skilled performers never repeat the same movement twice. Not even close. A master blacksmith striking a piece of iron varies his muscle activation patterns significantly from blow to blow. A concert pianist varies their finger force, timing, and coordination in ways that would be measurable as errors if you were looking for the “correct” movement.
And yet the blow lands in the same place. The note sounds perfect.
Bernstein called this the degrees of freedom problem. The human body has more possible movement combinations than any practice system can specify or any teacher can correct. The solution evolution landed on is not to find the single correct movement and lock it in. It is to develop a functional solution space, a range of movements that all accomplish the goal under varying conditions. The expert doesn’t have one answer. The expert has a repertoire of answers and the perceptual sensitivity to deploy the right one for each moment.
He called the principle “repetition without repetition.”
Practice, done correctly, does not consist of repeating the same solution. It consists of solving the same problem again and again through means that change every repetition. The goal is not a locked-in motor pattern. The goal is an adaptive, problem-solving organism that can find functional solutions across infinite variations of context.
This is what my furious, chaotic, sideways-wind session was actually building without my knowing it. Not a perfect movement to replicate. A problem-solving capacity that could find functional solutions in conditions I had never practiced in before.
Deliberate practice, by trying to eliminate variability and find the correct pattern, works against this process. It builds a skill that is precise in the conditions where it was trained and fragile everywhere else.
Where You’ve Felt This Already
You don’t need to be an athlete to recognize this in your own experience.
Think about the last time you had a real conversation versus the last time you rehearsed what you were going to say. The rehearsed version felt solid in your head and collapsed the moment the other person said something you didn’t predict. The real conversation forced you to think, adapt, perceive what was actually happening in front of you, and respond to it. You probably learned more about how to communicate in that one real conversation than in ten rehearsed versions.
That’s the ecological principle at work. The environment of real conversation provided information the rehearsal context lacked. Your capacity to communicate is built in real conversational contexts, not in isolated preparation.
Think about the first time you drove a new route versus the tenth time. The first time you were genuinely alert. Every intersection required actual perception and decision-making. The tenth time your nervous system had begun to automate the route and you arrived home with no memory of the journey. The first time built genuine perceptual skill. The tenth time was running a program.
Deliberate practice is the tenth drive. It builds programs. The ecological approach is the first drive. It builds perception.
Think about how your children learn. Not in school, where information is delivered in decontextualized fragments through isolated subject-matter drills. In life, where they learn language by being immersed in environments where language is the tool for getting what they need, where they learn physics by climbing and falling and throwing things, where they learn social dynamics by actually navigating social dynamics with real consequences. The learning that sticks isn’t the learning that was drilled. It’s the learning that happened in full-context engagement with a world that talked back.
What Half-Right Costs You
The cost of organizing your practice around deliberate practice alone is not that you get nothing. You get something real. You get better at the drilled component in the drilled conditions.
The cost is transfer. The cost is performance under pressure. The cost is the gap between how good you are in practice and how good you are when it matters.
Every athlete who has ever been “great in practice” but struggles in competition is living the deliberate practice problem. The skill was built in conditions where the perceptual environment of competition was absent. Under competition conditions, the organism is suddenly receiving information it doesn’t know how to use, and the carefully drilled patterns developed without that information don’t hold.
Every professional who has rehearsed a presentation until it was perfect and then delivered it poorly in the room is living the deliberate practice problem. The preparation context lacked the perceptual information of the real room, real audience, real stakes.
Every musician who can play a piece flawlessly alone and fumbles it in front of people is living the deliberate practice problem.
The skill you build in isolation is a skill for isolation. If you want a skill that works in the world, you have to build it in the world.
The Reframe That Changes Everything
The question deliberate practice teaches you to ask is: am I putting in the right kind of focused repetitions on my specific weaknesses?
That is a reasonable question. It is not the right question.
The question ecological dynamics teaches you to ask is: is my practice representative of the environment where this skill needs to perform?
Those two questions produce completely different practice designs and completely different outcomes.
The deliberate practice designer isolates weakness, controls conditions, eliminates variability, and focuses on errorless repetition toward the correct pattern.
The ecological designer asks what perceptual information will be present during performance, builds practice environments that contain that information, introduces functional variability that forces the organism to solve the real problem rather than execute a pre-set solution, and measures success by transfer rather than performance within the practice context.
The deliberate practice approach feels more rigorous because it is more controlled. Control is seductive. It looks like mastery because the numbers go up inside the controlled context.
The ecological approach feels messier because it is less controlled. Functional variability looks like error if you’re looking for the correct pattern. But the organism is not making errors. The organism is learning to solve a problem that has more than one solution, across conditions that will never repeat exactly.
That is the only skill worth building if you want it to work in the world.
The Protocol: Representative Practice Design
This week, choose one skill you are actively developing. It can be athletic, professional, creative, relational. Anything where you have a practice context and a performance context.
Ask yourself this single question with total honesty: does my practice environment contain the perceptual information that will be present when this skill matters?
If you are a writer, does your practice contain the actual conditions of real writing: the blank page, the uncertainty, the pressure of a reader you care about? Or does your practice consist of studying other writers’ work in a context where your own writing is not at risk?
If you are developing a physical skill, does your practice contain the perceptual landscape of real performance: opponents, variable conditions, decision-making under fatigue? Or does your practice isolate components in controlled conditions where the decision has already been made for you?
If you are trying to improve your communication in difficult conversations, does your practice involve actual difficult conversations with real stakes? Or does it involve journaling about what you would say?
Make one change this week. Add one element of the real performance environment into your practice context. Not to make it harder. To make it more representative. Let the environment that will eventually ask for the skill be present while you are building it.
Notice what happens to your performance when the conditions you practiced in show up in the real world.
That noticing is the beginning of ecological perception. That is what you are actually trying to develop.
What Ericsson Got Right and What You Should Keep
This is not a case for abandoning focus or effort or deliberate attention to weakness.
Ericsson was right that most people’s practice is not designed to produce improvement. Most people go through comfortable motions in their skill domain and call it practice when it is actually maintenance. The deliberate attention to what is genuinely hard, the willingness to work at the edge of current ability, the feedback loop that tells you whether the skill is actually developing: these are real and important.
What needs to change is where that deliberate attention is directed.
Not toward the correct isolated pattern. Toward the representative problem that the real environment will present.
Not toward errorless repetition. Toward functional variability that builds a solution space rather than a locked movement.
Not toward performance within the practice context. Toward transfer to the contexts where the skill actually needs to work.
Ericsson gave us the right work ethic applied to the wrong model of skill.
Ecological dynamics gives the work ethic somewhere real to go.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Every practice session you have ever had was either building a skill for practice or building a skill for the world.
The difference is not in how hard you worked. It is in whether the environment you practiced in contained the information that matters in the environment where the skill has to perform.
Most people have never asked this question. They have simply practiced harder in contexts that felt rigorous and wondered why the transfer never came.
You now have a different question to bring to every session.
Is this practice representative?
That question, asked consistently, will change what you build and where it holds.
This is Signal/Noise. Where we filter what doesn’t matter and amplify what does.
Still searching,
Sam
If this challenged something you thought you knew about how to practice, forward it to someone who needs to hear it. And if you want to go deeper on building skills that actually transfer, that is exactly what the Attune community is built around.
Love the article. Anders became a good friend of mine and we had multiple meeting and discussions before his passing. He was so curious about what you are talking about, he was always asking questions about the environment in golf. I believe he understood but it wasn't his body of work.