By Chris Dixon

My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. I applied to hundreds of jobs:  low-level VC roles, startups jobs, even to big tech companies.  I got rejected from every single one.  Big companies rejected me outright or gave me a courtesy interview before rejecting me. VCs told me they wanted someone with VC experience.  Startups at the time were laying people off.  The economy was bad (particularly where I was looking – consumer internet) and I had a strange resume (computer programmer, small bootstrapped startups, undergrad and masters studying Philosophy/mathematical logic).

The reason this period was so useful was that it helped me develop a really thick skin.  I came to realize that employers weren’t really rejecting me as a person or on my potential – they were rejecting a resume.  As it became depersonalized, I became bolder in my tactics. I eventually landed a job at Bessemer (thanks to their willingness to take chances and look beyond resumes), which led to getting my first VC-backed startup funded, and things got better from there.

One of the great things about looking for a job is that your “payoff” is almost always a max function (the best of all attempts), not an average. This is also generally true for raising VC financing, doing bizdev partnerships, hiring programmers, finding good advisors/mentors, even blogging and marketing.  I probably got rejected by someone once a day last week alone. In one case a friend who tried to help called me to console me. He seemed surprised when I told him: “no worries – this is a daily occurrence – we’ll just keep trying.”  If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough.

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By Seth Godin

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Letters written by John Graham

 CHICAGO, October 1, 189x

Dear Pierrepont:

Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me
to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be
sure not to under-study. What we’re really sending you to Harvard for is
to get a little of the education that’s so good and plenty there. When
it’s passed around you don’t want to be bashful, but reach right out and
take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You’ll
find that education’s about the only thing lying around loose in this
world, and that it’s about the only thing a fellow can have as much of
as he’s willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and
the screw-driver lost.

I didn’t have your advantages when I was a boy, and you can’t have mine.
Some men learn the value of money by not having any and starting out to
pry a few dollars loose from the odd millions that are lying around; and
some learn it by having fifty thousand or so left to them and starting
out to spend it as if it were fifty thousand a year. Some men learn the
value of truth by having to do business with liars; and some by going to
Sunday School. Some men learn the cussedness of whiskey by having a
drunken father; and some by having a good mother. Some men get an
education from other men and newspapers and public libraries; and some
get it from professors and parchments–it doesn’t make any special
difference how you get a half-nelson on the right thing, just so you get
it and freeze on to it. The package doesn’t count after the eye’s been
attracted by it, and in the end it finds its way to the ash heap. It’s
the quality of the goods inside which tells, when they once get into the
kitchen and up to the cook.

You can cure a ham in dry salt and you can cure it in sweet pickle, and
when you’re through you’ve got pretty good eating either way, provided
you started in with a sound ham. If you didn’t, it doesn’t make any
special difference how you cured it–the ham-tryer’s going to strike the
sour spot around the bone. And it doesn’t make any difference how much
sugar and fancy pickle you soak into a fellow, he’s no good unless he’s
sound and sweet at the core.

The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and
the second thing is education. That is where I’m a little skittish about
this college business. I’m not starting in to preach to you, because I
know a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches to
himself harder than any one else can, and that he’s mighty often
switched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrong
way.

I remember when I was a boy, and I wasn’t a very bad boy, as boys go,
old Doc Hoover got a notion in his head that I ought to join the church,
and he scared me out of it for five years by asking me right out loud in
Sunday School if I didn’t want to be saved, and then laying for me after
the service and praying with me. Of course I wanted to be saved, but I
didn’t want to be saved quite so publicly.

When a boy’s had a good mother he’s got a good conscience, and when he’s
got a good conscience he don’t need to have right and wrong labeled for
him. Now that your Ma’s left and the apron strings are cut, you’re
naturally running up against a new sensation every minute, but if you’ll
simply use a little conscience as a tryer, and probe into a thing which
looks sweet and sound on the skin, to see if you can’t fetch up a sour
smell from around the bone, you’ll be all right.

[Illustration: "_Old Doc Hoover asked me right out in Sunday School if I
didn't want to be saved._"]

I’m anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I’m more anxious that
you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound
conscience, I shan’t care so much if there are a few holes in your
Latin. There are two parts of a college education–the part that you get
in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outside
of it from the boys. That’s the really important part. For the first
can only make you a scholar, while the second can make you a man.

Education’s a good deal like eating–a fellow can’t always tell which
particular thing did him good, but he can usually tell which one did him
harm. After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pie
and watermelon, you can’t say just which ingredient is going into muscle,
but you don’t have to be very bright to figure out which one started the
demand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, which
one made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, while
a fellow can’t figure out to an ounce whether it’s Latin or algebra or
history or what among the solids that is building him up in this place
or that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they’re
not the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It’s down among the sweets,
among his amusements and recreations, that he’s going to find his
stomach-ache, and it’s there that he wants to go slow and to pick and
choose.

It’s not the first half, but the second half of a college education
which merchants mean when they ask if a college education pays. It’s the
Willie and the Bertie boys; the chocolate eclair and tutti-frutti boys;
the la-de-dah and the baa-baa-billy-goat boys; the high cock-a-lo-rum
and the cock-a-doodle-do boys; the Bah Jove!, hair-parted-in-the-middle,
cigaroot-smoking, Champagne-Charlie, up-all-night-and-in-all-day boys
that make ‘em doubt the cash value of the college output, and overlook
the roast-beef and blood-gravy boys, the shirt-sleeves and
high-water-pants boys, who take their college education and make some
fellow’s business hum with it.

Does a College education pay? Does it pay to feed in pork trimmings at
five cents a pound at the hopper and draw out nice, cunning, little
“country” sausages at twenty cents a pound at the other end? Does it
pay to take a steer that’s been running loose on the range and living
on cactus and petrified wood till he’s just a bunch of barb-wire and
sole-leather, and feed him corn till he’s just a solid hunk of
porterhouse steak and oleo oil?

You bet it pays. Anything that trains a boy to think and to think quick
pays; anything that teaches a boy to get the answer before the other
fellow gets through biting the pencil, pays.

College doesn’t make fools; it develops them. It doesn’t make
bright men; it develops them. A fool will turn out a fool, whether
he goes to college or not, though he’ll probably turn out a
different sort of a fool. And a good, strong boy will turn out a
bright, strong man whether he’s worn smooth in the
grab-what-you-want-and-eat-standing-with-one-eye-skinned-for-the-dog
school of the streets and stores, or polished up and slicked down in the
give-your-order-to-the-waiter-and-get-a-sixteen-course-dinner school of
the professors. But while the lack of a college education can’t keep No.
1 down, having it boosts No. 2 up.

It’s simply the difference between jump in, rough-and-tumble,
kick-with-the-heels-and-butt-with-the-head
fighting, and this grin-and-look-pleasant,
dodge-and-save-your-wind-till-you-see-a-chance-to-land-on-the-solar-plexus
style of the trained athlete. Both styles win fights, but the fellow
with a little science is the better man, providing he’s kept his muscle
hard. If he hasn’t, he’s in a bad way, for his fancy sparring is just
going to aggravate the other fellow so that he’ll eat him up.

Of course, some men are like pigs, the more you educate them, the more
amusing little cusses they become, and the funnier capers they cut when
they show off their tricks. Naturally, the place to send a boy of that
breed is to the circus, not to college.

Speaking of educated pigs, naturally calls to mind the case of old man
Whitaker and his son, Stanley. I used to know the old man mighty well
ten years ago. He was one of those men whom business narrows, instead
of broadens. Didn’t get any special fun out of his work, but kept right
along at it because he didn’t know anything else. Told me he’d had to
root for a living all his life and that he proposed to have Stan’s
brought to him in a pail. Sent him to private schools and dancing
schools and colleges and universities, and then shipped him to Oxford
to soak in a little “atmosphere,” as he put it. I never could quite lay
hold of that atmosphere dodge by the tail, but so far as I could make
out, the idea was that there was something in the air of the Oxford
ham-house that gave a fellow an extra fancy smoke.

Well, about the time Stan was through, the undertaker called by for the
old man, and when his assets were boiled down and the water drawn off,
there wasn’t enough left to furnish Stan with a really nourishing meal.
I had a talk with Stan about what he was going to do, but some ways he
didn’t strike me as having the making of a good private of industry, let
alone a captain, so I started in to get him a job that would suit his
talents. Got him in a bank, but while he knew more about the history of
banking than the president, and more about political economy than the
board of directors, he couldn’t learn the difference between a fiver
that the Government turned out and one that was run off on a hand press
in a Halsted Street basement. Got him a job on a paper, but while he
knew six different languages and all the facts about the Arctic regions,
and the history of dancing from the days of Old Adam down to those of
Old Nick, he couldn’t write up a satisfactory account of the Ice-Men’s
Ball. Could prove that two and two made four by trigonometry and
geometry, but couldn’t learn to keep books; was thick as thieves with
all the high-toned poets, but couldn’t write a good, snappy,
merchantable street-car ad.; knew a thousand diseases that would take a
man off before he could blink, but couldn’t sell a thousand-dollar
tontine policy; knew the lives of our Presidents as well as if he’d been
raised with them, but couldn’t place a set of the Library of the Fathers
of the Republic, though they were offered on little easy payments that
made them come as easy as borrowing them from a friend. Finally I hit on
what seemed to be just the right thing. I figured out that any fellow
who had such a heavy stock of information on hand, ought to be able to
job it out to good advantage, and so I got him a place teaching. But it
seemed that he’d learned so much about the best way of teaching boys,
that he told his principal right on the jump that he was doing it all
wrong, and that made him sore; and he knew so much about the dead
languages, which was what he was hired to teach, that he forgot he was
handling live boys, and as he couldn’t tell it all to them in the
regular time, he kept them after hours, and that made them sore and put
Stan out of a job again. The last I heard of him he was writing articles
on Why Young Men Fail, and making a success of it, because failing was
the one subject on which he was practical.

I simply mention Stan in passing as an example of the fact that it isn’t
so much knowing a whole lot, as knowing a little and how to use it that
counts.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

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By Chris Tucker

September 11, 2001

It really was a remarkable day. I remember stopping on the sidewalk on the way into work to just look at the sky, it was crystalline and incredibly blue. Beautiful. I stepped into my place of business, a large room about the size of a football field, very dark with the constant hum of electronics and various sections filled with radar scopes. I work at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, NYARTCC or New York Center as we say. I had no idea that this day would turn out to be the most terrible and memorable day of my career. I had been lucky so far, dodging bullets by not being on duty when Avianca 52 went down in Great Neck, Long Island or the explosion of TWA 800 or the suicide/mass murder of EgyptAir 990. But not today. The pilots were particularly chatty that day, constantly commenting on how nice the city looked, how clear it was. It was a CAVU day. Ceilings And Visibility Unlimited.

I was plugged in and working sector 55, a radar departure sector that encompasses airspace to the southwest of New York City from 14,000 feet to 28,000 feet and I was working quite a few JFK departures westbound, several NY Metro departures southwest-bound and some arrivals into DCA and BWI that had to be descended through the climbing departures. I was getting a bit busy and asked the controller working with me to “point out” an aircraft to the sector above us (sector 42) so I could climb the flight into his airspace and basically get him out of the way. My coworker called and then hung up, incredulous, saying sarcastically “He won’t take the point out, he says he has a hijack”. As the controller working the sector above us had a flair for drama we didn’t take him seriously and I remarked “Get a real controller over there”.

But it was true. American 11 had turned off its transponder and had turned south over the Hudson River toward New York. The transponder transmits a 4 digit code along with altitude and position information so our computers can track the flight and we can see its altitude and speed. Although the flight had turned off the transponder we still had a very solid “primary” (radar reflection) target visible on the scope. So we could still see what we believed was AAL11 heading south toward New York, but we had no idea what its altitude was.

At some point I remember calling Huntress, the Northeast Air Defense Sector to give the position of the target that we believed was AAL 11. “Where is he?” the military controller asked. “About ten miles west of LaGuardia, right over the Hudson, heading south, its a strong primary target”. “I’m sorry, where? I don’t see him”. I gave up and hung up the line. The target was gone. We did not know then that AAL 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center. A few moments later some aircraft on my frequency that had just departed JFK asked me if I knew the south tower was on fire. There was a huge column of smoke they said. Later, after listening to the tapes, we discovered that one of the pilots on my frequency had said “Maybe its that American you guys are looking for” but I hadn’t heard what he said. All we knew for sure was that he was no longer on the radar and that simply meant that he was very, very low. We assumed (for some reason) that they were flying low and down the coast and headed god knows where. Someone said that a small twin engine aircraft had hit the World Trade Center, but it never occurred to us that it could possibly have been American 11. No way. Not in your dreams bud.

As this was beginning, UAL175 checked on with the controller working sector 42 and told him that they had heard a suspicious transmission on the prior frequency in Boston Center’s airspace. But all eyes were on the target that we believed was AAL11. As we focused on the target, trying to figure out what was going on, the facility chief entered the room with a phone in each ear and his deputy beside him. They stood behind sector 42 and talked quietly but I was too busy to hear any of their conversation. While everyone in the room was staring at this target tracking toward New York, I heard a voice behind me say “Hey, there’s an intruder over Allentown” This meant that there was a target that we call a “Mode C Intruder” that the computer wasn’t tracking. Then we noticed that the computer track for United 175 had separated from its target so we assumed the intruder was UAL175 and he was showing up as an intruder because someone on the flight deck had changed the transponder code to a code that the computer couldn’t identify. The intruder climbed briefly from 36,000 feet or as we say Flight Level Three Six Zero (if I recall correctly) and then as it passed over Allentown, PA it began descending and turning left to the south.

Someone said “watch this guy” to me but I was already watching, I had entered the 3321 code that the aircraft was now squawking on its transponder into to make its target appear brighter on my scope. As the target continued turning and descending I became increasingly concerned about two aircraft that I had under my control, both heading southwest and climbing. If the intruder continued the left turn and descending at the same rate it looked like they would get very close. But it was impossible to tell which way to move the traffic to get them out of the way. If the intruder turned rather tightly than he would come north of my traffic, if the turn was wide he would come south of them. As it was he turned head on into both of them.

Before the intruder had finished the turn I had issued a traffic call to both of my climbing aircraft: “Delta 2315 and USAir 542, traffic, one o’clock, one five miles turning southeast and descending, we believe it is a hijack and we don’t know his intentions” (please keep in mind that these are my recollections ten years after the event and I don’t have transcripts of my tapes available, but the essence is exactly as it was that day). Still, I had no idea what the intruder was going to do. Would he continue turning? Continue descending? I had to assume yes to both of these questions and it began to look as if he was heading for New York City, but for what purpose? Was he an emergency we speculated? If so it must be a dire one. No pilot would turn off course or descend without informing us first. This was crazy. We were thinking hijack but just weren’t sure. Delta 2315 was level now at FL 280 (28,000 feet) and USAir 542 was about five miles behind him and leveling off at FL 260. I called the traffic again, “Delta 2315 that traffic is now one o’clock, ten miles, turning opposite direction and descending rapidly. It looks like he will be directly in your face. Take any evasive action you deem necessary.” “Roger” came the reply. I called the traffic to USAir 542 again and he asked me a question that I didn’t hear correctly. I thought he said “Is that the guy at our one o’clock?” and I responded “affirmative”, but we later determined that what he actually said was “Is that the Delta we are following at our one o’clock?” which was not the case, I wanted him to look for the intruder that was turning head on.

By now I was becoming extremely concerned. The tension in the room was palpable. Several people were staring in disbelief at my scope as the events began to unfold. When the intruder was about 7 miles from Delta 2315 and pointed directly at him and about 1,500 feet above him, I turned both aircraft, shooting off the clearances as quickly and as clearly as I could: “Delta 2315 turned left IMMEDIATELY heading two zero zero” The pilot responded with a “roger” that sounded just a bit too nonchalant for my current state. “USAir 542 turn left IMMEDIATELY heading two zero zero”. The intruders target was now about five miles from Delta 2315 and closing at right around 1,000 miles per hour. I again called the traffic to the Delta and waited to see the turns. I watched in horror as the two aircraft converged at 28,000 feet. “GOD F#&KING DAMNIT” I shouted as I jumped out of my chair, screaming at the scope. Dead silence. I could hear people breathing across the room. Shit. This was it. It takes twelve seconds for the radar to update. That was the longest twelve seconds of my life. I was focused so intensely on the radar that I thought my eyes might pop out of their sockets. Finally the targets both appeared after having passed each other by about 2 miles. But at that time it seemed like you couldn’t fit a sheet of paper between them.

“USAir 542 is responding to an R.A.” said the USAir pilot as he began descending, responding to an onboard collision avoidance device called TCAS. Sh*t. “Christ I’m sorry about that sir, I really thought he was going to hit the Delta”, I said apologizing to the USAir flight that had come almost as close as the Delta. As it turns out, we suspect that the hijackers aboard United 175 must have heard the TCAS alerts as well because they briefly stopped descending and actually climbed to about 28,300 feet, 300 feet above the Delta. But as soon as they passed they began descending again and rapidly. This is when USAir 542 began descending as well to avoid the conflict, but the turns I had given earlier ended up doing the job, but much, much too close for comfort.

By now I was a nervous wreck and we all watched United 175 descending toward New York City. We wondered, clutching to hope, if he really might be an emergency and not a hijack and was just trying to get the aircraft down on a runway, any runway. We wondered aloud if he was trying for Newark as he was pointed right at it. “Maybe he’s shooting for the 4′s at Newark??” (Newark has two runways called 4, a left and a right) “No”, Jimmy B. said, “He’s too high and too fast”. We watched as the target clipped off the miles, twelve seconds a hit. (We call each subsequent target presentation a “hit”). He was descending at five thousand feet a minute. Then six. Then seven. Unbelievable. Things were beginning to feel surreal. This wasn’t actually happening was it? Yes. “Maybe he’s trying for runway 4 at LaGuardia?”, someone said. “No”, again from Jim. “This guy is going in” And we knew. They were going to crash the plane into the city. They were pointed right at lower Manhattan and we knew it. “Two more hits” said Jimmy. “One more” And then he was gone. We had just watched a commercial airliner deliberately crashed into New York City. It didn’t take long for the tears to come. There was confusion, fear, wild emotion. But we still had work to do.

I vectored aircraft on course, climbed some, descended others, I don’t remember really. I remember choking back tears as I issued instructions to several pilots and talked with some about what had just happened. At some point the supervisor asked me if I needed to get up. I nodded emphatically and was relieved by another controller.

As I walked out of the area and passed the watch desk I heard the Operational Manager in Charge screaming into the phone: “I don’t give a shit what they do, just get them in the air NOW!!” Must be scrambling fighters I pondered, feeling distant and disconnected. I reached over his multiple CRT’s and grabbed the cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He never noticed.

The rest is history. The controllers in my area, area B, were sequestered with a priest and a psychologist in a conference room for a while, and someone would pop in occasionally with the latest news. “The south tower just collapsed” No f#$king way I thought. They kept popping in with more bad news, bomb threats, more hijackings. I couldn’t take it and got up and walked out to smoke one cigarette after another. The controller sitting next to me had just lost his best friend who was working at Windows On the World. People were in tears, everyone was afraid and angry. Unbelievably angry.

At one point they gathered us up, the controllers from Area B and we made written statements and a recording. They brought this big old reel to reel recorder in and passed around a microphone asking us to give our version of what we saw. Four or five people had already spoken when they discovered it wasn’t recording and we had to start over. Later, a Quality Assurance Manager destroyed this tape and there was a bit of conspiracy theory going on about it. But this is nonsense. The tape was destroyed because the manager knew it was counterproductive and embarrassing. Not embarrassing to the FAA, but to us personally. Many people were crying, several facts were stated incorrectly, it was just a mess. And they had all the data they could possibly need with the voice recordings of all the transmissions and all of the radar data. Not only was he within his rights to destroy the tape, it was actually in his job description. Was it right? I’ll leave that to you to decide. But I can tell you from first hand experience that the contents of the tape that caused such a flap were totally innocuous.

So that is what I experienced on 9/11. I hope it gives some insight, it is definitely a harrowing tale. Below are some statements from my coworkers that I retrieved from the national archives. I was unable to locate mine on the website, although I have a hard copy of it myself. I would really liked to have been able to provide a transcript of my voice recordings from that day, but I was told I have to go through a Freedom of Information procedure and just didn’t want to bother. More government red tape is all I need.

Several weeks (months? who knows) after the event I spoke with a reporter over the phone about that day and he wrote a story for the Hartford Courant. A few days after it was printed he called me again with a strange request. A reader had contacted him and wanted to speak with me, could he share my number with him? I said sure and the gentleman called. Apparently he had been a passenger aboard Delta 2315, a circuit court judge for either the U.S. or Connecticut, I don’t remember. But he had called to thank me. “For what?” I asked. “For saving my life that day”, “for doing your job” and we talked for hours. I think he saved my life that day.

This is dedicated to all those who lost their lives that day, especially the pilots, crew and passengers aboard American 11 and United 175.

Also, please note that much of the information on wikipedia about these two flights is incorrect, but only mildly so.

Christopher Tucker

September 9th, 2011

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By: K. Anders Ericsson (2000)

EXPERTISE refers to the mechanisms underlying the superior achievement of an expert, i.e. “one who has acquired special skill in or knowledge of a particular subjects through professional training and practical experience” (Webster’s dictionary, 1976, p. 800). The term expert is used to describe highly experienced professionals such as medical doctors, accountants, teachers and scientists,  but has been expanded to include any individual who attained their superior performance by instruction and extended practice: highly skilled performers in the arts, such as music, painting and writing, sports, such as swimming, running and golf and games, such as bridge and chess.

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents.  Although a certain amount of knowledge and training seems necessary, the role of acquired skill for the highest levels of achievement has traditionally been minimized.  However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers of speed, memory and intelligence with psychometric tests, no general superiority was found –the demonstrated superiority was domain specific.  For example, the superiority of the chess experts’ memory was constrained to regular chess positions and did not generalize to other types of materials (Djakow, Petrowski & Rudik, 1927).  Not even IQ could distinguish the best among chessplayers (Doll & Mayr, 1987) nor the most successful and creative among artists and scientists (Taylor, 1975). In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.

In a pioneering empirical study of the thought processes mediating the highest levels of performance, de Groot (1946/1978) instructed expert and world-class chessplayers to think aloud while they selected their next move for an unfamiliar chess position. The world-class players did not differ in the speed of their thoughts or the size of their basic memory capacity, and their ability to recognize promising potential moves was based on their extensive experience and knowledge of patterns in chess.  In their influential theory of expertise, Chase and Simon (1973; Simon & Chase, 1973) proposed that experts with extended experience acquire a larger number of more complex patterns and use these new patterns to store knowledge about which actions should be taken in similar situations.

According to this influential theory, expert performance is viewed as an extreme case of skill acquisition (Proctor & Dutta, 1995; Richman, Gobet, Staszewski & Simon, 1996; VanLehn, 1996) and as the final result of the gradual improvement of performance during extended experience in a domain. Furthermore, the postulated central role of acquired knowledge has encouraged efforts to extract experts’ knowledge so that computer scientists can build expert systems that would allow a computer to act as an expert (Hoffman, 1992).

Among investigators of expertise, it has generally been assumed that the performance of experts improved as a direct function of increases in their knowledge through training and extended experience.  However, recent studies show that there are, at least,  some domains where “experts” perform no better then less trained individuals (cf. outcomes of therapy by clinical psychologists, Dawes, 1994) and that sometimes experts’ decisions are no more accurate than beginners’ decisions and simple decision aids (Camerer & Johnson, 1991; Bolger & Wright, 1992). Most individuals who start as active professionals or as beginners in a domain change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work and leisure experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Hence, continued improvements (changes) in achievement are not automatic consequences of more experience and in those domains where performance consistently increases aspiring experts seek out particular kinds of experience, that is deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993)–activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance. For example, the critical difference between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts,  around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists.  More generally, the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians (Ericsson et al., 1993; Sloboda, et al., 1996), chessplayers (Charness, Krampe & Mayr, 1996) and athletes (Starkes et al., 1996).

The recent advances in our understanding of the complex representations, knowledge and skills that mediate the superior performance of experts derive primarily from studies where experts are instructed to think aloud while completing representative tasks in their domains, such as chess, music, physics, sports and medicine (Chi, Glaser & Farr, 1988; Ericsson & Smith, 1991; Starkes & Allard, 1993). For appropriate challenging problems experts don’t just automatically extract patterns and retrieve their response directly from memory. Instead they select the relevant information and encode it in special representations in working memory that allow planning, evaluation and reasoning about alternative courses of action (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Hence, the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982).  Experts’ knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant. Less skilled subjects’ knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that make the retrieval of even their limited relevant knowledge difficult and unreliable. Furthermore, experts have acquired domain-specific memory skills that allow them to rely on long-term memory (Long-Term Working Memory, Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) to dramatically expand the amount of information that can be kept accessible during planning and during reasoning about alternative courses of action.  The superior quality of the experts’ mental representations allow them to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and anticipate future events in advance.  The same acquired representations appear to be essential for experts’ ability to monitor and evaluate their own performance (Ericsson, 1996; Glaser, 1996) so they can keep improving their own performance by designing their own training and assimilating new knowledge.

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