How To Become An Expert At Anything: 5 Scientific Steps To Mastery

Here’s the problem with advice about becoming an expert: it’s almost always junk. It’s not just that the advice itself is bad, it’s that it’s somehow both incredibly vague and aggressively overconfident:

• “Practice makes perfect!” Oooh, it’s got that motivational poster energy
• “Embrace failure.” Look, I’ve embraced failure so many times we’re in a common-law marriage.
• “Just start!” Another winner. Just start. Really?

Here’s the thing: there’s a whole field of legitimate research dedicated to developing expertise. Whether you’re trying to improve work skills, do better at school or master a hobby, the same principles can help. And now it’s time for you to finally get that info with the kind of clarity that says, “Yes, this works, we’ve tested it, please stop sobbing.”

We’re going to draw from the book, “Accelerated Expertise: Training for High Proficiency in a Complex World.”

Let’s get to it…

 

Concepts First

The real secret to learning is first grasping the broad strokes — the big picture, the overarching principles, the general ideas. You don’t want to get tied up in jigsaw pieces until you grasp the picture of the completed puzzle on the box.

Mastering concepts instead of merely memorizing tasks is what separates the true experts from the mere posers. Concepts give you the confidence to handle the unexpected, the audacity to make judgment calls, and the ability to not sound like a complete moron when someone throws a curveball your way.

Over the long term, understanding an area’s fundamental ideas creates the scaffolding for you to keep expanding your knowledge.

(To learn more scientific secrets of expertise from the great David Epstein, click here.)

Sound good? Okay, here comes the bad news…

 

It Needs To Be Difficult

Plain and simple: if learning is easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.

In the expertise literature there’s this concept called “desirable difficulties.” And, yes, I agree with you — “difficult” and “desirable” are not words that belong together. Like “delightful fungus” or “sexy email.”

But here’s the thing: when you’re forced to struggle, you’re forced to actually think. You have to grapple with conflicting concepts, wrestle them to the ground, and try to pin them into something that resembles understanding. You’re engaging with the material like it’s a puzzle you actually want to solve, not a set of instructions for putting together a desk lamp.

It’s ugly, it’s frustrating, and it’s guaranteed to initially make you feel like the dumbest person in the room. But over the long haul, this is what makes for expertise. Difficult learning is like a filter — it separates the people who really understand something from those who are just doing mental karaoke.

And as long as we’re talking about difficulty, let’s cover the big principle you’ve probably heard about before: deliberate practice. What’s it really mean?

It’s like normal practice, but with all the fun surgically removed. In fact, the phrase “deliberate practice” sounds a bit too polite for what it actually is. It should be called “Controlled Suffering for Skill Acquisition.”

Let’s be clear: deliberate practice isn’t just “spending 10,000 hours.” No, that’s the romantic myth. It’s not the hours that matter—it’s the miserable specificity of those hours. You need to be 100% focused on consciously fixing errors. There’s no autopilot here, no daydreaming about lunch. It forces you to crawl inside the little nooks of your incompetence and live there for a while.

You might think, “Oh, but won’t it eventually get easier?” Well, no. The answer is no. It doesn’t get easier. Because once you fix one small mistake, you immediately discover six more lurking beneath the surface, attacking the fractal nature of your mediocrity. It’s like running a marathon only to find out that the finish line is actually just the start of another, longer marathon, except this one has snakes and someone keeps hitting you in the face with a rake.

But it works.

Now there are other methods of effective practice — but they all have that “make it hard” part in common. “Increasing variability of practice” (mixing up how you do it) works, as does “adding sources of contextual interference” (practicing with the “inconvenient” setting turned up to 11). No matter what, you need some struggle in there.

What about when you reach an advanced level? That’s when you want to make your practice as realistic as possible. You need to practice it in the same awful conditions you’ll face when it actually matters. You have to screw up in real life and feel the awkward sting of failure that no YouTube tutorial can simulate. Good boxers don’t just hit the heavy bag all day long – they also get punched in the face. Repeatedly.

(For more actionable tips on increasing expert-level performance, click here.)

So what’s the quickest way to develop mastery?

Honestly, you shouldn’t even be asking that question…

 

Don’t Cram

Cramming is all about the thrill, the terror, and that temporary sense of accomplishment when you wake up the next morning and miraculously remember some of what you learned. And in a matter of hours, all that knowledge evaporates, like you hit “Empty Trash” on your mental desktop.

The more effective technique is “distributed practice.” Yes, stretching that learning over a longer time period.

Distributed practice is the boring parent of learning strategies. It shows up in sensible shoes, with a packed lunch, asking if you’ve remembered to floss today. You don’t get the satisfaction of a big, glorious push to the finish line. No, you get the equivalent of slowly chipping away at a stone wall like you’re escaping Shawshank.

It requires patience, which is basically the least sexy word in the English language. But learning something day after day over countless days sends a strong message to your brain: this activity isn’t going anywhere, so you better start remembering it.

(To learn the most effective methods for studying in school, click here.)

Everybody always talks about the importance of “feedback.” But what’s the best kind – and how do we get it?

 

Feedback

You want both outcome and process feedback. Not just “Am I doing well?” but also “Am I doing it the right way?”

And, as with deliberate practice, you want to spend the majority of your time analyzing errors. Sound like it can do a real number on your self-esteem after a while? Yup, it can, and that’s something to be cognizant of.

You want the feedback equivalent of a balanced diet. On one hand, there’s feedback overload, a phenomenon that should come with its own Surgeon General’s warning. You sign up for constructive criticism, and suddenly, everyone thinks they’re Simon Cowell. And now you’re just sitting there, nodding, trying to remember what it felt like to be happy.

But if you do nothing but congratulate yourself, improvement will slow to a crawl.

What’s the best way to navigate this? Have someone else do it for you.

Find a good mentor. Someone who has achieved mastery and can prevent both ego inflation or ego collapse. Mentoring is like getting a cheat code, except instead of “infinite lives,” it’s more like “infinite improvement.”

(To learn the 8 steps to finding the perfect mentor for you, click here.)

You learned plenty of things in school. And how many of them do you really remember? Exactly. And that brings us to the critical issue of…

 

Retention

In the literature, the gradual loss of learning and skills is referred to as “decay.”

Decay? Really? Not even a nice euphemism like “gradual reduction” or “temporary lapse”? Nope. Decay.

And, sadly, decay arrives fast, like a repo man for your skills. “Oh, you wanted to remember the new technique you learned in Photoshop? Sorry, we had to clear space for all the lyrics to that 1997 Smash Mouth song you somehow still know by heart.” You leave your guitar unplayed for a week, and the next time you pick it up, your fingers are like, “Sorry, but have we met?”

The principle to remember is that skill level predicts decay rate. The more you have practiced something, the better you’ll retain it. And so the solution is: overlearning.

If you want to prevent decay, it’s not gonna be like those movie montages where someone becomes a martial arts expert in three minutes set to upbeat music. This practice isn’t “casual.” This is the kind of learning where you take the skill out to dinner, move in together, meet its parents, and propose to it in front of a full restaurant. You don’t just need to know it. You need to know it so deeply, so profoundly, that it’s burned into your very essence like an existential rash. Practice until your friends stage an intervention.

Sound difficult? It won’t be forever. After you’ve initially learned something, you just need periodic practice to keep your skill level. Maintenance is easier than mastery.

And there’s a very counterintuitive way to speed up those early stages. Instead of pounding away at a skill nonstop, we actually learn better when we interleave other tasks with the thing we’re trying to learn. This is more realistic and forces your brain to reorient on the fly. The goal is to teach it to recover from surprise detours with the grace of someone who accidentally took a sip of a stranger’s latte and is now trying to play it cool.

When you study, do something else, and then come back to studying, your brain sits up straight and goes, “Whoa, wait a minute, this feels like a struggle — better log this in the ‘Remember or Die’ file.”

(To learn the 8 secrets that will make your memory stronger, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Time to round it all up – and we’ll learn how teams can develop expertise…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to become an expert at anything:

• Concepts First: Learning the fundamental principles instead of just the immediate behaviors is the difference between being a cook and being a chef.
• It Needs To Be Difficult: If you’re doing it right, you don’t feel like an expert; you feel like a person who has been mildly electrocuted by their own ambition. It’ll make you wonder if ignorance really is bliss. But an arduous process is what creates mastery.
• Don’t Cram: Distributed practice is the sensible Volvo of studying techniques. You’re supposed to take things step-by-step, day after day, until the knowledge seeps into your brain and settles down like a retired couple moving to Florida. Your brain hates the quickie approach and prefers to be seduced gradually, like a Jane Austen character.
• Feedback: It’s not “feedback”; it’s a forensic investigation into your incompetence. Find a mentor.
• Retention: The “decay curve” is like a ski slope, except there’s no lodge at the bottom — just a pit of “Whoops, I forgot how to speak Spanish.” Overlearning is repetitive, it’s boring, it’s the linguistic equivalent of hitting your head against a wall until the wall starts to feel bad for you. But that’s how you make stuff stick. Wax on, wax off, Daniel-san.

There are two key things that are consistently found in expert teams:

1-“In high-performing teams, team members develop rich mental models of the goals of the other team members.”

In most teams, no one knows what anyone else is doing, and honestly, no one wants to know, because that might involve taking on more responsibility or, worse, having to talk to someone.

Developing these mental models is basically like trying to memorize a really boring version of Dungeons & Dragons. You have to know everyone’s skills, weaknesses, and how much damage they’re likely to take when the VP of Marketing announces a “realignment.”

But when people take time to develop this level of understanding it’s powerful. You stop duplicating efforts. You start anticipating who’s going to screw up and how you can help them avoid screwing up. You begin to act like a coordinated group of people working toward a common goal. (And finally figuring out that when Bob says, “This will be a quick meeting,” he actually means “We will die here” will improve scheduling and logistics.)

2-“High-performing teams effectively exchange information in a consensually agreed-upon manner and with consistent and meaningful terminology, and are careful to clarify or acknowledge the receipt of information.”

What a concept, right? An email response. It sounds so basic, but let’s be honest: “acknowledging receipt” is rarer than a public restroom that doesn’t make you contemplate the death of civility.

But on great teams? You send a message, and they respond. They even confirm they’ve read it and clarify. I can hardly type these words without feeling a little emotional. You’ll say something vague, like “Let’s touch base about the marketing plan,” and instead of responding with a thumbs-up emoji or, worse, absolute silence, they’ll come back with, “Do you mean the Q3 digital strategy, or are you referring to the print campaign?”

Questions like that imply “I actually care what happens next.” There’s no ambiguity, no “Sure, let’s circle back” (which we all know means “I hope this problem dies on its own while I avoid it”). A team that actually acknowledges messages and communicates clearly is about 9000% more likely to finish a project without everyone screaming, “WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO DO THIS?!” like a twisted, corporate version of Clue.

But whether it’s working as a team or practicing the ukulele by yourself, the above principles can help. And with time, you can become an expert at something. You’ve ascended the rickety ladder of mediocrity, rung by splintery rung, and emerged on the other side as someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.

You try to act nonchalant, but inside you’re beaming like a Labrador who’s been told they’re a very good boy. You won’t have to “fake it ’til you make it” anymore, because you’ve made it.

Just please do us all one favor — try not to start every sentence with, “Well, actually…”