Sublime

Ericsson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim: “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable … Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

When a ball reached me in the middle, it was as though my eyesight and my hands got better. I could see from sideline to sideline, knowing where each of my teammates was. My impulse was to get the ball to someone who was in a position to shoot. More and more, I prided myself on my passing. I never made fancy passes, but I always made good ones that

Several sports psychologists I interviewed told me that they publicly support a view that marginalizes genes because they believe it sends a positive social message. “But maybe it’s dangerous too,” one eminent sports psychologist told me, “to say that you’re stuck where you are because you’re not working hard enough.” Either way, the social message

Football, as a more complex team game without a form of real possession, is largely about triangles. One such triangle might be the player currently touching the ball, the one about to receive it, and the off-ball player currently causing the greatest deformation in the defence’s shape. Triangles might replace ‘ball events’ as the key unit of footb

When asked about the routine, Bowman said: “If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been vi

You always try to be perfect, he says, and you always fall short, and it fucks with your head. Your confidence is shot, and perfectionism is the reason. You try to hit a winner on every ball, when just being steady, consistent, meat and potatoes, would be enough to win ninety percent of the time.

Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.”