K. Anders Ericsson

K. Anders Ericsson (23 October 1947 – 17 June 2020) was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who was internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.

Ericsson studied expert performance in domains such as medicine, music, chess, and sports, focusing exclusively on extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one's comfort zone) as a means of how expert performers acquire their superior performance. Critically, Ericsson's program of research served as a direct complement to other research that addresses cognitive ability, personality, interests, and other factors that help researchers understand and predict deliberate practice and expert performance.

In a highly cited 1993 paper, Ericsson and colleagues conducted studies in which they concluded that expert violinists derived their talent not from innate abilities but rather from large amounts of deliberate practice, amounting to 10,000 hours over a decade or more. Malcolm Gladwell later popularized Ericsson's so-called 10,000 hour rule in the book ''Outliers''. Provided by Wikipedia