Sam Priestley was never Mr Sporty. After failed attempts at rowing and running he had all but given up on the possibility of becoming a sportsman. That was until childhood friend, and table tennis coach, Ben Larcombe convinced him to act as the guinea pig in an experiment he had concocted - The Expert in a Year Challenge. Starting 1st January 2014 novice Sam was immersed in the world of competitive table tennis. He began training every day and over the course of the year notched up hundreds of hours of practice in an attempt to reach a seemingly impossible goal. There was blood, sweat, tears, injuries, frustrations and moments of elation as the pair travelled up and down the UK, and beyond, in their quest for training, mentors and competition. Sam found potential he never thought he had, got better at table tennis than most people thought possible, and discovered what it feels like when 1.5 million people watch you fail. Here is their story, including all the ridiculous training methods and unreachable goals, and the surprising lessons they learnt from playing table tennis every day for a year.

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.

Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge on the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.

Join two of the internet's favorite dogs and their owner, sports broadcaster Andrew Cotter, as he shares journal entries from life during the pandemic lockdown. Are you sitting nicely? Good. Let's discover exactly what happened after two superstar Labradors chewed up the lockdown internet and found it really quite tasty. He's not kept a journal for decades but here, in Dog Days, Andrew Cotter draws inspiration from the great Samuel Pepys; like him, he bears witness to the extraordinary everyday as the world tilts on its axis in our own unsettling era. And so, with Olive and Mabel at his side—actually, dawdling in the long grass or sleeping upside down—Andrew takes a clear-eyed, often hilarious walk through a year that encompasses all of life from the crushingly mundane to the decidedly odd. Followed by whispers of "Is that really Olive and Mabel?"—not to mention the occasional Hollywood approach—the three of them pad around literary festivals, breakfast TV, live radio, and even an appearance on Good Morning America. Slightly bemused by their fame, Andrew not only pitches up in the iconic Mastermind chair, but makes a return to sports broadcasting to find that it has become rather strange as well. But, always, his pair of utterly endearing, endlessly optimistic and eternally hungry canine companions show just how precious our time is. Especially our time spent in the devoted company of dogs. For fans new and old, this witty, insightful account of a year like no other is an unmissable treat.

Master the art of what to say in your funnels to convert your online visitors into lifelong customers in this updated edition from the $100M entrepreneur and co-founder of the software company ClickFunnels. Your business is a calling. You’ve been called to serve a group of people with the products, services, and offers that you’ve created. The impact that the right message can have on someone at the right time in their life is immeasurable. Your message could help to save marriages, repair families, change someone’s health, grow a company, or more. . . . But only if you know how to get it into the hands of the people whose lives you have been called to change. By positioning yourself as an expert and telling your story in a way that gets people to move, you will be able to guide people through your value ladder, offer solutions to their problems, and give them the results they are looking for. This is how you change the lives of your customers, and this is how you grow your company. In this updated edition of Expert Secrets, Russell Brunson, CEO and co-founder of the multimillion-dollar software company ClickFunnels, gives you the step-by-step strategies you need to turn your expertise into a carefully crafted sales message that will attract your dream customers. Don’t hide inside your business. Implement these story selling techniques now so you can find your voice and gain the confidence to become a leader, build a movement of people whose lives you can change, and make this calling a career.

An unprecedented constellation of experts—leading cancer doctors, policymakers, cutting-edge researchers, national advocates, and more—explore the legacy and the shortcomings from the fifty-year war on cancer and look ahead to the future. The longest war in the modern era, longer than the Cold War, has been the war on cancer. Cancer is a complex, evasive enemy, and there was no quick victory in the fight against it. But the battle has been a monumental test of medical and scientific research and fundraising acumen, as well as a moral and ethical challenge to the entire system of medicine. In A New Deal for Cancer, some of today’s leading thinkers, activists, and medical visionaries describe the many successes in the long war and the ways in which our deeper failings as a society have held us back from a more complete success. Together they present an unrivaled and nearly complete map of the battlefield across dimensions of science, government, equity, business, the patient provider experience, and more, documenting our emerging understanding of cancer’s many unique dimensions and offering bold new plans to enable the American health care system to deliver progress and hope to all patients.