Prepare to be inspired!

If you've ever envied someone's achievements in athletics, music, or scholarship--and wondered "How do they do that?!"--two recently published books in the Lake Forest Library collection will interest you.

The first is Peak : secrets from the new science of expertise by Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson and science writer Robert Pool. Ericsson has studied expertise for more than forty years and concludes that experts are made, not born. The keys to expertise, he says, are deliberate practice--not just practicing what you already can do, but setting goals and working toward what you cannot yet do--and constructive feedback from and supervision by the right coach or teacher.

When the going gets tough, though, you might find you need Grit : the power of passion and perseverance by Angela Duckworth, another professor of psychology, this time at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth, the daughter of Chinese immigrants with high expectations for their children, explains in her book's introduction how she endured years of being told "You're no genius!" by her father. After winning a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant") in 2013, she thinks about the irony of the situation: she won the award not for being a genius but because she discovered that "what we eventually accomplish may depend more on our passion and perseverance than on our innate talent."

Unsurprisingly, Ericsson and Duckworth have worked together. You can hear them both interviewed on the May 2, 2016 edition of the WBUR (Boston) radio program On Point.