Curling is a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice towards a target area which is segmented into four concentric circles. It is related to bowls.

Free Kindle eBooks Every day we bring you a comprehensive list of free ebooks for download for your Kindle. The list is compiled from ebooks which are promoted free of charge by the author or publisher for that day. The free Kindle ebooks cover a wide range of genres and tastes ranging from reference and educational material to fiction and poetry. If you choose to subscribe by email, you can look forward to a daily emailer with the very best of the morning's free ebook releases from genres you select yourself. The free books are updated regularly throughout the day with more and more books being added or removed from the free books listings so please do check regularly and also be vigilant that a free offer has not expired. If you do not own a Kindle, you can still read the books on your computer, tablet or mobile phone using the free Kindle reader software which you can download from your app store or from the Amazon website.

Please note that the books listed were indicated as being free at the time this email was composed. On rare occasions a book may be withdrawn or the price changed by the author or distributor.

Always check the final price shown on Amazon before you download a book. 3841 reviews by Robert J.

Crane Find the rest of the series here: www.smarturl.it/girlinthebox This is a collection of the first three titles in The Girl in the Box Series, which are about a teenage girl who develops powers far beyond those of a normal human, and her battles against those who would use her against her will. 185,000 words total.) Books included: 1.

Soulless Alone Sienna Nealon was a 17 year-old girl who had been held prisoner in her own house by her mother for twelve years. Then one day her mother vanished, and Sienna woke up to find two strange men in her home. On the run, unsure of who to turn to and discovering she possesses mysterious powers, Sienna finds herself pursued by a shadowy agency know. Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy Size: 628 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 5392 reviews by Mark Twain THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.

Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry 'Huck' Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River.

Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of H. Genre: Children's eBooks, Action & Adventure, Literature & Fiction, Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literary Size: 190 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 5391 reviews by Mark Twain Thomas 'Tom' Sawyer is the title character of the Mark Twain novel THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (1876). He appears in three other novels by Twain: ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884), TOM SAWYER ABROAD (1894), and TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE (1896). Sawyer also appears in at least three unfinished Twain works, HUCK AND TOM AMONG THE INDIANS, SCHOOLHOUSE HILL and TOM SAWYER'S CONSPIRACY. While all three uncompleted works were posthumously published, only Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy has a complete plot, as Twain abandoned the other two works after finishing only a few chapters.The fictional character's name may have been derived from a jolly and flamboyant fireman named Tom Sawyer with whom Twain was acquainted in San Francisco, California, while Twain was employed as a reporter at the San Francisco. Genre: Children's eBooks, Action & Adventure, Literature & Fiction, Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literary Size: 140 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

5534 reviews by H. Wells THE INVISIBLE MAN is a science fiction novella by H. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it absorbs and reflects no light and thus becomes invisible. Pro Tools Edirol Ua 25 more.

He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. (more on www.wisehouse-classics.com).

Genre: Children's eBooks, Literature & Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Suspense, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Literary Size: 102 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 11129 reviews by Charles Dickens and Hablot Knight Browne A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution.

The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period. It follows the lives of several characters through these events. A Tale of Two Cities was published in weekly installments from April 1859 to November 1859 in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly installments. With sales of about 2. Genre: History, World, Literature & Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Nonfiction, Romance, Historical Romance, Historical, Literary Size: 272 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

5534 reviews by H. Wells THE TIME MACHINE is a science fiction novella by H. Wells, published in 1895. Wells is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time.

The term 'time machine', coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle.The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension, and his demonstration of a tabletop model machine for travelling through it. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carryin. Genre: Children's eBooks, Literature & Fiction, Classics, Action & Adventure, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Size: 78 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

4915 reviews by Sun Tzu THE ART OF WAR (Chinese: 孫子兵法; pinyin: Sūnzĭ bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu, a high-ranking military general, strategist and tactician, and kindred to the Realpolitik of his time, termed in China as Legalism. The text is composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare. It is commonly thought of as a definitive work on military strategy and tactics. It has been the most famous and influential of China's Seven Military Classics, and 'for the last two thousand years it remained the most important military treatise in Asia, where even the common people knew it by name.' It has had an influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, legal strategy and beyond.Beyond its military and intelligence ap. Genre: Business & Investing, Management & Leadership, History, Asia, Military, Nonfiction, Professional & Technical, Accounting & Finance Size: 42 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

6139 reviews by Jane Austen and H M Brock PERSUASION is Jane Austen's last completed novel, published posthumously. She began it soon after she had finished Emma and completed it in August 1816. Persuasion was published in December 1817, but is dated 1818. The author died earlier in 1817. As the Napoleonic Wars come to an end in 1814, Admirals and Captains of the Royal Navy are put ashore, their work done.

Anne Elliot meets Captain Frederick Wentworth after seven years, by the chance of his sister and brother-in-law renting her father's estate, while she stays for a few months with her married sister, living nearby. They fell in love the first time, but she broke off the engagement.Besides the theme of persuasion, the novel evokes other topics, with which Austen was familiar: The Royal Navy, in which two of Jane Austen's brothers. Genre: Literature & Fiction, Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Nonfiction, Parenting & Relationships, Family Relationships, Romance, Sexuality, Military, Literary Size: 158 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

6137 reviews by Jane Austen and H M Brock EMMA, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. 6139 reviews by Jane Austen and H M Brock SENSE AND SENSIBILITY is a novel by Jane Austen, and was her first published work when it appeared in 1811 under the pseudonym “A Lady”. A work of romantic fiction, better known as a comedy of manners, Sense and Sensibility is set in southwest England, London and Kent between 1792 and 1797, and portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. The novel follows the young ladies to their new home, a meagre cottage on a distant relative's property, where they experience love, romance and heartbreak.

Austen biographer Claire Tomalin argues that Sense and Sensibility has a “wobble in its approach”, which developed because Austen, in the course of writing the novel, gradually became less certain about whether sense or sensibility should triumph. Austen characteri. Genre: Arts & Photography, Art, History, Literature & Fiction, Drama & Plays, Anthologies & Literature Collections, Classics, Nonfiction, Romance Size: 228 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 2172 reviews by Robyn Peterman Vampyres don’t exist.

They absolutely do not exist. At least I didn’t think they did ‘til I tried to quit smoking and ended up Undead.

Who in the hell did I screw over in a former life that my getting healthy equates with dead? Now I’m a Vampyre. Yes, we exist whether we want to or not.

However, I have to admit, the perks aren’t bad. My girls no longer jiggle, my ass is higher than a kite and the latest Prada keeps finding its way to my wardrobe. On the downside, I’m stuck with an obscenely profane Guardian Angel who looks like Oprah and a Fairy Fighting Coach who’s teaching me to annihilate like the Terminator. To complicate matters, my libido has increased to Vampyric proportions and my attraction to a hotter than Satan’s underpants. Genre: Literature & Fiction, Humor & Satire, Romance, Series, Paranormal, Romantic Comedy, General Humor Size: 322 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

3652 reviews by Sean Costello Bush pilot and family man Tom Stokes is about to face the worst day of his life. On a clear winter morning he sets out in his Cessna 180 to do some repairs on a remote hunt camp, leaving his five year old son and very pregnant wife snug in their beds. On the return trip, a squall forces him into an emergency landing and he winds up—quite literally—in the lap of petty criminal Dale Knight. Dale, now a fugitive from the law—and worse, from a merciless drug lord who just happens to be his brother—draws Tom into a web of mayhem and treachery that puts not only his life at risk, but the lives of his wife, sonand unborn child. SQUALL is a fast-paced, darkly-comic tale of murder and gang-style retribution that grabs the reader on page one and simply does not l.

Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers, Suspense Size: 178 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 1353 reviews by Elizabeth Reyes Book 1 in the BEST SELLING Moreno Brothers companion series,Editorial Reviews:A Night Owl Teen Review 5 Star 'Top Pick' ~ 'I can't even begin to express how much I loved this book.

I read the whole thing in less than one day. In fact, it was nearly five o'clock in the morning when I finished, it was that good.'

In Between Writing and Reading Blogspot ~ Oh My God I LOVED this book!!! It was amazing!!Reading Eating and Dreaming ~ It's great and I highly recommend it for older teens. I have a feeling the Moreno Brother's series is going to be a sexy series full of drama and romance.

I can't wait to read them all!YA Indie Princess Reviews ~ WOW Elizabeth Reyes has blown my mind with Forever Mine. Fans of Sarah Dessen & Simone Elkeles will eat up Forever Mine like the total book candy it is.Sizz. Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Teen & Young Adult, New Adult & College Size: 335 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 816 reviews by Sharon Srock A baby is dead and Callie Stillman blames herself. Haunted by memories of a tiny coffin, Callie can’t understand how God could expect her to put her heart on the line a second time. But the evasive little girl attending her Sunday School class is so obviously in trouble that Callie finds her resolve cracking. Iris and Samantha Evans are living on borrowed time.

Deserted, orphaned, betrayed, and deceived, they need rescuing in the worst way. Steve Evans had his life changed by God. A reformed drug addict, he’s searching for the family he abandoned ten years ago and praying for a miracle. The road to healing is rocky. But as Callie confronts her worst fears by bringing father and daughters together in a risky bid for reconciliation, she realizes tha.

Genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity, Religious & Inspirational Fiction, Christian, Women's Fiction, Sagas Size: 241 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 755 reviews by Aleatha Romig and Book Covers By Design One week.

No more.Alexandria Collins has one week to live carefree—no ghosts of her past or pressures of her future haunting her. Reinventing herself as 'Charli,' she is knocked off her feet by a sexy, mysterious man who brings her pleasure like she never imagined.

With her heart at stake, she forgets that decisions made in the dark of night reappear in the bright light of day. 'Some of my tastes are unique. They aren’t for everyone. I understand that.” Lennox 'Nox' Demetri is wealthy, confident, and decisive--he knows what he wants. From the first time he sees Charli at an exclusive resort, he knows he wants her. Although he is usually the one to make the rules, together they agree on one: One week.

No more.When betrayal comes from those closest to Alexandria. Genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Romance, Coming of Age, Mystery & Suspense Size: 232 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

931 reviews by Vera Nazarian You have two options. You die, or you Qualify. The year is 2047.

An extinction-level asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, and the descendants of ancient Atlantis have returned from the stars in their silver ships to offer humanity help. But there’s a catch. They can only take a tiny percent of the Earth’s population back to the colony planet Atlantis. And in order to be chosen, you must be a teen, you must be bright, talented, and athletic, and you must Qualify. Sixteen-year-old Gwenevere Lark is determined not only to Qualify but to rescue her entire family.

Because there’s a loophole. If you are good enough to Qualify, you are eligible to compete in the brutal games of the Atlantis Grail, which grants all w. Genre: Children's eBooks, Science Fiction, Fantasy & Scary Stories, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Teen & Young Adult Size: 600 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

2478 reviews by Nathaniel Hawthorne THE SCARLET LETTER is an 1850 work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is considered to be his best work. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.20th-century writer D. Lawrence said that there could not be a more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter. Henry James once said of the novel, 'It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things-an indefinable purity and lightness of c. Genre: Literature & Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Romance, Literary Size: 160 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 983 reviews by Lee Tobin McClain Battle for a Baby...

Poor-but-proud Kendra Forrester doesn’t need an arrogant millionaire to tell her how to raise her sister’s baby. But when handsome Zeke King arrives at her Colorado cabin demanding custody of his brother’s child, strategy dictates that she let him stick around. Battling mountain weather and the baby’s illness brings these two opposites together, but their own insecurities, their dead siblings’ secrets, and a jealous former boyfriend threaten their tentative bond. Only the Lord and the Sacred Bond Brotherhood can help Kendra and Zeke form a family for their baby.

Genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity, Religious & Inspirational Fiction, Romance, Series, Christian, Inspirational Size: 139 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 1202 reviews by Susan Stoker and Missy Borucki **Protecting Caroline is a stand-alone love story. It's Book 1 in the SEAL of Protection Series.**Matthew 'Wolf' Steel hated flying commercial. Luckily his job as a Navy SEAL meant he didn't have to do it very often. He'd been unlucky enough to be assigned a middle seat on the cramped jet, but fortunately for him, the woman next to him was willing to switch seats with him. Hoping for a relaxing flight, Wolf was pleasantly surprised at the good conversation and sense of humor the woman had as they flew 36,000 feet over the countryside.When Caroline boarded the plane to Virginia to move across the country for her new job she never expected to be seated next to the hottest guy she'd ever seen. She also never expected he'd be so easy to talk to.

She knew he'd never be interested in talking to. Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Military, Mystery & Suspense Size: 231 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

789 reviews by R.S. Ingermanson What If?

What if you were studying for your Ph.D. In archaeology and decided to take a break from your crummy life by working on an archaeological dig in Israel? What if you met a great guy in Jerusalem who happened to be a world-famous theoretical physicist working on a crazy idea to build a wormhole that might make time-travel possible someday? What if he had a nutball colleague who turned the theory into reality — and then decided to use YOU as a guinea pig to make sure it was safe? What if the nutball had a gun and went on a crazy, impossible mission to hunt down and kill the apostle Paul?

57 when Rivka Meyers walks out of the wormhole into a world she’s only studied in books. Ancient Jerusalem is awesome. Genre: Literature & Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity, Religious & Inspirational Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Christian Size: 370 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 547 reviews by Renae Christine and Amanda Blanche FREE Bonus Included Stop buying your materials for your handmade products at local craft stores. I'll show you where to find the best materials from the best suppliers to fuel your Etsy selling success. After getting more than 1 million views on YouTube with over 100,000 follow up questions answered for handmade businesses since 2012, Renae Christine has learned that 90% of handmade businesses fail within the first 5 years due to lack of proper suppliers or the know-how to find those suppliers of the best materials. Read this resource guide to learn: Why every Etsy seller and handmade business owner needs a supplier.

Why you should avoid your local craft store's clearance section like the plague. Common mistakes that you could be ma. Genre: Business & Investing, Industries & Professions, Small Business & Entrepreneurship, Nonfiction, Professional & Technical, Accounting & Finance Size: 32 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 826 reviews by Jessie Donovan and Hot Tree Editing ***USA Today and Amazon Top 20 Bestseller*** STONEFIRE DRAGONS BOOK 1 In exchange for a vial of dragon’s blood to save her brother’s life, Melanie Hall offers herself up as a sacrifice to one of the British dragon-shifter clans. Being a sacrifice means signing a contract to live with the dragon-shifters for six months to try to conceive a child. Her assigned dragonman, however, is anything but easy. He’s tall, broody, and alpha to the core.

There’s only one problem—he hates humans. Due to human dragon hunters killing his mother, Tristan MacLeod despises humans. Unfortunately, his clan is in desperate need of offspring to repopulate their numbers and it’s his turn to service a human female. Despite his plans to have sex with her and walk away, his. Genre: Romance, Series, Paranormal Size: 258 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 573 reviews by Uncle Amon Are you looking for a kid's or children's book that is highly entertaining, great for early readers, and is jam-packed with bedtime stories, jokes, games, and more? This children's storybook has it all!Happy Monsters is a fun storybook about a few friendly monsters!

This is an excellent read for beginning and early readers. Each story is easy to read and exciting. Cute and bright illustrations for younger readers and a free coloring book.This book is especially great for traveling, waiting rooms, and read aloud at home.Fun games and puzzles includedExcellent for beginning and early readersCute short stories that are great for a quick bedtime storyFunny and hilarious jokes & illustrations for kidsFREE coloring book downloads includedThis story is great for a quick bedtime story and to be re. Genre: Children's eBooks, Literature & Fiction Size: 35 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST. 614 reviews by Deborah Coonts A young woman plunges from a Las Vegas sightseeing helicopter, landing in the Pirate Lagoon in front of the Treasure Island Hotel in the middle of the 8:30 Pirate Show. Almost everyone writes her off as another Vegas victim. But, Lucky O’Toole, head of customer relations at the Babylon megacasino, smell a rat, though she’s got a lot on her plate: the adult film industry’s annual awards banquet, a spouse-swapping convention, sex-toy purveyors preying on the pocket-protector crowd attending ElectroniCon Still Lucky can’t resist turning over a few stones.

When a former flame is one of the snakes she uncovers, Lucky is certain the woman’s death was no Sin City suicide. To top it all off, Lucky’s best friend, Teddie—Las Vegas’s finest female impersonator—pr. Genre: Humor & Entertainment, Literature & Fiction, Humor & Satire, Action & Adventure, United States, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Mystery, Romance, Women's Fiction, Crime Fiction, Humor, Mystery & Suspense, Romantic Comedy, Women's Adventure, American, General Humor Size: 339 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

1019 reviews by Holly Rayner Aaron Winters, the gorgeously handsome billionaire CEO and philanthropist has always hated Christmas; for him, the festive season holds too many tormenting memories. Robyn Hurst is one of his many dutiful employees, but won't let anything - or anyone - cancel Christmas for her. A couple of weeks before Christmas, the traditional charity auctions take place; Robyn finds herself one of the unlucky ones, auctioned away for a date with the highest bidder. Just when she fears falling into the wrong hands, she's relieved to find that a mysterious bidder has saved her. She's even more surprised to discover that it's none other than Aaron Winters himself! Soon they find themselves in a most unexpected romance, as Aaron finds a woman truly in love with life. Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Holidays, Mystery & Suspense Size: 185 pages Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

727 reviews by Kit Morgan Be Watching for Book Two of the Holiday Mail Order Bride Series, The New Year's Bride, coming December 2013 A Holiday Mail Order Bride Romance! The Christmas Mail Order Bride is the first in the Holiday Mail Order Bride Series! Enjoy these sweet romances as you read about characters falling in love during some of your favorite holidays! Also from Kit Morgan: The Prairie Bride Series Sheriff Clayton Riley asked for a pair of boots for Christmas, not a mail order bride!

Unfortunately for Clayton, his brother and mother figured a bride would look better on him than a new pair of boots! After all, he'd been sulking around long enough after the death of his wife, and his family decided it was time to take matters into their own hands and se. Genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Westerns, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity, Religious & Inspirational Fiction, Romance, Historical Romance, Series, Christian, Holidays, Inspirational Size: Unknown Free eBook download for Kindle from 23 December 2017 onward PDT/PST.

Executive Summary Reprint: R0707J Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made. Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. Ordinary practice is not enough: To reach elite levels of performance, you need to constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. Such discipline is the key to becoming an expert in all domains, including management and leadership.

Those are the conclusions reached by Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University; Prietula, a professor at the Goizueta Business School; and Cokely, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who together studied data on the behavior of experts, gathered by more than 100 scientists. What consistently distinguished elite surgeons, chess players, writers, athletes, pianists, and other experts was the habit of engaging in “deliberate” practice—a sustained focus on tasks that they couldn’t do before. Experts continually analyzed what they did wrong, adjusted their techniques, and worked arduously to correct their errors. Even such traits as charisma can be developed using this technique.

Working with a drama school, the authors created a set of acting exercises for managers that remarkably enhanced executives’ powers of charm and persuasion. Through deliberate practice, leaders can improve their ability to win over their employees, their peers, or their board of directors. The journey to elite performance is not for the impatient or the faint of heart.

It takes at least a decade and requires the guidance of an expert teacher to provide tough, often painful feedback. It also demands would-be experts to develop their “inner coach” and eventually drive their own progress. Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.

The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts. It will take you at least a decade to achieve expertise, and you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in “deliberate” practice—practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort. You will need a well-informed coach not only to guide you through deliberate practice but also to help you learn how to coach yourself. Above all, if you want to achieve top performance as a manager and a leader, you’ve got to forget the folklore about genius that makes many people think they cannot take a scientific approach to developing expertise.

We are here to help you explode those myths. Let’s begin our story with a little wine. What Is an Expert? In 1976, a fascinating event referred to as the “Judgment of Paris” took place. An English-owned wineshop in Paris organized a blind tasting in which nine French wine experts rated French and California wines—ten whites and ten reds. The results shocked the wine world: California wines received the highest scores from the panel.

Even more surprising, during the tasting the experts often mistook the American wines for French wines and vice versa. Two assumptions were challenged that day. The first was the hitherto unquestioned superiority of French wines over American ones.

But it was the challenge to the second—the assumption that the judges genuinely possessed elite knowledge of wine—that was more interesting and revolutionary. The tasting suggested that the alleged wine experts were no more accurate in distinguishing wines under blind test conditions than regular wine drinkers—a fact later confirmed by our laboratory tests.

Current research has revealed many other fields where there is no scientific evidence that supposed expertise leads to superior performance. One study showed that psychotherapists with advanced degrees and decades of experience aren’t reliably more successful in their treatment of randomly assigned patients than novice therapists with just three months of training are. There are even examples of expertise seeming to decline with experience. The longer physicians have been out of training, for example, the less able they are to identify unusual diseases of the lungs or heart. Because they encounter these illnesses so rarely, doctors quickly forget their characteristic features and have difficulty diagnosing them. Performance picks up only after the doctors undergo a refresher course. How, then, can you tell when you’re dealing with a genuine expert?

Real expertise must pass three tests. First, it must lead to performance that is consistently superior to that of the expert’s peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results. Brain surgeons, for example, not only must be skillful with their scalpels but also must have successful outcomes with their patients. A chess player must be able to win matches in tournaments. Finally, true expertise can be replicated and measured in the lab. As the British scientist Lord Kelvin stated, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” Things to Look Out for When Judging Expertise.

Individual accounts of expertise are often unreliable. Anecdotes, selective recall, and one-off events all can present insufficient, often misleading, examples of expertise. There is a huge body of literature on false memories, self-serving biases, and recollections altered as a result of current beliefs or the passage of time. Reporting is not the same thing as research. Many people are wrongly believed to possess expertise. Bear in mind that true expertise is demonstrated by measurable, consistently superior performance.

Some supposed experts are superior only when it comes to explaining why they made errors. After the 1976 Judgment of Paris, for example, when California wines bested French wines in a blind tasting, the French wine “experts” argued that the results were an aberration and that the California reds in particular would never age as well as the famous French reds. (In 2006, the tasting of the reds was reenacted, and California came out on top again.) Had it not been for the objective results from the blind tastings, the French wine experts may never have been convinced of the quality of the American wines. Intuition can lead you down the garden path. The idea that you can improve your performance by relaxing and “just trusting your gut” is popular.

While it may be true that intuition is valuable in routine or familiar situations, informed intuition is the result of deliberate practice. You cannot consistently improve your ability to make decisions (or your intuition) without considerable practice, reflection, and analysis. You don’t need a different putter. Many managers hope that they will suddenly improve performance by adopting new and better methods—just as golf players may think that they can lower their scores with a new and better club. But changing to a different putter may increase the variability of a golfer’s shot and thus hinder his or her ability to play well. In reality, the key to improving expertise is consistency and carefully controlled efforts. Expertise is not captured by knowledge management systems.

Knowledge management systems rarely, if ever, deal with what psychologists call knowledge. They are repositories of images, documents, and routines: external data that people can view and interpret as they try to solve a problem or make a decision. There are no shortcuts to gaining true expertise.

Skill in some fields, such as sports, is easy to measure. Competitions are standardized so that everyone competes in a similar environment. All competitors have the same start and finish lines, so that everyone can agree on who came in first. That standardization permits comparisons among individuals over time, and it’s certainly possible in business as well.

In the early days of Wal-Mart, for instance, Sam Walton arranged competitions among store managers to identify those whose stores had the highest profitability. Each store in the Nordstrom clothing chain posts rankings of its salespeople, based on their sales per hour, for each pay period.

Nonetheless, it often can be difficult to measure expert performance—for example, in projects that take months or even years to complete and to which dozens of individuals may contribute. Expert leadership is similarly difficult to assess. Most leadership challenges are highly complex and specific to a given company, which makes it hard to compare performance across companies and situations. That doesn’t mean, though, that scientists should throw up their hands and stop trying to measure performance.

One methodology we use to deal with these challenges is to take a representative situation and reproduce it in the laboratory. For example, we present emergency room nurses with scenarios that simulate life-threatening situations. Afterward, we compare the nurses’ responses in the lab with actual outcomes in the real world. We have found that performance in simulations in medicine, chess, and sports closely correlates with objective measurements of expert performance, such as a chess player’s track record in winning matches. Testing methodologies can be devised for creative professions such as art and writing, too. Researchers have studied differences among individual visual artists, for instance, by having them produce drawings of the same set of objects. With the artists’ identities concealed, these drawings were evaluated by art judges, whose ratings clearly agreed on the artists’ proficiency, especially in regard to technical aspects of drawing.

Other researchers have designed objective tasks to measure the superior perceptual skills of artists without the help of judges. Practice Deliberately To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades. However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist.

Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice— deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become. To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you are learning to play golf for the first time.

In the early phases, you try to understand the basic strokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes (like driving the ball into another player). You practice on the putting green, hit balls at a driving range, and play rounds with others who are most likely novices like you. In a surprisingly short time (perhaps 50 hours), you will develop better control and your game will improve.

From then on, you will work on your skills by driving and putting more balls and engaging in more games, until your strokes become automatic: You’ll think less about each shot and play more from intuition. Your golf game now is a social outing, in which you occasionally concentrate on your shot. From this point on, additional time on the course will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades. Why does this happen?

You don’t improve because when you are playing a game, you get only a single chance to make a shot from any given location. You don’t get to figure out how you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to adjust your playing style to improve your control. In fact, professionals often take multiple shots from the same location when they train and when they check out a course before a tournament.

This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing business and leadership expertise. The classic example is the case method taught by many business schools, which presents students with real-life situations that require action. Because the eventual outcomes of those situations are known, the students can immediately judge the merits of their proposed solutions. In this way, they can practice making decisions ten to 20 times a week.

War games serve a similar training function at military academies. Officers can analyze the trainees’ responses in simulated combat and provide an instant evaluation. Such mock military operations sharpen leadership skills with deliberate practice that lets trainees explore uncharted areas. Let’s take a closer look at how deliberate practice might work for leadership.

You often hear that a key element of leadership and management is charisma, which is true. Being a leader frequently requires standing in front of your employees, your peers, or your board of directors and attempting to convince them of one thing or another, especially in times of crisis. A surprising number of executives believe that charisma is innate and cannot be learned. Yet if they were acting in a play with the help of a director and a coach, most of them would be able to come across as considerably more charismatic, especially over time.

In fact, working with a leading drama school, we have developed a set of acting exercises for managers and leaders that are designed to increase their powers of charm and persuasion. Executives who do these exercises have shown remarkable improvement. So charisma can be learned through deliberate practice. Bear in mind that even Winston Churchill, one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, practiced his oratory style in front of a mirror. Genuine experts not only practice deliberately but also think deliberately.

The golfer Ben Hogan once explained, “While I am practicing I am also trying to develop my powers of concentration. I never just walk up and hit the ball.” Hogan would decide in advance where he wanted the ball to go and how to get it there. We actually track this kind of thought process in our research. We present expert performers with a scenario and ask them to think aloud as they work their way through it. Chess players, for example, will describe how they spend five to ten minutes exploring all the possibilities for their next move, thinking through the consequences of each and planning out the sequence of moves that might follow it.

We’ve observed that when a course of action doesn’t work out as expected, the expert players will go back to their prior analysis to assess where they went wrong and how to avoid future errors. They continually work to eliminate their weaknesses.

Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them. The famous violinist Nathan Milstein wrote: “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my mentor] Professor Auer how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.’” It is interesting to note that across a wide range of experts, including athletes, novelists, and musicians, very few appear to be able to engage in more than four or five hours of high concentration and deliberate practice at a time.

In fact, most expert teachers and scientists set aside only a couple of hours a day, typically in the morning, for their most demanding mental activities, such as writing about new ideas. While this may seem like a relatively small investment, it is two hours a day more than most executives and managers devote to building their skills, since the majority of their time is consumed by meetings and day-to-day concerns. This difference adds up to some 700 hours more a year, or about 7,000 hours more a decade.

Think about what you could accomplish if you devoted two hours a day to deliberate practice. It’s very easy to neglect deliberate practice. Experts who reach a high level of performance often find themselves responding automatically to specific situations and may come to rely exclusively on their intuition. This leads to difficulties when they deal with atypical or rare cases, because they’ve lost the ability to analyze a situation and work through the right response.

Experts may not recognize this creeping intuition bias, of course, because there is no penalty until they encounter a situation in which a habitual response fails and maybe even causes damage. Older professionals with a great deal of experience are particularly prone to falling into this trap, but it’s certainly not inevitable. Research has shown that musicians over 60 years old who continue deliberate practice for about ten hours a week can match the speed and technical skills of 20-year-old expert musicians when tested on their ability to play a piece of unfamiliar music. Moving outside your traditional comfort zone of achievement requires substantial motivation and sacrifice, but it’s a necessary discipline. As the golf champion Sam Snead once put it, “It is only human nature to want to practice what you can already do well, since it’s a hell of a lot less work and a hell of a lot more fun.” Only when you can see that deliberate practice is the most effective means to the desired end—becoming the best in your field—will you commit to excellence. Snead, who died in 2002, held the record for winning the most PGA Tour events and was famous for having one of the most beautiful swings in the sport. Deliberate practice was a key to his success.

“Practice puts brains in your muscles,” he said. Take the Time You Need By now it will be clear that it takes time to become an expert. Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions. In some fields the apprenticeship is longer: It now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years of steady practice, on average, before they succeed at the international level. Though there are historical examples of people who attained an international level of expertise at an early age, it’s also true that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people could reach world-class levels more quickly.

In most fields, the bar of performance has risen steadily since that time. For instance, amateur marathon runners and high school swimmers today frequently better the times of Olympic gold medalists from the early twentieth century. Increasingly stiff competition now makes it almost impossible to beat the ten-year rule. One notable exception, Bobby Fischer, did manage to become a chess grand master in just nine years, but it is likely that he did so by spending more time practicing each year. Many people are naive about how long it takes to become an expert. Leo Tolstoy once observed that people often told him they didn’t know whether or not they could write a novel because they hadn’t tried—as if they only had to make a single attempt to discover their natural ability to write.

Similarly, the authors of many self-help books appear to assume that their readers are essentially ready for success and simply need to take a few more easy steps to overcome great hurdles. Popular lore is full of stories about unknown athletes, writers, and artists who become famous overnight, seemingly because of innate talent—they’re “naturals,” people say. However, when examining the developmental histories of experts, we unfailingly discover that they spent a lot of time in training and preparation.

Sam Snead, who’d been called “the best natural player ever,” told Golf Digest, “People always said I had a natural swing. They thought I wasn’t a hard worker. But when I was young, I’d play and practice all day, then practice more at night by my car’s headlights. My hands bled. Nobody worked harder at golf than I did.” Not only do you have to be prepared to invest time in becoming an expert, but you have to start early—at least in some fields. Your ability to attain expert performance is clearly constrained if you have fewer opportunities to engage in deliberate practice, and this is far from a trivial constraint.

Once, after giving a talk, K. Anders Ericsson was asked by a member of the audience whether he or any other person could win an Olympic medal if he began training at a mature age. Nowadays, Ericsson replied, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to win an individual medal without a training history comparable with that of today’s elite performers, nearly all of whom started very early. Many children simply do not get the opportunity, for whatever reason, to work with the best teachers and to engage in the sort of deliberate practice that they need to reach the Olympic level in a sport. Find Coaches and Mentors Arguably the most famous violin teacher of all time, Ivan Galamian, made the point that budding maestros do not engage in deliberate practice spontaneously: “If we analyze the development of the well-known artists, we see that in almost every case the success of their entire career was dependent on the quality of their practicing. In practically every case, the practicing was constantly supervised either by the teacher or an assistant to the teacher.” Research on world-class performers has confirmed Galamian’s observation. It also has shown that future experts need different kinds of teachers at different stages of their development.

In the beginning, most are coached by local teachers, people who can give generously of their time and praise. Later on, however, it is essential that performers seek out more-advanced teachers to keep improving their skills. Eventually, all top performers work closely with teachers who have themselves reached international levels of achievement. Having expert coaches makes a difference in a variety of ways. To start with, they can help you accelerate your learning process. The thirteenth-century philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon argued that it would be impossible to master mathematics in less than 30 years. And yet today individuals can master frameworks as complex as calculus in their teens.

The difference is that scholars have since organized the material in such a way that it is much more accessible. Students of mathematics no longer have to climb Everest by themselves; they can follow a guide up a well-trodden path. The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful, feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated students who seek out such feedback.

They’re also skilled at understanding when and if a coach’s advice doesn’t work for them. The elite performers we studied knew what they were doing right and concentrated on what they were doing wrong. The King Of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match Ps2 Iso Creator on this page. They deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance. The best coaches also identify aspects of your performance that will need to be improved at your next level of skill. If a coach pushes you too fast, too hard, you will only be frustrated and may even be tempted to give up trying to improve at all. Real experts seek out constructive, even painful feedback.

They’re also skilled at understanding when and if a coach’s advice doesn’t work for them. Relying on a coach has its limits, however. Statistics show that radiologists correctly diagnose breast cancer from X-rays about 70% of the time. Typically, young radiologists learn the skill of interpreting X-rays by working alongside an “expert.” So it’s hardly surprising that the success rate has stuck at 70% for a long time.

Imagine how much better radiology might get if radiologists practiced instead by making diagnostic judgments using X-rays in a library of old verified cases, where they could immediately determine their accuracy. We’re seeing these kinds of techniques used more often in training.

There is an emerging market in elaborate simulations that can give professionals, especially in medicine and aviation, a safe way to deliberately practice with appropriate feedback. So what happens when you become an Olympic gold medalist, or an international chess master, or a CEO? Ideally, as your expertise increased, your coach will have helped you become more and more independent, so that you are able to set your own development plans.

Like good parents who encourage their children to leave the nest, good coaches help their students learn how to rely on an “inner coach.” Self-coaching can be done in any field. Expert surgeons, for example, are not concerned with a patient’s postoperative status alone. They will study any unanticipated events that took place during the surgery, to try to figure out how mistakes or misjudgments can be avoided in the future. Benjamin Franklin provides one of the best examples of motivated self-coaching.

When he wanted to learn to write eloquently and persuasively, he began to study his favorite articles from a popular British publication, the Spectator. Days after he’d read an article he particularly enjoyed, he would try to reconstruct it from memory in his own words.

Then he would compare it with the original, so he could discover and correct his faults. He also worked to improve his sense of language by translating the articles into rhyming verse and then from verse back into prose.

Similarly, famous painters sometimes attempt to reproduce the paintings of other masters. Anyone can apply these same methods on the job. Say you have someone in your company who is a masterly communicator, and you learn that he is going to give a talk to a unit that will be laying off workers. Sit down and write your own speech, and then compare his actual speech with what you wrote. Observe the reactions to his talk and imagine what the reactions would be to yours.

Each time you can generate by yourself decisions, interactions, or speeches that match those of people who excel, you move one step closer to reaching the level of an expert performer. • • • Before practice, opportunity, and luck can combine to create expertise, the would-be expert needs to demythologize the achievement of top-level performance, because the notion that genius is born, not made, is deeply ingrained. It’s perhaps most perfectly exemplified in the person of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who is typically presented as a child prodigy with exceptional innate musical genius. Nobody questions that Mozart’s achievements were extraordinary compared with those of his contemporaries. What’s often forgotten, however, is that his development was equally exceptional for his time.

His musical tutelage started before he was four years old, and his father, also a skilled composer, was a famous music teacher and had written one of the first books on violin instruction. Like other world-class performers, Mozart was not born an expert—he became one.