This means spending time staring at or listening to the
desired skill—the song, the move, the swing—as a single coherent entity. People
in the hotbeds stare and listen in this way quite a lot. It sounds rather Zen,
but it basically amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you can
imagine yourself doing it.
"We're prewired to imitate," Anders Ericsson
says. "When you put yourself in the same situation as an outstanding
person and attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on your
skill."
Imitation need not be conscious, and in fact it often
isn't. In California I met an eight-year-old tennis player named Carolyn Xie,
one of the top-ranked age-group players in the country. Xie had a typical
tennis prodigy's game, except for one thing. Instead of the usual two-handed
backhand for thatage, she hit one-handed backhands exactly like Roger Federer.
Not a little bit like Federer but exactly like Federer,
with that signature head-down, torero finish.
I asked Xie how she learned to hit that way. "I
dunno," she said. "I just do." I asked her coach: he didn't
know. Later Li Ping, Carolyn's mother, was chatting about their evening plans
when she mentioned they'd be watching a tape of Roger's match. It turned out
that everyone in the family was a huge fan of Federer; in fact, they had
watched just about every televised match he'd ever played on tape. Carolyn in
particular watched them whenever she could. In other words, in her short life
she had seen Roger Federer hit a backhand tens of thousands of times. She had
watched the backhand and, without knowing, simply absorbed the essence of it.
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