Peak — Anders Ericsson

 

Rating: ★★★★★

Summary: Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise (Canada/US)  distills decades of research in the field of performance psychology to explain how experts develop their skills. Ericsson dispels the idea that innate talent and abilities are what lead to expertise. He also dismantles the myth known as The 10,000 Hour Rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, which posits that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a  given field or discipline. Peak reveals that deliberate practice is what leads to high levels of expertise. This type of practice includes three crucial elements: accurate and immediate feedback, objective measures (e.g. a somersault can be evaluated by a judge) and direct coaching or mentorship by a skilled expert practitioner. 

Peak has far-reaching implications. In fields like chess, music, sports and gymnastics,

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deliberate practice is already a staple for competitive participants. But, what if writers, illustrators, designers and other artists used the principles of deliberate practice to improve at their craft?  How many people might come closer to realizing their potential if they read this book and implemented its lessons? I can't wait to find out. 

Key Concepts/Passages:
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• Heartfelt desire and motivation aren’t enough. We need the right sort of practice, and long periods of time.

 

• Deliberate practice is the most powerful approach to learning that has yet been discovered.

 

• Marathon runners haven’t shaved off 30% of the world record times from a century ago by being born with natural talent. Great gymnasts and divers don’t have some innate talent that allows them to do what would have been considered impossible only decades ago. These people just practiced more. A lot more.

 

• Most people learn new skills to the point where they can perform acceptably and automatically, and then stop learning. Weaknesses are ignored, or chalked up as just a natural flaw, and improvement ceases. 

 

• Performance of doctors and other practitioners actually decreases as they accumulate years of experience. The reason behind this is they don’t employ the principles of deliberate practice, and their automatic skills decline without new challenges.

 

• Naive practice is unconscious repetition with the expectation of improvement.

 

• Purposeful practice is more thoughtful, and involves moving towards a specific goal by breaking down aspects of a skill and working on them in a focused manner.

 

• When barriers towards achieving goals are encountered, the solution may not be to try harder, but to try differently.

 

• Purposeful practice is not always fun; there are elements of struggle, discomfort and frustration. This raises the issue of motivation. Usually, intermittent improvement and positive feedback are enough to sustain interest and lead to perseverance.

 

• The key to improved mental performance of any sort is the development of mental structures that circumvent the limitations of short term memory. 

 

• It is possible to shape and restructure the brain through conscious, deliberate training.

• “In the brain, the greater the challenge, the greater the changes.”

 

• A chess master has access to over 50,000 "chunks", or patterns of interactive pieces. 

• A mental representation can be understood as a method of sidestepping the constraints of short-term memory. These representations are useful for accessing or encoding large amounts of information quickly.

 

• The quality and quantity of mental representations are what differentiate experts from amateurs. 

 

• We are (almost) all experts at reading, because we have an expansive array of mental representations that we use to quickly decode information, infer meaning, and use context to form clues. 

 

• For a sport you are familiar with, you have mental structures that allow you to make sense of information quickly (outfield, short-stop, grand slam, bunt). For sports you don’t understand, you have no mental representations to guide you and can’t decode related content (beamer, snick, dolly, golden duck).

 

• Writing, at a more advanced level, is not merely re-telling—it is knowledge transforming. Gradually, the author’s understanding begins to evolve as they refine their written explanation. 

 

• More accomplished musicians were better able to identify mistakes, and better able to identify difficult areas that they needed to focus on. This is due to their ability to form more detailed mental representations. 

 

• A virtuous circle - the more skilled you are, the better their mental representations become; the better your mental representations become, the more you are able to practice effectively.

 

• Identify top performers, find out what makes them so good and deconstruct their method, using training techniques to reach their level of ability.

 

• For areas where deliberate practice is not strictly possible—because quality feedback, direct coaching, and objective measures are unrealistic--try to get as close as you can. If you are a painter, have other artists whom you admire critique your work and give you suggestions for improvement. Or, take a painting in the style you wish to master and deconstruct it, or reproduce elements of it, and compare your results to the original. 

 

• Tradition and convenience are two principal reasons why institutions value knowledge over skills. It is easier to present knowledge to a wide group of people at a conference or talk than it is to actively teach new skills. However, it is the development of skills, and the mental representations that go hand in hand with them, that set expert practitioners apart from average ones. 

 

• “Deliberate practice is for everyone who dreams. It’s for anyone who wants to learn how to draw, to write computer code, to juggle, to play the saxophone, to pen the great American novel. It’s for everyone who wants to improve their poker game, their softball skills, their salesmanship, their singing. It’s for all those people who want to take control of their lives and create their own potential, and not buy into the idea that this, right here, right now, is as good as it gets.” 

 

• Generally speaking, if your mind is wandering, and you feel relaxed and at ease, you are not improving. Deliberate practice requires deep focus on every action, while simultaneously developing the mental representations required to internalize what works and grasp what doesn’t. 

 

• “The hallmark of deliberate practice is that you try to do something that you can not do, that takes you out of your comfort zone, and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better.” 

 

• Beware the self-fulfilling prophecy: those who are told that they are too tone-deaf to learn an instrument, or too clumsy to play sports, will come to believe it is true and give up trying. Conversely, those who are given praise for their strengths in a particular area are bolstered by such praise, and usually end up improving to a far greater degree. 

 

• “You build mental representations by trying to do something, failing, and revising, over and over.”​
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