Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

by K. Anders Ericsson

This is naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math problems and tried to solve them. Purposeful practice is, as the term implies, much more purposeful, thoughtful, and focused than this sort of naive practice. In particular, it has the following characteristics: Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Our hypothetical music student would have been much more successful with a practice goal something like this: “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row.” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success.

Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.

key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player’s mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver’s mental representations will be useless for basketball. This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player.

For the experts we just described, the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it.

There were a number of factors we did not include in our study that could have influenced—and indeed probably did influence—the skill levels of the violinists in the different groups. For instance, students who were lucky enough to have worked with exceptional teachers would likely have progressed more quickly than those with teachers who were just okay.

Padahal ini penting gak sih, akses yg dimiliki orang dg latar belakang sosio-ekonomi yg beda pasti beda juga, walau utk sampel ini bisa diasumsikan semua murid datang dari kelas yg relatif sama krn sekolahnya sama

In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance.

Yah gw pikir si deliberate practice yg dijelasin buku ini bakal mencakup segala skill yg butuh mental representation, ternyata enggak hhh

Thus, while digit-memory training isn’t deliberate practice in its strictest sense, it captures the most important element—learning from the best predecessors—and that has proved enough to generate rapid improvements in the field. This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can.

The first step toward enhancing performance in an organization is realizing that improvement is possible only if participants abandon business-as-usual practices. Doing so requires recognizing and rejecting three prevailing myths. The first is our old friend, the belief that one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetically prescribed characteristics. That belief manifests itself in all sorts of “I can’t” or “I’m not” statements: “I’m just not very creative.” “I can’t manage people.” “I’m not any good with numbers.” “I can’t do much better than this.” But, as we’ve seen, the right sort of practice can help pretty much anyone improve in just about any area they choose to focus on. We can shape our own potential.

The second myth holds that if you do something for long enough, you’re bound to get better at it. Again, we know better. Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline. The third myth states that all it takes to improve is effort. If you just try hard enough, you’ll get better. If you want to be a better manager, try harder. If you want to generate more sales, try harder. If you want to improve your teamwork, try harder. The reality is, however, that all of these things—managing, selling, teamwork—are specialized skills, and unless you are using practice techniques specifically designed to improve those particular skills, trying hard will not get you very far.

This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach. Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something—solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay—the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.

The most effective interventions, Davis found, were those that had some interactive component—role-play, discussion groups, case solving, hands-on training, and the like. Such activities actually did improve both the doctors’ performance and their patients’ outcomes, although the overall improvement was small. By contrast, the least effective activities were “didactic” interventions—that is, those educational activities that essentially consisted of doctors listening to a lecture—which, sadly enough, are by far the most common types of activities

When the writer asked him why he was doing it, Dan gave an answer I really liked. He said he didn’t appreciate the attitude that only certain people can succeed in certain areas—that only those people who are logical and “good at math” can go into mathematics, that only athletic people can go into sports, that only musically gifted people can become really good at playing an instrument. This sort of thinking just gave people an excuse not to pursue things that they might otherwise really enjoy and perhaps even be good at, and he didn’t want to fall into that trap. “That inspired me to try something completely different from anything I’d ever done,” he said. “I wanted to prove that anything’s possible if you’re willing to put in the time.”

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.

Ok let's see

Given the expense of private instruction, people will often try to make do with group lessons or even YouTube videos or books, and those approaches will generally work to some degree. But no matter how many times you watch a demonstration in class or on YouTube, you are still going to miss or misunderstand some subtleties—and sometimes some things that are not so subtle—and you are not going to be able to figure out the best ways to fix all of your weaknesses, even if you do spot them.

Remember: one of the most important things a teacher can do is to help you develop your own mental representations so that you can monitor and correct your own performance.

This is a key to getting the maximum benefit out of any sort of practice, from private or group lessons to solitary practice and even to games or competitions: whatever you are doing, focus on it.

Researchers who have studied long-distance runners have found that amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running, while elite long-distance runners remain attuned to their bodies so that they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race.

The advice I offered to Per Holmlöv in this area can be applied to just about anyone who is getting started on deliberate practice: Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster.

The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot 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. Real life—our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies—seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities.

To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.

Some people had suggested that the students who had spent the most time practicing did so because they actually liked this sort of studying and got some sort of pleasure out of it. But the answers the students gave to our questionnaire told a very different story: they didn’t like studying at all. None of them did, including the very best spellers. The hours they had spent studying thousands of words alone were not fun; they would have been quite happy to do something else. Instead, what distinguished the most successful spellers was their superior ability to remain committed to studying despite the boredom and the pull of other, more appealing activities.

Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact: Jason is an incredible tennis player, so he must have been born with this natural talent. Jackie practiced the violin for years, several hours each day, so she must have incredible willpower. In neither case can we make this determination ahead of time with any likelihood of being right, and in neither case has anyone ever identified any genes that underlie these supposed innate characteristics, so there is no more scientific evidence for the existence of individual genes that determine willpower than there is for the existence of genes that are necessary for succeeding in chess or piano-playing. Furthermore, once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about: If you don’t have innate musical talent, forget about ever being a good musician. If you don’t have enough willpower, forget about ever taking on something that will require a great deal of hard work. This sort of circular thinking—“The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing”—is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.

People want to believe that there is magic in life, that not everything has to abide by the staid, boring rules of the real world. And what could be more magical than being born with some incredible ability that doesn’t require hard work or discipline to develop? There is an entire comic-book industry built on that premise—that sometimes something magical happens, and you suddenly acquire incredible powers.

Lol

We do know—and this is important—that among those people who have practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best. Once you get to the top, it isn’t natural talent that makes the difference, at least not “talent” in the way it is usually understood as an innate ability to excel at a particular activity.

The bottom line is that no one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with “innate talent.” No one has ever found a gene variant that predicts superior performance in one area or another, and no one has ever come up with a way to, say, test young children and identify which among them will become the best athletes or the best mathematicians or the best doctors or the best musicians. There is a simple reason for this. If there are indeed genetic differences that play a role in influencing how well someone performs (beyond the initial stages when someone is just learning a skill), they aren’t likely to be something that affects the relevant skills directly—a “music gene” or a “chess gene” or a “math gene.” No, I suspect that such genetic differences—if they exist—are most likely to manifest themselves through the necessary practice and efforts that go into developing a skill. Perhaps, for example, some children are born with a suite of genes that cause them to get more pleasure from drawing or from making music. Then those children will be more likely to draw or to make music than other children. If they’re put in art classes or music classes, they’re likely to spend more time practicing because it is more fun for them. They carry their sketchpads or guitars with them wherever they go. And over time these children will become better artists or better musicians than their peers—not because they are innately more talented in the sense that they have some genes f...

But since we know that practice is the single most important factor in determining a person’s ultimate achievement in a given domain, it makes sense that if genes do play a role, their role would play out through shaping how likely a person is to engage in deliberate practice or how effective that practice is likely to be. Seeing it in this way puts genetic differences in a completely different light.

When people assume that talent plays a major, even determining, role in how accomplished a person can become, that assumption points one toward certain decisions and actions. If you assume that people who are not innately gifted are never going to be good at something, then the children who don’t excel at something right away are encouraged to try something else. The clumsy ones are pushed away from sports, the ones who can’t carry a tune right away are told they should try something other than music, and the ones who don’t immediately get comfortable with numbers are told they are no good at math. And, no surprise, the predictions come true: the girl who was told to forget about sports never becomes any good at hitting a tennis ball or kicking a soccer ball; the boy who was told he was tone-deaf never learns to play a musical instrument or to sing well; and the children who were told they were no good at math grow up believing it. The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

Two hundred years ago a person could learn a craft or trade and be fairly certain that that education would suffice for a lifetime. People born in my generation grew up thinking the same way: get an education, get a job, and you’ll be set until you retire. That has changed in my lifetime. Many jobs that existed forty years ago have disappeared or else have changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. And people coming into the work force today should expect to change careers two or three times during their working lives.

It is quite normal to have a career shift

But it is the coming generations who have the most to gain. The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job. They will need to see firsthand—through their own experiences of developing abilities they thought were beyond them—that they control their abilities and are not held hostage by some antiquated idea of natural talent. And they will need to be given the knowledge and support to improve themselves in whatever ways they choose.