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

by K. Anders Ericsson

I have found that they all develop their abilities in much the same way that Sakakibara’s students did—through dedicated training that drives changes in the brain (and sometimes, depending on the ability, in the body) that make it possible for them to do things that they otherwise could not.

the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.

the ability to create, through the right sort of training and practice, abilities that they would not otherwise possess by taking advantage of the incredible adaptability of the human brain and body.

Furthermore, it is a book about how anyone can put this gift to work in order to improve in an area they choose.

And finally, in the broadest sense this is a book about a fundamentally new way of thinking about human potential, one that suggests we have far more power than we e...

The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before.

This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones.

We can create our own potential. And this is true whether our goal is to become a concert pianist or just play the piano well enough to amuse ourselves,

Surprisingly, this question has gotten very little attention from most of the people who have written about this general subject. Over the past few years a number of books have argued that people have been overestimating the value of innate talent and underestimating the value of such things as opportunity, motivation, and effort.

it is certainly important to let people know that they can improve—and improve a lot—with practice, or else they are unlikely to be motivated to even try.

But sometimes these books leave the impression that heartfelt desire and hard work alone will lead to improved performance—“Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there”—and this is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over ...

This book describes in detail what that “right sort of practice” is and how it can be put to work. The details about this sort of practice are drawn from a relatively new area of psychology that...

More than two decades ago, after studying expert performers from a wide range of fields, my colleagues and I came to realize that no matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles. We named this universal approach “deliberate practice.” Today deliberate practice remains the gold standard for anyone in any field who wishes to take advantage of the gift of adaptability in order to build new skills and abilities, and it is the main concern of this book.

These are not isolated examples. We live in a world full of people with extraordinary abilities—abilities that from the vantage point of almost any other time in human history would have been deemed impossible.

The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible. If you wish to develop a truly effective training method for anything—creating world-class gymnasts, for instance, or even something like teaching doctors to perform laparoscopic surgery—that method will need to take into account what works and what doesn’t in driving changes in the body and brain. Thus, all truly effective practice techniques work in essentially the same way.

That is, you have “learned” tennis in the traditional sense, where the goal is to reach a point at which everything becomes automatic and an acceptable performance is possible with relatively little thought, so that you can just relax and enjoy the game.

We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.

But there is one very important thing to understand here: once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving.

People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five, that a teacher who has been teaching for twenty years must be better than one who has been teaching for five.

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional year...

If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who’s been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who’s been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually ...

The approach that he took, which we will call “purposeful practice,” turned out to be incredibly successful for him. It isn’t always so successful, as we shall see, but it is more effective than the usual just-enough method—and it is a step toward deliberate practice, which is our ultimate goal.

Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call “naive practice,” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.

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 is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.

If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well-defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway. That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that? An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. The key thing is to take that general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

Purposeful practice i...

Purposeful practice involves feedback.

Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback—either from yourself or from outside observers—you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.

Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone.

Our memory experiment was set up to keep Steve from getting too comfortable. As he increased his memory capacity, I would challenge him with longer and longer strings of digits so that he was always close to his capacity. In particular, by increasing the number of digits each time he got a string right, and decreasing the number when he got it wrong, I kept the number of digits right around what he was capable of doing while always pushing him to remember just one more digit.

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

The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “practice” during that time, but he is no better at play...

It turns out that most of what doctors do in their day-to-day practice does nothing to improve or even maintain their abilities; little of it challenges them or pushes them out of their comfort zones.

Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be able to do it. Finding ways around these barriers is one of the hidden keys to purposeful practice.

Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.” It is a technique issue, in other words.

The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach.

And sometimes it turns out that a barrier is more psychological than anything else.

This provided another type of positive feedback. Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.

the key to improved mental performance of almost any sort is the development of mental structures that make it possible to avoid the limitations of short-term memory and deal effectively with large amounts of information at once.

“retrieval structure,” and it allowed Steve to focus on memorizing the three- and four-digit sets individually and then keep in mind where in the retrieval structure each of these individual sets fit. This proved to be a very powerful approach, as it allowed him to encode each set of three or four digits as a running time or some other mnemonic, put it in his long-term memory, and then not have to think about it again until he went back at the end to recall all of the digits in the string.

Although it is generally possible to improve to a certain degree with focused practice and staying out of your comfort zone, that’s not all there is to it. Trying hard isn’t enough. Pushing yourself to your limits isn’t enough. There are other, equally important aspects to practice and training that are often overlooked.

Maguire’s study, which was published in 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic evidence we have that the human brain grows and changes in response to intense training. Furthermore, the clear implication of her study is that the extra neurons and other tissue in the posterior hippocampi of the licensed cabbies underlie their increased navigational capabilities. You can think about the posterior hippocampi of a London taxi driver as the neural equivalent of the massively developed arms and shoulders of a male gymnast.

In short, the human body is incredibly adaptable. It is not just the skeletal muscles, but also the heart, the lungs, the circulatory system, the body’s energy stores, and more—everything that goes into physical strength and stamina. There may be limits, but there is no indication that we have reached them yet.

From Maguire’s work and that of others, we’re now learning that the brain has a very similar degree and variety of adaptability.

To read, for example, the blind run their fingertips over the raised dots that make up the Braille alphabet. When researchers use MRI machines to watch the brains of blind subjects as they read words in Braille, one of the parts of the brain that they see lighting up is the visual cortex. In people with normal sight, the visual cortex would light up in response to input from the eyes, not the fingertips, but in the blind, the visual cortex helps them interpret the fingertip sensations they get from brushing over the groups of raised dots that make up the Braille letters.

Interestingly enough, it is not just otherwise-unused areas of the brain where rewiring occurs. If you practice something enough, your brain will repurpose neurons to help with the task even if they already have another job to do.

These studies of brain plasticity in blind subjects—and similar studies in deaf subjects—tell us that the brain’s structure and function are not fixed. They change in response to use. It is possible to shape the brain—your brain, my brain, anybody’s brain—in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate training.