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

by K. Anders Ericsson

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.

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.

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.

that a particular part of the hippocampus—the posterior, or rear, part—was larger in the taxi drivers than in the other subjects. Furthermore, the more time that a person had spent as a taxi driver, the larger the posterior hippocampi were.

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.

the brain has a very similar degree and variety of adaptability.

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.

If you practice something enough, your brain will repurpose neurons to help with the task even if they already have another job to do.

when a body system—certain muscles, the cardiovascular system, or something else—is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis.

This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming,

learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned.

The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.

The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.

learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone.

years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.

The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.

The key to the successful diagnosis wasn’t merely having the necessary medical knowledge, but having that knowledge organized and accessible in a way that allowed the doctor to come up with possible diagnoses and to zero in on the most likely.

new training techniques leading to new levels of accomplishment and new accomplishments generating innovations in training.

Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.

Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change.