Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift

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.

Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it.

“Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there”— and this is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.

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 deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.

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 has well-defined, specific goals.

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

Purposeful practice is focused.

Purposeful practice involves feedback.

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

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 playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.

Mere 10,000 hours of practice does not make you perfect. It probably makes you worse

Research on many specialties shows that doctors who have been in practice for twenty or thirty years do worse on certain objective measures of performance than those who are just two or three years out of medical school.

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.

He was like the pianist playing the same songs the same way for thirty years. That is a recipe for stagnation, not improvement.

Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before.

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.”

In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve.

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,

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.

This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.

This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.

myelination can increase the speed of nerve impulses by as much as ten times.

Recent studies have shown that 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.20

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.

In other words, the most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they are actually increasing your ability to play.

in every area that scientists have studied, the findings are the same: long-term training results in changes in those parts of the brain that are relevant to the particular skill being developed.

Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.

in many cases people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area.

the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away.

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis —

You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis — not the amount of time spent playing chess with others — is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability. It generally takes about ten years of this sort of practice to reach the level of grandmaster.

In short, while the mental representations give masters a view of the forest that novices lack, they also allow masters to zero in on the trees when necessary.

Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.

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.

What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.

a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns

The superior organization of information is a theme that appears over and over again in the study of expert performers.

Researchers refer to this sort of writing as “knowledge transforming,” as opposed to “knowledge telling,” because the process of writing changes and adds to the knowledge that the writer had when starting out.

In general, mental representations aren’t just the result of learning a skill; they can also help us learn.

the differences among the students most likely lay, in large part, in how well the students were able to detect their mistakes — that is, how effective their mental representations of the musical pieces were.

the more accomplished music students were better able to determine when they’d made mistakes and better able to identify difficult sections they needed to focus their efforts on.

In any area, not just musical performance, the relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle:

she spent more than thirty hours practicing the third movement of the Italian Concerto of Johann Sebastian Bach,

Indeed, any expert in any field can be rightly seen as a high-achieving intellectual where that field is concerned.

Because most students spend the same amount of time each week with the music teacher — an hour — the primary difference in practice from one student to the next lies in how much time the students devote to solitary practice.