Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

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

You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

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.

Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”

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. This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who wishes to improve — but it is still just a start.

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.

There is a growing body of evidence that both the structure and the function of the brain change in response to various sorts of mental training, in much the same way as your muscles and cardiovascular system respond to physical training.

As long as the physical exercise is not so strenuous that it strains the body’s homeostatic mechanisms, the exercise will do very little to prompt physical changes in the body. From the body’s perspective, there is no reason to change; everything is working as it should.

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. With such practice you are modifying the parts of the brain you use when playing music and, in a sense, increasing your own musical “talent.”

Mental representations aren’t just for chess masters; we all use them constantly. A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting in their minds; that image is their mental representation of the Mona Lisa. Some people’s representations are more detailed and accurate than others, and they can report, for example, details about the background, about where Mona Lisa is sitting, and about her hairstyle and her eyebrows.

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

What exactly is being changed in the brain with deliberate practice? The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their 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.

And if you are a reader who is already familiar with the concept of deliberate practice or with the broader area of the psychology of learning, you will likely find it easier than other readers to assimilate the information in this book.

This ability to create a detailed mental representation of a climb before embarking on it is something that only comes with experience.

The key change that occurs in our adaptable brains in response to deliberate practice is the development of better mental representations, which in turn open up new possibilities for improved performance. In short, we came to see our explanation of mental representations as the keystone of the book, without which the rest of the book could not stand.

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.

This is an example of one way in which expert performers use mental representations to improve their performance: they monitor and evaluate their performance, and, when necessary, they modify their mental representations in order to make them more effective. The more effective the mental representation is, the better the performance will be. We had developed a certain mental representation of the book, but we found out that it had led us to a performance (the explanations in our original proposal) that was not as good as we wished, so we used the feedback we had gotten and modified the representation accordingly.

Obviously the mental representation for a book is much larger and more complex than one for a personal letter or a blog post, but the general pattern is the same: to write well, develop a mental representation ahead of time to guide your efforts, then monitor and evaluate your efforts and be ready to modify that representation as necessary.

When practicing a new piece, beginning and intermediate musicians generally lack a good, clear idea of how the music should sound, while advanced musicians have a very detailed mental representation of the music they use to guide their practice and, ultimately, their performance of a piece. In particular, they use their mental representations to provide their own feedback so that they know how close they are to getting the piece right and what they need to do differently to improve.

The researchers found, among other things, that 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. This implies that the students had more highly developed mental representations of the music they were playing and of their own performances, which allowed them to monitor their practice and spot mistakes.

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.

The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance, followed by such things as practicing with others, taking lessons, performing (particularly in solo performance), listening to music, and studying music theory. Many of them also said that getting enough sleep was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep — and often an afternoon nap.

Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve. In short, there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.

We found that the best violin students had, on average, spent significantly more time than the better violin students had spent, and that the top two groups — better and best — had spent much more time on solitary practice than the music-education students.

But two things were strikingly clear from the study: First, to become an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice. We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And, second, even among these gifted musicians — all of whom had been admitted to the best music academy in Germany — the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were on average more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing.

Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed.

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. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. 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. Improving some aspect of the target perf...

Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her pract...

Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mista...

Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. Th...

Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minim...

In a field you’re already familiar with — like your own job — think carefully about what characterizes good performance and try to come up with ways to measure that, even if there must be a certain amount of subjectivity in your measurement. Then look for those people who score highest in the areas you believe are key to superior performance. Remember that the ideal is to find objective, reproducible measures that consistently distinguish the best from the rest, and if that ideal is not possible, approximate it as well as you can.

whenever possible, the best approach is almost always to work with a good coach or teacher. An effective instructor will understand what must go into a successful training regimen and will be able to modify it as necessary to suit individual students.

Finally, a good teacher can give you valuable feedback you couldn’t get any other way. Effective feedback is about more than whether you did something right or wrong. A good math teacher, for instance, will look at more than the answer to a problem; he’ll look at exactly how the student got the answer as a way of understanding the mental representations the student was using. If needed, he’ll offer advice on how to think more effectively about the problem.

Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work, and it is generally a decade or more between a scientist’s first publication and his or her most important publication — and this is in addition to the years of study before that first published research.

In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.

if you follow the principles of deliberate practice you can develop ways to identify the top performers in a field and train other, lesser performers and bring them up closer to that top level. And by doing that it is possible to raise the performance level of an entire organization or profession.

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 deliberate-practice mindset offers a very different view: anyone can improve, but it requires the right approach. If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is.

They just set up a program that mimicked the situations pilots would face in real dogfights and that allowed the pilots to practice their skills over and over again with plenty of feedback and without the usual costs of failure. That is a pretty good recipe for training programs in many different disciplines.

From the perspective of deliberate practice, the problem is obvious: attending lectures, minicourses, and the like offers little or no feedback and little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, correct the mistakes, and gradually develop a new skill. It’s as if amateur tennis players tried to improve by reading articles in tennis magazines and watching the occasional YouTube video; they may believe they’re learning something, but it’s not going to help their tennis game much.

In general, professional schools focus on knowledge rather than skills because it is much easier to teach knowledge and then create tests for it. The general argument has been that the skills can be mastered relatively easily if the knowledge is there. One result is that when college students enter the work world, they often find that they need a lot of time to develop the skills they need to do their job.

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.”

First, while a good teacher does not have to be one of the best in the world, he or she should be accomplished in the field. Generally speaking, teachers will only be able to guide you to the level that they or their previous students have attained.

In reading reviews of an instructor, skip over the stuff about how much fun their lessons are and look for specific descriptions of progress the students have made and obstacles they have overcome.

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.