Peak Quotes

“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“In short, perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“The clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon only a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training. The study has completely rewritten our understanding of perfect pitch.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. 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, to join the PGA golf tour or just bring our handicaps down a few strokes.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“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.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“A 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”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“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.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“if there is no agreement on what good performance is and no way to tell what changes would improve performance, then it is very difficult—often impossible—to develop effective training methods.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Call it “the New Year’s resolution effect”— it’s why gyms that were crowded in January are only half full in July and why so many slightly used guitars are available on Craigslist. So”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

“abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. So”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

“Suppose there was some group of people who selected beginning chess players for some chess program according to what seemed to be their “innate talent.” They would teach a group of youngsters how to play and then, after three or six months had passed, look to see who were the best. We know what would happen. On average, the kids with higher IQs would have an easier time in the beginning learning the moves and would be selected for further training and grooming; the others would not be offered a spot in the program. The end result would be a collection of chess players with much higher than average IQs. But we know that in the real world there are many grandmasters who don’t score particularly well on IQ tests—so we would have missed the contributions of all of those people who could become great chess players.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“while innate characteristics may influence performance among those who are just learning a new skill or ability, the degree and the effectiveness of training plays a more significant role in determining who excels among those who have worked to develop a skill.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“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.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Which brings us back to Benjamin Franklin again. As a young man he was interested in all sorts of intellectual pursuits—philosophy, science, invention, writing, the arts, and so on—and he wished to encourage his own development in those areas. So at twenty-one he recruited eleven of the most intellectually interesting people in Philadelphia to form a mutual improvement club, which he named “the Junto.” The club’s members, who met each Friday night, would encourage each other’s various intellectual pursuits. Every member was expected to bring at least one interesting topic of conversation—on morals, politics, or science—to each meeting. The topics, which were generally phrased as questions, were to be discussed by the group “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“This is true even for something as mundane as insurance sales. A recent study examined knowledge about multiline insurance (life, home, auto, and commercial) in 150 agents. Not surprisingly, the highly successful agents—as determined by their sales volumes—knew more about the various insurance products than the less successful agents.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Blindfold chess offers one of the most dramatic examples of what is possible to accomplish with purposeful practice. And learning a bit about blindfold chess can give us a clear idea of the sorts of neurological changes that arise from such practice.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

“In many of the cases that have been studied, children with talented siblings also had one or both parents encouraging them as well. The Polgár sisters we know about, and Mozart too: his father was not far behind László Polgár in his focus on developing a prodigy. Similarly, Serena and Venus Williams’s father, Richard Williams, started them on tennis with the intention of turning them into tennis professionals. In such cases it can be hard to disentangle the influence of the siblings from that of the parents. But it is probably no coincidence in these cases that it is generally the younger siblings who have reached greater heights. Part of it may be that the parents learn from their experiences with the older siblings and do a better job with the younger ones, but it is also likely that the presence of an older sibling fully engaged in an activity provides a number of advantages for the younger sibling. By watching an older sibling engaging in an activity, a younger child may become interested in—and get started on—that activity much sooner than he or she might otherwise. The older sibling can teach the younger one, and it can seem more like fun than lessons provided by the parent. And competition between siblings will likely be more helpful to the younger sibling than the older one because the older one will naturally have greater skills, at least for a number of years. Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn’t introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general. They encouraged their children’s curiosity, and reading was a major pastime, with the parents reading to the children early on, and the children reading books themselves later. They also encouraged their children to build models or science projects—activities that could be considered educational—as part of their play. But”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“It is one of the most enduring and deep-seated of all beliefs about human nature—that natural talent plays a major role in determining ability. This belief holds that some people are born with natural endowments that make it easier for them to become outstanding athletes or musicians or chess players or writers or mathematicians or whatever. While they may still need a certain amount of practice to develop their skills, they need far less than others who are not as talented, and they can ultimately reach much greater heights. My studies of experts point to quite a different explanation of why some people ultimately develop greater abilities in an area than others, with deliberate practice playing the starring role. So let’s separate myth from reality by exploring the intertwined roles of talent and training in the development of extraordinary abilities. As we’ll see, innate characteristics play a much smaller—and much different—role than many people generally assume.”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“keep this one thing at the front of your mind: subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritize their practice.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

“They had been pushed out of their comfort zone, and the muscles responded by getting strong enough to establish a new comfort zone. Homeostasis had been reestablished.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life