Saurabh 😎

Peak by Anders Ericsson

Book cover for Peak

It was commonly thought that perfect pitch was purely genetic. In 2014, a study showed that it could be learned by nearly everyone. The catch is that for perfect pitch specifically, it must be developed by age six. Still, the research supports a broader conclusion that our brains are surprisingly adaptable.

Contrary to popular opinion, hard work by itself doesn't lead to improved performance. The work must consist of the right type of practice called "deliberate practice", which is the main subject of the author's research and this book. Becoming an expert at something through deliberate practice usually takes a decade.

Many benchmarks of peak human performance are much higher than they were at any point before in human history. In 1973, the world record for number of digits of pi memorized was 511 digits; today, it's 70,000 digits. This increase in maximum human peak performance happened because of the sharp increase in both quantity and quality of practice by top performers.

Deliberate practice is so effective across many unrelated fields as it maximally exploits the adaptability of the human brain.

Naive practice is doing the same activity over and over again. This is useful for reaching an "acceptable" level of performance, and is how we approach most things in life, like learning to drive to work. Past a certain point however, just doing the same activity over and over doesn't necessarily make you better at it. People who have 20 years of normal, casual day-to-day driving experience don't perform much better than 5-year drivers.

Purposeful practice is one step up from naive practice. Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals that together contribute to a longer-term goal; requires focus and concentration; and has a feedback mechanism. Most importantly, purposeful practice requires pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, which is the main aspect that distinguishes purposeful practice from naive practice. In some cases, going beyond your comfort zone means changing your technique, not just increasing your effort, which is made easier by working with a coach.

Physical activity creates change in your body by rebuilding muscle after homeostatis is disrupted (by pushing outside your comfort zone). This increases the amount of exertion to disrupt homeostatis again, and so on. However, you also don't want to push too hard.

The brain grows by re-wiring and strengthening existing connections, rather than growing new brain cells (like muscles do). In the long term, with repeated practice the brain will become specialized and optimized for the relevant skills. Example: in a study done on musicians who play stringed instruments which require exceptionally careful control of the left hand, the area of the brain that controls the left hand's fingers had gradually expanded.

Training the brain is more effective at a younger age, when the brain is still developing and more adaptable.

In some cases, excessive mental training in one area can cause a regression in another area, as the brain will use devote more cells to only the skill being trained.

After the brain has changed, training is required to retain the new connections. If training stops, the changes go away.

Unlike naive practice, purposeful practice aims to disrupt homeostasis.

The fact that many chess grandmasters are able to effortlessly play blindfolded chess suggests that they have developed superior mental processes for playing chess.

One thing that separates chess experts from novices is that the experts are able to study and remember most of an entire chess board in just a few seconds. However, this doesn't hold if the chess board has pieces in completely random places. Instead, chess masters have developed highly memory-efficient patterns for the types of arrangements that show up in real-world games. It's the same phenemonen that explains why it's much easier for humans to quickly memorize a coherent English sentence over a random string of words. The coherent sentence actually has meaning, and meaning helps us remember it faster.

This suggests that over years of practice, chess masters have seen so many different situations, they are able to "chunk" the different situations and efficiently store them in long-term memory. Further, chunks are arranged hierarchaly, with chunks grouped by pattern.

This is confirmed when a chess master is asked to look at a chess board and explain what they see. Instead of giving a bottoms-up representation of the exact spot of each piece, they give much higher-level descriptions of things like "lines of force" and "power", which is much closer to their actual mental representation of the board. They aren't storing the locations of individual pieces, but instead higher-level concepts they have internally developed after years of practice. This also explains how they are so effective at blindfold chess.

The representations allow a chess master to quickly evaluate the effect of different moves, and quickly evaluate the next best move for the highest chance of winning.

Mental representations happen in every field, not just chess.

Deliberate practice entails developing more complex mental representations of the task at hand. As such, mental representations are domain and skill specific.

Deliberate practice trains a specific skill, not general human performance. Practicing memorizing the digits of pi doesn't vastly improve your memory generally; it vastly improves your ability to memorize a sequence of digits.

The main advantage of good mental representation is it allows processing large amounts of information extremely quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory.

Experts are distinguished from novices by the quantity and quality of mental representations. Experts see patterns in things where novices see randomness. They are able to quickly simulate the outcome of many different actions in their head to decide on the next best move.

The more detailed your mental representation, the easier it is to incorporate more information, which further refines your mental representation, and so on.

As an example in another field, doctors form complex, domain-specific mental representations. They use these representations to treat patients: first they learn facts about the patient, then recall the relevant medical knowledge, and finally search through and pick the most plausible diagnosis.

Simply having the knowledge isn't enough; the knowledge must be organized in a coherent way that allows for quick processing.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is developing and refining mental representations. Further, practice and mental representations work together. Mental representations allow you to monitor and evaluate your performance while practicing, which if necessary, causes the mental representations to be refined. In other words, mental representations aren't just a result of learning; they also help you learn by giving you a way to evaluate your own performance. The better your mental representations, the better your practice will be, which in turns further improves your mental represenations, and so on.

The authors selected music (specifically, playing the violin) as the domain to study deliberate practice. This is because it has an objective way to measure performance, and the skills needed to perform at an expert level are well-established and standardized and can be taught by teachers who are already experts.

In a controlled study of middle-aged violinists in music academies, the main variable that explained performance differences was the number of hours of solitude practice. Further, nearly every participant in the study, even those who loved playing the violin, did not describe deliberate practice as enjoyable. They were motivated by knowing that practice was the only way to improve their performance.

Every study on deliberate practice suggests that it is impossible to develop expert-level performance without exceptional amounts of practice. (But the converse is not necessarily true.)

Deliberate practice is different from purposeful practice in two main ways. First, it needs to involve a field where there is a clear, objective criteria to distinguish experts from novices. Second, there needs to be teachers in the field who can guide the student. In other words, deliberate practice is purposeful practice that is informed and guided by the existing experts in the field.

Summary of deliberate practice:

You can still apply the deliberate practice principles even if you're trying to improve in a field that doesn't meet all the above criteria - for example, there is no objective criteria to evaluate a business manager. First, try to evaluate the top performers, even if it entails subjective judgement (but keep in mind that this will be subject to many common psychological biases). Then, try and figure out what they do differently that results in superior performance.

In general, it is always better to work with a teacher who is far more proficient than you. They can give you feedback or adjust your technique in ways it would have been impossible for you to on your own (or, only after many hours of trial-and-error). For example, a math teacher doesn't just evaluate whether the answer is correct (even the student can do that); they will analyze the reasoning behind the answer and infer the mental representation of the student, refining the representation if necessary.

Gladwell summarized some of the authors' earlier research into the "ten thousand hour rule", which states that it takes ten thousand hours to become a master in a field. One reason it's so popular is it satifies our natural instinct to think in terms of simple cause-and-effect relationships: if you invest ten thousand hours into practice, you will become an expert. Unfortunately, the rule as stated as Gladwell is too simple. There's nothing special about ten thousand hours - some expert performers practice for less, and some for more than twenty thousand hours. Furthermore, the rule doesn't distinguish between naive practice and deliberate practice. Gladwell cites the Beatles numerous concerts as evidence of the effect of practice, but public performances are not necessarily the same as deliberate, focused practice.

Compounding on the problems of Gladwell's simplification, many people interpret his rule as a "promise" that guarantees expert-level performance after ten thousand hours of practice. This was not the hypothesis the authors' original research analyzed; they simply observed that the best performers all had in common more hours of solitary practice than the next-best performers, not necessarily a causal effect.

However, Gladwell's rule is still correct in spirit: becoming a master at anything does require significant amounts of practice. The reason is that you are being benchmarked against and competing with other top-performers who also put in exceptional hours of practice. And, regardless of your current skill level, practice will noticably improve one's performance at something, even if they don't become world-class.

How can people use deliberate practice to improve performance on the job? As mentioned before, just doing something for a long time doesn't necessarily improve performance. People need to be pushed outside their comfort zone, get feedback, and mimic the best performers in thier field.

Organizations can incorporate principles of deliberate practice into everyday business activities. For example, while giving a presentation to a group of colleagues, the speaker can choose a particular skill like speaking without looking at slides and the audience will take notes on that aspect of the presentation for feedback. When done repeatedly, employees can use this practice to improve specific business skills.

You don't necssarily need to know exactly what the top performers do differently. For example, the military didn't try to analyze the techniques of the best pilots. They just put trainees in practice situations that mimicked real-life situations, allowing them to practice over and over with immediate feedback.

Simulators work especially well for improving performance in jobs with a high cost of failure, like pilots and surgeons. For example, radiologists could be given a set of images from previous patients where the outcome is known to practice on.

There is too much emphasis on knowledge-training over skill-training. This is primarily because knowledge is much easier to teach to large groups of people. However, more knowledge doesn't necessarily improve performance. In fact, a study showed that doctors who had more experience performed the same or even worse than younger doctors. This is because for the most part, doctors continue their education through attending lectures and conference rather than performing highly-focused, deliberate practice with immediate feedback.

Unlike doctors, surgeons do get better with more experience, as surgeons inherently get feedback much faster than doctors, which allows them to improve their mental representations.

One way to examine and improve mental representations is to stop someone in the middle of a task and ask them to describe the situation and what they plan on doing next.

In your personal life, the best approach to improving performance is to hire a teacher or coach, especially when starting out. At the beginning, your mental representations aren't developed enough to monitor and improve upon your own performance.

Even with a teacher, most of your improvement will come from solitary practice outside the teaching sessions.

One difference between people who stay amateurs at something and experts is that amateurs describe practice sessions as enjoyable, while experts describe them as focused and tiring. The amateurs view practice as a way to enjoy the activity, while experts view practice as a way to exert effort to improve performance. For example, a swimmer will leisurely swim laps around the pool, while the expert will carefully think about and control every stroke, constantly monitoring their performance and making on-the-fly adjustments as necessary. As mentioned above, enjoyable practice and practice to improve performance are mostly mutually exclusive.

The difference between enjoyable and effortful practice is so great that it's generally better to have shorter practice sessions with 100% effort than longer practice sessions with 70% effort.

Benjamin Franklin had a unique approach to improving his writing, without access to an experienced teacher. To improve his ability to write clearly, he would read a well-written article, write down short notes about the content, and then attempt to reproduce his own version of the article that was as well-written. To improve his ability to order different ideas, he would take his notes, re-arrange them in a different order, and attempt to re-produce the article in a coherent order. Comparing his version of the article to the original article gave him immediate feedback, and he only focused on improving one skill at a time.

As a more modern-day example, comedians also don't have access to a teacher, so they typically will first test out new routines and material in lower-profile comedy clubs and getting rid of what doesn't work.

Mozart also in part learned to compose by reproducing the works of other great composers.

The act of reproducing the work of experts develops our own mental representations. This must be an active process; simply passively analyzing the work of past experts does not have the same effect.

When you hit a plateau, you need to figure out which exact aspect of your technique is holding you back. To find this out, you need to push yourself beyond your previous limit and observe what breaks down first. Then, design a practice routine that specifically hones in on that particular skill.

The biggest obstacle for anyone trying to reach expert-level performance is the willpower to sustain effortful, deliberate practice over a long period of time. The best way to keep going is to develop habits and systems to ensure you practice consistently.

Most people won't be able to fully focus on something for more than an hour. This is usually shorter when just starting out.

The initial part of getting better at something is the hardest. Once you start developing a baseline level of performance, these new skills become part of your motivation.

For the most part, the top performers in the world become interested in their area at a very young age. Their initial interest started out as fun and curiosity, and cultivated into a serious pursuit by thier parents. Starting at a young age gives more time for serious practice, and takes advantage of the body's more efficient adapability at younger ages. This is especially true for physical activities, like sports or ballet dance.

It is of course possible to acquire new skills at older ages. However, studies have shown that the specific neurological adaptive mechanisms are different for adult brains than children brains.

Despite stories of extraordinary performance at a young age, which implies that some people have special, innate talent, virtually all prodigies in fact began practice in that field or a related field before their superior performance was revealed.

One way the prodigy myth has been debunked is that many prodigies don't significantly improve with additional training. If their talent was truly natural, then the additional training should have improved their performance. Instead, practice didn't help them improve since most of their performance gains indeed came from practice, not innate talent.

What does differ from person to person are the ability to focus for long periods of time and finding certain activities naturally more enjoyable, which allows them to practice with much less willpower than others.

In intellectual pursuits, IQ - which supposedly measures "natural" intelligence - plays a very little role in determining experts. While IQ may play a role in early success, over time the majority of one's success come from the development of domain-specific mental representations, which happens through deliberate practice.

If there were genetic differences that determined success, it would be possible to predict who will rise to become a top performer. However, no one has been able to come up with a reliable way to do this.

In summary, genetic differences may give people an advantage in the beginning, but over time what determines success is the quantity and quality of practice.

The danger of believing in innate talent is that people who display early successes will be self-selected for more attention from coaches and teachers. They will get more feedback, and hence more practice, which further improves their skill, which is then erronoesly used to confirm their superior innate ability. Ultimately, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that dangerously discounts the role of practice.

Instead of focusing on the long-term retention of knowledge, teachers should focus on students' ability to perform certain tasks, using knowledge as needed.

Developing a rich mental representation of something allows you to freely explore that skill on your own.