25 January 2020
Peak
Peak
Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Highlights

But the clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of “gifted” people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have — the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.
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The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.
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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.
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Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
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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.
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You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
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Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback — either from yourself or from outside observers — you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.
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This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
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Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”
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And sometimes it turns out that a barrier is more psychological than anything else.
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Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles — points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through. 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.
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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.
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As we shall see, 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.
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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.
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The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that 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. In this view, all that you are doing with practice — indeed, all that you can do — is to reach a fixed potential.
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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 — getting out of your comfort zone — and forcing your brain or your body to adapt. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.
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Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.
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Of course, the deliberate practice will also lead to physical changes in the body itself — in divers, the development of the legs, abdominal muscles, back, and shoulders, among other body parts — but without the mental representations necessary to produce and control the body’s movements correctly, the physical changes would be of no use.
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This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
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The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.
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The superior organization of information is a theme that appears over and over again in the study of expert performers.
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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.
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If you don’t know for sure what constitutes improvement, how can you develop methods to improve performance?
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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.
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Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.
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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 minimize the chances that the student will have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.
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If you find that something works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, stop. The better you are able to tailor your training to mirror the best performers in your field, the more effective your training is likely to be.
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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.
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When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
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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.
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Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
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It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session.
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It does no good to do the same thing over and over again mindlessly; the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.
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To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
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Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact.
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As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.
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After all, how are you going to come up with a valuable new theory in science or a useful new technique on the violin if you are not intimately familiar with — and able to reproduce — the accomplishments of those who preceded you?
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You can picture the process as building a ladder step by step. You climb as high as you can and build one more step at the top of the ladder, climb up one more step, build another step, and so on. Once you get to the edge of your field, you may not know exactly where you’re headed, but you know the general direction, and you have spent a good deal of your life building this ladder, so you have a good sense of what it takes to add on one more step.
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There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them. Even the famous “aha” moments could not exist without a great deal of work to build an edifice that needs just one more piece to make it complete.
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People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because, for whatever reasons, they stopped practicing — or never started. There is no evidence that any otherwise normal people are born without the innate talent to sing or do math or perform any other skill.
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In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.
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It is human nature to want to put effort — time, money, teaching, encouragement, support — where it will do the most good and also to try to protect kids from disappointment. There is usually nothing nefarious going on here, but the results can be incredibly damaging. The best way to avoid this is to recognize the potential in all of us — and work to find ways to develop it.
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Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills; knowledge should never be an end in itself. Nonetheless, deliberate practice results in students picking up quite a lot of knowledge along the way.