Peak by Ericsson and Pool
Ref: Ericsson & Pool (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. HarperOne.
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Summary
We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn, from baking a pie to writing a descriptive paragraph. We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic. Once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving. 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. This Book explains how to get past the perceived improvement ceiling.
Automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.
The best are not born with some innate talent but rather because they have developed their abilities through years of practice, taking advantage of the adaptability of the human body and brain.
The reason that most people don’t possess 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.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in, from writing a report to driving a car, from teaching a class to running an organization, from selling houses to performing brain surgery. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or white matter or to rewire entire sections in the way that an aspiring London taxi driver or violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.
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Brain
Cerebellum: Part of the brain that plays an important role in controlling movements.
Corpus Callosum: The collection of tissue that connects the brain’s hemispheres and serves as the communications path between them.
Hippocampus: Brain region where new neurons grow.
Gray Matter: The tissue containing neurons, the nerve fibers that connect the neurons, and the neurons’ support cells.
Synapses: The junctions between nerve cells; reach a maximum number early in life- a 2yo child has 50% more synapses than an adult.
Myelin: The insulating sheath that forms around nerve cells and allows nerve signals to travel more quickly; myelination can increase the speed of nerve impulses by as much as 10x.
Premotor Cortex: Brain region that controls movement and guiding movement in space.
Somatosensory Region: Brain region that controls touch and other senses.
Superior Parietal Region: Brain region that controls sensory input from the hands.
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Purposeful Training
Purposeful Training: Training outside your comfort zone in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress.
Practice
The ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time- the ingredients of deliberate practice that produce expert abilities.
Practice is the single most important factor in determining a person’s ultimate achievement in a given domain. It is safe to conclude from many studies on a wide variety of disciplines that nobody develops extraordinary abilities without putting in tremendous amounts of practice. No matter which area you study—music, dance, sports, competitive games, or anything else with objective measures of performance—you find that the top performers have devoted a tremendous amount of time to developing their abilities.
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.
The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better.
Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.
In one study on rats, scientists counted 112 different genes that were turned on when the workload on a particular muscle in the rear legs of the rats was sharply increased. Judging by the particular genes that were switched on, the response included such things as a change in the metabolism of the muscle cells, changes in their structure, and a change in the rate at which new muscle cells were formed. The eventual result of all of these changes was a strengthening of the rats’ muscles to handle the increased workload. 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.
When a body system—muscles, the cardiovascular system, etc is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes intended to reestablish homeostasis. Suppose that you begin a program of aerobic exercise—say, jogging 3x/wk for :30 each time, keeping your HR at the recommended level of 70% of your MAX HR (which works out to something over 140 bpm for younger adults). The sustained activity will, among other things, lead to low levels of O in the capillaries that supply your leg muscles. Your body will respond by growing new capillaries in order to provide more O to the muscle cells in your legs and return them to their comfort zone.
Push the body hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination. However, once the compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the physical activity that had previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So, to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving. 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 setting yourself back.
Goal Planning: Put small steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
Coaching: The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them.
Focus: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention. Focus and concentration are crucial, so shorter training sessions (~1h) with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster.
If your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
Feedback: You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong. 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.
People need Immediate responses that tell them when they are doing something wrong and how to fix it.
Get out of your Comfort Zone: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
Failure: You need to try and fail—but with ready access to models that show what success looks like.
Health: Expert performers do two things for general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy.
Sleep: In studies, the best students averaged ~5h more sleep per week than the good students, mostly by taking afternoon naps.
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Performance Barriers
Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into 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.
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. identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.
If you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.
The best way to move beyond a performance plateau is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way.
First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first.
Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else.
Medicine
Research on many specialties shows that doctors who have been in practice for 20-30y do worse on certain objective measures of performance than those who are just 2-3y out of medical school. It turns out that 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.
While surgeons who had performed just 10 prostatectomies had a five-year cancer recurrence rate of 17.9%, those who had performed 250 prior surgeries had a recurrence rate of just 10.7%. In other words, you were almost twice as likely to have your cancer come back within 5y if you were operated on by an inexperienced surgeon than if you were operated on by an experienced one.
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Genetics
Two areas where we know for certain that genetics affects sports performance: height and body size.
Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their 20s.
Much of the age-related deterioration in various skills happens because people decrease or stop their training; older people who continue to train regularly see their performance decrease much less.
No one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with “innate talent.” No one has ever found a gene variant that predicts superior performance in one area or another, and no one has ever come up with a way to, say, test young children and identify which among them will become the best athletes or the best mathematicians or the best doctors or the best musicians. One major takeaway message: 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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Mental Representations
Everyone has and uses mental representations. What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields—such as the vast number of arrangements of chess pieces that can appear during games. These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation.
Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.
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.
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.
In one study, the main way the surgeons detected problems was by noticing that something about the surgery didn’t match the way they had visualized the surgery in their preoperative plan. Once they noticed the mismatch, they came up with a list of alternative approaches and decided which was most likely to work.
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Expertise
Subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases. Research has shown that people are swayed by factors like education, experience, recognition, seniority, and even friendliness and attractiveness when they are judging another person’s overall competence and expertise.
Be careful when identifying expert performers. Ideally you want some objective measure of performance with which to compare people’s abilities. If no such measures exist, get as close as you can.
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. Once you’ve identified the expert performers in a field, the next step is to figure out specifically what they do that separates them from other, less accomplished people in the same field, and what training methods helped them get there. This is not always easy. Why does one teacher improve students’ performances more than another? Why does one surgeon have better outcomes than another? Why does one salesperson consistently make more sales than another? You can generally bring an expert in the field in to observe the performance of various individuals and make suggestions about what they are doing well and what they need to improve on, but it may not be obvious, even to experts, exactly what differentiates the best performers from everyone else.
Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start. In all of this keep in mind that the idea is to inform your purposeful practice and point it in directions that will be more effective. 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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Children
The psychologist Benjamin Bloom once directed a project that examined the childhoods of a number of experts in various fields. One of his findings was that when these future experts were young, their parents would use various strategies to keep them from quitting.
One of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation is social motivation. This can take several forms. One of the simplest and most direct is the approval and admiration of others. Young children are often motivated to practice a musical instrument or a sport because they are looking for their parents’ approval. Older children, on the other hand, are often motivated by positive feedback for their accomplishments. After having practiced long enough to reach a certain skill level, they become known for their abilities—this child is an artist, that child plays the piano well, and that one is a phenomenal basketball player—and this recognition can provide motivation to keep going.
The effects of training on the brain can vary with age in several ways. The most important way is that younger brains—those of children and adolescents—are more adaptable than adult brains are, so training can have larger effects in younger people. Because the young brain is developing in various ways, training at early ages can actually shape the course of later development, leading to significant changes. This is “the bent-twig effect.” If you push a small twig slightly away from its normal pattern of growth, you can cause a major change in the ultimate location of the branch that grows from that twig; pushing on a branch that is already developed has much less effect.
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Teaching
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.
You want a teacher who will guide you as much as possible, not only tell you what to practice on but what particular aspects you should be paying attention to, what errors you have been making, and how to recognize good performance. 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.
Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses. Thus, one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.
It doesn’t matter if the levels are arbitrary. What matters is that the teacher divides up what can look like an infinite amount of material to learn into a series of clear steps, making the student’s progress more concrete and more encouraging.
The best teachers don’t focus on the rules for solving particular problems but rather encourage their students to think about general patterns and processes—the why more than the how.
Teaching Method
Identify what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations.
Teach the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step.
Give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.
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Top Gun (USN)
In the first five months of 1968 the ratio for the navy pilots had dropped down to about one-to-one: the USN had shot down nine MiGs, but lost ten of its own jets. Furthermore, over the summer of 1968, navy pilots had fired more than 50 air-to-air missiles without shooting down a single MiG. The navy’s brass decided that something had to be done. That something turned out to be the establishment of the now-famous Top Gun school, properly known as the U.S. Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program (and originally the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School). The school would teach navy pilots how to fight more effectively and, it was hoped, increase their success rate in dogfights. The program that the navy designed had many of the elements of deliberate practice. In particular, it gave the student pilots a chance to try different things in different situations, get feedback on their performance, and then apply what they had learned. The navy picked its best pilots to be the trainers. These men would play the role of the enemy North Vietnamese pilots and engage the students in air-to-air “combat.” The trainers, who were known collectively as the Red Force, flew fighter planes that were similar to the MiGs, and they used the same Soviet tactics the North Vietnamese pilots had learned. Thus, they were, for all practical purposes, top-notch North Vietnamese fighter pilots, with one exception: instead of missiles and bullets, their aircraft were equipped with cameras to record each encounter. The dogfights were also tracked and recorded by radar. The students who attended the Top Gun academy were the next best fighter pilots in the navy after the trainers, and collectively they were known as the Blue Force. They flew USN fighter jets, again without the missiles or bullets. Each day they would climb into their planes and take off to face the Red Force. In those combats the pilots were expected to push their planes—and themselves—right up to the edge of failure in order to learn what the planes were capable of and what was required to get that performance out of them. They tried different tactics in different situations, learning how best to respond to what the other guys were doing. The pilots of the Red Force, being the best the navy had, generally won the dogfights. And the trainers’ superiority only increased over time, because every few weeks a whole new class of students would enter the Top Gun academy, while the trainers stayed there month after month, accumulating more and more dogfight experience as time went on and getting to the point at which they had seen pretty much everything the students might throw at them. For each new class the first few days of dogfights, in particular, were usually brutal defeats for the Blue Force. That was okay, however, because the real action occurred once the pilots landed, in what the navy called “after-action reports.” During these sessions the trainers would grill the students relentlessly: What did you notice when you were up there? What actions did you take? Why did you choose to do that? What were your mistakes? What could you have done differently? When necessary, the trainers could pull out the films of the encounters and the data recorded from the radar units and point out exactly what had happened in a dogfight. And both during and after the grilling the instructors would offer suggestions to the students on what they could do differently, what to look for, and what to be thinking about in different situations. Then the next day the trainers and students would take to the skies and do it all over again. Over time the students learned to ask themselves the questions, as it was more comfortable than hearing them from the instructors, and each day they would take the previous session’s lessons with them as they flew. Slowly they internalized what they’d been taught so that they didn’t have to think so much before reacting, and slowly they would see improvement in their dogfights against the Red Force. And when the class was over, the Blue Force pilots—now much more experienced in dogfighting than almost any pilot who hadn’t been to Top Gun—returned to their units, where they would become squadron training officers and pass on what they had learned to the other pilots in their squadrons. The results of this training were dramatic. U.S. forces had stopped their bombing throughout all of 1969, so there were no dogfights that year, but the air war resumed in 1970, including air-to-air combat between fighters. Over the next three years, from 1970 to 1973, U.S. Navy pilots shot down an average of 12.5 North Vietnamese fighter planes for every U.S. Navy plane that was lost. During the same time, air force pilots had approximately the same two-to-one ratio they had had before the bombing halt. Perhaps the clearest way to see the results of the Top Gun training is to look at the “kills per engagement” statistics. Throughout the entire war, U.S. fighters downed an enemy jet an average of once every five encounters. However, in 1972, which was the last full year of fighting, Navy fighter pilots shot down an average of 1.04 jets per encounter. In other words, on average, every time navy pilots came in contact with the enemy they would down an enemy plane. Noticing the dramatic effects of Top Gun training, the air force would later institute training exercises designed to prepare its own pilots for air-to-air combat, and both services continued this training after the end of the Vietnam War. By the time of the First Gulf War, both services had honed their programs so much that the pilots were far better trained than those in almost any other fighting service in the world. During the seven months of the First Gulf War, U.S. pilots shot down thirty-three enemy planes in air-to-air combat, losing only one plane in the process—perhaps the most dominant performance in combat aviation history. The question that the navy had faced in 1968 is familiar to people in organizations and professions of almost any type: What is the best way to improve performance among people who are already trained and on the job?
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Misc Quotes
(In a study of Olympic swimmers) The key to excellence in swimming lay in maintaining close attention to every detail of performance, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.”-Daniel Chambliss.
Once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about: If you don’t have innate musical talent, forget about ever being a good musician. If you don’t have enough willpower, forget about ever taking on something that will require a great deal of hard work. This sort of circular thinking—“The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing”—is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.
Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact.
Experience does not lead to improved performance.
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Terminology
Homo erectus: Upright man.
Homo habilis: Handy man.
Homo sapiens: Knowing man.
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Chronology
1763: Young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart embarks on a tour around Europe.-Peak by Ericsson.
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