Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise in Science and Inquiry

Jun 09, 2019 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biology, self-help, psychology

This is a wonderful book about the method of deliberate practice. While Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success popularized the concept that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field, this book shows that 10,000 hours of repetition does not make one an expert. Gladwell gave as an example The Beatles, but he was wrong. While in Hamburg, they played about 1,100 hours, not 10,000. And they did get useful feedback but it wasn't deliberate practice. What made them f This is a wonderful book about the method of deliberate practice. While Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success popularized the concept that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field, this book shows that 10,000 hours of repetition does not make one an expert. Gladwell gave as an example The Beatles, but he was wrong. While in Hamburg, they played about 1,100 hours, not 10,000. And they did get useful feedback but it wasn't deliberate practice. What made them famous was not their performance capabilities, but their song-writing abilities. But, Gladwell was correct in that a tremendous amount of effort over many years is required to become an effort in any field.

Deliberate practice requires going outside one's comfort zone. Practicing exactly the same thing over and over does not improve performance. In addition, immediate feedback is necessary. You must identify what the best performers do that sets them apart.

People who are usually considered to be experts often are not. As an example, older doctors and nurses do not usually improve with experience. They don't gain expertise from experience alone. Doctors try hard to keep their skills sharp. Continuing education for doctors is popular, but it doesn't really help much! The reason is that most continuing education is in the format of lectures, in which the audience passively accepts the message delivered by the lecturer. But the best continuing education has an interactive component--role play, discussion groups, case-solving, and hands-on training. These approaches have been shown to improve doctors' performance.

The principles of deliberate practice are:
1) Find a good teacher
2) Engagement and focus
3) Practice outside of your comfort zone
4) Set things up so you constantly see signs of improvement
5) Share your activities with like-minded people

There is no such thing as "natural talent". Most of the stories about experts having a natural talent are incorrect. There is no evidence that any genetically-determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best. Nothing came easily to these experts; they worked hard at their craft, very hard. A high IQ can help someone initially improve a skill. But experts show no correlation between IQ and skill level. What matters most is their ability to make mental representations.

The book has a very interesting description of how a deliberate practicing method was experimentally applied to a university physics course. The emphasis was placed on skills vs. knowledge.

I thought it was fascinating that, despite the fact that perfect pitch is quite rare in the West, children who were taught musical chords between the ages of two and six all developed perfect pitch. Deliberate practice increases the sizes of certain areas of the brain for violinists, pianists, mathematicians, cab drivers, swimmers, gymnasts, and glider pilots. In the case for pianists, the brain growth is only in accordance with practicing during childhood, not as an adult. Deliberate practice changes the neural circuity to produce specialized mental representations, to make possible incredible memory, pattern recognition, and problem solving.

If you want to become an expert in a field (or your have a child you want to push), then start young, very young for an athlete or a musician. For other fields, age doesn't seem to matter much. It's just a matter of following the methodology of deliberate practice. This book is filled with fascinating anecdotes about people who became experts. Blindfolded chess players, memorization experts, athletes; they achieved expertise by following the methodologies explained here. ...more

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Oct 13, 2023 CatReader rated it really liked it

Shelves: slc, mod, cnet, cc, no-audiobook

Inducing peak performance is a highly saturated topic in pop psychology. Ericsson's contribution to this topic is based on his academic work where among various projects he's studied human concentration and recall of very long series of numbers, understanding how some people are able to devise clever mental systems for remembering long sets of complex information. (These memory studies are in turn vignetted in many books on this topic.) Ericsson also heavily repeats vignettes that have been publ ...more

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