Book Review: Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise

Unlock the secrets to achieving unparalleled excellence with insights from "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Learn how to transform your abilities, whether in music, sports, or medicine, by engaging in deliberate, focused practice. In this episode you'll learn:

• How top performers harness the incredible adaptability of the human body and brain. 
• Explore the compelling studies of elite violinists and London taxi drivers, revealing how deliberate practice not only enhances skills but can also alter brain structures. 
• How the best use mental representations and the crucial role of expert feedback to make their practice most effective.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Peak
• 5:08 Deliberate Practice and Brain Plasticity
• 11:22 Mastering Skills Through Deliberate Practice

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined and in an environment where there's feedback. Malcolm Gladwell Man's time here is finite, but the influence of a man is infinite. The question is, what shall we do with the daylight that remains? Welcome back.

Speaker 1: 0:38

Today we're talking about the book Peak Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, written by Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole. The book is written as if it's done by one person, but they specifically say that was intentional and the entirety of the book is done by both of them. This book is essentially about how the best in any field, whether we're talking sports or science or academia or whatever um, how did those top performers get to where they are and what separates them from the rest of the crowd? Uh, you know it's. It's very natural for us to identify a young person who has some specific talent and say they're destined to be a you know, a violinist, a musician. They're an excellent basketball player. They're going to be a violinist, a musician, they're an excellent basketball player, they're going to go to the NBA. The thing is is, as you go through this book and they bring up study after study after study, there is a little bit of natural propensity, but those don't end up being the best ones all the time, and there's a lot of interesting data that shows, really, it doesn't matter where you start. It's how dedicated and intentional you are to practicing certain things and techniques that will make you better, and if you'll do that, you become one of the greats. Now, obviously, in some things like basketball, you can't learn how to be tall so you can become the best short guy in the game, but that never really overcomes certain aspects for certain positions and whatnot right. So the same might be true for other things, right. High jump also a tall person sport. Bull riding kind of a short person sport right. So there are a few natural genetic factors that can play into certain things. However, when you cancel out those types of like extreme height or whatever, when it comes to how high you can jump or how fast you can run, how well you play the violin, how good you are at math, how how you become a chess master, et cetera, there's not, there's not any real tie to natural talent. It's mostly, um, or almost completely, how you practice. So I'll give you a, you know, maybe a handful of highlights that I thought were interesting that give you a good idea of what's in this book and, um, some of my own thoughts on this. Let's jump right in.

Speaker 1: 3:27

It says I have found that no matter what field you study music or sports or chess or something else the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles. There's no obvious reason why this should be the case. Why should the teaching techniques used to turn aspiring musicians into concert pianists have anything to do with the training that a dancer must go through to become a prima ballerina or the study that a chess player must undertake to become a grand master? The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step-by-step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible. If you wish to develop a truly effective training method for anything creating world-class gymnasts, for instance, or even something like teaching doctors to perform laparoscopies, instance, or even something like teaching doctors to perform laparoscopies that method will need to take into account what works and what doesn't work in driving changes in the body and the brain. Thus, all truly effective practice techniques work in essentially the same way and, skipping down a couple of paragraphs he says there are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form, which I named deliberate practice back in the early 1990s, is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area. Deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.

Speaker 1: 5:08

So when they really dive into different levels of greatness in different categories, so they have a bunch of studies in here with like high level violinists at the best schools in the world, and then they categorize those different students into like the best, who are going to become, you know, the best in the world and already are some to to some degree the best in the world. Uh, then their peer group, who is also extremely good, but they categorize them as like very good. And then then there's the kind of bottom of the class that, compared to most normal humans, they're extremely good musicians but they're more destined to be like a music teacher or something, not not necessarily set out to hit the stage. And when they broke down, how much time these guys spent playing their violin in deliberate practice, spent playing their violin in deliberate practice, the best out-practiced the other groups by thousands of hours. And there's a lot of information in this book. Maybe I'll read some of them here in a minute about deliberate practice.

Speaker 1: 6:19

So it's not necessarily how many times you've done the thing. It's working at the edge of your capabilities, doing things that you would like to be able to do. But when you attempt to do it you know it's a lot of stress. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe you're messing things up. Keep practicing that until you get it right and as soon as you get it, move on, go to something else that's at the edge of your skillset. You have your brain focused on the task with intention for the entire time of the practice. So actually you can't practice for more than about an hour. That's kind of where human capability ends for the most part in any one session and then you need a break. Ends for the most part in any one session and then you need a break. But the people who practice that way throughout their life, day in and day out, for many years turn into the best that we see on TV and in concerts and in the schools and etc. So that's deliberate practice.

Speaker 1: 7:21

Now he goes on and on into many different categories of this, how you can get better, and one vital piece of this is that you got to have somebody who has achieved some very high level of success and can now give you feedback or coaching on what's the next step, what's the strategy or tactic to challenge your brain and body to do something new that was previously impossible. In fact, as I'm flipping through some of my highlights, he says you seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention. Purposeful practice involves feedback, he says. Although it's generally possible to improve a certain degree with focused practice and staying out of your comfort zone, that's not all there is to it. Trying hard isn't enough. Pushing yourself to your limits isn't enough. There are other equally important aspects to practice and training that are often overlooked.

Speaker 1: 8:24

So there's this really interesting Braille study about people who read braille a lot. He says the subjects were three fingered braille readers. That is, they use their index finger to read the patterns of the dots that make up individual letters, their middle fingers to pick up the spaces between the letters and their ring finger to keep track of the particular line they were reading. The wiring in their part of the brain that controls the hands is normally set up so that each individual finger has distinct parts of the brain dedicated to it. This is what makes it possible for us to tell, for example, which finger is being touched by a pencil tip or a thumbtack without looking at our fingers by a pencil tip or a thumbtack, without looking at our fingers. The subjects in the study were braille instructors who used their fingers to read braille several hours each day. What the researchers discovered was that the steady use of these three fingers had caused the areas of the brain devoted to each of those fingers to grow so much that those areas eventually overlapped. As a result, the subjects were exceptionally sensitive to touch on these fingers. They could detect a much gentler touch than sighted subjects, but they often couldn't tell which of the three fingers had been touched.

Speaker 1: 9:35

These studies of brain plasticity in blind subjects and similar studies in deaf subjects tell us the brain's structure and function are not fixed. They change in response to use. It is possible to shape. The brain's structure and function are not fixed. They change in response to use. It is possible to shape the brain, your brain, my brain, anybody's brain in the ways that we desire, through conscious, deliberate training. Isn't that fascinating? There's a lot of good science in the modern world showing how plastic the brain really is and that you can literally change the way your brain is right. I think we've talked about the taxi drivers in Europe who have a massive change in their brain from memorizing the city and the roads and the very complex setup that is in I think it's London, I can't remember, but when they go through the knowing and learn, that city changes their brain dramatically. Musicians have a larger, I think, hippocampus right. So there's ways that we change our brain. Your brain's very plastic, even throughout adulthood.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Jumping to a chapter that's called recognizing and responding to patterns, in pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well-developed mental representations. Remember that they're going to. He talks about mental representations throughout the book. In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only the trees. So your ability to continue to progress or grasp a concept well has a lot to do with the mental representations that you can put in your brain prior to attempting. So.

Speaker 1: 11:22

Really good musicians, because they've been around music a lot. They've heard a lot of music, they've played a lot of music, they've studied it. When they hear a new piece, they have a certain mental representation in their head, maybe one that I can't explain well because I'm not that talented at music. Right, I do play some instruments, but not a great level. So it's like their mental representations means different things. They may have perfect pitch and know every single musical theory, pattern and shapes of different sounds and whatnot, and so their mental representations can sort of contextualize a certain amount of what is about to be performed or what they're about to try and do. Same thing with sports or other things.

Speaker 1: 12:16

Skipping ahead again, he says one of our most significant findings was the most factors the students had identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labor-intensive. Identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labor intensive and not much fun. And on this page is a study I was referring to earlier. He says the hours of these different students groups. So the specifically the music education students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they were 18. The better violin students had practiced an average of 5,301 hours and the best violin students had practiced an average of 7,410 hours. So again, every single category has a direct correlation with the number of hours or time they put into practice.

Speaker 1: 13:07

He says that a couple things are clear from these studies. First, to become an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice. We found no shortcuts and no prodigies who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And number two even among these gifted musicians, all of whom had been admitted to the best musical academy in Germany, the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were, on average, more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing. In short, we are saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways. First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well-developed, that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who were just entering the field. Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designated to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers, there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others. At the end of this chapter he's got a list of all of these sort of ideas about what deliberate practice includes, and just this page alone would be worth the book page 99.

Speaker 1: 14:34

I found this part to be very interesting. If years of practice makes physicians better than the quality of care they give should increase as they amass more experience. But just the opposite was true. In almost every one of the five dozen studies included in the review, doctors' performance grew worse over time or at best stayed about the same. The older doctors knew less and did worse in terms of providing appropriate care than doctors with far fewer years of experience, and researchers concluded that it was likely the older doctors' patients fared worse because of it. Not surprisingly, the same thing is true for nurses as well.

Speaker 1: 15:13

So this section is talking about if you just repeat the same stuff over and over and you're not living on the edge of your expertise or forcing your brain to in you know, adapt and and internalize new methods, new ideas, information that you actually get worse at the thing you're already good at. I experienced this with playing the guitar. Actually, I was never exceptional, but I was fairly good when I was young. I spent a lot of time doing it Over the years as I've had new jobs, multiple kids, other, you know, priorities have have taken the place of playing the guitar. I essentially only play songs I already know, and I do it on a very rare occasion. And so I've just gotten worse and worse and worse at the guitar, and to the point where I you know my timing is not good. Learning a new song is difficult. Like I've just gotten worse at the thing that I'm already good at, and that's the same for anybody. Repetition of something you're good at doesn't necessarily make you better, especially if you've achieved some level of excellence. You actually get worse with only repeating those things.

Speaker 1: 16:26

So he says first find a good teacher. That's a critical step to achieving greatness. Next is engagement he's talking about. Your brain has got to be focused on the activity that you're trying to improve at. He says you do 10 kicks with your right leg, then 10 with your left. You do 10 blocks and punch combinations to the right, then 10 to the left. You get into a zone, your mind starts to wander and pretty soon all of the benefit of the practice dissipates. This goes back to basic principles we talked about in the first chapter the importance of engaging in purposeful practice instead of mindless repetition without any clear plan for getting better. Remember, if your mind is wandering or you're relaxed and just having fun, you probably won't improve. This is extremely important.

Speaker 1: 17:17

He brings up several people like Olympians. There was Olympian that uh, a female swimmer. She won like eight, eight medals over her career. She said it wasn't until college that she realized like I'm just sitting here letting my mind wander, getting strokes in right, and so staying hours in the pool every day of course keeps up her cardio and strengthens those muscles that she needs. But technique and extreme attention to your body and those kinds of things are important when it comes to split second races at the highest level. And so in college she started to focus on every stroke. So that takes a lot of willpower and motivation to be able to spend hours every day working on your craft and not let your mind just drift.

Speaker 1: 18:14

Getting past plateaus. What we learned from Steve's experience holds true for everyone who faces a plateau. The best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way. Bodybuilders, for instance, will change the types of exercises they're doing, increase or decrease the weight they're lifting or the number of repetitions, and switch up their weekly routine. Actually, most of them will vary their patterns proactively, so they don't get stuck on plateaus in the first place. So switch it up, keep changing it, he says. The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about one hour. You can't maintain intense concentration for much longer than that, and when you're first starting out it's likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.

Speaker 1: 19:03

Studies of expert performance tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends' compliments and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense. Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don't feel like it, you must believe that you can improve, and particularly for people shooting to become expert performers that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality. Anyway, I'll end on that.

Speaker 1: 20:01

One Several good nuggets for you there, a good view into what this book is, what it entails Lots of great studies from all over the world, from years and years of science, from different people, different labs, different arenas of expertise, and it just shows, in the end it doesn't really matter a whole lot what you're born with, where you started. You can overcome any deficits you think you have with deliberate practice. But you've got to be able to have a coach who can identify where you're weak, what's going right, what's going wrong, new methods that they can introduce to you to change up where you're at. Once you start to hit some level of excellence, your brain has clearly captured that. Your body has adapted. Change it up, keep going to the next phase, the next phase, the next phase. It's a step-by-step process, but if you put all these steps together, slowly and surely your brain and your body will continue to change and grasp these concepts and conquer new abilities and at some point you become better than almost all humans on earth in your category.

Speaker 1: 21:17

So this is a very valuable book. No matter where you're at, whether you're talking about business, your relationships, your sports, your music, your science, your academia, whatever, uh, anyone can become really, really good at anything. If they pick the right methods, they practice diligently, with intention and proper technique and coaching Over time, you can do essentially anything. So Peak Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole I'll put the link below, of course, so you can purchase yours from Amazon, and I appreciate you guys listening. If you want to support the show, give this a like, a share, a review. Those are zero cost ways for you to support the show and it goes a long way for us. So thank you for listening and we will catch you on the next one. You