Notes on Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.
Quantity is half the equation to improving a skill. The other half is quality.
The three levels of practice are: naive, purposeful, and deliberate.
Naive Practice is just blindly repeating a task over and over again, without much strategic thought.
Purposeful Practice includes:
- breaking down the skill into chunks
- creating well defined, specific goals for those chunks with baby steps to the bigger goal, especially to fix your weaknesses
- focusing intensely on improving a single chunk via practice (full attention and conscious action)
- developing an immediate/specific feedback system (eg. quantitative measurements)
- continually pushing yourself to more challenging levels
Deliberate Practice is purposeful and also includes:
- an already existing field where the best regimen for improving is well known
- an expert coach mentoring how to develop the skill and giving immediate/specific feedback
Consider these two scenarios. Both players want to become a better baseball player. They decide to focus on their swing and practice for the same amount of time.
- Baseball player takes 300x swings per hour. Uses a automated batting cage with 100+ balls. Never has to retrieve the ball. Records quantitative stats and a qualitative journal. Gets an expert coach to record video and give him specific feedback.
- Baseball player leisurely takes 30x swings per hour. A friend pitches for him and they only have one ball, which they must retrieve after every hit. Does not keep records. Does not have a coach.
Practicing physical activities will have an obvious change to a person's body. Someone constantly running will lose excess fat. Someone constantly lifting heavy weights will gain muscle.
Neuroscientists have concluded that the same happens with mental activities. The brain adapts to get better at our practiced skill, just like our muscles do.
Homeostasis is when a system tends to maintain its current state for stability. We must push ourselves consistently in order to change ourselves, ideally with deliberate practice.
Skill is based on the quantity/quality of mental representations you have. A mental representation is just a structure that represents an object/idea/information.
The naive approach for chess players to get better would be to just play more games. But studies have shown that chess players get better by spending more time analyzing positions. They make it better to process large amounts of information more quickly.
For example, using purposeful practice to learn long strings of numbers, a student got frustrated when he couldn't remember more. It forced him to come up with the mental representation of a tree structure with each number stored on a leaf (he used a heap data structure). Purposeful practice sparked his creative insight.
Experts have adapted their brains to create better mental representations, which give them better memory or problem solving abilities.
The gold standard is deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is often seen as difficult, labor-intensive, and not fun.
Deliberate practice differs from purposeful practice. It requires a field that's already established, with performers that have already attained mastery. Other people have already figured out the best practice regimen and utilized it. It requires a teacher who can coach a student, using the current best standards.
In the example from the previous section, the student coached another student his heap method for memorizing large strings of numbers. The second student was able to acquire the skill and excel at a much quicker pace. He eventually ended up developing his own mental representation, but had a large head start.
The definition of Deliberate Practice:
- existing/established field, where best performers are obvious
- a teacher who can guide the student to improve
- well defined, specific steps that approach your goal
- near maximal effort, labor-intensive and not fun, practice should take you out of comfort zone
- consistent focused attention, you should not find yourself drifting away during practice
- constant and immediate feedback, especially addressing weaknesses
Participants must abandon previous processes that are harmful. They need a growth mindset.
- they must believe they are not genetically limited
- they must believe quality matters as much as quantity in terms of practice (quantity alone will not get you there)
- they must believe effort is not enough
- you may outgrow your teacher, don't be afraid to change teachers
- intense focus is critical, shorter/clear sessions are better than longer/distracting ones
- if you're not fully focused (mind is wandering or you're relaxed), you're not improving
- if you hit a plateau, determine a new way to challenge yourself (either at a new level or via a different component)
If you can't find a coach, remember the three Fs: Focus, Feedback, and Fix it. Focus on a specific aspect of the skill, get feedback on what you're doing wrong, and fix it.
The common timeline to an extraordinary individual:
- Introduced to skill as a hobby or as play during childhood. It becomes interesting and naive practice is used.
- Parents encourage child to pursue it. Usually teaching values of hard work and discipline. At this stage, purposeful practice may be introduced by the parent (but usually not).
- Child starts to take lessons from a coach.
- Coach develops child's mental representations and introduced deliberate practice.
- Students improve and may seek out new teachers as they get to the next level.
- A commitment is made to the skill and motivation becomes intrinsic.
- Expert performance is reached.
- Optionally, this performer may contribute to their field with some unique knowledge.
There are a small amount of skills that have a genetic attribute: mostly height. For the vast majority of everything else, large quantities of deliberate practice is what develops talent.
People stop improving when they stop practicing. People reach their peak by continuous, focused, purposeful, deliberate practice.