Catch Hold Of Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise Written By K. Anders Ericsson Readily Available As Leaflet
think again that you cannot do something because the talent for it "was not born to you", The myth of the naturally talented genius is simply outdated, With targeted practice and conscious learning, you can bring all skills to worldclass level from languages to musical instruments to chess or math Blinkist,.
This is basically "deliberate practice" book, This book challenges Malcolm Gladwell's,Hour Rule that you need to have practised and to have apprenticed for,hours before you get good.
Anders Ericsson argued that while practice is important, it's not the whole story, Besides the quantity of hours spent practising, there's also the quality of that practice, which allows us to learn more efficiently, The trick is what he coins as "Deliberate Practice":
, Create a feedback loop surround yourself with experts and get their feedback
, Focus very delierately on the subskills that make up an overall skill
, Be a teacher "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself, " Einstein
Overall, I think it's an interesting book that challenges me to think about how I can pick up skills more efficiently, rather than just jump into practice, practice, practice.
The research behind Tiger mom and outliers and all of those other pop theories on excellence, It's a very liberating and democratic thesisyou are not genetically restrained from being a master of anything, You
just need to do deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson reasons that expertise is best developed by deliberate practice and the existence of innate talent is an unconfirmed hypothesis,
Deliberate practice means doing knowledge by itself is not indicative of expertise,
This is a positive book as its message is that the power to become great in any area is in everyone's hands.
Here are the insights,
Gaining expertise is largely a matter of improving ones mental processes,
If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve,
Purposeful practice has welldefined, specific goals, “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row, ” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success,
Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do, Putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longerterm goal,
You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention,
Purposeful practice involves feedback, You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how youre going wrong,
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.
The relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practice to hone your skill.
Deliberate practice requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities, Thus it demands nearmaximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable,
Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance.
The traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge.
Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it,
How do we improve the relevant skills
Get some personal sessions with a coach who could give advice tailored to your performance.
An experienced teacher watching you and providing feedback, Someone who knows the best order in which to learn things,
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.
Shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster, It is better to train atpercent effort for less time than atpercent effort for a longer period,
Crosstraining switch off between different types of exercise so that you are constantly challenging yourself in different ways,
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,
Strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit,
Belief is important,
This is a wonderful book about the method of deliberate practice, While Malcolm Gladwell's sitelinkOutliers: The Story of Success popularized the concept that it takes,hours of practice to become an expert in any field, this book shows that,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,hours, not,, And they did get useful feedback but it wasn't deliberate practice, What made them famous was not their performance capabilities, but their songwriting 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 componentrole play, discussion groups, casesolving, and handson training, These approaches have been shown to improve doctors' performance,
The principles of deliberate practice are:
Find a good teacher
Engagement and focus
Practice outside of your comfort zone
Set things up so you constantly see signs of improvement
Share your activities with likeminded 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 geneticallydetermined 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, .