February 3, 2025 • 22 mins
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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Success has to do with deliberate practice.
Practice must be focused,determined and in an environment
where there's feedback.
Malcolm Gladwell Man's timehere is finite, but the
(00:20):
influence of a man is infinite.
The question is, what shall wedo with the daylight that
remains?
Welcome back.
Today we're talking about thebook Peak Secrets from the New
(00:42):
Science of Expertise, written byAnders Ericsson and Robert
Poole.
The book is written as if it'sdone by one person, but they
specifically say that wasintentional and the entirety of
the book is done by both of them.
This book is essentially abouthow the best in any field,
(01:02):
whether we're talking sports orscience or academia or whatever
um, how did those top performersget to where they are and what
separates them from the rest ofthe crowd?
Uh, you know it's.
It's very natural for us toidentify a young person who has
some specific talent and saythey're destined to be a you
(01:22):
know, a violinist, a musician.
They're an excellent basketballplayer.
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 gothrough this book and they bring
up study after study afterstudy, there is a little bit of
natural propensity, but thosedon't end up being the best ones
(01:44):
all the time, and there's a lotof interesting data that shows,
really, it doesn't matter whereyou start.
It's how dedicated andintentional you are to
practicing certain things andtechniques that will make you
better, and if you'll do that,you become one of the greats.
(02:06):
Now, obviously, in some thingslike basketball, you can't learn
how to be tall so you canbecome the best short guy in the
game, but that never reallyovercomes certain aspects for
certain positions and whatnotright.
So the same might be true forother things, right.
High jump also a tall personsport.
(02:29):
Bull riding kind of a shortperson sport right.
So there are a few naturalgenetic factors that can play
into certain things.
However, when you cancel outthose types of like extreme
(02:49):
height or whatever, when itcomes to how high you can jump
or how fast you can run, howwell you play the violin, how
good you are at math, how howyou become a chess master, et
cetera, there's not, there's notany real tie to natural talent.
It's mostly, um, or almostcompletely, how you practice.
(03:13):
So I'll give you a, you know,maybe a handful of highlights
that I thought were interestingthat 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.
It says I have found that nomatter what field you study
music or sports or chess orsomething else the most
(03:33):
effective types of practice allfollow the same set of general
principles.
There's no obvious reason whythis should be the case.
Why should the teachingtechniques used to turn aspiring
musicians into concert pianistshave anything to do with the
training that a dancer must gothrough to become a prima
ballerina or the study that achess player must undertake to
(03:55):
become a grand master?
The answer is that the mosteffective and most powerful
types of practice in any fieldwork by harnessing the
adaptability of the human bodyand brain to create,
step-by-step, the ability to dothings that were previously not
possible.
If you wish to develop a trulyeffective training method for
(04:16):
anything creating world-classgymnasts, for instance, or even
something like teaching doctorsto perform laparoscopies,
instance, or even something liketeaching doctors to perform
laparoscopies that method willneed to take into account what
works and what doesn't work indriving changes in the body and
the brain.
Thus, all truly effectivepractice techniques work in
(04:37):
essentially the same way and,skipping down a couple of
paragraphs he says there arevarious sorts of practice that
can be effective to one degreeor another, but one particular
form, which I named deliberatepractice back in the early 1990s
, is the gold standard.
It is the most effective andpowerful form of practice that
we know of, and applying theprinciples of deliberate
(04:59):
practice is the best way todesign practice methods in any
area.
Deliberate practice is the bestway to design practice methods
in any area.
So when they really dive intodifferent levels of greatness in
different categories, so theyhave a bunch of studies in here
with like high level violinistsat the best schools in the world
(05:19):
, and then they categorize thosedifferent students into like
the best, who are going tobecome, you know, the best in
the world and already are someto to some degree the best in
the world.
Uh, then their peer group, whois also extremely good, but they
categorize them as like verygood.
(05:40):
And then then there's the kindof bottom of the class that,
compared to most normal humans,they're extremely good musicians
but they're more destined to belike a music teacher or
something, not not necessarilyset out to hit the stage.
And when they broke down, howmuch time these guys spent
playing their violin indeliberate practice, spent
(06:09):
playing their violin indeliberate practice, the best
out-practiced the other groupsby thousands of hours.
And there's a lot ofinformation in this book.
Maybe I'll read some of themhere in a minute about
deliberate practice.
So it's not necessarily how manytimes you've done the thing.
It's working at the edge ofyour capabilities, doing things
that you would like to be ableto do.
(06:31):
But when you attempt to do ityou know it's a lot of stress.
Maybe it's not perfect, maybeyou're messing things up.
Keep practicing that until youget it right and as soon as you
get it, move on, go to somethingelse that's at the edge of your
skillset.
You have your brain focused onthe task with intention for the
(06:52):
entire time of the practice.
So actually you can't practicefor more than about an hour.
That's kind of where humancapability ends for the most
part in any one session and thenyou need a break.
Ends for the most part in anyone session and then you need a
break.
But the people who practicethat way throughout their life,
(07:13):
day in and day out, for manyyears turn into the best that we
see on TV and in concerts andin the schools and etc.
So that's deliberate practice.
Now he goes on and on into manydifferent categories of this,
how you can get better, and onevital piece of this is that you
got to have somebody who hasachieved some very high level of
(07:36):
success and can now give youfeedback or coaching on what's
the next step, what's thestrategy or tactic to challenge
your brain and body to dosomething new that was
previously impossible.
In fact, as I'm flippingthrough some of my highlights,
he says you seldom improve muchwithout giving the task your
(07:59):
full attention.
Purposeful practice involvesfeedback, he says.
Although it's generallypossible to improve a certain
degree with focused practice andstaying out of your comfort
zone, that's not all there is toit.
Trying hard isn't enough.
Pushing yourself to your limitsisn't enough.
There are other equallyimportant aspects to practice
(08:22):
and training that are oftenoverlooked.
So there's this reallyinteresting Braille study about
people who read braille a lot.
He says the subjects were threefingered braille readers.
That is, they use their indexfinger to read the patterns of
the dots that make up individualletters, their middle fingers
to pick up the spaces betweenthe letters and their ring
finger to keep track of theparticular line they were
(08:44):
reading.
The wiring in their part of thebrain that controls the hands
is normally set up so that eachindividual finger has distinct
parts of the brain dedicated toit.
This is what makes it possiblefor us to tell, for example,
which finger is being touched bya pencil tip or a thumbtack
without looking at our fingersby a pencil tip or a thumbtack,
(09:05):
without looking at our fingers.
The subjects in the study werebraille instructors who used
their fingers to read brailleseveral hours each day.
What the researchers discoveredwas that the steady use of
these three fingers had causedthe areas of the brain devoted
to each of those fingers to growso much that those areas
eventually overlapped.
As a result, the subjects wereexceptionally sensitive to touch
on these fingers.
(09:25):
They could detect a muchgentler touch than sighted
subjects, but they oftencouldn't tell which of the three
fingers had been touched.
These studies of brainplasticity in blind subjects and
similar studies in deafsubjects tell us the brain's
structure and function are notfixed.
They change in response to use.
It is possible to shape.
The brain's structure andfunction are not fixed.
They change in response to use.
(09:46):
It is possible to shape thebrain, your brain, my brain,
anybody's brain in the ways thatwe desire, through conscious,
deliberate training.
Isn't that fascinating?
There's a lot of good sciencein the modern world showing how
plastic the brain really is andthat you can literally change
the way your brain is right.
I think we've talked about thetaxi drivers in Europe who have
(10:11):
a massive change in their brainfrom memorizing the city and the
roads and the very complexsetup that is in I think it's
London, I can't remember, butwhen they go through the knowing
and learn, that city changestheir brain dramatically.
Musicians have a larger, Ithink, hippocampus right.
(10:32):
So there's ways that we changeour brain.
Your brain's very plastic, eventhroughout adulthood.
Jumping to a chapter that'scalled recognizing and
responding to patterns, inpretty much every area, a
hallmark of expert performanceis the ability to see patterns
in a collection of things thatwould seem random or confusing
to people with lesswell-developed mental
(10:55):
representations.
Remember that they're going to.
He talks about mentalrepresentations throughout the
book.
In other words, experts see theforest when everyone else sees
only the trees.
So your ability to continue toprogress or grasp a concept well
has a lot to do with the mentalrepresentations that you can
(11:17):
put in your brain prior toattempting.
So.
Really good musicians, becausethey'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
(11:38):
well because I'm not thattalented at music.
Right, I do play someinstruments, but not a great
level.
So it's like their mentalrepresentations means different
things.
They may have perfect pitch andknow every single musical
theory, pattern and shapes ofdifferent sounds and whatnot,
(11:59):
and so their mentalrepresentations can sort of
contextualize a certain amountof what is about to be performed
or what they're about to tryand do.
Same thing with sports or otherthings.
Skipping ahead again, he saysone of our most significant
findings was the most factorsthe students had identified as
(12:22):
being important to improvementwere also seen as
labor-intensive.
Identified as being importantto improvement were also seen as
labor intensive and not muchfun.
And on this page is a study Iwas referring to earlier.
He says the hours of thesedifferent students groups.
So the specifically the musiceducation students had practiced
an average of 3,420 hours onthe violin by the time they were
(12:45):
18.
The better violin students hadpracticed an average of 5,301
hours and the best violinstudents had practiced an
average of 7,410 hours.
So again, every single categoryhas a direct correlation with
the number of hours or time theyput into practice.
(13:07):
He says that a couple things areclear from these studies.
First, to become an excellentviolinist requires several
thousand hours of practice.
We found no shortcuts and noprodigies who reached an expert
level with relatively littlepractice.
And number two even among thesegifted musicians, all of whom
(13:29):
had been admitted to the bestmusical academy in Germany, the
violinists who had spentsignificantly more hours
practicing their craft were, onaverage, more accomplished than
those who had spent less timepracticing.
In short, we are saying thatdeliberate practice is different
from other sorts of purposefulpractice in two important ways.
First, it requires a field thatis already reasonably
(13:51):
well-developed, that is, a fieldin which the best performers
have attained a level ofperformance that clearly sets
them apart from people who werejust entering the field.
Second, deliberate practicerequires a teacher who can
provide practice activitiesdesignated to help a student
improve his or her performance.
Of course, before there can besuch teachers, there must be
(14:11):
individuals who have achieved acertain level of performance
with practice methods that canbe passed on to others.
At the end of this chapter he'sgot a list of all of these sort
of ideas about what deliberatepractice includes, and just this
page alone would be worth thebook page 99.
(14:34):
I found this part to be veryinteresting.
If years of practice makesphysicians better than the
quality of care they give shouldincrease as they amass more
experience.
But just the opposite was true.
In almost every one of the fivedozen studies included in the
review, doctors' performancegrew worse over time or at best
(14:54):
stayed about the same.
The older doctors knew less anddid worse in terms of providing
appropriate care than doctorswith far fewer years of
experience, and researchersconcluded that it was likely the
older doctors' patients faredworse because of it.
Not surprisingly, the samething is true for nurses as well
.
So this section is talking aboutif you just repeat the same
(15:15):
stuff over and over and you'renot living on the edge of your
expertise or forcing your brainto in you know, adapt and and
internalize new methods, newideas, information that you
actually get worse at the thingyou're already good at.
I experienced this with playingthe guitar.
Actually, I was neverexceptional, but I was fairly
(15:39):
good when I was young.
I spent a lot of time doing itOver the years as I've had new
jobs, multiple kids, other, youknow, priorities have have taken
the place of playing the guitar.
I essentially only play songs Ialready know, and I do it on a
very rare occasion.
And so I've just gotten worseand worse and worse at the
(16:00):
guitar, and to the point where Iyou know my timing is not good.
Learning a new song isdifficult.
Like I've just gotten worse atthe thing that I'm already good
at, and that's the same foranybody.
Repetition of something you'regood at doesn't necessarily make
you better, especially ifyou've achieved some level of
(16:20):
excellence.
You actually get worse withonly repeating those things.
So he says first find a goodteacher.
That's a critical step toachieving greatness.
Next is engagement he's talkingabout.
Your brain has got to befocused on the activity that
you're trying to improve at.
(16:40):
He says you do 10 kicks withyour right leg, then 10 with
your left.
You do 10 blocks and punchcombinations to the right, then
10 to the left.
You get into a zone, your mindstarts to wander and pretty soon
all of the benefit of thepractice dissipates.
This goes back to basicprinciples we talked about in
the first chapter the importanceof engaging in purposeful
(17:03):
practice instead of mindlessrepetition without any clear
plan for getting better.
Remember, if your mind iswandering or you're relaxed and
just having fun, you probablywon't improve.
This is extremely important.
He brings up several people likeOlympians.
There was Olympian that uh, afemale swimmer.
(17:24):
She won like eight, eightmedals over her career.
She said it wasn't untilcollege that she realized like
I'm just sitting here letting mymind wander, getting strokes in
right, and so staying hours inthe pool every day of course
keeps up her cardio andstrengthens those muscles that
she needs.
But technique and extremeattention to your body and those
(17:51):
kinds of things are importantwhen it comes to split second
races at the highest level.
And so in college she startedto focus on every stroke.
So that takes a lot ofwillpower and motivation to be
able to spend hours every dayworking on your craft and not
(18:11):
let your mind just drift.
Getting past plateaus.
What we learned from Steve'sexperience holds true for
everyone who faces a plateau.
The best way to move beyond itis 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
(18:33):
they're lifting or the number ofrepetitions, and switch up
their weekly routine.
Actually, most of them willvary their patterns proactively,
so they don't get stuck onplateaus in the first place.
So switch it up, keep changingit, he says.
The second thing is to limitthe length of your practice
sessions to about one hour.
You can't maintain intenseconcentration for much longer
(18:54):
than that, and when you're firststarting out it's likely to be
less.
If you want to practice longerthan an hour, go for an hour and
take a break.
Studies of expert performancetell us that once you have
practiced for a while and cansee the results, the skill
itself can become part of yourmotivation.
You take pride in what you do,you get pleasure from your
friends' compliments and yoursense of identity changes.
(19:17):
You begin to see yourself as apublic speaker or a piccolo
player or a maker of origamifigures.
As long as you recognize thisnew identity as flowing from
many hours of practice that youdevoted to developing your skill
, further practice comes to feelmore like an investment than an
expense.
Another key motivational factorin deliberate practice is
(19:41):
belief that you can succeed.
In order to push yourself whenyou really don't feel like it,
you must believe that you canimprove, and particularly for
people shooting to become expertperformers that you can rank
among the best.
The power of such belief is sostrong that it can even trump
reality.
Anyway, I'll end on that.
(20:01):
One Several good nuggets for youthere, a good view into what
this book is, what it entailsLots of great studies from all
over the world, from years andyears of science, from different
people, different labs,different arenas of expertise,
and it just shows, in the end itdoesn't really matter a whole
(20:25):
lot what you're born with, whereyou started.
You can overcome any deficitsyou think you have with
deliberate practice.
But you've got to be able tohave a coach who can identify
where you're weak, what's goingright, what's going wrong, new
methods that they can introduceto you to change up where you're
(20:46):
at.
Once you start to hit somelevel of excellence, your brain
has clearly captured that.
Your body has adapted.
Change it up, keep going to thenext 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 yourbrain and your body will
continue to change and graspthese concepts and conquer new
(21:09):
abilities and at some point youbecome better than almost all
humans on earth in your category.
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,
(21:32):
really good at anything.
If they pick the right methods,they practice diligently, with
intention and proper techniqueand coaching Over time, you can
do essentially anything.
So Peak Secrets from the NewScience of Expertise by Anders
Ericsson and Robert Poole I'llput the link below, of course,
(21:53):
so you can purchase yours fromAmazon, 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 foryou to support the show and it
goes a long way for us.
So thank you for listening andwe will catch you on the next
one.
You
Success has to do with deliberate practice.
Practice must be focused,determined and in an environment
where there's feedback.
Malcolm Gladwell Man's timehere is finite, but the
(00:20):
influence of a man is infinite.
The question is, what shall wedo with the daylight that
remains?
Welcome back.
Today we're talking about thebook Peak Secrets from the New
(00:42):
Science of Expertise, written byAnders Ericsson and Robert
Poole.
The book is written as if it'sdone by one person, but they
specifically say that wasintentional and the entirety of
the book is done by both of them.
This book is essentially abouthow the best in any field,
(01:02):
whether we're talking sports orscience or academia or whatever
um, how did those top performersget to where they are and what
separates them from the rest ofthe crowd?
Uh, you know it's.
It's very natural for us toidentify a young person who has
some specific talent and saythey're destined to be a you
(01:22):
know, a violinist, a musician.
They're an excellent basketballplayer.
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 gothrough this book and they bring
up study after study afterstudy, there is a little bit of
natural propensity, but thosedon't end up being the best ones
(01:44):
all the time, and there's a lotof interesting data that shows,
really, it doesn't matter whereyou start.
It's how dedicated andintentional you are to
practicing certain things andtechniques that will make you
better, and if you'll do that,you become one of the greats.
(02:06):
Now, obviously, in some thingslike basketball, you can't learn
how to be tall so you canbecome the best short guy in the
game, but that never reallyovercomes certain aspects for
certain positions and whatnotright.
So the same might be true forother things, right.
High jump also a tall personsport.
(02:29):
Bull riding kind of a shortperson sport right.
So there are a few naturalgenetic factors that can play
into certain things.
However, when you cancel outthose types of like extreme
(02:49):
height or whatever, when itcomes to how high you can jump
or how fast you can run, howwell you play the violin, how
good you are at math, how howyou become a chess master, et
cetera, there's not, there's notany real tie to natural talent.
It's mostly, um, or almostcompletely, how you practice.
(03:13):
So I'll give you a, you know,maybe a handful of highlights
that I thought were interestingthat 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.
It says I have found that nomatter what field you study
music or sports or chess orsomething else the most
(03:33):
effective types of practice allfollow the same set of general
principles.
There's no obvious reason whythis should be the case.
Why should the teachingtechniques used to turn aspiring
musicians into concert pianistshave anything to do with the
training that a dancer must gothrough to become a prima
ballerina or the study that achess player must undertake to
(03:55):
become a grand master?
The answer is that the mosteffective and most powerful
types of practice in any fieldwork by harnessing the
adaptability of the human bodyand brain to create,
step-by-step, the ability to dothings that were previously not
possible.
If you wish to develop a trulyeffective training method for
(04:16):
anything creating world-classgymnasts, for instance, or even
something like teaching doctorsto perform laparoscopies,
instance, or even something liketeaching doctors to perform
laparoscopies that method willneed to take into account what
works and what doesn't work indriving changes in the body and
the brain.
Thus, all truly effectivepractice techniques work in
(04:37):
essentially the same way and,skipping down a couple of
paragraphs he says there arevarious sorts of practice that
can be effective to one degreeor another, but one particular
form, which I named deliberatepractice back in the early 1990s
, is the gold standard.
It is the most effective andpowerful form of practice that
we know of, and applying theprinciples of deliberate
(04:59):
practice is the best way todesign practice methods in any
area.
Deliberate practice is the bestway to design practice methods
in any area.
So when they really dive intodifferent levels of greatness in
different categories, so theyhave a bunch of studies in here
with like high level violinistsat the best schools in the world
(05:19):
, and then they categorize thosedifferent students into like
the best, who are going tobecome, you know, the best in
the world and already are someto to some degree the best in
the world.
Uh, then their peer group, whois also extremely good, but they
categorize them as like verygood.
(05:40):
And then then there's the kindof bottom of the class that,
compared to most normal humans,they're extremely good musicians
but they're more destined to belike a music teacher or
something, not not necessarilyset out to hit the stage.
And when they broke down, howmuch time these guys spent
playing their violin indeliberate practice, spent
(06:09):
playing their violin indeliberate practice, the best
out-practiced the other groupsby thousands of hours.
And there's a lot ofinformation in this book.
Maybe I'll read some of themhere in a minute about
deliberate practice.
So it's not necessarily how manytimes you've done the thing.
It's working at the edge ofyour capabilities, doing things
that you would like to be ableto do.
(06:31):
But when you attempt to do ityou know it's a lot of stress.
Maybe it's not perfect, maybeyou're messing things up.
Keep practicing that until youget it right and as soon as you
get it, move on, go to somethingelse that's at the edge of your
skillset.
You have your brain focused onthe task with intention for the
(06:52):
entire time of the practice.
So actually you can't practicefor more than about an hour.
That's kind of where humancapability ends for the most
part in any one session and thenyou need a break.
Ends for the most part in anyone session and then you need a
break.
But the people who practicethat way throughout their life,
(07:13):
day in and day out, for manyyears turn into the best that we
see on TV and in concerts andin the schools and etc.
So that's deliberate practice.
Now he goes on and on into manydifferent categories of this,
how you can get better, and onevital piece of this is that you
got to have somebody who hasachieved some very high level of
(07:36):
success and can now give youfeedback or coaching on what's
the next step, what's thestrategy or tactic to challenge
your brain and body to dosomething new that was
previously impossible.
In fact, as I'm flippingthrough some of my highlights,
he says you seldom improve muchwithout giving the task your
(07:59):
full attention.
Purposeful practice involvesfeedback, he says.
Although it's generallypossible to improve a certain
degree with focused practice andstaying out of your comfort
zone, that's not all there is toit.
Trying hard isn't enough.
Pushing yourself to your limitsisn't enough.
There are other equallyimportant aspects to practice
(08:22):
and training that are oftenoverlooked.
So there's this reallyinteresting Braille study about
people who read braille a lot.
He says the subjects were threefingered braille readers.
That is, they use their indexfinger to read the patterns of
the dots that make up individualletters, their middle fingers
to pick up the spaces betweenthe letters and their ring
finger to keep track of theparticular line they were
(08:44):
reading.
The wiring in their part of thebrain that controls the hands
is normally set up so that eachindividual finger has distinct
parts of the brain dedicated toit.
This is what makes it possiblefor us to tell, for example,
which finger is being touched bya pencil tip or a thumbtack
without looking at our fingersby a pencil tip or a thumbtack,
(09:05):
without looking at our fingers.
The subjects in the study werebraille instructors who used
their fingers to read brailleseveral hours each day.
What the researchers discoveredwas that the steady use of
these three fingers had causedthe areas of the brain devoted
to each of those fingers to growso much that those areas
eventually overlapped.
As a result, the subjects wereexceptionally sensitive to touch
on these fingers.
(09:25):
They could detect a muchgentler touch than sighted
subjects, but they oftencouldn't tell which of the three
fingers had been touched.
These studies of brainplasticity in blind subjects and
similar studies in deafsubjects tell us the brain's
structure and function are notfixed.
They change in response to use.
It is possible to shape.
The brain's structure andfunction are not fixed.
They change in response to use.
(09:46):
It is possible to shape thebrain, your brain, my brain,
anybody's brain in the ways thatwe desire, through conscious,
deliberate training.
Isn't that fascinating?
There's a lot of good sciencein the modern world showing how
plastic the brain really is andthat you can literally change
the way your brain is right.
I think we've talked about thetaxi drivers in Europe who have
(10:11):
a massive change in their brainfrom memorizing the city and the
roads and the very complexsetup that is in I think it's
London, I can't remember, butwhen they go through the knowing
and learn, that city changestheir brain dramatically.
Musicians have a larger, Ithink, hippocampus right.
(10:32):
So there's ways that we changeour brain.
Your brain's very plastic, eventhroughout adulthood.
Jumping to a chapter that'scalled recognizing and
responding to patterns, inpretty much every area, a
hallmark of expert performanceis the ability to see patterns
in a collection of things thatwould seem random or confusing
to people with lesswell-developed mental
(10:55):
representations.
Remember that they're going to.
He talks about mentalrepresentations throughout the
book.
In other words, experts see theforest when everyone else sees
only the trees.
So your ability to continue toprogress or grasp a concept well
has a lot to do with the mentalrepresentations that you can
(11:17):
put in your brain prior toattempting.
So.
Really good musicians, becausethey'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
(11:38):
well because I'm not thattalented at music.
Right, I do play someinstruments, but not a great
level.
So it's like their mentalrepresentations means different
things.
They may have perfect pitch andknow every single musical
theory, pattern and shapes ofdifferent sounds and whatnot,
(11:59):
and so their mentalrepresentations can sort of
contextualize a certain amountof what is about to be performed
or what they're about to tryand do.
Same thing with sports or otherthings.
Skipping ahead again, he saysone of our most significant
findings was the most factorsthe students had identified as
(12:22):
being important to improvementwere also seen as
labor-intensive.
Identified as being importantto improvement were also seen as
labor intensive and not muchfun.
And on this page is a study Iwas referring to earlier.
He says the hours of thesedifferent students groups.
So the specifically the musiceducation students had practiced
an average of 3,420 hours onthe violin by the time they were
(12:45):
18.
The better violin students hadpracticed an average of 5,301
hours and the best violinstudents had practiced an
average of 7,410 hours.
So again, every single categoryhas a direct correlation with
the number of hours or time theyput into practice.
(13:07):
He says that a couple things areclear from these studies.
First, to become an excellentviolinist requires several
thousand hours of practice.
We found no shortcuts and noprodigies who reached an expert
level with relatively littlepractice.
And number two even among thesegifted musicians, all of whom
(13:29):
had been admitted to the bestmusical academy in Germany, the
violinists who had spentsignificantly more hours
practicing their craft were, onaverage, more accomplished than
those who had spent less timepracticing.
In short, we are saying thatdeliberate practice is different
from other sorts of purposefulpractice in two important ways.
First, it requires a field thatis already reasonably
(13:51):
well-developed, that is, a fieldin which the best performers
have attained a level ofperformance that clearly sets
them apart from people who werejust entering the field.
Second, deliberate practicerequires a teacher who can
provide practice activitiesdesignated to help a student
improve his or her performance.
Of course, before there can besuch teachers, there must be
(14:11):
individuals who have achieved acertain level of performance
with practice methods that canbe passed on to others.
At the end of this chapter he'sgot a list of all of these sort
of ideas about what deliberatepractice includes, and just this
page alone would be worth thebook page 99.
(14:34):
I found this part to be veryinteresting.
If years of practice makesphysicians better than the
quality of care they give shouldincrease as they amass more
experience.
But just the opposite was true.
In almost every one of the fivedozen studies included in the
review, doctors' performancegrew worse over time or at best
(14:54):
stayed about the same.
The older doctors knew less anddid worse in terms of providing
appropriate care than doctorswith far fewer years of
experience, and researchersconcluded that it was likely the
older doctors' patients faredworse because of it.
Not surprisingly, the samething is true for nurses as well
.
So this section is talking aboutif you just repeat the same
(15:15):
stuff over and over and you'renot living on the edge of your
expertise or forcing your brainto in you know, adapt and and
internalize new methods, newideas, information that you
actually get worse at the thingyou're already good at.
I experienced this with playingthe guitar.
Actually, I was neverexceptional, but I was fairly
(15:39):
good when I was young.
I spent a lot of time doing itOver the years as I've had new
jobs, multiple kids, other, youknow, priorities have have taken
the place of playing the guitar.
I essentially only play songs Ialready know, and I do it on a
very rare occasion.
And so I've just gotten worseand worse and worse at the
(16:00):
guitar, and to the point where Iyou know my timing is not good.
Learning a new song isdifficult.
Like I've just gotten worse atthe thing that I'm already good
at, and that's the same foranybody.
Repetition of something you'regood at doesn't necessarily make
you better, especially ifyou've achieved some level of
(16:20):
excellence.
You actually get worse withonly repeating those things.
So he says first find a goodteacher.
That's a critical step toachieving greatness.
Next is engagement he's talkingabout.
Your brain has got to befocused on the activity that
you're trying to improve at.
(16:40):
He says you do 10 kicks withyour right leg, then 10 with
your left.
You do 10 blocks and punchcombinations to the right, then
10 to the left.
You get into a zone, your mindstarts to wander and pretty soon
all of the benefit of thepractice dissipates.
This goes back to basicprinciples we talked about in
the first chapter the importanceof engaging in purposeful
(17:03):
practice instead of mindlessrepetition without any clear
plan for getting better.
Remember, if your mind iswandering or you're relaxed and
just having fun, you probablywon't improve.
This is extremely important.
He brings up several people likeOlympians.
There was Olympian that uh, afemale swimmer.
(17:24):
She won like eight, eightmedals over her career.
She said it wasn't untilcollege that she realized like
I'm just sitting here letting mymind wander, getting strokes in
right, and so staying hours inthe pool every day of course
keeps up her cardio andstrengthens those muscles that
she needs.
But technique and extremeattention to your body and those
(17:51):
kinds of things are importantwhen it comes to split second
races at the highest level.
And so in college she startedto focus on every stroke.
So that takes a lot ofwillpower and motivation to be
able to spend hours every dayworking on your craft and not
(18:11):
let your mind just drift.
Getting past plateaus.
What we learned from Steve'sexperience holds true for
everyone who faces a plateau.
The best way to move beyond itis 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
(18:33):
they're lifting or the number ofrepetitions, and switch up
their weekly routine.
Actually, most of them willvary their patterns proactively,
so they don't get stuck onplateaus in the first place.
So switch it up, keep changingit, he says.
The second thing is to limitthe length of your practice
sessions to about one hour.
You can't maintain intenseconcentration for much longer
(18:54):
than that, and when you're firststarting out it's likely to be
less.
If you want to practice longerthan an hour, go for an hour and
take a break.
Studies of expert performancetell us that once you have
practiced for a while and cansee the results, the skill
itself can become part of yourmotivation.
You take pride in what you do,you get pleasure from your
friends' compliments and yoursense of identity changes.
(19:17):
You begin to see yourself as apublic speaker or a piccolo
player or a maker of origamifigures.
As long as you recognize thisnew identity as flowing from
many hours of practice that youdevoted to developing your skill
, further practice comes to feelmore like an investment than an
expense.
Another key motivational factorin deliberate practice is
(19:41):
belief that you can succeed.
In order to push yourself whenyou really don't feel like it,
you must believe that you canimprove, and particularly for
people shooting to become expertperformers that you can rank
among the best.
The power of such belief is sostrong that it can even trump
reality.
Anyway, I'll end on that.
(20:01):
One Several good nuggets for youthere, a good view into what
this book is, what it entailsLots of great studies from all
over the world, from years andyears of science, from different
people, different labs,different arenas of expertise,
and it just shows, in the end itdoesn't really matter a whole
(20:25):
lot what you're born with, whereyou started.
You can overcome any deficitsyou think you have with
deliberate practice.
But you've got to be able tohave a coach who can identify
where you're weak, what's goingright, what's going wrong, new
methods that they can introduceto you to change up where you're
(20:46):
at.
Once you start to hit somelevel of excellence, your brain
has clearly captured that.
Your body has adapted.
Change it up, keep going to thenext 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 yourbrain and your body will
continue to change and graspthese concepts and conquer new
(21:09):
abilities and at some point youbecome better than almost all
humans on earth in your category.
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,
(21:32):
really good at anything.
If they pick the right methods,they practice diligently, with
intention and proper techniqueand coaching Over time, you can
do essentially anything.
So Peak Secrets from the NewScience of Expertise by Anders
Ericsson and Robert Poole I'llput the link below, of course,
(21:53):
so you can purchase yours fromAmazon, 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 foryou to support the show and it
goes a long way for us.
So thank you for listening andwe will catch you on the next
one.
You
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