By Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool December 21, 2018 ⋅ 13 min read ⋅ Books
Introduction: The Gift
Perfect pitch isn’t the gift but rather the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift.
The main gift that people have is the adaptability of the human brain and body.
Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but a way of developing it. We create our own potential.
The golden standard of practice is deliberate practice.
One of the key differences among different types of practice is the extent to which they harness the adaptability of the human brain and body.
Three defining features of expertise
It must lead to performance that’s consistently superior to that of others.
It must produce concrete results.
It must be replicable and measurable.
Chapter 1: The Power of Purposeful Practice
Usual Practice
You’ve mastered the easy stuff.
There are weaknesses that don’t disappear.
We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher/coach/book/website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.
There’s nothing wrong to be mediocre performer.
Once you’ve reached this satisfactory skill level and have automated your performance, you stop improving.
People often misunderstand this because they assume that continued experience and practice means they’re better.
Once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.
Purposeful Practice
Isn’t always successful but it’s more effective.
Has well defined, specific goals.
Putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer term goal.
The key thing is to take that general goal and turn it into something specific that you can work on. SMART goals.
You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention and focus.
Involves feedback.
You have to know what you’re doing right and how you’re doing it wrong.
Requires getting out of one’s comfort zone.
If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before.
The solution to barriers is not to try harder but to try differently.
It’s always possible to keep going and keep improving, however, it’s not always going to be easy.
Meaningful positive feedback is a crucial factor in maintaining motivation.
Limitations of purposeful practice
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.
Chapter 2: Harnessing Adaptability
Physical challenges are more visible and it’s easier to see changes and measure progress.
E.g. Muscles grow larger.
Mental challenges are different because you don’t see any changes in your brain. It’s easy to assume that there really isn’t much going on but this is a mistake.
The years spent mastering the knowledge had enlarged precisely that part of the brain responsible for navigating from one place to another.
Brain plasticity is when the brain changes in response to use.
Why does the body and mind adapt? Homeostasis.
When a body system is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis.
In the brain, the greater the challenge, the greater the change, up to a point.
The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it’s pushed outside, but not too far outside, it’s comfort zone.
The most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they’re actually increasing your ability to play.
Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges. There are a few additional details.
One, younger brains are more adaptable. Small changes in the beginning lead to bigger changes later. Think chaos theory, butterfly effect, compound interest.
Two, developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost. In many cases, people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area. Think tradeoff, finite brain size.
Third, cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Think don’t use it lose it, homeostasis acts against us in this case.
People don’t possess these extraordinary capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather its because they’re satisfied to live in the comfort of homeostasis and never do the work required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough”. Think of Wade in Three Body, we must keep advancing.
It’s ok to be good enough, but it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.
It isn’t about reaching your potential but building it.
Learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny, it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.
What is the best way to challenge homeostasis and develop that potential?
What exactly are we trying to improve about our brains?
Chapter 3: Mental Representations
Meaning aids memory.
Memory chunks are organized in a hierarchy with more abstract chunks at the top.
Memory representations allow for efficient encoding of the data rather than remembering the raw details.
Two other features of mental representations.
One, mental representations are more than just ways of encoding data. They allow meaning and conclusions to be drawn.
Two, while mental representations give masters a view of the forest that novices lack, they also allow masters to zero in on the trees when necessary.
A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, idea, collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract.
E.g. Mona Lisa
Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.
Mental representations are domain specific.
In expert performance, there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
E.g. You don’t train to become a doctor, you train to become a diagnostician, pathologist, or neurosurgeon.
One could define a mental representation as a way to bypass the limitations of short term memory.
What sets expert performers apart is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
The main thing that sets experts apart (and answers the question from the previous chapter) is that they produce highly specialized mental representations which makes it possible their incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities.
Recognizing and Responding to Patterns
Experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees. Sounds like AlphaGo. Think big picture.
The advantage better Chess players had in predicting future events was related to their ability to envision more possible outcomes and quickly soft through them and come up with the most promising action.
In other words, the better players had a more highly developed ability to interpret the pattern of action on the field.
Better mental representations lead to better performance.
Making Sense of Information
The key factor determining a person’s comprehension of a story is how much that person already understands about the story.
Finding an Answer
The major advantage of developed mental representations is that you can assimilate and consider a great deal more information at once.
This ability to generate a number of likely diagnoses and carefully reason through them distinguishes expert diagnostician from the rest. Think heuristic brute forcing and the simulation as the basis for intelligence.
The superior organization of information is a theme that appears over and over again in the study of expert performers.
Planning
To write well, develop a mental representation ahead of time to guide your efforts, then monitor and evaluate your efforts and be ready to modify that representation as necessary. Positive feedback loop.
Mental Representations in Learning
The differences lay in how well the students were able to detect their mistakes, in essence how effective their mental representations were.
The relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better the mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practice to hone your skill.
Physical Activities are Mental Too
As you push yourself to do something new, you are also expanding and sharpening your mental representations, which will in turn make it possible for you to do more than you could before.
Chapter 4: The Gold Standard
A Highly Developed Field
Some fields like math and music are blessed with highly developed, broadly accepted training methods.
Common characteristics
First, there are always objective ways or at least semi-objective ways to measure performance.
Second, these fields tend to be competitive enough that performers have strong incentive to practice and improve.
Third, these fields are generally well established, with the relevant skills having been developed over time.
Fourth, a subset of people in that field are teachers with sophisticated set of training techniques.
Good versus Better versus Best
We found no shortcuts and no prodigies who reached an expert level with relatively little practice.
Expert performers spent significantly more time practicing than those who had spent less time practicing. Time tradeoff.
You find that the top performers have devoted a tremendous amount of time to developing their abilities.
The Principles of Deliberate Practice
Level of performance in established areas have increased greatly over time and as individuals have developed greater and more complex skills and performance.
The improvement in performance generally has gone hand-in-hand with the development of teaching methods.
Deliberate practice is different from purposeful practice in two important ways:
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 are just entering the field. What areas don’t qualify? Areas with little or no direct competition. (Manager, teacher, electrician, engineer). There isn’t an objective criteria for superior performance.
It requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
The clear distinction is practice that is not only purposeful but also informed.
Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it’s going and how to get there.
Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills.
Deliberate practice traits
Develops skills that people have figured out and know how to teach
Outside comfort zone
Well defined, specific goals
Requires full attention and conscious actions
Feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback
Produces and depends on mental representations
Building and modifying previously acquired skills
Applying the Principles of Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is a specialized form of practice.
This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit; get as close to deliberate practice as possible.
In many fields, people who are widely accepted as “experts” are actually not expert performers when judged on objective criteria.
E.g. Wine experts, psychiatrists, psychologist, stock pickers.
Be careful when identifying expert performers.
Once you’ve identified the expert performers in a field, the next step is to figure out specifically what they do that separates them from other, less accomplished people in the same field and what training methods helped them get there.
Once you’ve identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance.
No, the ten thousand hour rule isn’t really a rule
It’s an arbitrary number.
The number varies from field to field.
10,000 hours is actually an average for the violinists at age 20.
The rules implies that if you put 10,000 hours into a field, then you become an expert in the field. This is correlation but not a proven causation.
The one thing Gladwell got right was that becoming accomplished in any field requires tremendous amounts of effort exerted over years.
In any area, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance as long as they train in the right way.
You have to put in so many hours because others have already done so; to match them in performance you have to match them in time inputted.
We have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice.
Chapter 5: Principles of Deliberate Practice on the Job
Improvement requires rejecting three beliefs:
That one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetics.
That if you do something for long enough, you’re bound to get better at it.
That all it takes to improve is effort.
Similar to supervised learning. Given feedback, you learn much quicker.
Knowledge versus Skills
Learn by doing.
See one, do one, teach one.
Chapter 6: Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life
Dan doesn’t appreciate that only certain people can succeed in certain areas.
Dan wanted to prove that anything’s possible if you’re willing to put in the time.
Many accomplished performers are terrible teachers because they have no idea how to teach. Just because they themselves can do it doesn’t mean they can teach others how to do it.
This chapter is useful for when picking a PhD supervisor.
You may need to change teachers as you yourself change.
The maximum benefit from an activity requires focus.
Focus and concentration are crucial.
It’s better to train at 100 percent for shorter than 70 percent for longer.
Try to do something you cannot.
Without a teacher, focus, feedback, fix it.
The major reason that people in every area stop improving is because they plateau.
The best way to move beyond a plateau is to try something new and different.
Target specific areas of trouble to surpass the plateau. Identify those areas by varying the training.
How do you keep going? Motivation is a bug hurdle in practice.
Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign after the fact. After someone is successful, they’re labeled that.
Circular reasoning “The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing” is worse than useless, it’s damaging.
People that maintain deliberate practice generally have developed various habits that help them keep going.
Must practice at least one hour a day at full concentration.
Maintain motivation by strengthening the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit.
Expert performers do two things: general physical maintenance and limit practice sessions to about an hour.
You must believe that you can succeed, and that you can rank among the best.
At its core, deliberate practice is a lonely pursuit.
There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced we’re out of reach. Open that door.
Chapter 7: The Road to Extraordinary
We now switch our attention to the best in the world performers.
Three common stages.
Steps like Mastery.
Starting Out
In the first stage, children are introduced in a playful way to what will eventually become their field of interest.
The parents shaped the interests of their children.
Many prodigies had older siblings.
It’s generally the younger sibling who reached greater heights.
Slightly different pattern for mathematicians and neurologists. Parents introduced their child to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general.
Becoming Serious
Perhaps the most important factor in the early days of an expert’s development: maintaining that interest and motivation while the skills and habits are being built.
The motivation must ultimately be something that comes from within the child or else it won’t endure.
As the students continued to improve, they started to seek out better qualified teachers and coaches.
They started to identify with their skills such as scientist, mathematician, swimmer.
Commitment
They make a major commitment to becoming the best that they can be.
The Benefits of Starting Young
Expertise in some fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn’t start training as a child.
Performance issues that involve physical abilities that peak at around 20.
In addition to the gradual deterioration in physical abilities that accompanies aging, some physical skills simply cannot be developed to expert levels if one doesn’t start working on them in childhood.
A two year old child has about 50 percent more synapses than an adult.
If Richard Sutton secret is animal psychology, then my secret is children neuroscience.
One thing we do know about these path-breakers is that they, without exception, have worked to become expert performers in their field before they started breaking new ground.
There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them.
That’s how it always is. The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward. To advance. To do things that others have not.
Chapter 8: But What About Natural Talent?
Expert performers develop their extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step by step in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts.
Basic approach to understanding expert performers: What is the exact nature of the ability? And, what sorts of training made it possible?
The only two areas where we know for certain that genetics affects sports performance are height and body size.
It’s natural to assume that those differences in learning rate persist, that the same people who did so well in the beginning will continue to breeze through later on.
This is an understandable result of observing the beginning of the journey and concluding that the rest of the journey will be similar. It’s also wrong.
In the long run, it’s the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.
Research suggests a minimum requirement for performing capably.
E.g. IQ between 110 and 120 for scientist.
We do know that among those people who have practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best.
The strong argument against talent: if some sort of innate ability were playing a role in deciding who eventually becomes the best, it would be much easier to spot those future champions early in their careers.
No one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with innate talent.
Maybe the genetic difference manifests itself as “hardworking” or “focus” genes. Genes that aid in deliberate practice.
There is a dark side of believing in innate talent.
The first is the self fulfilling prophecy. It works both ways. The ones who believe they can’t do it early on don’t continue, and the ones who believe they can do it early on continue to do it.
The second is that we lose a collection of people that we’ve judged early on to not be good due to their initial “talent”.
Chapter 9: Where Do We Go from Here?
Experiment on deliberate practice.
The non-control group had to
Before class they had to read assigned sections ann then complete a short quiz about the reading.
They had discussions.
Think of Make It Stick
You pick up the necessary knowledge to develop the skills; knowledge should never be an end in itself.
You don’t build mental representations by thinking about something, you build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over.
Instead of planning for what a student should know, plan for what they should be able to do.