Peak

How do the exceptional become the exceptional? Is you kid who isn't learning Calculus by age 6 doomed to a life of mediocrity? And what about this “10,000 hours makes you an expert” thing I hear about?

Peak is, at it's core, a book about how we learn. The 4 word answer to that question is “practice the right way”, and Anders Ericsson uses his own research and the work of others to provide you a path to improving your ability to learn a new subject and to, with time, achieve expertise.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour idea in his book Outliers, and there's an element of merit to it, but it's incomplete. Ericsson was responsible for that research, and goes into detail, but the short version is that the research was done in highly specialized fields with a lot of shared expertise already. He calls this deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice, as he defines it, may rely on a solidly established field with clear definitions and outcomes, but that doesn't mean there's nothing we can take away to our own areas of interest. Setting goals, finding a way to get feedback to evaluate outcomes, and ensuring that you are engaged and challenging yourself the right amount are all strategies encouraged through the book.

Overall, the message is that the human brain is incredibly adaptable and that systematically approaching new subjects (or old subjects you want to improve) can allow you to reach levels you didn't believe were possible.


This is a must read if you have interest in the brain.

The main idea of the book is to present the idea of deliberate practice, a way to purposefully practice your craft to gain mental representation and become an expert in your field. The concept is simple:

- Well-defined specific goals, not just repetition.
- Focused, full of attention practice.
- Get out of your comfort zone.
- Monitor your progress.
- Figure out how to maintain your motivation.

You design the learning process to learn how to do the craft, learn the mental representations that experts use in this field, and design a feedback loop (the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.)

The book has plenty of research and examples. It's a bit repetitive, but I like the idea of reinforcing the concept and make me think and rethink my ways of learning throughout the book.

There's this thread that runs through a lot of different subjects: fitness, marketing, learning, cleaning, etc. If I was to boil it down, it would be: just do it (and do matters much more than it).

The version of that thread runs throughout Peak is a little bit different. It goes: You can't practice without paying attention. If you're having fun you're probably not growing as fast as you could. You can develop almost any skill you want to a high degree. Whatever your excuse is, it's probably bullshit.

If that's a message you need convincing of, this is a great book to do it. If you've been primed by other books like Growth Mindset or The Power of Habit that explore similar territory, you might not need to read the whole thing. Either way, there's a good 20-30 pages that break down the conceptual pieces of how to practice deliberately and in a way that leads to fast growth, and I found that really useful. Your mileage may vary, but if you think you might be interested in this, you probably will be.