77 Quotes from Peak: Secrets of the New Science of expertise by anders Ericsson
''Perfect pitch is
not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the
gift—and, as nearly as we can tell, pretty much everyone is born with that gift.''
''Brain researchers
have come to realize that the brain—even the adult brain—is far more adaptable
than anyone ever imagined, and this gives us a tremendous amount of control
over what our brains are able to do. In particular, the brain responds to the
right sorts of triggers by rewiring itself in various ways. New connections are
made between neurons, while existing connections can be strengthened or
weakened, and in some parts of the brain it is even possible for new neurons to
grow. This adaptability explains how the development of perfect pitch was
possible in Sakakibara’s subjects as well as in Mozart himself.''
''Both the brain and
the body are more adaptable in young children than in adults, so there are
certain abilities that can only be developed, or that are more easily developed, before the age of six or twelve or
eighteen. Still,both the brain and the body retain a great deal of adaptability
throughout adulthood, and this adaptability makes it possible for adults, even
older adults, to develop a wide variety of new capabilities with the
right training.''
''The clear message
from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment
may play in the achievements of ‘gifted’ people, the main gift that these
people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and
body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.''
''There’s no such
thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable,and training can create
skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before.''
''Learning isn’t a
way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can
create our own potential. And this is true whether our goal is to become a
concert pianist or just play the piano well enough to amuse ourselves, to join
the PGA golf tour or just bring our handicaps down a few strokes.''
''While the
principles of deliberate practice were discovered by studying expert
performers, the principles themselves can be used by anyone who wants to
improve at anything, even if just a little bit. Want to improve your tennis
game? Deliberate practice. Your writing? Deliberate practice. Your sales
skills? Deliberate practice. Because deliberate practice was developed
specifically to help people become among the best in the world at what they do
and not merely to become 'good enough,' it is the most powerful approach to
learning that has yet been discovered.''
''Here is a good way
to think about it: You wish to climb a mountain. You’re not sure how high you want
to go—that peak looks an awfully long way off—but you know you want to get higher
than you currently are. You could simply take off on whichever path looks
promising and hope for the best, but you’re probably not going to get very far.
Or you could rely on a guide who has been to the peak and knows the best way
there. That will guarantee that no matter how high you decide to climb, you are
doing it in the most efficient, effective way. That best way is deliberate
practice.''
''There are various
sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one
particular form—which I named 'deliberate practice' back in the early 1990s—is
the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that
we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way
to design practice methods in any area.''
''Once you have
reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your
driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving.
People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving
or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep
doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better
nonetheless.''
''Purposeful practice has several characteristics that
set it apart from what we might call “naïve practice,” which is essentially
just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will
improve one’s performance.:
Purposeful
practice has well-defined, specific goals.
Purposeful
practice is focused.
Purposeful
practice involves feedback.
Purposeful
practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do
something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively
easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes
you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be
able to do it. Finding ways around these barriers is one of the hidden keys to
purposeful practice.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it
from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a
teacher or coach. Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles
you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them.''
''Whenever you’re
trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles—points at
which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what
you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a
true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or
through. In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare
to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable
limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people
more often just give up and stop trying to improve.''
''One caveat here is
that while it is always possible to keep going and keep improving, it is not always
easy. Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is
hard work, and it is generally not fun. So the issue of motivation inevitably
comes up.''
''Generally
speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in
maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction
of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by
others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to
maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Get outside your
comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching
those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to
maintain your motivation.This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who
wishes to improve—but it is still just a start.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Although it is generally possible to improve to a
certain degree with focused practice and staying out of your comfort zone,
that’s not all there is to it. 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.One particular approach to
practice and training has proven to be the most powerful and effective way to
improve one’s abilities in every area that has been studied. This approach is
deliberate practice.''
''This is the
general pattern for how physical activity creates changes in the body: when a
body system—certain muscles, the cardiovascular system, or something else—is
stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body
responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis. Suppose,
for example, that you begin a program of aerobic exercise—say,jogging three
times a week for half an hour each time, keeping your heart rate at the
recommended level of 70 percent of your maximum heart rate (which works out to
something over 140 beats per minute for younger adults). The sustained activity
will, among other things, lead to low levels of oxygen in the capillaries that
supply your leg muscles. Your body will respond by growing new capillaries in
order to provide more oxygen to the muscle cells in your legs and return them
to their comfort zone.This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be
harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for
long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier
to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance,
developed a little more coordination. But there is a catch: once the
compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more
efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the
physical activity that had previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The
changes stop. So to keep the changes
happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run
uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body
will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you
will stop improving.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''In the brain, the greater the challenge, the
greater the changes—up to a point. Recent studies have shown that learning a
new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than
simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned. On the
other hand, pushing too hard for too long can lead to burnout and ineffective
learning. The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot
where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Years of practice
on a stringed instrument had caused the area of the brain that controls the
fingers of the left hand to gradually expand, resulting in a greater ability to
control those fingers.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''The details of
exactly what happens to which region of the brain can be daunting to anyone who
is not trained in neuroscience, but the big picture is clear: musical training
modifies the structure and function of the brain in various ways that result in
an increased capacity for playing music. In other words, the most effective
forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument;
they are actually increasing your ability to play. ..Although less of
this sort of research has been done in areas other than music, in every area
that scientists have studied, the findings are the same: long-term training
results in changes in those parts of the brain that are
relevant to the particular skill being developed.''
''The cognitive and
physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they
start to go away. Astronauts who spend months in space without gravity to work
against come back to Earth and find it difficult to walk…Similar things have
been seen with athletes who have volunteered for studies in which they must lie
in bed for a month or
so. Strength fades. Speed diminishes. Endurance wilts.And something similar is
true with the brain.''
''We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but
once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very
little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or white matter or
to rewire entire sections in the way that an aspiring London taxi driver or
violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. 'Good enough' is generally
good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If
you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Here is the key
difference between the traditional approach to learning and the purposeful practice
or deliberate-practice approaches: The traditional approach is not designed to
challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all
about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular
skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone.In this view,
all that you are doing with practice—indeed, all that you can do—is to reach a
fixed potential.''
''A mental representation
is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of
information,or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking
about.
A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance,
and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting in their minds;
that image is their mental representation of the Mona Lisa. Some
people’s representations
are more detailed and accurate than others, and they can report, for example,
details about the background, about where Mona Lisa is sitting, and about her
hairstyle and her eyebrows.Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever
more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you
are practicing….. When London taxi trainees are learning to navigate
efficiently from every point A to every point B in the city, they do it by developing
increasingly sophisticated mental maps of the city—that is, by making mental representations.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''There is no such
thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train
your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s
faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a
sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to
become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a
neurosurgeon. Of course, some people do become overall memory experts or
athletes in a number of sports or doctors with a general set of skills, but
they do so by training in a number of different areas.''
''So everyone has
and uses mental representations. What sets expert performers apart from
everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated
representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their
fields—such as the vast number of arrangements of chess pieces that can appear during
games. These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions
and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than
anything else, explains the difference in performance between novices and
experts.''
''The more you study
a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better
you get at assimilating new information. ….if you are a reader who is already
familiar with the concept of deliberate practice or with the broader
area of the psychology of learning, you will likely find it easier than other
readers to assimilate the information in this book.Either way, reading this
book and thinking about the topics I’m discussing will help you create new mental
representations, which will in turn make it easier for you to read and learn
more about this subject in the future.''
''The key to the
successful diagnosis wasn’t merely having the necessary medical knowledge, but having
that knowledge organized and accessible in a way that allowed the doctor to
come up with possible diagnoses and to zero in on the most likely. The superior
organization of information is a theme that appears over and over again in the
study of expert performers.This is true even for something as mundane as
insurance sales…..the better agents had much more highly developed “if . . .
then” structures: if these things are true about a client, then say this or do
that. Because their insurance knowledge was better organized, the best agents
could figure out what to do more quickly and more accurately in any given
situation, and this made them much more effective agents.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''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.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Honing the skill
improves mental representation, and mental representation helps hone the skill.
There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg component to this. Take figure skating:
it’s hard to have a clear mental representation of what a double axel feels
like until you’ve done it, and, likewise, it is difficult to do a clean double
axel without a good mental representation of one. That sounds paradoxical, but
it isn’t really. You work up to a double axel bit by bit, assembling the mental
representations as you go. It’s like a staircase that you climb as you build
it. Each step of your ascent puts you in a position to build the next step.
Then you build that step, and you’re in a position to build the next one. And
so on.''
''In every area, some approaches to training are more
effective than others.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''If you don’t know
for sure what constitutes
improvement, how can you develop methods to improve performance?''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Deliberate
practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to
constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus
it demands near-maximal effort,which is generally not enjoyable.''
''Deliberate
practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving
some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall
improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop
a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired
larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a
performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training.''
''Deliberate
practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and
conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s
directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her
practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification
of efforts in response to that feedback.Early in the training process much of the
feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will monitor progress, point
out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and
experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust
accordingly.Such self-monitoring requires effective mental representations.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Deliberate
practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations.
Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations;
as one’s performance improves, the representations become more detailed and
effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations
make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual
performance. They show the right way to do something and allow one to notice
when doing something wrong and to correct it.''
''Deliberate
practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired
skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve
them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead
to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of
existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the
correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will
have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''This is the basic
blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate
practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an
option, you should take that option. If not,apply the principles of deliberate
practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful
practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then
figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training
techniques that allow you to do it, too.''
''Keep in mind that
the idea is to inform your purposeful practice and point it in directions that
will be more effective. If you find that something works, keep doing it; if it
doesn’t work, stop. The better you are able to tailor your training to mirror
the best performers in your field,the more effective your training is likely to
be.''
''If you wish to
become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields,
you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work
just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in
the same sort of work.One way to think about this is simply as a reflection of
the fact that, to date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that
can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are
improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of
human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on
what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The
horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.''
''Doing the same
thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for
improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline.''
''The …. myth states
that all it takes to improve is effort. If you just try hard enough, you’ll get
better. If you want to be a better manager, try harder. If you want to generate
more sales, try harder. If you want to improve your teamwork, try harder. The
reality is, however, that all of these things—managing, selling, teamwork—are
specialized skills, and unless you are using practice techniques specifically
designed to improve those particular skills, trying hard will not get you very
far.''
guarantee that an
approach will be effective, but it will certainly make that much more likely.''
''One of the
implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting
down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The
bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is
understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your
job.This distinction
between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between
traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach…..''
''But one thing is
clear: with few exceptions, neither
doctors nor nurses gain expertise from experience alone.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''when medical
researchers compared the learning curves of surgeons who had a great deal of experience
in traditional surgery with the learning curves of surgical trainees, they
found no difference in how quickly the two groups mastered laparoscopic surgery
and reduced the numbers of complications. In short, neither their greater
knowledge nor their greater experience in traditional surgery gave the experienced
surgeons an advantage in developing skill in laparoscopic surgery. That skill,
it turns out,must be developed independently. Because of these findings,
surgeons today who wish to perform laparoscopic procedures must go through
training supervised by expert laparoscopic surgeons and be tested on this
specific skill.''
''As is the case in
so many situations, once you have figured out the right question to ask, you
are halfway to the right answer. And when referring to improving performance in
a professional or business setting, the right question is, How do we improve
the relevant skills? rather than, How do we teach the relevant knowledge?''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''A good teacher
should also have some skill and experience in teaching in that field. 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. Ask about a teacher’s experience and, if possible, investigate and even
talk to the teacher’s former or current students. How good are they? How much
of their skill can be attributed to that particular teacher? Do they speak highly
of the teacher? The best students to talk to are those who started working with
a teacher when they were at about the same level you are now, since their
experience will be closest to what you yourself will get from a teacher.''
''Focus and
concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer
goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at
100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period.
Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make
sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''Despite the first
word in the term 'mental representation,' pure mental analysis is not
nearly enough. We can only form effective mental representations when we try to
reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try
again, and repeat—over and over again.Successful mental representations are
inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended
practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental
representations we seek.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''This, then, is
what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have
failed. First,figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are
you making, and when? 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. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be
able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or
teacher for suggestions.Either way, pay attention to what happens when you
practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else.''
''One of the
hallmarks of expert performers is that even once they become one of the best at
what they do, they still constantly strive to improve their practice techniques
and to get better. And it is here at the frontier that we find the
pathbreakers, those experts who go beyond what anyone else has ever done and
show us all what it is possible to achieve.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''We can’t answer
that question yet, but we do know that people who develop skills in a certain
area through years of practice seem to get a great deal of pleasure from
engaging in that skill. Musicians enjoy performing music. Mathematicians enjoy
doing mathematics. Soccer players enjoy playing soccer. Of course, it is
possible that this is completely due to a self-selection process—that the only people
who would spend years practicing something are those who naturally love to do
it—but it is also possible that the practice itself may lead to physiological
adaptations that produce more enjoyment and more motivation to do that
particular activity. That is nothing but speculation at this point, but it is
reasonable speculation.''
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
''First, while the
adult brain may not be as adaptable in certain ways as the brain of the child
or adolescent, it is still more than capable of learning and changing. And
second, since the adaptability of the adult brain is different from the
adaptability of the young brain, learning as an adult is likely to take place
through somewhat different mechanisms. But if we adults try hard enough, our
brains will find a way.''
''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 do things that others
have not. And once a pathfinder shows how something can be done, others can
learn the technique and follow. Even if the pathfinder doesn’t share the
particular technique, …., simply knowing that something is possible drives
others to figure it out.''
''Progress is made
by those who are working on the frontiers of what is known and what is possible
to do, not by those who haven’t put in the effort needed to reach that
frontier. In short, in most cases—and this is especially true in any
well-developed area—we must rely on the experts to move us forward. Fortunately
for all of us, that’s what they do best.''
''The evidence is
that, like Mozart, Lemieux had a lot of practice before people
began noticing what a
“natural” talent he had.''
''In the long run it
is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial
advantage in intelligence or some other talent.''
''But since we know
that practice is the single most important factor in determining a person’s
ultimate achievement in a given domain, it makes sense that if genes do play a
role, their role would play out through shaping how likely a person is to
engage in deliberate practice or how effective that practice is likely to be.
Seeing it in this way puts genetic differences in a completely different light.''
''They [students]
need to try and fail—but with ready access to models that show what success
looks like.Having students create mental representations in one area helps them
understand exactly what it takes to be successful not only in that area but in
others as well.''
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