High-Level Thoughts

Peak is the definitive book on mastering a skill. Anders is a leading expert in the science of expertise and this book, which is the culmination of his decades of experience, lays out the best way to develop your skills. If you want to know how to get better at something, read this book.

I think the concept of ‘deliberate practice’ is something we’re all aware of subconsciously; we just haven’t spent any time actively thinking about it. The great thing about how Anders covers these ideas is that in so doing he does away with the notion of innate talent or skill. The idea of someone being born with an innate skill for something is a lie we all tell ourselves at one time or another, and deep down we’re likely aware of its falsehood. Having it laid out so plainly, with some examples to back it up, is more motivational than it is disheartening. Sure, we may lie to ourselves about our ‘lack of talent’, but given enough discipline, practice, and tutelage, we are able to excel at things.

Key Ideas

1. Innate skills and talents are a myth. You’re not born with a fixed potential to succeed at something. Instead, potential is adaptable and will depend on the various acts we perform throughout our lives.
2. The best way to progress when developing a skill is to get as close as you can to incorporating ‘deliberate practice’ into your training.
3. The goal with ‘deliberate practice’ is not to reach your potential but to build and expand it, making things previously thought to be impossible, possible.
4. Once you reach a level of ‘acceptable’ performance and you begin to do things automatically, your progress will plateau. Additional years of experience and ‘practice’ in this state won’t lead to additional improvement.
5. Your ability and skills in a given field progress in relation to the quality of your mental representations. Much of deliberate practice involves developing more effective mental representations.

Book Summary

The Myth of Talent

When thinking of highly successful people, the ones who stand head and shoulders above the rest in their field, it’s not uncommon to hear people attribute their success to one of two things. It’s either some innate talent that they were lucky to be born with – a gift from God as it were. Or they’ve just spent more time on it than their competition – accumulating the 10,000 hours popularised in Gladwell’s book, Outliers. But despite what we tell ourselves, this isn’t the truth of the matter. Countless studies have been undertaken to look at expert performers in an attempt to figure out how they accomplish what they do – and as much as people might not like hearing it, expert performers aren’t born with some innate talent for their field. And, as explored in this book, spending time on something isn’t enough in and of itself to ensure success. Instead, something else is at play.

Anders has spent his career studying expert performers to learn what exactly sets them apart from others in their respective fields. What he’s found is that it’s not who they are but rather what they do that sets them apart. Peak is the culmination of his decades spent researching the science of expertise, and in it he’s accumulated everything he’s learned about how expert performers go about honing and developing their skills.

What Anders and other researchers have found is that whilst experts do put in a tremendous amount of time practising their skills, they don’t do it haphazardly. They don’t approach it with the mentality that merely putting in the hours will be enough. Instead, they all approach their practice in similar ways. As Anders puts it in the book

“The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.”

Naïve Versus Purposeful Practice

Let’s briefly return to the popular concept of accumulating 10,000 hours of practice. How this idea manifests itself in the collective consciousness is that if we accumulate this amount of time doing something then we’ll become a master at it. In other words, doing something repeatedly for long enough is the key to success. Only, “research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of ‘acceptable’ performance and automaticity, the additional years of ‘practice’ don’t lead to improvement.” So, if time spent practising isn’t the key, what is? If you had to sum up the key in one word, then the best choice would be intent or purpose. This is where it’s worth clearly defining two different kinds of practice – naïve and purposeful.

Naïve practice is what was defined above when thinking about 10,000 hours – doing the same thing over and over again under the assumption that repetition alone is enough to improve. Purposeful practice has several characteristics that help set it apart from naïve practice. Purposeful practice involves

• Setting clear, well-defined, and specific goals.
• Actively focusing on the task at hand.
• Getting out of your comfort zone to challenge yourself appropriately.
• Receiving feedback on what you’re doing.

These characteristics help ensure you get more from your time than you would if you engaged in naïve practice, so it’s worth exploring them in more detail.

Have well-defined goals: Having well-defined goals ensures you know precisely what it is you’re working towards at any given time. To make the most of these goals, they need to be actionable and specific. Drill down into your overarching goals in order to get one that you can actively work on when practising.

Actively focus: When practising, ensure you concentrate on what you’re doing. Don’t let your mind wander to the point where you’re practising on autopilot. If you’re doing things automatically then you won’t notice when slight mistakes start creeping in. Before you know it, you’ll have ingrained bad habits that might be difficult to unlearn later on.

Get outside your comfort zone: You’re in our comfort zone when you’re doing things you know how to do. Whilst a large part of practising involves doing this, you also need to challenge yourself slightly in order to develop further. You need to try doing things you aren’t fully comfortable with yet.

“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: if you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”

Get feedback: Without feedback, it’s difficult to know precisely where you’re making a mistake – especially if you’re just setting out to learn a new skill. Beyond receiving feedback when you make a mistake, it’s important to ensure you’re getting some positive feedback when things go right too. As Anders puts it, “generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation.”

Whilst purposeful practice can get us a long way – and indeed, a lot further than naïve practice can – there’s a limit to what it can help us achieve. This limit isn’t defined by some innate characteristic however, rather it’s defined by the quality of our mental representations.

Mental Representations

“A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, conrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.”

These representations are stored in long-term memory and they enable us to respond quickly and effectively to certain things. The definition might sound complex but mental representations are things you’ll already be familiar with. If you were asked about the game of chess, then in your mind you might conjure up an image of the board with the game pieces, you might be familiar with some of the rules of the game and have those in your mind, you might even remember some popular chess facts too. This would be your mental representation of chess.

A key thing to note about mental representations is that they’re domain-specific. For example, your mental representation of chess isn’t going to help you in other visuospatial activities. Given that a mental representation will be specialised it leaves to reason that your proficiency at a skill will be defined by the quality of your mental representations. Based on this, it would be easy to assume that a mental representation is the outcome of learning a skill. whilst this is true, our mental representations can actually help us learn the skill too. This is where another form of practice comes into play – deliberate practice.

The Gold Standard: Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is a term coined by Anders to define a universal approach to practice that is used by expert performers to help achieve success. It goes beyond purposeful practice by actively focusing on developing the quality of your mental representations. The reason it does this is because deliberate practice is not only purposeful but it’s also informed. The two key distinctions that separate deliberate practice from purposeful practice are:

1. Deliberate practice needs a well-developed field. A field where the best performers have attained a level that clearly sets them apart from those entering it.
2. You need a teacher or coach who can provide practice activities that are strategically designed to improve your performance.

There are some obvious benefits to pursuing a skill in a well-developed field. Firstly, it’s easier to see who the best performers are which helps to provide some indication of what’s possible to achieve. Secondly, when a field is well-developed there’ll typically be some form of consensus on good training techniques. Think of something like learning to play the violin. This field has been around for an age and as such, there’s a plethora of information out there on how to learn and how to improve at playing the violin.

Working with a teacher or coach has obvious benefits too, but the main ones are:

1. A good teacher will not only help you learn a skill, but they’ll also be familiar with the different hurdles you’ll encounter along the way. Because of this, they can design practice routines that will help you overcome the hurdles more easily.
2. They’ll know when you’re making a mistake and can correct you accordingly. Beyond this, a good teacher will not only spot and correct your mistakes but they’ll also teach you to be able to spot and correct them yourself.

These two distinctions that separate deliberate practice from purposeful practice are key to ensuring you make the most effective use of your time to make more progress. To summarise, deliberate practice involves:

• Practising in a well-developed field.
• Having your practice overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and how these abilities can be achieved.
• Going outside of your comfort zone and it demands near-maximal effort.
• Being deliberate; requires your full attention and conscious action at all times – no going on autopilot.
• Receiving regular feedback and modifying your efforts in response to said feedback.
• Focusing on building and improving specific skills by focusing on aspects of them.

Applying the Principles of Deliberate Practice

On the Job

When looking to develop at work, or in other professional environments, it can be difficult to find opportunities to introduce deliberate practice. The regular day-to-day of a job is often busy, leaving little to no room to practise something new. Unfortunately, going on a training course is also unlikely to provide much deliberate practice opportunity as, much like school, most training courses are knowledge-based rather than practice-based. It’s much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to create an environment that allows them to develop skills through practice. Despite this, it’s still possible to incorporate principles of deliberate practice at work.

Firstly, you’ll need to dispose of these 3 myths that we commonly tell ourselves:

1. You lack the innate characteristics to do something. Typically, this manifests itself in language choices along the lines of “I can’t do x because …”
2. If you do something for long enough then you’re bound to get good at it.
3. All it takes to improve is more effort.

Once you’ve disposed of these, you need to start looking for opportunities to actively practice within your business-as-usual activities. For example, if you’re regularly giving presentations, you could try asking the audience to take notes and provide feedback on how you present. Whilst giving the presentation ensure you’re actively focusing on it. Once you’ve gathered feedback from the audience, dissect it and look to see if you can incorporate any of it into your next presentation. Then pay attention to see if it’s making any difference in the performance of your presentations.

The key here is to have the opportunity to actively practise what you know. The emphasis is on the doing – in other words, it’s not what you know but what you can do that sets you apart.

In Daily Life

The basic framework to follow when looking to perform deliberate practice in your daily life (such as for a hobby) is:

1. Find a good teacher.
2. Be actively engaged in what you do.

Ideally, 1 will be through private instruction as opposed to group classes as private instruction will allow the teacher to focus on you and your needs more. But before you go through with getting a teacher, try to ensure it’s a good one. Talk to a prospective teacher about what they know and what their experience is and, if possible, try to talk to current and former students to get their thoughts too. Once you’ve secured your teacher and are working with them on improving, actively focus and engage with the training they provide. Don’t let your mind wander so that you’re engaging with mindless repetition.

But what happens if you don’t have a teacher? In that instance, you won’t be able to implement deliberate practice by its strictest definition, but you’ll still be able to implement most of the principles successfully – you’ll just have to be creative about how you compensate for the lack of a teacher. But in the age of the internet, it’s not hard to find resources online to help you learn. Just remember, to effectively practise without a teacher, keep in mind the three F’s: Focus, Feedback, and Fix it. Break the skill down into components, focus on each component as you practice them repeatedly, spot mistakes as you make them, analyse them to determine your weakness, and figure out ways to address them.

Plateaus and Motivation

Whenever you learn something new, it’s inevitable that you’ll experience a plateau. A period where your progress seemingly stalls no matter how much time you spend practising. The key to overcoming this plateau is to challenge your mind and body in a new way – it’s not about working harder; it’s about working differently. For example, it’s not uncommon for weightlifters to try different rep schemes, movement patterns, or to adjust the tempo of each rep whenever they begin to plateau. In fact, experienced weightlifters often program this variety into their routines in order to avoid plateaus in the first place. When you’re at a plateau, take a step back and assess what mistakes you might be making or where your weaknesses lie, then try to adjust how you handle them.

One side effect of experiencing a plateau is that your motivation can take a hit as a result. When we stop progressing, we start to feel like there’s little point in practising more and so we stop. One way to keep working on something is to ensure that you have the right reasons to keep going. We need to ensure that our reasons to keep going are higher than the reasons to quit.

Given the amount of focus required by deliberate (or even purposeful) practice, your energy and motivation can dwindle whilst you’re practising. To help increase your focus, and decrease demotivation, aim to limit your practise sessions to 1 hour. If you want to practice more, ensure you take a break between sessions. This will allow you to recharge and keep an intense level of focus whilst practising.

However, despite what you try to implement there will still be days when you’re not feeling motivated to even begin a practice session in the first place. One thing that experts do to help circumvent this is to turn the act of practising into a habit. They redesign aspects of their lives in order to minimise any friction to start practising. Once the act of practising is habitual, motivation plays a less vital role in getting you to start practising.