Summary of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Get the message / summary of the book from popular highlights
One simple way of getting a quick summary of any ebook is to read the popular highlights on Kindle. Read all the popular highlights below and decide for yourself if that’s enough to get the message of the book and navigate yourself to a greater expertise. Crowd wisdom rocks.
10,000-hour rule
10,000-hour rule was the original Ericsson’s research on expert violinists which was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. In short, if you practice for 10,000 hours (about 3 hours a day for 10 years), you will become a world leading expert.
Three types of practice: naive, purposeful, deliberate
According to Ericsson there are three types of practice: naive (generic, with mindless repetition), purposeful ( well-defined, with specific goals) and deliberate (pushes you out of your comfort zone and involves feedback and focus). The key to expertise is deliberate practice: “Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.”
Popular highlights from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
“Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.” 559 popular highlights (the number of popular highlights at the time of writing this blog summary)
“The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.” 1616 popular highlights
“Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.” 1864 popular highlights
“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.” 1945 popular highlights
“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.” 1903 popular highlights
“Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation.” 1806 popular highlights
“So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: 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.” 2212 popular highlights
“If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”
“The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.” 1565 popular highlights
“The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.” 1546 popular highlights
“To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.” 1379 popular highlights
To sum up
To become an expert, it takes a huge number of hours of purposeful / deliberate practice which includes pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. Read more about how to push yourself beyond your comfort zone – Set high expectations – spd rdng technique #34
You can get the ebook Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool