Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool - Chapter 1

Introduction

In case if you are not aware, Professor Anders Ericsson’s research was the inspiration for the 10,000 rule. The rule which got highly popularized in Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers.’

However, Ericsson, is a little upset over Gladwell popularizing this concept, because he believes there's more to the 10,000 hour rule.

According to him, simply pushing ourselves to achieve those 10,000 hours of practice, to specialize in a particular skill set, is not good enough if you really want to make a mark in your chosen niche.

For 10,000 hours to be really fruitful, special focus should be on deliberate practice, as it is the only way forward to achieve greatness in life. But then, it doesn’t stop there. Ericsson suggests us to keep working hard on our skills even after completing those grueling 10,000 hours.

To prove the theory of Deliberate Practice right, the author has cited various examples and experiments conducted by neurosciences on musicians, non musicians, London Taxi Drivers, non-Taxi drivers, golf players and so on.  Yes, the study on London Taxi drivers is quite a read. It's part of Chapter 2 which is I going to post shortly.

Here's goes the elaborate synopsis on Chapter 1

Chapter 1 – The Power of Purposeful Practice

Ericsson talks about the need of purposeful practice because simply trying hard won’t get you the desired results.

To explain the concept of purposeful practice Ericsson hired Steve Faloon, an undergraduate of Carnegie Mellon University where Ericsson was teaching at that time, to come in several times of the week and do one particular task: to memorize a string of numbers.

Ericsson would sit down with Steve and then read out to him a series of numbers at the rate of one per second. And, mind you, the numbers were not in order. As in they were jumbled up and read something like this – Seven…four…zero…one…one…nine and so on. Now Steve’s job was to remember them and repeat them back, ditto. Yes, the sequencing was important here. But then, Steve, a determined fellow, made sure he remembered them and repeated as was expected from him.

After four and hour session, Steve could remember seven digits strings – the length of phone numbers- easily. He could reliably recall eight digit strings. But when it came to nine digits, things started turning difficult for him.

The problem here, according to Ericsson, was committing numbers to short-term memory. Only by constant repetition of the numbers – over and over again that is – he could commit them to long term memory.

But then, Steve found a breakthrough on his own and repeated nine, and even ten digits strings correctly. Much to the surprise of Ericsson, he got to the point of repeating 11 digits correctly, without a single mistake.

How was that possible? Simple. Steve had devised a way to remember these strings and then repeated to himself over and over again until he could hear the sound of it in his memory. This is what is committing things to long term memory.

By the end of two hundred training session, Steve could repeat back eighty two digits. Yes, eighty-two. Think about it for a moment and you’d realize what an incredible achievement that was.

Here they go:

0326443449602221328209301020391832373927788917267653245037746120179094345510355530

Imagine, remembering all these numbers in a series? Even writing these numbers for me was a hassle, forget about remembering them.

But then, this was the feat that Steve achieved, after two hundred training sessions. Any other ordinary guy would have gave given up the strenuous exercise, in the middle of it, if not right at the start.  

Steve perseverance and his ability to develop devices that could help commit such impossibly long series of numbers to long-term memory made him different to his competitor Renee Elio, whom Ericsson had hired once Steve reached a ceiling eighty-two digits. Rene couldn’t move beyond 20.

However, Steve’s friend, Dario Donatelli – a member of Carnegie Mellon long-distance team and one of Steve’s training partners, went on to memorize one hundred digits, or about 20 more than Steve. However, unlike Renee, Dario got a head start as Steve had taught him his method of encoding digits to long-term memory, though Dario designed his own method later on.      

The Rise of Extraordinary Performers

#1. American teacher Barbara Blackburn, who could type up to 212 words per minute

#2. Marko Baloh of Slovenia, who once rode 562 miles on a bicycle in twenty-four hours

#3. Vikas Sharma of India, who in just one minute was able to calculate the roots of twelve large numbers, each with between twenty and fifty-one digits, with roots  ranging from the seventeenth to the fiftieth root. Sharma was able to perform twelve exceedingly difficult mental calculations in just sixty seconds – faster than many people could punch the numbers into a calculator and read off the answers.     

The Usual Approach

For someone who has never held a tennis racket even once, how do you think they’ll go about with the game of tennis? Simple. They will get all the required stuff for playing, like the shoes and a racket, and then join a tennis academy and start learning the nitty-gritty’s of the game.

Initially, you will be hitting the ball against the wall, and then once you have improved at that, you will compete against other team mates. In the beginning you will be experiencing several problems, like hitting the ball out of the courts, or hitting at the rear of your teammate and so on. But once you start practising daily, you will strokes will improve and you will have a better control over your backhand.

Now you pretty much know what you are doing and your shots have become automatic. You have become a serious tennis player. But then what has actually happened is that you have reached a comfort zone. And if you are completely satisfied with this level of work, your improvement will stall. You have mastered the easy stuff.    

However, very soon you will discover you are still an amateur who needs to master his weaknesses to become a pro. As in your backstrokes are not good enough to hit the balls that come chest-high with a spin. And since, they don’t happen often, you don’t make any real efforts to improve them. But then, in the long-run they prove to be the Achilles heel.

This just-enough method doesn’t work in the long run.  That is if you keep doing what you are good at, you always perform at a satisfactory level, whether it’s a driver who has been driving for no fewer than twenty years or a doctor who has been practising medicine for equal amount of years.

Research has proved that once you reach a level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity the additional years of practice doesn’t lead to improvement.

Purposeful Practice

There are two types of practice according to Ericsson – Purposeful practice and Naïve Practice.

According to him Naïve practice means doing something repeatedly and expecting that repetition alone will improve one’s performance.

On the other hand, purposeful practice is much more purposeful, thoughtful and focussed than naïve practice.

Purposeful practice has the following characteristics:

• Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.
• Purposeful practice is focussed.
• Purposeful practice involves feedback.

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice. If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “ practice” during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.

Key takeaways

#1. You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

#2. Purposeful practice involves feedback.

#3. Purposeful practice involves getting out of one’s comfort zone.   

#4.  The best way to get past a barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one of the reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach.

#4. If try harder doesn’t work. Change the technique. Try differently instead.

#5. 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.