The Directed Life

Notes and excerpts from Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Date read: 12/15/2022

You are limitless (page xx):

We now understand there’s no such thing as pre-defined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills … that did not exist before … potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it [emphasis mine]. We can create our own potential.

What are you trying to accomplish in your practice? (page 15)

Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals … Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal … They key is to take that general goal — get better — and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

Purposeful practice:

• has well-defined goals
• is focused
• involves feedback
• requires getting out of one’s comfort zone

More on feedback (page 17):

No matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback — either from yourself or from outside observers — you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.

The importance of being able to invert (page 20):

The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction … Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them.

Purposeful practice in a nutshell (page 22):

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.

Mental models (page 23):

The key to improved mental performance of almost any sort is the development of mental structures that make it possible to avoid the limitations of short-term memory and deal effectively with large amounts of information at once.

Brain shaping (page 36):

It is possible to shape the brain — your brain, my brain, anybody’s brain — in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate training.

Mutating from leaving your comfort zone (page 39):

In one study on rats the scientists conducting the study counted 112 different genes that were turned on when the workload on a particular muscle in the rear legs of the rats was sharply increased. Judging by the particular genes that were switched on, the response included such things as a chance in the metabolism of the new muscle cells, changes in their structure, and a change in the rate at which new muscle cells were formed. The eventual result of all of these changes was a strengthening of the rats’ muscles so that they could handle the increased workload. They had been pushed out of their comfort zone, and the muscles responded by getting strong enough to establish a new comfort zone.

Solitude (pages 92–93):

The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice [emphasis mine] was the most important factor in improving their performance … the best violin students had, on average, spent significantly more time than the better violin students had spend, and that the top two groups — better and best — had spent much more time on solitary practice than the music-education students.

Reminded me of the Naval quote that “Exceptional people are built in solitude.”

Ericsson and Pool’s outline of deliberate practice (pages 99–100):

• “Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established.”
• Training should be overseen by a teacher or coach who knows how abilities can be best developed
• Outside one’s comfort zone; student has to continually try things just beyond their current abilities.
• “Involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of target performance”
• The goal gets set → coach develops plan for making “small changes that will add up to the desired larger change.”
• Requires “a person’s full attention and conscious actions.”
• Involves “feedback and modifications of efforts in response to that feedback.”
• Teachers provide feedback → student improves → student builds the effective mental representations → student improves to the point of being able to self-assess which accelerates progress and optimizes practice
• “Produces and depends on mental representations.” Positive practice loop: abilities improve → mental representations improve → abilities improve as a result of mental representations → improved representations improve abilities
• “Involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically.”

The Blueprint (page 103):

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.

Setting your own standard and analyzing training methods (page 107):

In some cases you can bypass figuring out what sets experts themselves apart from others and simply figure out what sets their training apart. For instance, in the 1920s and 1930s the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi set twenty-two world records in distances from 1,500 meters to 20 kilometers. For a few years he was untouchable at any distance he chose to train for; everyone else was competing for second place. But eventually other runners realized Nurmi’s advantage came from having developed new training techniques, such as pacing himself with a stopwatch, using interval training to build speed, and following a year-long training regimen so that he was always training. Once those techniques were widely adopted, it elevated the performance of the entire field.

Not only is this great advice with a great embedded story, I also highlighted it from pride of my Finnish heritage.

Your best work won’t come if you don’t start with your first work (page 112):

Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work, and it is generally a decade or more between a scientist’s first publication and his or her most important publication — and this is in addition to the years of study before that first published research … in many areas of human endeavor it takes many, many years of practice to become one of the best in the world — in a forceful, memorable, way, and that’s a good thing.

The great example of self-assessment set forth by Benjamin Franklin (pages 155–156):

Early in his autobiography Franklin describes how as a young man he worked to improve his writing … He came up with a series of clever techniques aimed at teaching himself how to write as well as the writers of The Spectator … he chose several of the articles whose writing he admired and wrote down short descriptions of the content of each sentence … he tried to reproduce the articles from the hints he had written down … he went back to the original articles … compared them with his own efforts, and corrected his versions where necessary. This taught him to express ideas clearly and cogently … he waited long enough that not only had he forgotten the wording of the sentences in the original articles, but he had also forgotten their order, and he tried once again to reproduce the articles … this exercise forced him to think carefully about how to order the thoughts in a piece of writing.

Opening the door (page 179):

Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.

Building your focus base (page 205):

Research on the most successful creative people … finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time — exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place.

Play long-run games (page 233):

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.

The importance of mental representations continued (page 255):

Students who develop mental representations can go on to generate their own scientific experiments or to write their own books — and research has shown that many successful scientists and authors started their careers at a young age in just this way. The best way to help students develop their skills and mental representations in an area is to give them models they can replicate and learn from … 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 other areas as well.

Why this all matters beyond chess grandmasters and violin virtuosos (pages 258–259):

We humans are most human when we’re improving ourselves. We, unlike any other animal, can consciously change ourselves, to improve ourselves in ways we choose … In the future most people will have no choice but to continuously learn new skills, so it will be essential to train students and adults about how to learn efficiently [emphasis mine] … it may be that the only answer to a world in which rapidly improving technologies are constantly changing the conditions under which we work, play, and live will be to create a society of people who recognize that they can control their development and understand how to do it.