7 Take-aways from Peak by Ericsson and Pool

Peak (Secrets from the New Science of Expertise) is a book by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Ericsson is the original researcher behind the famous 10,000 hours rule (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and misinterpreted).

You have to read this book if you want to dive deep into the topic of how a few people manage to rise to the top of their fields (and top of the world: think Mozart) while others don’t.

Here’s my take-aways from this book:

1) There is hardly any such thing as innate talent. People who rise and shine and impress their achievements upon the world do so by practicing long, hard hours and by constantly improving on their skills slowly and steadily. This holds true for violinists, sports people and mathematicians.

2) Start young gives you an edge

In the book, the authors make it clear that even having a perfect-pitch (which is a pre-requisite for having the potential to become Mozart-like musician) is not innate. Spoiler & fun-fact: ALL children in young age have the ability to hone this perfect-pitch ability for recognizing notes of music. However, since not all children attend music lessons, so not many end up exploiting that potential.

The authors quote a Japanese study in which the researchers were able to develop perfect-pitch recognition in every small child they had in their study.

3) Deliberate practice — name of the game

“Deliberate practice” (as the name suggests) means deliberately training one specific skill or sub-skill. That is, you don’t train music skills or computer programming, but instead focus on one weak area at a time and try to improve it. For example, as a violin player you focus on playing notes where a higher speed is required (something you are not comfortable with and is thus your weak spot). As a computer programmer, you could try to solve one certain type of command in your code or a certain problem.

4) Mental Representations and why they matter

This is the new phrase I learned from this book: Mental representations is a subject’s mental understanding (image) of how they perform something. Expert performers have very different mental representations from novices. Ericsson has found through his intensive research that these representations play a key role in how well you perform. Top performers use highly trained mental representations to play complicated music pieces with brilliance, runners use their mental representations to run well and at amazing speeds, and world-class chess-players use them to know in the fraction of a second which is the winning move.

5) Experience alone does not make you better

The authors assert that more experienced performers (be in medicine or sports) don’t necessarily make better performers. What matters is how much deliberate practice they have put into improving their specific skills (whether surgery or running long-distance) and in fact there is research that proves that once a person has reached a certain high level in a specialized field, they will over the coming time level off and become at least slightly worse than they once were. The reason? Not sticking with deliberate practice.

6) Reaching Expert performance is Expensive

Trainings cost a lot. More so in fields such as sports than mathematics. In the book you find calculations of how training a child for pro-tennis level skill will amount close to 100,000 $ until that child reaches the expert level. Thus most parents, they author say, cannot afford to train all their children in such highly expensive fields.

7) Having Fun = Not Going to be expert

The most surprising finding is that training to become an expert in any area is not fun. If you do any practice (playing an instrument or writing an article), unless you are fully absorbed in it and really try to push yourself outside of the comfort zone, you are basically not developing more skills. In other words, you are working at a plateau.

In the book you find an example of a study where the amateur singers reported having fun in the practice while the pros said something along the lines of “dude, it’s hard work” (my words).

Becoming an expert is about pushing yourself outside of comfort zone. That is tough work. Not fun at all. For most people, that would be a torture, which is probably why most people don’t end up being experts.

Peak is not a book for the average reader. Outliers (by Gladwell) was and that book quoted and popularized the 10,000 hours rule which is an erroneous generalization of Ericson’ research findings. “Peak” gives you in-depth explanations of high-performers and what the studies found out about them. Therefore, the book can seem boring to a reader who just wants to read interesting stories.