Peak (2016) | Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool

TL;DR: The key to Mastery and Peak Performance is to build Mental Representations. The key to building Mental Representations is Proper Training, Effort and Time. The best format for proper training: Deliberate Practice.

Okay now one by one.

Peak Performance is pretty easy to spot in some areas: a championship trophy, placing in a top notch exam, jumping the highest or memorizing the most number of cards. In some fields, not so much. It's not easily clear who are the best teachers, best doctors or the best managers. Nevertheless, when we encounter them, we are left in awe in how well they do their work.


So two guys have been studying Peak Performers for a reaally long time; Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool. Most people would have heard of Anders Ericcson from Malcolm Gladwell's book: Outliers, who famously popularized the 10,000 Hours Rule. Ericcson and Pool clarifies: The 10,000 hours is not a rule. It is an average. You have to put a tremendous amount of effort to be the best at something.



Back to us normal people. What most of us have usually known or have usually done is what Ericcson and Pool defines as Naive Practice: 

Naive Practice is doing something repeatedly and expecting repetition alone will improve one's performance.
The real juice in improving performance is Purposeful Practice:
Purposeful Practice is focused; has well-defined, specific goals, involves feedback and requires getting out of one's comfort zone. 
Even better than that, the one they call the Gold Standard: Deliberate Practice. Which is essentially Purposeful Practice with a teacher/coach and where the field is well established and clear on what elite performance is.
Deliberate Practice is where effective training techniques have been established; takes place outside of one's comfort zone; well-defined and specific goals; requires full attention and conscious action; involves feedback and modification of effort in response to feedback; produces and depends on effective mental representations; builds and modifies previously acquired skills and works to improve specific sub-skills.
What makes all this possible? 


Homeostasis, and that your brain and body is adaptable; busy rewiring and rebuilding.

Push it (your body) hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.
Regular Training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenge.
And what really happens when your brain rewires and you train for something with some real focus, you build Mental Representations.
A Mental Representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.
This seems vague and hard to absorb as a definition in itself; but think of it like Sherlock Holmes' seeing every move before the actual move. One thing made definite by Ericsson and Pool:
Better Mental Representation leads to Better Performance
So yea, we can get better at things with the right system in place.


For the elite ones, Grandmasters and all, they usually follow a path

  1. They started young. It started as Fun and Play.
  2. Then they start to build an identity around it. An intrinsic switch happens.
  3. They commit to the field; the art or the sport.
  4. The last is they expand the boundaries of their fields. They elevate everyone's game. Their legacy is an even further bar of excellence.
Well then they must have been geniuses, prodigies, natural talents!? 


Wrong. There are no prodigies, only people who put in time. Ericcson and Pool writes

... 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.
Both will power and natural talents are traits that people assign to someone after the fact.
Ericcson and Pool gives many examples in the book. It is interesting to realize the overlaps in other works: Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset; Angela Duckworth's Grit and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow.


On Mindset: Believing in fixed capabilities doles out fixed performances. Tell people they can't do something long enough, they will eventually believe it. On persevering: Duckworth notes practice as a subset of Grit. On Flow; Ericsson and Pool gives a nod to Csikszentmihalyi's work. There doesn't seem to be any animosity. Practice is Preparation; Flow is the performance.



To conclude, Ericcson and Pool argues to revolutionize learning itself. Current classroom set ups and lectures have done okay. But it still prioritizes Knowledge over Skills, which may explain why some of us feel no particular attachment to school after graduating from it. The objective should be on

What you can do versus what you know
The buzzword is Actionable.
You don't build mental representation by thinking about something; You build by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over.
So find a teacher or build a skill, fail and iterate.


Have an awesome day!





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