Notes on Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

I enjoyed reading Playing Scared (all about conquering stage fright through deliberate practice), and I recently heard a Freakonomics podcast all about the original researcher who coined the term and researched how experts practice. So I decided to check out the book discussed in the podcast, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.

I greatly enjoyed it, and it was interesting as a counterpoint and further specialization of many of the ideas discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (which popularized, though not quite the same way Ericsson intended, the "10,000 hour rule").

I loved the takeaway message of Peak: while talent can give an initial boost, everyone has the potential to develop skills in whatever area they desire as long as they put in the hard work and practice in the right way. The examples of how people who were "bad singers" purposefully learned and were "certified" to have perfect pitch were inspiring.

​Intro
Gifted aren't born
Perfect pitch is about training
Brain very adaptable until 6 years old

1 the power of purposeful practice
Have specific short term goal for each practice session which is objective and which would show performance improvement (play song 3 times in a row with no errors
Concrete baby steps
Break down goal
Give task full attention
Immediate feedback

2 harnessing adaptability
The greater the challenge the greater the change

3 mental representations 
Visual images 
Training is specific for each skill
Allow more efficient processing of info
Experts have more mental representations
Recognizing and responding to patterns

4 the gold standard
Amount of solitary practice time per week is biggest differentiator
Deliberate practice is purposeful with well defined goal and helped by expert coach
Requires full attention on specific goal

5 principles of deliberate practice 

6 principles in everyday life
Find a good teacher 
Need to focus while practicing 
To get past plateau start using different training ideas

7 road to extraordinary
Desire to play is motivation for kids
Parents praise achievement
Adults can develop perfect pitch from proper training

8 what about natural talent
Innate characteristics play smaller role than assumed
Practice more important in long run than initial advantage of talent
Recognize and develop potential in everyone

9 where we go from here
Focus on building skills not knowledge through training 

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