22 Feb 5 Game-Changing Ideas from the book “Peak”

I recently finished a book entitled “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Historically-speaking, books with the word “science” in their title tend to intimidate me. However, this book was an accessible read with inspiring insights into just how attainable the expertise we admire really is. Though attainable, there is no way to traverse the road to expertise without tremendous effort.

Here are five big ideas that I took away from this book:

1. Not all practice is created equal.

It’s a commendable thing to form the habit of showing up to practice in the first place. Many people never intentionally practice anything consistently for any sustained period of time. It is this feature of our culture that inspired me to formalize an initiative challenging people to practice something for one hundred days. Ideally, this commitment is to practice something for one hundred consecutive days, but there is some grace in this commitment. However, even with leeway, most people who start out on their 100-day journey do not finish it. 

I bring this up to say that if you have an intentional practice habit at all I commend you. If you purposefully practice anything consistently, then you have built the infrastructure to truly take advantage of the principles this book has to offer.

However, this book makes it abundantly clear that if you desire to become an expert, the habit of practice is not enough. You have to engage the proper form of practice in order to ensure continual growth.

There are three types of practice:

Naïve Practice, the most common form, is when you practice enough to gain a functional, even recreational, level of proficiency but naïvely assume that growth will continue through the same sort of engagement with the activity.

Purposeful Practice is more effective than Naïve Practice in that it engages a higher level of intentionality. Practicing purposefully involves setting goals and identifying specific objectives.

Deliberate Practice builds upon Purposeful Practice by inviting helpful training methods and expert feedback.

According to Ericsson and Pool, one of the most important elements to an effective practice regimen is that it pushes beyond the limits of one’s current abilities but just far enough so that the task is still attainable. Training with an expert is a great way to ensure that your practice regimen is challenging you appropriately.

Peak talks a lot about the idea of “mental representations”. A mental representation is a conceptual rendering of idyllic performance upon which you can draw data to improve your own performance. Training with an expert is ideal because experts hold specific data on what idyllic performance looks like. Furthermore, an expert can help you identify the gaps that stand in your way from achieving higher levels of performance. In Karate, these are our senseis. In sports, these are our coaches. In life these are our mentors.

2. It is impossible to reach expert-level performance without honesty.

As a musician, one way I leverage this principle is by recording myself playing. Through several years of musical study and exposure to a breadth of musical expressions, I’ve developed detailed mental representations of most of the music I like. Recording myself presents me with the unbridled truth about how I sound in comparison to these mental representations. Recordings also do this without imposing any value judgement on it. 

This is an important thing to note about honesty in relation to practice. The feedback needn’t carry negative or positive energy along with it. When it comes to improving performance, honesty is best served objectively. 

For instance, it is less helpful to say a subjective statement like, “This sounds bad”, than it is to say something more specific and objective like, “Your tempo is accelerating beyond the starting tempo.” There are musical contexts in which the composer calls tempo acceleration. This is to say that tempo acceleration is not inherently bad. However, when you become aware of the objective information that your tempo is accelerating, you can then decide whether or not this is something you want to change.

In the same vein, commenting that something is “good” is a statement of opinion that also does little to help development. It may or may not be an honest expression of a person’s thoughts and feelings. However, it lacks helpfulness because it fails to provide honest and actionable information about the performance itself.

This factor is another reason why training with an expert is so valuable. An expert can help guide you with an accurate assessment of your performance in relation to a reliable mental representation of a desired performance.

3. Experience ≠ Expertise

Have you ever encountered someone with lesser proficiency than their experience seems to support? These instances are real world manifestations of the idea that only certain types of practice lead to expertise.

Ericsson and Pool reveal that experience without the proper type of practice can actually lead to a decrease in proficiency.

I’m grateful for my childhood piano teacher, Solomon Phifer. He taught me how to practice deliberately which led to fast growth in the beginning of my piano studies. This growth encouraged me and inspired me to fall in love with the instrument. Early on, I was able to learn advanced concepts on piano. Although I was inexperienced, I had good mental representations of what the music I was playing was supposed to sound like. Solomon blessed me with the framework for how to practice effectively. I’m continually grateful for the proficiency I possess as a result. I’m also grateful for an understanding of how to continually improve my expertise.

4. The traditionally held concept of talent is mostly propaganda.

A common response to the fast rate of my initial growth was the idea that I was born with some unquantifiable quotient of innate talent. Several family members who witnessed me kicking in rhythm in my mother’s womb supported this idea. The explanation was that this rhythmic kicking meant that I was born to play music. I’ve since come to understand that my kicking in rhythm could be explained by any number of causes that have no correlation to a predisposed musical ability. 

In the book, Ericsson and Pool study savants and famed prodigies. In every case, they are able to make a compelling argument for the existence of deliberate practice in the development of prodigious performance. 

Peak reveals that even a rare ability like perfect pitch, which is widely believed to be an innate talent, occurs as a result of the right form of practice at the right time in a child’s development, even if this practice is done unintentionally. (Perfect or absolute pitch is the ability to accurately recognize or reproduce a specific pitch without the aid of a reference tone.)

A notable point to mention is that there are some abilities that are much harder to gain expertise in if you start later in life. However, Peak makes it clear that even in most of these cases a high level of performance is still possible through deliberate practice.

I know this subheading may be slightly provocative to some. The point here is that if there does exist some predetermined fixed ceiling of talent bestowed upon all individuals, we have no way of being able to accurately measure this. Even more to the point, the measures that humans have traditionally used to measure talent speak more to development than anything – which leads to my last point…

5. Belief is crucial. Messaging Matters.

I was blessed to be fed positive messages from an early age about my innate talents. I know other people who were fed the exact opposite types of messages. Erroneous or not, these ideas have the power to shape our beliefs about ourselves, especially when we are exposed to them at formative stages. 

Think about it. Compare these two ideas:

“I have a fixed level of innate talent that I can’t ever hope to surpass and necessarily limits my performance potential.”

“I have an unlimited ability to learn and grow in my performance abilities.”

Which one of these, if believed, would facilitate more action towards expertise?

I now fight hard against deterministic, talent-based thinking. For too long I’ve seen people use this thinking to absolve themselves from doing the work to become great in their level of proficiency in areas they claim to value. Grace comes into play for me when I remember that most people were fed these victim-based ideas from someone influential in their lives. However, now the cat is out of the bag. We are not irreversibly linked to the beliefs we inherited. We possess the freedom to examine these beliefs and the opportunity to choose to believe something more helpful. 

I choose to believe that we all have a talent called curiosity. However, I believe that we cultivate this talent through nurturing. I believe we each have another talent called discipline which we each have the ability to strengthen. And, as long as we are living, we each have a talent called choice. We can choose what we believe which ultimately influences how we behave. I’m grateful for a belief system that empowers me to develop myself.

Do any of these ideas stand out to you? Any objections? I’d love to discuss these thoughts with anyone interested in chatting about them. Feel free to reach out to me. Also like, share and subscribe to my blog to stay up to date on my latest writings.