Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,

There's a well-known idea called the "10,000-hour rule of genius," but it's not quite as simple as that! Ericson, the author of Peak: In his book, Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Ericsson shares some fascinating insights. He suggests that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve true expertise.

Ericsson is a wonderful professor of psychology at Florida State University and the brilliant creator of the "deliberate practice" law. He's really interested in how amazing people in different areas like sports, music, chess, medicine, the military, and other fields get to be so good at what they do. He made an amazing discovery! He found that all of these incredible people have one thing in common: they follow the "deliberate practice" law. The book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise is a real page-turner! Secrets from the New Science of Expertise was an instant bestseller with astonishing sales as soon as it was published in 2016.

I've been studying knowledge management for quite some time now, and I've read so many books on effective learning methods. But I have to say, "Peak: If you're looking for the most thorough and profound explanation of training methods, look no further than "Secrets from the New Science of Expertise." This book is a real eye-opener! It helps us to understand things that were unclear before and also makes us think about how we see things. I'm sure this book will become a classic in the field of learning!

This book has really inspired us with three amazing ideas. The first is that training can create genius. I've always wondered if genius is something you're born with. The second thing I want to mention is that training can be divided into two types: effective and ineffective. How can we tell the difference between the two? And finally, we have the most powerful and effective learning method to date: deliberate practice! Have you ever wondered what deliberate practice is all about? Let's dive in and explore these three ideas one by one together!

Part 1

Let's dive in and explore why training can create genius together! Everyone knows Mozart was a musical genius. He gave a major concert when he was just seven years old, which was pretty amazing for someone so young! But that was nothing compared to the amazing fact that Mozart could tell the pitch of any note, even the tone of a sound like the chime of a clock or the sound of someone sneezing, when he was just four years old! This ability is pretty rare, so it's pretty cool! Just one in ten thousand people has this amazing ability to perfectly pitch notes! Mozart's incredible talent has always been used as a perfect example to prove that "talent is innate." It's so interesting to think about why geniuses are geniuses! It seems that they have extraordinary abilities.

I wonder if this is really the case? In 2014, a Japanese psychologist conducted an experiment. He found 24 lovely little ones between the ages of two and six. After just one year of training, all 24 children had the amazing ability to sing in perfect pitch! In other words, after training, they could also achieve the same amazing performance as a genius! The author thoughtfully considered the possibility that Mozart's remarkable talent might also have been shaped by his dedicated training. It's also worth mentioning that as early as when Mozart was just four years old, his father taught him music full-time. The daily music training was even more intense than that of the 24 children! It was all that training that made him a genius!

In the past, we thought that in some fields, some people were just born with a talent for it, while others weren't. If you've got the talent, you've got what it takes to succeed. But if you don't, no amount of practice is going to make a difference. Talent is something you're born with, and it's not something you can just make up! Have you ever wondered what "talent" really means? Have you ever wondered what genius really means? It simply means you were born with it! However, the author has a different take on this. He says the good news is that all so-called potential can be cultivated! It's amazing how running for fitness can build muscles! The same is true of potential — it can be cultivated with the right method. This view is a real game-changer! It turns everything we thought we knew on its head.

The amazing thing about the human body and brain is that they can adapt to anything you throw at them! If you train deliberately, you can really make a big change to how adaptable your body is. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the world record for human push-ups! How many do you think it is, 500 or 1,000? In 1980, a Japanese man did an amazing 10,507! Is that a bit of an exaggeration? Oh, that's nothing! In 1993, an amazing American managed to do 46,001 push-ups in just 21 hours! Oh my, just how far can our amazing bodies go? With the right training, you can become strong enough to do more than 40,000 push-ups in 21 hours! And it's the same with our wonderful brains! With a little bit of practice, the brain can also grow and develop new potential that it didn't have before.

Have you heard about the taxi drivers in London? They have to pass what is considered the world's toughest test! It's because GPS systems can get confused in the city's complex road conditions. To pass the taxi test, drivers have to put their all into a lot of intense training. It's so inspiring to see how intensive training can really make a difference! Studies have shown that the hippocampus, the part of the brain that helps us navigate, actually grows quite a bit in drivers who have passed the test after going through a lot of training. Guess what? The same thing happens in blind people, too! It's so inspiring to see how, after losing their sight, they have developed the relevant part of the brain by training to use their fingers to touch Braille. So, the author says, we can change how our bodies adapt through intensive training. We can also create potential and talent, which can lead to genius.

Part 2

Then, you might be wondering, why have we been going to school and receiving training all this time, if we haven't been trained to be geniuses? The author says that it's because we haven't been using the right training methods. Training methods can be divided into two groups: effective and ineffective. Unfortunately, most of us often fall into the ineffective training group. Have you ever wondered how you can tell the difference between effective training and ineffective training? The author is so helpful! They give us another great insight.

Let's picture this: a young boy is taking piano lessons. Every day, he practices for an hour. But, sadly, he keeps failing his tests. "Could you please explain why?" The student says, "I don't know why, I practice every day, but I just can't seem to get it." The teacher asks kindly, "How many times have you practiced?" The student says, "Oh, I've done it ten or twenty times." The teacher asks again, "How many times did you get it right?" The student says, "I'm sorry, I'm not sure. Once or twice, I think." The teacher then asked with a smile, "So, how did you practice?" The student replied, "I'm sorry, I just kept practicing and didn't know how else to do it." Does this sound familiar to you? We keep doing our homework, doing our exercises, running, and playing chess, but we haven't become academic prodigies, sports champions, or chess masters, which is totally okay! I'd love to know why! It's okay, we've all been there! It's because we're doing what I like to call "naïve practice." Even though we're totally absorbed in our work, we're not training as effectively as we could be.

It's totally normal to have some misconceptions about practice. In fact, most people have three misconceptions about practice: The first thing a lot of us think is that practice isn't that useful and that our abilities are mainly down to our genes. Some folks might say, "I'm just not good at math," "I don't have a strong spatial imagination," "I don't know the way," or "I can't do better." But the author says that the good news is that anyone can change themselves through the right training. All you need is the right attitude!

The second thing people often get wrong is thinking that if you just keep at it, your abilities will gradually improve. But the author says that if doing something long enough would be enough to get good at it, then there wouldn't be so many people who have been playing chess on the street for years but are still terrible at it. It just doesn't add up! It's a common misconception that doing something the same way over and over will magically make it better. Unfortunately, that's not how it works! Sometimes, it can even make us stagnate and cause our abilities to slowly decline.

The third thing a lot of us get wrong about practice is that if we just work hard enough, we'll get better at something. Let's say I want to become a better manager, sell more products, or get the team to work together more closely. I know I can do it by just working harder! The author also says that if you don't have a dedicated and appropriate practice method, even if you work twice as hard, you might not make much progress. I'm sure we've all seen that really hardworking student at school who was always studying and trying their best. But, sadly, their grades never seemed to reflect that.

It's a common misconception that the more you practice, the better you'll get. But that's not quite right! Effective practice doesn't necessarily mean long hours or repetitive practice. It's so important to find the right practice method to make sure you're getting the most out of your practice time! So, you might be wondering, what kind of practice method is considered effective? The author says that a very important method is called purposeful training, which is great to hear! Have you ever wondered what purposeful training is all about? Let's go back to the lovely example we just used, the child practising the piano. If his training is a process like this, he sets himself a goal, such as not making any mistakes for three consecutive times, and then playing the piece at the right speed. If it doesn't meet this standard, he will find the reason. Just picture this: if this child trains every night with such a standard, will he make faster progress?

So, purposeful training is all about making little steps and big strides! It's about taking those small victories and turning them into something bigger. It's about building up your skills bit by bit until you're ready to take on the world! Secondly, it's really important to be focused when you're training. It's so easy to get distracted, but try your best to stay on track! We all do things without thinking about them carefully sometimes. As Sherlock Holmes said, you're not just looking, you're observing! And, as a helpful reminder, purposeful training requires timely feedback. It can be really hard to know whether you're doing something right or wrong after you've finished doing it. This can make progress feel really slow.

And last but not least, it's really important to remember that you've got to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Just picture an amateur pianist who started learning to play the piano in his teens and is still playing in the same way 30 years later. Even if he has completed 10,000 hours of genius training, he will not become a genius. I'd love to know why! He hasn't yet taken the plunge and stepped outside his comfort zone. I'm sure you'll agree that effective practice is training that purposefully breaks outside your comfort zone. This is the only way you can make rapid progress! So, does that mean that if we train purposefully, we'll become geniuses? The author kindly says, "No." Purposeful training is really effective, but it's not quite enough to develop a genius-level ability. If you're looking to reach a genius-level, you'll want to try a more efficient method, which is "deliberate practice."

Part 3

Deliberate practice is also a type of purposeful practice. It's the most effective method humans have discovered so far for improving and training skills! So, what exactly is deliberate practice? Before we dive into deliberate practice, let's take a moment to ask ourselves a question: What are we training with our efforts and diligence, my friends? Are we training speed? Or maybe it's musicality? Or maybe it's technique? The author says that the real core of training is our "mental representations." Have you ever wondered what a mental representation is? This is a term from cognitive psychology. It's a fancy way of saying the mental structure we use when we think about things. I know it sounds a little vague, so let me give you an example.

Let's take chess as an example. When an amateur player looks at a chess game, they see the pieces moving one by one. But for a master, it's not just about seeing the changes in the game on the chessboard. They can also see the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, the next trend, the opponent's possible strategies, and the corresponding solutions they might take. Have you ever noticed that when it comes to the same thing, there's a difference in how novices and professionals look at it? Simply put, their cognitive modules and structures are different, and this difference is reflected in their mental representation. That's where experts really shine! They can take all that complex and large amounts of information and turn it into individual cognitive modules. Then, they can use these modules to think through and tackle problems in a way that's unique to them. When they're faced with new situations, they can quickly pull up some helpful cognitive modules from the past, which makes it easier for them to think and solve problems.

Let's say you've never played soccer before. You might think there are more than 20 people on the field, running around, and all you have to do is just grab the ball when it comes to you. But a professional player will see patterns, which is really helpful! Some folks have even done experiments where they've asked professional players to watch a game, or a video of a real soccer game. When a player just receives the ball, they press pause and then ask the subject what action they think the player will take next. Oh, what do you think he'll do next? Will he dribble the ball, shoot it, or pass it? The more talented the player, the more accurately they can judge the next move. Simply put, there's a big difference in how professionals and regular folks think about a problem. And there's a similar difference between geniuses and the rest of us. So, grasping this concept is key to understanding the purpose of deliberate practice. We're all looking to build a stronger mental representation to think about things, and deliberate practice is currently the most powerful and efficient training method humans have discovered!

So, what exactly is deliberate practice? The author says that, technically speaking, there are two main things to look for when you're judging whether something is deliberate practice. First, the field you're training in is a reasonably developed industry with a set of mature evaluation standards and efficient methods. Second, you need an excellent mentor who can assign training assignments and provide timely feedback. So, to make sure we're all on the same page, let's make sure we meet these two conditions together. Then we can call it deliberate training in the strict sense!

As you can imagine, this means that there are only a few industries that can really meet this strict definition of deliberate training. These include things like chess, ballet, gymnastics, and musical performance. Take violin training, for example. It's a great one that can really benefit from the method of deliberate practice! The great thing about violin training is that it has a very standardized skill set. Plus, most performance methods have been perfected over decades or even centuries! If you can find a good teacher who can tell you what is correct, or even the best way to hold the violin, how to move the bow most effectively when playing the sautillé, and so on, these methods cannot be achieved quickly by exploring and training on your own. You'll have to take many detours if you don't have a teacher to show you the way! This is why we often see very young, talented violinists—they have first-class mentors who guide them with mature and reasonable skills and methods. With a little bit of deliberate training, they can become absolute geniuses in this field!

Sadly, though, most of our industries don't quite meet this standard. It's so sad that in many cases, there just isn't a system in place for finding the most efficient methods, or a way to connect with first-class instructors who specialize in coaching. So, what can we do about it? The author says that we can be happy with second best and train as much as possible using the principles of deliberate practice.

I'd love to tell you more about the principles of deliberate practice! First, take a moment to think about what you want to achieve. What kind of performance are you aiming for? Second, it would be really great if we could find the best experts in the field, or masters, or classic books, so that we can compare ourselves with the high-level mental representations in this field and obtain high-quality feedback. Third, it would be really helpful to study the possible reasons for success behind these outstanding people or successful cases. Fourth, we should always make sure we're investing time and energy into training.

I'm so excited to share with you the four principles of deliberate practice! This principle may sound simple, but if you can apply it effectively, the results will be amazing! It might surprise you to know that in the early years of the Vietnam War, the track record of US naval pilots was actually very poor. In the first five months of 1968, the US Navy did a great job shooting down nine Vietnamese aircraft. Unfortunately, they lost more than ten fighter jets. And, sadly, the pilots fired 50 air-to-air missiles, but none hit the target. Given these circumstances, the US Navy had to come up with a plan to help their pilots improve their skills and become the best they could be. This led to the development of the famous "Ace Training Program," which was a real game-changer!

The plan was to first choose the best pilots to be instructors. These pilots would then simulate Vietnamese fighter tactics, form the Red Army, and select the second-best pilots as students to form the Blue Army. Next, the Red Army and the Blue Army were pitted against each other every day, which was a great way to learn and grow! The instructors were really great at pushing their students to the brink of defeat. This was a great way to help them learn how to make combat decisions in emergencies, dangerous situations, or various complex situations. Once the battle was over, the instructors and students would get together to chat and debrief that day to sum up their experiences. The instructors were happy to share their thinking and judgment processes, and the students were eager to learn and find ways to improve. The next day, they trained again with new methods.

After all that hard work, these US Navy pilots were back in the battlefield by 1970. And they did amazingly well! They shot down 12.5 enemy aircraft and only lost one of their own. The amazing success of this pilot program is thanks to the power of deliberate practice. It's all about having clear goals, the best teachers, training that challenges you, and feedback to help you improve. Plus, it's about doing this over and over again until you get it right! As a matter of fact, the whole process is based on the principle of deliberate practice.

I think you'll agree that this method of deliberate practice is pretty great, don't you? I'd absolutely love to keep training and find a good mentor, but I'm so busy at work! It's a bit too difficult for me right now. The author says, "Yes, you can! You don't have to stop working. Instead, use the strategy of learning by doing and apply the principles of deliberate practice."

Take sales skills, for example. They've always been considered tacit knowledge, which makes it tough to improve them. The author then told us about a wonderful company called Blue Rabbit, which uses the principle of deliberate practice to train the sales skills of sales managers on the job. Every year, they get together with their top-performing senior sales managers for a few meetings to chat about the next sales strategy. But what should they do if the past meetings have often been a bit of a formality? The company had a great idea! They came up with a way for these senior sales managers to role-play with real customers during the meeting. One manager would act as the customer and the other would sell the company's products to him. The other senior managers are there to give him lots of helpful feedback on the whole sales process. They'll tell him what he did well this time, what he could change, and what experience they can share with him. The next day, this sales manager gives us a quick summary of his experience, conducts another sales session, and then the others provide their evaluations and feedback again. The company even records this process on video! This is a great way to help the whole team improve their sales skills! The great thing about this process is that it doesn't require you to be in training full-time. You'll be amazed at what you can achieve by simply incorporating the principles of deliberate practice into your daily work!

I totally get it. You might be thinking, "If I want to improve my abilities, I don't know any outstanding mentors or have any friends who are such experts." What should I do, dear? The author says, "Don't worry if you don't have a mentor! You can still apply the principles of deliberate practice to improve your abilities, even if you use cases or high-quality books."

Take Benjamin Franklin, for example. He was a great man in the early years of the founding of the United States. He didn't have a lot of formal education when he was younger, but that didn't stop him! He was able to write such beautiful, flowing sentences! It's so impressive, but he was always looking for ways to improve his writing skills. By a wonderful stroke of luck, he came across a magazine called "The Observer." He was really impressed by the quality of the articles in the magazine and was super keen to be able to write articles as beautiful as those. But he didn't know any of these amazing authors to get their feedback. So what did he do? So he tried his best to imitate the style of the articles in the magazine. At first, he tried to copy the way they phrased things. If I were to write this sentence myself, how would I phrase it? I compare my way of writing with theirs and I wonder why their way is better. I guess I just have to keep practicing!

Even after he'd made some tweaks to the wording, he still felt like there was something missing from the article. He noticed that the layout and structure of his own article weren't quite right, either. So he took the liberty of rearranging the paragraphs of the article in The Observer to better suit his vision. He thought about what he would write first and what second, and he wondered why the author had a different order. Thanks to his endless curiosity and dedication to research, Benjamin Franklin became one of the most respected writers in American history. His book, Poor Charlie's Book of Wisdom, and his later autobiography are two of the most beloved classics in American literary history.

You know, Franklin actually used the principle of deliberate practice to solve a problem that most of us face. I'd love to improve my abilities, but I don't know any experts and I can't afford such a professional mentor. Do you have any tips for me? Then we can use the principle of deliberate practice to break down high-level cases and books to help us improve, which is really useful! You see, in this case, Franklin studied high-level cases without a mentor. He analyzed the reasons for their possible success and then deliberately and repeatedly trained himself to continuously improve his skills.

But there's another situation I'd like to mention. In my field, there aren't even any classic books, and the opinions of industry experts aren't always right. I could really use some advice here! The author says that in this situation, we have to go back to the heart of deliberate practice. We need to make sure we're giving ourselves timely and high-quality feedback so we can make sure we're being as effective as we can be.

The author gives a great example of American radiologists who diagnose and analyze breast cancer patients through X-ray photos. As they've been in the profession for longer, their judgment skills haven't improved as much as they could have. Sometimes they've even regressed a bit! I'd love to know why! It's so interesting to learn that radiologists may only find 4 to 8 cancerous features in about 1,000 X-rays they look at! That means the number of times the doctor gets effective feedback is very small. Even in these few cases, the doctor feels that the X-ray may have a cancerous lesion. But for privacy reasons, the case goes to the doctor's own private doctor, so the radiologist has no way of knowing whether their judgment is correct. What's more, there hasn't been a particularly effective way to improve this ability to judge X-ray photos in this field. Even the most experienced experts can't always be sure their judgments are correct. So, how can doctors' judgment abilities be improved? The author has a great idea! He thinks we should use the principles of deliberate practice to strengthen the feedback between decisions and results. Then, we can find the gaps and deliberately train.

I'd love to know how one goes about doing this! The author has a great idea! He suggests collecting cases of patients whose X-ray images were diagnosed over the years, and then finding the actual subsequent case files of the corresponding patients. From these cases, we can find and summarize some really valuable ones. These are the case photos that have a special feedback effect. For example, we can look at photos where the radiologist initially looked at the photo and did not find a problem, but then the patient developed an illness. Or we can look at photos where the doctor initially judged that there was cancer, but it was actually a misdiagnosis. These valuable cases that have been summarized are great training material for doctors! It's a great way to learn from your mistakes! You can study why your diagnosis was wrong and how to improve it by re-diagnosing these X-rays that you know the results of. This is how radiologists have transformed what might have been a less effective form of feedback training, which was only done once a year in the past, into a more effective form of feedback training that can be done dozens of times a day! This is a great example of how we can use the principles of deliberate practice to make a real difference in how radiologists work. It's amazing to see how much their diagnostic accuracy has improved!

This is a great way to use the principles of deliberate practice to make your work more effective, even when you don't get much feedback. We all face these kinds of situations in our work, don't we? Your work is part of a whole project process, and we're here to support you every step of the way! Take graphic designers or programmers, for instance. We don't always know how our work affects the outcome, which makes it tricky to improve our abilities. After a few years, we might feel like we're just coasting along. The wonderful thing about deliberate practice is that it helps us find a way to connect our work with the final result. For example, if you're a graphic designer this time, you can have a chat with your colleagues and relevant department personnel about the improvement plan. Then, you can deliberately practice it yourself to continue to improve next time! This is a great way to keep on improving!

In a nutshell, the above content is the main content of deliberate practice. It's so great when you have first-class people to guide you and give you feedback, because that's the best way to grow quickly in an area! It's so helpful to learn the right concepts and methods first, which makes learning much more efficient! This is what we call deliberate practice. It's amazing how in some fields, when you combine the best teachers and methods with high-intensity training, you can create geniuses! But don't worry! Even if you don't have access to these conditions, you can still use the principle of deliberate practice to its fullest. Learn from the amazing examples of top performers, study why they might have succeeded, and keep trying to improve!

And now for a quick recap! I'd like to tell you about a wonderful book I've read recently called Peak: We're so excited to share that Secrets from the New Science of Expertise has inspired us with three amazing points! The great news is that talent can be trained! The great news is that we can undergo intense training to cause changes in our brain and body structure, thereby producing miraculous abilities like those of a natural genius. Secondly, why don't most of us train to become geniuses? It's okay, we all do it! We often engage in ineffective training. The good news is that anyone can make rapid progress with the right training! All you need is purposeful training that keeps you focused, provides timely feedback, constantly sets goals, and pushes you out of your comfort zone. But there's more! To truly excel in genius training, you also need to deliberately practice, find the best and most outstanding mentors to guide you, and constantly figure out why others are successful. Keep training and improving, and you'll be amazed at what you can achieve!