Big Ideas

The big takeaway from this book is that most people do not know how to practice effectively and believe in a lot of limiting myths about natural talent. A great tactical guide on how to practice better to build mastery in a wide range of skills.

The main points are:

1. Only purposeful or deliberate practice will enable consistent improvement
2. If possible it is far more effective to get a coach or teacher
3. The mind and body are malleable throughout one's life
4. Practice is fundamentally about building better, more efficient mental representations
5. Natural talent only applies in the beginning of skill acquisition 

Notes

The Power of Purposeful Practice

The chapter describes research done by the author with a student at Carnegie Mellon who was tasked with trying to remember a string of random integers read out to him at 1 second intervals. Previously it was believed that people could remember at most 6-9 but by the end of the study he was able to remember 82.

The Rise of Extraordinary Performers

This section catalogues how over time the level of achievement in various fields has improved a lot. This begs the question then of how and why. What differentiates olympians of today from those 100 years ago.

The Usual Approach

This section describes how most people typically practice until they reach a level of competence and then they plateau. Ericsson explains how simply repeating the same activity over and over again does not yield improvements. Simply because someone has been doing something a long time does not make them necessarily more skilled. This is "naive" practice.

Purposeful Practice

Distinct from "naive" practice is "purposeful" practice and this is what actually drives improvement.

• "Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals"
• "Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal."
• "Purposeful practice is focused"
• "Purposeful practice involves feedback"
• "Purposeful practice requires getting out of one's comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice."
• "Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn't do before."
• "The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach."
• "Meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation."

Purposeful Practice is Incomplete

Similarly, just working hard and remaining focused isn't enough to guarantee progress. Sometimes people can hit a limit that's impossible to get around without adding some additional elements. By adding these additional elements you get "Deliberate Practice". This is discussed in later in chapter 4.

Harnessing Adaptability

By studying the brains of cabbie drivers in London, blind people and others, researchers have been able to demonstrate that it's possible to literally change the structure of the brain through certain forms of practice and training. This is true well into adulthood, the brain does not stop adapting after puberty. Like the body, the brain can change in response to external stimuli, up to a point.

The trick is pushing the brain or body into a new place for a long enough time where it must change in order to become more efficient and regain comfort. However if not pushed enough or for long enough, or if pushed too hard, then no change can occur. How does one do this? The answer is deliberate practice.

Mental Representations

Using the example of chess masters who can play multiple games while blindfolded Ericsson explains that this is only made possible because of the way these experts have accumulated experience and knowledge of thousands of chess positions and patterns. What they're doing is abstracting arrangements of pieces on the board and codifying them at a higher level. They're essentially taking lots of information and aggregating it and distilling into conceptual models of the game. When describing an arrangement of  pieces they might refer to "lines of force" or "power" etc.

• "Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing."
• "Even when the skill being practiced is primarily physical, a major factor is the development of the proper mental representations."
• "Mental representations are "domain specific", that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed ... there is no such thing as developing a general skill".
• "[Mental representations] make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory."
• "The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuity in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities need to excel in their particular specialities."
• "Mental representations aren't just the result of learning a skill; they can also help us learn." Better representations can make for better, more effective practice.

The Gold Standard

Ericsson describes a study in which he interviews a bunch of violin students at a top music school in Germany.  The largest difference between the three groups 1) good 2) better 3) best was the total amount of time spent practicing. The found the same thing when studying dancers. All the fields they studied however were fully explored disciplines with codified measures of performance.

• "By now it is safe to conclude from many studies on a wide variety of disciplines that nobody develops extraordinary abilities without putting in tremendous amounts of practice."

Deliberate practice is different from purposeful practice in two important ways:

1. "[Deliberate practice] requires a field that is already reasonably well developed - that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field."
2. "Deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance."

"We are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice - in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve - and practice that is both purposeful and informed."

Ericsson goes on to say that many fields are not so well defined that they allow deliberate practice in the pure sense but one should strive instead to find objective measures of skill so that they can direct their own training and development towards those measures. One should also try and find a coach or teacher who can be objectively evaluated on their skill in that field.

He also describes in a full section how the "10 thousand hour rule" is not true and many people can achieve high levels of competency in less than 10k hours while others may require more than 10k. It's a bit arbitrary and varies from field to field. It is without a doubt true however that massive amounts of practice are necessary to become truly exceptional at anything.

Principles of Deliberate Practice  on the Job

Ericsson uses the example of the top gun academy during the Vietnam war to illustrate how effective deliberate practice can be in a professional setting to improve performance.

• "The first step towards enhancing performance in an organization is realizing that improvement is possible only if participants abandon business-as-usual practices. Doing so requires recognizing and rejecting three prevailing myths."

1. "The belief that one's abilities are limited by one's genetically prescribed characteristics."
2. "The second myth holds that if you do something for long enough, you're bound to get better at it."
3. "The third myth states that all it takes to improve is effort. If you just try hard enough, you'll get better."

• "If you're not improving, its not because you lack innate talent; it's because you're not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring what the "right way" is.
  

Knowledge Versus Skills

• "The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your job. This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach."
  

Ericsson then goes on to explain that on the job training programs should emphasize skill acquisition and development over knowledge transfer. This is far more effective.

Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life

First, find a good teacher

"[You] will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses"

Engagement

• Focused deliberate practice of volume. If it's not focused then it's a waste of time.
• If practicing without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind
• ~Focus
• ~Feedback
• ~Fix

Getting Past Plateaus

• "When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid -- or at least steady -- improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you've hit some implacable limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau."
• Steps to get past:

1. "Figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes you are making, and when?
2. Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first.
3. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness."

The Road to Extraordinary

This chapter charts the growth and training of three sisters who are trained by their parents specifically to become world class chess champions. The basic idea is that the parents had to play a big role in nurturing the children's passion for the game and then guiding them using the methods of deliberate practice.

Pathbreakers

• "One thing we do now about these innovators is that they, almost without exception, have worked to become expert performers in their fields before they started breaking new ground."
• "Having studied many examples of creative genius, it's clear to me that much of what expert performers do to move the boundary of their fields and create new things is very similar to what they were doing to reach that boundary in the first place."
  

But What About Natural Talent

In this chapter Ericsson demystifies prodigies, savants and natural talent as well.

• "I can report with confidence that I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice."
• Talks about anti-prodigies i.e. adults who are truly tone deaf due to a genetic disorder vs adults who were able to train themselves in the skill
• How IQ and chess ability is not correlated at all based the beginner levels
  

The Real Role of Innate Characteristics

• "Among those people who have practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best."
• Genetics may help out in getting past the beginner levels and therefore people who are more genetically inclined may find it more enjoyable in the beginning and thus stick with it but ultimately it's a non-factor
  

Where Do We Go From Here

Ericsson concludes by pointing on glaring gaps in the way we educate in schools and universities and describes how some compelling research suggests that a skills based educational approach with more doing and quick, iterative feedback loops is the most effective.