Robert PoolReseñas

Interesting book. At first it stressed me out because if deliberate practice means I can become great at anything, then what's my excuse for NOT being the best at every fucking thing? Buut then I realized it probably just means that if I want to be good at something, I can absolutely become so if I just practice in the right way. Which is a much less stressful way to live.

Took me a while to get through though, it's hardly a page-turner.

How do the exceptional become the exceptional? Is you kid who isn’t learning Calculus by age 6 doomed to a life of mediocrity? And what about this “10,000 hours makes you an expert” thing I hear about?

Peak is, at it’s core, a book about how we learn. The 4 word answer to that question is “practice the right way”, and Anders Ericsson uses his own research and the work of others to provide you a path to improving your ability to learn a new subject and to, with time, achieve expertise.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour idea in his book Outliers, and there’s an element of merit to it, but it’s incomplete. Ericsson was responsible for that research, and goes into detail, but the short version is that the research was done in highly specialized fields with a lot of shared expertise already. He calls this deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice, as he defines it, may rely on a solidly established field with clear definitions and outcomes, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can take away to our own areas of interest. Setting goals, finding a way to get feedback to evaluate outcomes, and ensuring that you are engaged and challenging yourself the right amount are all strategies encouraged through the book.

Overall, the message is that the human brain is incredibly adaptable and that systematically approaching new subjects (or old subjects you want to improve) can allow you to reach levels you didn’t believe were possible.


This is a must read if you have interest in the brain.

This book by Anders Ericsson is superb. I often wondered where the concepts of 'deliberate practice' and the '10,000-hour rule' originated. Now, I know!

The book is replete with case studies, all of which have been carefully chosen to highlight certain principles. There is a weakness in the book, and it is this: sometimes when he specifies the principles, it is difficult to spot them. You can miss them if you are not focused when reading the book. Treat this as an exercise in concentration!

Apart from this, Anders Ericsson has written an excellent book. There is a crucial chapter for those who cannot afford an expensive coach. This chapter is essential for most of us!

This book can pretty much be summed up with "Become an expert by doing a lot of DELIBERATE practice", and "Anyone can do it." At times, I found the book inspiring with new human feats. But overall for a book about peak there were some valleys of boredom which the authors droned on.

What i've learned from this book the key take away is that if i want to get good at something, i need to believe that it is possible, that our brains and bodies are adaptable and that first i need to know that it will take sacrifice, along with the key habit of disciplining myself to engage in consistent deliberate practice sessions that are first guided by a coach/teacher and then continued with an emphasis on developing and refining mental representations that match the thinking of the experts in that specific field.

An interesting look at how the world's most exceptional people got that way, and the lessons the rest of us can learn from it. Ericsson is the academic whose research formed the basis of Malcolm Gladwell's famous "10,000 hours" rule; Ericsson criticizes Gladwell for misunderstanding and misrepresenting his research and seems to have written this book in part as a response. (If the popularizers are getting my stuff wrong, then I'll just hire a co-author and popularize it myself!)

From studying people becoming great at things consequential (classical music) and not (memorizing long lists of numbers), Ericsson identifies a few key factors necessary for success: true growth comes from practicing at a level that pushes boundaries, with expert guidance from teachers familiar with good habits, all in the interests of developing "mental representations" of success (everything from exactly what one's body should do in an athletic competition to what a particular position on a chess board means) that encode this vital information in durable, accessible long-term memory.

Ericsson doesn't get into a few angles I would be curious to learn more of: how happy, successful and adjusted his single-subject experts are when not doing their specialty, and exactly how efficient his "deliberate practice" techniques are. That is, even if every all-time great got so through diligent application of a particular method, that doesn't mean that everyone who diligently applies that particular method will become an all-time great. Spending 10,000 hours may be worth it to become a world-class violinist, but is it worth sacrificing an entire childhood just to become a pretty good violinist?

More significantly, I wish Ericsson had focused less on experts and more on how ordinary people can use his talents to become better (but not necessarily the best) at matters of everyday life. He devotes one chapter, and bits of others, to this question, but perpetually returns to the question of how to become world-class. Since very few of us are going to devote our entire lives to becoming experts in one particular area, I'd have found a book that segued from what we can learn from experts in Part 1 to how the rest of us can apply that in our own lives in Part 2 to be more interesting.

If there is one overwhelming takeaway from the book about how to become a world-class expert, I'd say it's this: pick an immature field for your expertise. Mature fields like classical music or chess will require far more investment of time and practice to be better than everyone else, simply because so many other people are already putting in those huge investments. But you could become the best in the world at something less developed by devoting a few thousand or even a few hundred hours, rather than 10,000 or 20,000.

Most of the book is just filler telling you what experiments were done, what was achieved and found.

This guy goes on and on about deliberate and purposeful practice and mental representation.

Would have given 4 stars but he insulted Malcolm Gladwell purposely so minus another star.

Read this book on a whim. Not too much to say here, a pretty good treatment of the ideas of deliberate practice. Which makes sense because that's kind of the author's big thing. Not gonna cover it here, you can read Wikipedia on your own. I like that he presents the quality of practice as a sort of continuum. The takeaway being that you can basically always be practicing better, so... maybe try thinking about it?

Things I thought about:
- what are things I am doing that I would like to attempt to deliberately practice? what are things that I don't want to deliberately practice?
- how would I go about practicing better?

Most of the book is just filler telling you what experiments were done, what was achieved and found.

This guy goes on and on about deliberate and purposeful practice and mental representation.

Would have given 4 stars but he insulted Malcolm Gladwell purposely so minus another star.

Didn't read all of this ( the Sloan technology series isn't great )

Didn't read all of this ( the Sloan technology series isn't great )

Everyone always thinks that engineers have no regard for normal people. This book makes a great point that usually the society an engineer works in actually has a tremendous influence on the final design.

4/14/2016 9:39 PM Saw this at BN and read first chapter. Of course, I want it.