Peak MP3 CD – Audiobook, September 27, 2016

Let’s cut right to the chase on this one. If you’ve read anything about Ericsson’s work, especially the concept of “deliberate practice,” and you want to understand it, you should buy and read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise at least a couple of times.The fact is that most of the stuff out there about Ericsson’s work is incomplete and imprecise. I think we have Ericsson to blame for most of that.Most commentators have based their understanding and perceptions on Ericsson’s interviews and academic writing. Those were sometimes works in progress and sometimes incomplete, but this book is different. This time, Ericsson used a professional writer, Robert Pool. I’m biased, of course, since I do the same kind of work that Pool does, but I think his participation in the book makes the book more comprehensive, more coherent, and more understandable.The book begins with a review of things we’ve been learning from psychologists for the last 20 years or so. It’s all about how the brain isn’t a fixed thing but is very plastic and changes based on experience. Ericsson outlines his part in some of the research that’s led us to the “plasticity” conclusion.The message is clear. Despite what you may have learned growing up (as I did), abilities and talents are not generally fixed at birth. We can improve our performance in almost any area if we work at it. But wait, there’s more.It’s not enough to just work at it. Simply practicing your golf swing over and over will not make you a better golfer. There are specific ways to improve, and Ericsson presents us with two of them.“Purposeful practice” is the first one. That’s a term you may not have become familiar with from other people’s writings about Ericsson’s work. Ericsson sums up purposeful practice this way.“So, here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.”Deliberate practice is a subset of purposeful practice. Deliberate practice requires two things. First, it must be part of a field in which excellent performance has been observed and delineated and, second, there must be teachers who can provide practice activities designed to help the student improve performance. That’s a fairly limited range of domains.Ericsson is very clear that you can only do true deliberate practice in a few fields. He’s talking about musical performance, chess, dance, gymnastics and other similar domains. In other words, if you’re in those domains get an expert teacher and don’t try this at home. What if you’re not, though?Don’t despair. If you’re a manager or a practitioner of some other kind of field and you’d like to get better with some kind of purposeful practice, this book has a lot of guidance about how to do it well. I’ll speak about business managers because that’s the group that I write for.Let’s say that you’re a business manager and you want to get really good at what you do. Ericsson says you should start with good “mental representations.” Mental representations are a key to getting things right if you’re not in a field where you can do deliberate practice. Here’s how it works.In the beginning, you need to learn what effective work looks like. That matches what I’ve found in research into great bosses. Most of them had a boss early in their career who was an excellent role model. In other words, they could see from their first boss or two what good work looked like.It helps if you get regular feedback from people who know more than you do about the craft. That’s one reason I encourage companies and managers to create peer support groups. Once the role models and feedback have given you a good idea of what good performance is, you can set up systems where you give yourself feedback.Again, my own experience supports Ericsson’s assertions. In training, we would first have people develop an idea of what being a good boss looks like based on their personal experience of working for one. For the rest of the time we had together, we would keep referring back to that model. As we came to the end of the training, we would talk about what Ericsson would call “purposeful practice.” We’d discuss how you can grade your own performance.That’s necessary because a manager’s most important work doesn’t have immediate feedback. The results show up down the road. So you have to have your own, more timely, feedback based on your mental model of great performance.Bottom LineMany writers have attempted to explain the implications of Anders Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice. In Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise you’ll learn that deliberate practice is a subset of purposeful practice. You learn that true deliberate practice is limited to a very specific list of disciplines. Most important, you also learn how you can apply the principles of purposeful practice to just about any domain where you want to improve your performance. This book is worth buying and reading, more than once, as you apply the lessons of purposeful practice to your own life, work, and career.

This is the best book I've read in a really long time..I'm a big fan of "self improvement" books and it's so rare these days to find a genuine, original work with breakthrough ideas that are actually backed up by real academic research. The data and research described in this book are really fresh, some of it from mid 2015.The findings in this book about learning, practicing, studying a new skill - are so powerful that I honestly think this is the type of books that can really change the course of one's life, if you choose to act on the wisdom and lessons of this book.First this book destroys the false belief that we all have natural talent for some skills (like playing music) and we DON'T have natural talent for others like sing or dance. The author brings strong and convincing data to proof that this "natural talent" just a myth and nothing more.Yes, if you take 50 people and teach them a new skill, like playing the piano, after the first 100 hours, some of them will do better than others - that's the main reason why we all think there is such a thing as "natural talent" or "gift". However, it turns out that once each person can pass the "beginner" phase if he will practice enough, and even if it takes you twice as many hours as the guy next to you, once you pass that first phase and aim to be at the top, or one of the best in that skill - it's all about practicing and working hard, really hard, "natural talent" has nothing to do with it.I really liked chapters (5) and (6) which describe in detail how one should practice when he\she wants to learn a new skill, or to improve a specific skill one is already familiar with. Let's say you have 8 hours a week to work on a certain skill, it turns out that there are a few principles which together are called "deliberate practice" and if you'll follow them, the effectiveness of your practice will be so much more than just practicing without giving these principles any thought.Having a coach is extremely important when learning a new skill. after reading this book you'll be convinced too. Also it's important to make sure you give your full attention when you practice and not think about other, not related, things. You need to give your full effort during practice.Many people think that if they just repeat what they do and know, it's called practice. The best example in the book is with doctors who think they have "20 years of practice in field X", which is actually just repeating for 20 years the same steps over and over again, without learning anything new, without improving the weak points, without getting any feedback from some expert who watch the doctor act. It turns out that just repeating will actually make the skill go backwards, not forward, thus studies have shown that younger doctors just out of school usually perform better, because they have the knowledge from school fresh.Every chapter in this book is mind opening, surprising, full with interesting real life stories, examples and anecdotes. I learned so much from this book and enjoyed every moment of it. Even more important, the author convinced me that at the age of 32 I can learn and be really good at almost any skill I choose, even if I never done it before. The author wants to break the myth that if you didn't do X while you were a child, it means that you can't do it, or that it's too late. I really believe I can learn how to cook, swim, play tennis, maybe even sing, and I plan to ACTUALLY do it.I want to take the opportunity to say thank you for the authors of this book who have done an amazing amazing work.