Reading Journal: Peak - Secrets From The New Science of Expertise
Published: 01 Aug 2022
18 mins
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“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” -William Ernest Henley.
Every once in a while, we come across a book that is so utterly perspective-changing, so positively edifying that it’s as if we have been living life with blinders on. I would put “Peak” in that category. Of course, mileage may vary. For me personally, this book shattered so many of my previously held beliefs about expertise, innate talent, and the nature vs. nurture debate. There was a life before reading “Peak” and there is a life after reading “Peak”. What an emphatic refutation this was to all of my previously held self-doubts, and recurring imposter syndrome. And what an inspiring message this was to all the tormented souls who believes they are somehow limited by their innate talent.
What is The Limit of Human Potential?
If you had to guess the world record for the number of pushups, what would you say? 500? 1000?
In 1980, Minoru Yoshida did 10,507 pushups nonstop… After that, Guinness World Record had to change up the rules. It became how many pushups can you do within a 24 hour period
If you had to guess the most number of digits of pi ever remembered, what would you say? Perhaps the previous record was kind of a shock to you so you bump up your number. 1000? 10,000?
The answer is Akira Haraguchi, who remembered over 100,000 digits of pi
In 1908, Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon race in what was described as “race of the century” with a world record time of 2:55:18. Today, that time is just enough to qualify you for the Boston Marathon, along with thirty thousand other runners
In the same summer Olympics of 1908, a diver barely avoided serious injury while attempting a doubel somersault. Official later concluded that the dive was simply too dangerous and should be banned from the game. Today, double somersault is an entry-level dive with ten year olds nailing it in competitions
We live in a world with chess grandmasters who can play several dozen games simultaneously - while blindfolded. A world where people can solve multiple Rubik’s cubes in minutes - while juggling them. A world full of extraordinary performers and “geniuses”. The natural temptation is to think of these people as naturally gifted; that they are just a different breed not comparable to regular folks like us. But take some time to ponder: One may be born with great athletic prowess, but no one is born with a genetic gift of doing 10,000 pushups, or 9 hour planks. What about the example of Johnny Hayes. Did our DNA fundamentally change such that we can run marathons faster? Of course not! We have better training regimens, better diet, better scientific understanding of the human body.
The main gift that these people have is the same one accessible to all of us: Human Adaptability
Before you scoff at such a hackneyed remark, know that this isn’t a self-help book vouching for some vague notion of anti-determinism, the real genius of this book is that it teaches you how to practice, and the science of expertise. In short, the insights are extremely actionable. This book is also replete with substantiating research and interesting stories/anecdotes.
Deliberate Practice
People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because, for whatever reason, they stopped practicing - or never started.
Before defining deliberate practice, it’s worth contrasting it to the typical practice paradigm.
Suppose you want to learn tennis. Perhaps you watch some YouTube tutorials, sign up for some group lessons, and practice hitting with a partner on weekends. After maybe half a year, you’ve reached a point where you are somewhat consistent and can go out and have fun playing the game. You’ve “learned” the game of tennis in the traditional sense.
You naively think that if you just keep playing, you are bound to get better even if the process is slow. This is sadly false. Eventually you reach a point where it seems impossible to progress, you’ve reached a plateau. This is where people often give up and stop trying to improve.
This applies to pretty much any skill we learn from cooking to writing to driving. We practice until we are proficient, then let it become automatic. The additional years of “practice” only leads to marginal improvement, if at all. In some cases, abilities can even gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate effort to get better
Research shows that, in some disciplines, doctors fresh out of medical school actually perform better than those with decades of experience. This is because most of the practice/feedback occurs in school. Without a deliberate effort to maintain a skillset and without quality feedbacks, their skills get rusty
For most things in life, it’s perfectly fine to reach an intermediate level of performance. You don’t have to be the best coffee maker, or the best driver in the world to complete your morning routine.
But what if we really want to excel? The answer to that is Deliberate Practice:
Deliberate practice should be well-defined. You should have a specific goal in mind; key milestones you want to achieve. For our tennis example, something like: “rally 15 times without making an unforced error”. Without a goal, there is no way to judge whether you are making progress. Make a training plan with bunch of baby steps to reach a long-term goal.
Deliberate practice should be focused. You need to give the task your full attention and seek to make adjustments . In general, deliberate practice is not fun, and often exhausting. To stick with our tennis example, having a leisurely game Friday evening is not deliberate practice. If your mind is wandering and you’re just having fun, you’re probably not improving
Deliberate practice involve feedbacks. You must have some sort of guidance from teachers or online tutorials. You have to know when you are doing something right, or when you are doing something wrong, and adjust accordingly and timely.
Deliberate practice involve getting out of one’s comfort zone. To reiterate, deliberate practice is usually not fun and require pushing ourselves beyond our limit. Being frustrated, and trying again and again. “No pain, no gain” as the saying goes
The last piece of the puzzle is to have quality feedbacks from experts who have achieved the peak in their well-defined field. Most sports and music pursuits fall in this category. But most of life does not fall into this category (e.g. cooking, most professions)
The last piece of the puzzle is important! We do not apply deliberate practice in most areas of our lives because it is simply not possible. Real life - our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies - usually don’t give us the opportunity for this kind of focused, deliberate repetition.
Seminars, lectures, mini-courses are a waste of time because they offer little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, fail again and again, and gradually learn along the way.
Therefore, we must manufacture our own opportunities and benchmarks for improvement. Without an expert within a well-defined field who can offer advice and design exercises, we are on our own
Deliberate practice is exhausting. It may be easy to maintain motivation for a week, or even a month, but how does someone maintain focus and dedication for a prolonged period of time? How can we prevent the urge to not push ourselves as hard?
Grit and Willpower?
It may be tempting to assume again that some people are born with more willpower or “grit”, but there is no scientific basis for this. Furthermore, studies have shown that willpower is very situation-specific. Here are some secrets to how some people can maintain focus and dedication:
Motivation is often short-lived. The trick to maintaining deliberate practice is to form a habit
Set a fixed time to practice that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions. Minimize anything that might interfere with training
The key to deliberate practice is the belief that you can succeed. Meticulously keep track of all improvements, however minor they may be. Once you have practiced for a while and can see results, the skill itself becomes part of your motivation.
Your sense of identity changes. You often see this in kids and teenagers. They start seeing themselves as “violin players”, “tennis players”, “good at math”, etc. Further practice comes to feel more than an investment rather than an expense. It genuinely feels good to practice similar to how it feels good to contribute to your savings account.
Danger of The Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Perhaps the most important message of this book is this: People are not born with a fixed reserves of potential. We can create our own potential. Over time, sustained, deliberate practice far eclipses the role of innate talent.
All of these fences we built around ourselves are not only counter-productive, but sometimes downright damaging. The belief that we are limited by our own genetic predispositions manifests itself in many “I can’t” and “I am not” statements:
“I am just not very good at math”
“I am introverted and I cannot do public speaking”
“I’m a numbers guy. I suck at writing”
“I am not smart enough to apply for Stanford”
There is an important reason to emphasize practice over innate genetic differences, and that is the danger of self-fulfilling prophecy. Mindset matters, and our assumptions of what we are good or bad at can point us towards certain decisions and actions; and in turn shift our destiny.
The clumsy ones are pushed away from sports
The boy who was told he was tone-deaf are pushed away from music
The girl who was told she cannot do math is pushed away from STEM fields
And to no one’s surprise, these predictions come true.
You are not limited by some special birthright. You are not limited by some physical or intellectual constraint. To excel, one only has to look within. Your goal should not be to reach your potential, but to build it! Through human adaptation and the right practice, you can challenge homeostasis, force your brain and body to adapt, and take control of your destiny.
The most important gift we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job. They will need to see firsthand - through their own experiences of developing abilities they thought were beyond them - that they control their abilities and are not held hostage by some antiquated idea of natural talent.
Developing Efficient Mental Representation
A mental representation is the structure your brain builds corresponding to an object, idea, and any collection of information. That sounds vague but will make a lot of sense once we see some examples:
Suppose you’ve never heard and seen of a dog before. When you are first introduced to the concept of a dog, it might as well be collection of random words. Gradually, as you spend more time around dogs, you start to understand them, all this information about how they are furry, have four legs, run in packs, become one holistic concept.
Explaining the rule of baseball to someone who has never heard of baseball is hard. You might as well be reading lines from the tax code to them. It’s only after they’ve played a couple games that the concept of baseball starts making sense
This is clearly illustrated in a famous chessboard memorization experiment. Pieces were placed on a chessboard in common arrangements often seen in games, and participants were asked to memorize the position of every piece. Not surprisingly, the grandmasters only needed a few seconds to memorize the entire board. If however the pieces are placed at random, then the grandmasters do no better than someone who has never played chess before. In essence, the chess masters don’t memorize boards piece by piece, but holistically through mental representation.
Much of deliberate practice involve developing more and more efficient mental representation. In other words, mental representation leads to intuition, and efficient intuition looks to outsiders like natural gifts, or talents.
There is No Magic
I get it. People want to believe that there is magic in life, that not everything has to abide by the staid, boring rules of the real world. And what could be more magical than being born with some incredible ability that doesn’t require hard work or discipline to develop? There is an entire comic book industry built on that premise.
If you speak with an expert who has achieved the very peak of their domain, they seldom buy into the idea that they won some genetic lottery. Take the example of Ray Allen, widely considered one of the greatest three-point shooter in the National Basketball Association:
“I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life. When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in everyday.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.”
Indeed, if you speak to Allen’s high school basket ball coach, it’s evident that his jump shots were actually not noticeably better. In fact, it was quite poor
Almost all experts identify practice as the most important factor to improvement. Nobody develops extraordinary ability without putting in tremendous amount of work
Nature vs. Nurture.
We see examples all the time of vast differences between beginners learning a new skill for the first time. It’s natural to attribute these differences to innate talent, and even reasonable to assume that the difference will persist - that the same people who excel in the beginning will excel later on. But it’s not that simple.
Beginner differences can often be attributed to prior practice in a related field. Transferable skills
Even if there is a talent element involved, the assumption that the difference will persist have been demonstrably proven false. If it were so easy to predict who will rise to the top of a given field based on current ability, then sports drafting in NHL, NBA, etc would be a piece of cake. But that is not what we usually see. Of course you have your outliers like Lebron James, but there are plenty of first-round picks that ended being duds:
Jamarcus Russell of Louisiana State University was selected first overall in the NFL draft, he was a complete bust and was out within three years
Tom Brady was picked in the sixth round, after 198 other players. He developed to become the undisputed best quarterback of all time
Among elite youth chess players, not only was a high IQ no advantage. It seems to put them at a slight disadvantage. The reason being the players with lower IQ tends to practice more
In the long run, it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent
A famous example that was told in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” was the one about birthday distribution of hockey players (the book incidentally also popularized the 10,000 hour rule). In short, there appears to be a huge imbalance of birthday months for Canadian professional hockey players. Many more are born in the month of January to March. This phenomenon isn’t unique to hockey. Among thirteen year old soccer players, over 90% of players nominated to be the best on the team had been born in the first six months of the year.
Is it the case that people born in those months are better hockey players? Of course not! So why is there such a big imbalance?
As it turns out, when children first start playing hockey at the age of four or five, a couple more months of development makes a huge difference. Many coaches will treat these more “talented” players with more praises, better instruction, and more playing time. The player will also be viewed by others as more talented. More importantly, they start viewing themselves as more talented
Some Cool Facts
Pitch Perfect
“Perfect pitch” is the ability to distinguish musical notes in real time while listening to a piece of music.
For millennia, people thought to acquire “perfect pitch”, one must have some innate ability, and to go through intensive musical training at a very young age. In other words, the ability is widely perceived as a god-given gift bestowed upon only a select few geniuses
Research also indicate that people who grew up speaking “tonal language” like the ones in East Asia, have a better chance at acquiring this special ability
However, research conducted Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara revealed that this apparently god-given gift is something almost anyone can develop with the right exposure and training. Being very young also helps.
A group of 24 children aged two to six went through month-long, sometimes years-long training
Eventually, every one of the 24 child developed perfect pitch. This result is astonishing because perfect-pitch occurs at a rate of about 1 in 10,000 in normal population of children who undergo musical training
London Taxi Drivers
The London taxi driver license exam is often described as the “most difficult test in the world”. The drivers who pass must be able to memorize all of downtown London within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. One prospective driver was asked to navigate to “a statue of two mice with a piece of cheese”. The statue was on a building façade and is less than 1 ft tall. Imagine finding that in all of downtown London
A in-depth study conducted by Psychologist Eleanor Maguire found that the task is so demanding that the hippocampus of the taxi drivers, the region of the brain particularly engaged by spatial navigation, were noticeably larger in these taxi drivers than in the average population. The longer they’ve been driving, they larger their posterior hippocampi were
Tracking several subjects who were going through the licensure process, Maguire discovered the brain can be shaped similar to how body builder’s train their biceps. The one caveat is that once you stop training, the extraordinary ability starts to go away. Also pushing your ability to such extreme usually comes at a cost of regression in some other area of the brain.
Homo Exercens
We call ourselves the “knowing man” - Homo Sapiens. But perhaps it is better to view ourselves as man who takes control of its life through practice and discipline and makes itself what it wills - Homo Exercens - the “practicing man”.
We humans are most human when we’re improving ourselves. We, unlike any other animal, can consciously change ourselves, to improve ourselves in ways we chose. This distinguishes us from every other species alive today and, as far as we know, from every other species that has ever lived.