Peak (book)

Connect

🔼Topic:: Mastery 🔼Topic:: Deliberate Practice

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas Don't try harder, try smarter. Look for the experts, be an active learner, and search for feedback. By understanding the importance of mental representations, feedback, engagement, and having a personal coach, you can achieve mastery

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen? Mental representations as the basis of learning is an interesting idea that is worth considering when thinking about how to learn a new subject. It is nice being reassured that innate talent is not as important and might be even harmful to your progress, and it is better to focus on a solid method of learning.

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong... This is a lesser form of Ultralearning (book), most of the ideas presented in this book are not given enough clarification, but are replaced with examples that are repetitive. Thus, we are left with two main ideas that cover about third of the book, and the rest is "fluff"

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... the "go-to" attitude of this book is find a coach, which might be a solution for those 1% who want to have peak achievements, but in my opinion it disregards the advantages and capabilities of those who study by their own.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

📒 Notes

Intro

What we usually thought is the cause of innate Competence is actually the cause of years of practice. Out body and minds ability to adapt, to learn, and to create new connections is the root of peak achievements. Adaptability Deliberate practice is therefore the key for improvement.

Introduction: The Gift

• the brain responds to the right sorts of triggers by rewiring itself in various ways. New connections are made between neurons, while existing connections can be strengthened or weakened, and in some parts of the brain it is even possible for new neurons to grow.
• both the brain and the body retain a great deal of adaptability throughout adulthood, and this adaptability makes it possible for adults, even older adults, to develop a wide variety of new capabilities with the right training.
• there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before.
• Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it.
• The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

Chapter 1 - deliberate practice

There are two types of practices, the first is the naïve type, a "just do it" mindset, which would get you through the basics, but you will hit a ceiling, and further practice (or experience) won't lead to better results. The other type is deliberate or purposeful practice.

The Power of Purposeful Practice

• that method will need to take into account what works and what doesn’t in driving changes in the body and brain.
• once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.
• Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
• You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
• Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.
• Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone.
• Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”
• meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation.

Chapter 2 - brain adaptability

The body and mind are always adapting to the challenges they're facing. Change can only come when's it's beyond your current capabilities, but not by too much. Challenge

Harnessing Adaptability

• The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.
• the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away.

Chapter 3 - Mental representations

what separates experts from novices is not the amount of knowledge, but rather its organized structure. As mastery develops, you begin to form mental representations of your field of expertise, which is an assortment of context-domain specific knowledge into groups. Which would allow faster recognition of patterns, perhaps even automatically, with reduction of cognitive load and errors. An example could be a set of chess-board layouts and the possible moves for each scenario, this could be a collection of symptoms into a diagnosis, or a "feeling" Intuition of where should your fingers be at all times when playing a piano piece.
This mental representations cannot be transferred from one skill to another, so you cannot develop them by practicing a "general skill".

Mental Representations and expertise are a two way street, you create them by practicing, but also they improve your skills.

Mental Representations

• Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.
• mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed.
• one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing.
• What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
• The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry 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 needed to excel in their particular specialties.
• the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it.
• The superior organization of information is a theme that appears over and over again in the study of expert performers.
• honing the skill improves mental representation, and mental representation helps hone the skill.

Chapter 4 - common misconceptions about practice

first of all, no one becomes an expert without putting the work. Talent is not enough, and there is a somewhat correlation between time spent practicing and the quality of your skill, although as we said, you might hit a ceiling, and it depends on the type of practice. Practice beats talent

second, you must find an expert to help you improve. This is critical mostly for the useful feedback, and sharing the best mental representations in the field. Strategy for practicing is key, and it usually requires a coach. Mentor It is not always easy finding one, either because your field doesn't have known experts yet, or there isn't a clear measure of valuing expertise.

The Gold Standard

• nobody develops extraordinary abilities without putting in tremendous amounts of practice.

Chapter 5 - practice by doing

one of the best ways to learn is to set up an environment where you can test out your skills, receive Feedback, and have a low cost of errors. Simulations In essence, these are simulations. supervised learning.
Knowledge can only get you so far, to really improve you have to practice.

Principles of Deliberate Practice on the Job

• attending lectures, minicourses, and the like offers little or no feedback and little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, correct the mistakes, and gradually develop a new skill.
• training should focus on doing rather than on knowing—and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area.

Chapter 6 - deliberate practice in the day-to-day

this is sort of a summary of previous chapters:

1. find a good coach, one that is an expert in the field, and is also good at teaching.
2. Focus during the training, don't just "go with the flow"
3. test out different methods and work on your weaknesses

how to keep being motivated.

reduce reasons to quit:

1. schedule sessions in advance, no more than one hour at a time
2. keep time for leisure and rest
3. reduce distractions while practicing

strengthen reasons to keep going:

1. remember what your goal is
2. believe in yourself and your ability to improve
3. join a like-minded group

Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life

• Generally speaking, teachers will only be able to guide you to the level that they or their previous students have attained. If you’re a flat-out beginner, any reasonably skilled teacher will do, but once you’ve been training for a few years, you’ll need a teacher who is more advanced.
• one of the most important things a teacher can do is to help you develop your own mental representations so that you can monitor and correct your own performance.
• the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.
• To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
• to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.
• if you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.

Chapter 7 - how to produce an expert

(Pretty repetitive) - help the child find an inner motivation, provide ample opportunities to learn, help him grow passionate about it, and as he gets better, provide specialized coaching.

The Road to Extraordinary

• Simply by interacting strongly with their children, parents motivate their children to develop similar interests.
• While there are various ways that parents and teachers can motivate children, the motivation must ultimately be something that comes from within the child, or else it won’t endure.
• The body and the brain both are more adaptable during childhood and adolescence than they are in adulthood, but in most ways they remain adaptable to some degree throughout life.
• The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward, to do things that others have not.
• Progress is made by those who are working on the frontiers of what is known and what is possible to do, not by those who haven’t put in the effort needed to reach that frontier.

Chapter 8 - the curse of innate talent

Initial advantage either doesn't exists or gets smaller with time, which makes practice even more important, and even if it does exist, we have almost no way of truly recognizing the talented people early on.

But What About Natural Talent?

• savants are not the recipients of some miraculous talent; instead they have worked for it, just like anyone else.
• While people with certain innate characteristics—IQ, in the case of the chess study—may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time, and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining how skilled a person becomes.
• no one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with “innate talent.” No one has ever found a gene variant that predicts superior performance in one area or another, and no one has ever come up with a way to, say, test young children and identify which among them will become the best athletes or the best mathematicians or the best doctors or the best musicians.
• while innate characteristics may influence performance among those who are just learning a new skill or ability, the degree and the effectiveness of training plays a more significant role in determining who excels among those who have worked to develop a skill.
• This is the dark side of believing in innate talent. It can beget a tendency to assume that some people have a talent for something and others don’t and that you can tell the difference early on. If you believe that, you encourage and support the “talented” ones and discourage the rest, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy.