Interview: Peak with Anders Ericsson

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less Time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with Anders Ericsson, who is the world's expert on what makes experts, what makes great people great. I've been looking forward to his book forever. I got it the day it came out, read it basically the next day, and then created the philosopher's note on it the day after that. And I think this is one of the most important books we can read as we commit to optimizing and actualizing. It's truly an honor to have the opportunity to chat with you today, Anders. I appreciate you taking the time and I appreciate the decades of work you've done to bring this wisdom to the. To the world. So thank you.

Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. It's really a pleasure talking to you.

Fantastic. Well, let's jump in. And one of the things I loved about your book is the fact that you started it with a chapter called the Gift. Can you talk to us about the gift and how it might be a little different than how most of us conceive of that?

I think that's one of the key ideas that we're trying to, you know, pursue in the book. A lot of people actually go out looking for their gifts, and I think I've noticed that talking to undergraduates, you know, that they're trying out this and that and hoping that somehow there will be this magical sort of fit between their abilities and what basically the kind of occupation or activity demands. Now we take a very different view. And Having spent about 30 years looking for the existence of gifts that spontaneously emerge, and just to take an extreme example, you know, starting to be able to speak Chinese, I don't think any serious scientists believe that that's possible, and we argue that that's true when you look at other types of high performance activities as well. That every time when you find high performance, you can find a history that sort of allows for a description how that performance developed gradually. And also you can find the kind of activities that seems to produce the necessary mechanisms that have to be in place for somebody to exhibit that high performance. So this leads us to the idea here, you know, that you can actually create your gifts, but that means that you have to commit or your parents have to commit, helping you, sort of setting you in the right direction, providing you with teachers who can actually introduce you to the domain in a way that allows you to sustain, not pushing you too hard, helping you develop the mental representations that somehow guides you throughout this process. And eventually we'll get to a point here where you can take more and more responsibility for your own development and develop training activities that are specifically useful.

To you, which I'm excited to talk about in a moment, because that's obviously the cornerstone of how one masters any domain. And then just to underscore the gift that we all have is the ability to improve ourselves. Right. To optimize and actualize our potential in any area in which we want to explore that potential and reach our peak.

Right, exactly. So having that kind of help from a teacher that has actually helped other individuals, you know, complete this journey to the high level of performance and that commitment. Because what we find is that, you know, it's not like you can just sort of relax and you automatically become skilled. It's you have to change yourself. You have to basically engage in activities where you and your body will actually adapt to the kind of demands that you present to the body and your cognitive system. And I think that is kind of the heart of when we talk about purposeful practice, that effort of really trying to change something such that this will now be part of you, so you can actually build on that as you keep improving other aspects.

Yeah, I love that. And you make the point that, look, you may or may not want to go to the peak, the absolute peak in any given domain, but if you want to, here's how. You know, you can be comfortable going to whatever height you want, but this is what the greatest among us are doing in order to achieve this level of expertise. So let's talk about practice. And you differentiate naive practice, purposeful practice, and then the gold standard, as you call it, deliberate practice. Can you give us an overview of each of those?

Yeah. So this kind of standard practice is just doing what you're doing. So if you have somebody playing golf games on a almost every other day, all you do is kind of doing the same thing. You're trying to do your best, but basically you're not trying specifically to change any particular aspect of what you're doing. And I think it's the same thing for most professionals. You know, they are committed to doing a very good job, but they just kind of keep responding to the events and the kind of demands that they experience during the day. So we basically argue that that's a different type of engagement in the activity. And when we look at evidence, playing chess games or playing part of soccer or virtually any kind of activity does not seem to actually improve your performance. So what you really need is some activity that is pointed to some goal. And then it also has to be kind of a good activity that allows you now to gradually improve that particular aspect. So that's basically purposeful practice. We also talk about deliberate practice as sort of the gold standard, where you're actually in a domain where a teacher and coach has actually now assimilated all the knowledge that we know that's relevant here to effectively improve performance. And that teacher can now help you sequence the purposeful practice aspect. So you're actually building a skill following kind of a sequence that has worked for other individuals. And that, I guess, is something that is not really available in some domains, especially new domains. There aren't professional teachers. There isn't a big literature on how people got very good at various things. And there, I guess, you. We have some hints here about how you can find effective practice. But in domains like music, I would argue that it's well understood, the kind of sequence that everyone seems to go through in order to reach the highest levels.

That's great. So that's kind of the deliberate practice. Music, chess, sports that have such a clear, you know, when you're performing at the peak and people have been there and done that, you get a coach who pushes you. And then purposeful practice, you touched on them briefly. But just to recap them for our audience, my understanding is there's four specific elements. There's the goal orientation, there's being focused. This isn't a I'm having fun kind of thing. It's I'm focused and it's intensely so. And then there's feedback on your performance. Right. And then there's the need to get out of your comfort zone in order to actually trigger adaption, adaptability, et cetera. Is that accurate?

Yeah. And I would argue that in order to know that you're engaging in purposeful practice, the training task that you're doing, your current level is not where you want to be. So there's a gap between what you aspire to be able to do and basically what you're doing. And now by actually repeating and finding better ways of doing this task, you will eventually get to this sort of new goal that your teacher or you set for yourself. And that kind of is almost feedback to you that you engaged in practice. So something has changed. Your ability to do this new training task has changed. Now you have to make sure that that kind of benefit is integrated in the skill that you're doing. And I think it's a good question asking yourself, you know, and because it gets at that difference between natural practice and purposeful practice, what is it that have changed you? So after a day, basically, or a game of golf, what is it that you can do now that you could not do before? With purposeful practice, you can actually point to the thing you can do and if it's well integrated in the task that you're doing so such that you've improved now your ability to read greens for putting, that should basically be evident as you go out and play a new round of golf.

That's great. Can you bring this home? Do you engage in purposeful practice in your own work or have you over your career?

Well, you know, I'm sort of a scientist, and I guess at one point I was thinking about trying to acquire some skills, but I think I found, came to the conclusion that with my interest, it was better for me to study other people acquiring skills. So trying to become a good researcher and basically develop now and understand ideas that other people have generated and see here whether we can actually find new knowledge. That's probably what I've been trying to improve. And I think it is interesting. In the academic system, you write papers and then you give them to other people who comment on it, and you keep doing basically that revision. And I remember that the first important paper that I wrote with Professor Bill Chase, I think we went 50 rounds with me writing and him commenting on things that I needed to improve before we actually submitted it. And I think those kinds of activities where you actually can gradually modify and improve a product is really interesting sort of situations where one, you can see some things get better and hopefully will transfer now when you write your next paper. So you have now learned some things that you can apply and you will actually do a better job.

That's great. And one of the things I was excited to ask you was when I look at my own work and what I'm doing and, you know, bringing a more conscious, deliberate. Well for my domain, there really isn't the set of expertise to meet the precise definition, as I understand it, of deliberate practice, but purposefully practicing. And my emphasis has been more on building the systems to enable me to consistently create and then a certain repetition, right, of just getting better and better and finding this tiny little, just tiny little marginal gains in my own performance and energy levels and ability to kind of synthesize ideas. But I was just curious if you had any insight in terms of how someone like me looking to master my craft, would approach it using the wisdom that you've gained.

Now, one of the things, if you try to define now what you ultimately would want to do, and one way to do that might be to look at other interviewers that you admire and almost sort of ask yourself if you were in a similar situation, you know, and you could maybe just look at the video the first couple of minutes and now see what are the transitions? What are the basically ways in which this interviewer was able to elicit this or that. But I think, you know, doing something similar in the sense of looking back on interviews. I don't know if you've looked at interviews that you did a couple of years ago.

The interviews are kind of just a finer little bonus to what I do. It's more of a fun way to connect with the author. And it hasn't been the focal point of this is a subject that I want to master. It's been more of a. This is just, you know, a part of what I do. Whereas I've been really focused on mastering the presentation and the teaching and distilling these ideas, if that makes sense.

Well, I have to say that when it came to presenting the ideas in our book, I'm not sure that I can offer any suggestions for improvement, because I think you did just a terrific job.

Well, I appreciate that. And then sounds like you'd support the idea of. Just because you mentioned this in the book too. So we'll segue this back to kind of the more general conversation around the. The amount of time that you can actually invest in this type of practice. Right. Because for me, it's continuing to just find those little marginal gains of getting a little bit better and then also more efficient in the actual creation of these. And again, like I said, it's very subtle distinctions at this stage in that domain. So just getting to the point where the four hours you talked about, the fact that you really can't put in more than four hours of deliberate practice. Can you talk about that?

Well, what we found across domains is that when you look at elite performers and actually have them keep diaries, what's interesting is that if somebody is completely focused now on, say, writing a novel, it seems that four or five hours is about as much time as they can actually spend writing. And virtually all that I found who have control over their time would actually start out writing. And then at some point, basically maybe midday, they would stop, you know, maybe have some food. Some of them would take a nap, others would go for walks. But essentially this time after writing seems to be sort of recuperation and just sort of getting down, you know, you know, to relax so you can actually have a good night's sleep and then wake up by yourself in the morning and now being, you know, in the perfect state of continuing your work. Now most scientists, you know, they don't really have the luxury here of isolating themselves because, you know, you have responsibility for teaching classes, interacting with students and so on. So what I found is that when I talk to scientists, they spend maybe one or two hours in the morning, the first thing they do. And that will then sort of not kind of get them to the limits of how long they can kind of keep working, but they would then have enough energy so they would be able to do a good job here interacting with people. And because the level of concentration for giving a lecture would be much less than when you're actually trying to write something on a new topic that basically goes beyond what you can just sort of habitually do. And I think it's interesting, I've seen now several people experimenting with trying to put in an extra couple of hours in the afternoon for writing. And what they report is that when they actually start trying to integrate this work that they did later in the afternoon, they found they spend more time reworking it. So it's kind of not even productive for them to try to get more time in. But I think it's interesting that it's a little bit of this marathon attitude that these people have pretty much a seven day schedule where they actually are doing the same thing and they sort of sustain it. Now sometimes, you know, for years, sometimes you end with a book, but typically a lot of authors would take a little bit time off and then maybe start on a new book project. So it's almost like they're have developed these habitual routines that have been crafted to support their ability to do the best possible job on this dedicated work time.

That's amazing. And at the end of the day, that's arguably the most important part of the whole process. Right. Is simply creating your life such that you can consistently show up and actually do this type of deep work.

Yeah. And I think, you know, having a life where when you're actually relaxing, if you're starting to worry about 10 different things, then that is a problem. And I think a lot of people have written about the difficulties. So you need to have kind of a stable life with people and resources that allow you now to kind of direct yourself. And setting that up may be a difficulty for some individuals. But I think if you're really interested in that long term kind of production of useful work, then you invest in basically the foundation which is providing this safe space and then also giving you enough freedom to be able to dedicate that time to your best work.

I love it. And one of the things I talk about a lot in my work is the fundamentals of eating, moving and sleeping and training your mind, focusing in your research. And I want to talk about the 10,000 hour quote rule, which you unpack very nicely in the book and I think will be a fun chat. You talk about one of the variables that differentiated those who were performing at the highest levels was actually the quantity of sleep. Right.

We found that the highest performers of the musicians that we studied actually slept more than basically the less accomplished group. And I think, you know, just looking at the diaries, it was very clear that the elite individuals, they would actually go to bed at a sort of, you know, around midnight or before midnight even, whereas the sort of. The third group, the ones who did not get into the elite solo training, you know, they would stay up to two or three sometimes and have a much more varied. And I think basically once you make that commitment to trying to have your best energy when you're practicing, then that basically overrides now maybe the temptations here to kind of have fun and do this and that. And one thing that really struck me that I don't think we talked about in the book was how the best violinists were very careful when they arranged relationships, and they found individuals who had an equal commitment. Maybe it was to music or dance or acting or science, but that actually now allowed them to be able to train. Without getting into this conversation here, you know, you don't love me enough. You're going off practicing when in fact, you know, you should be spending time with me. And I think, you know, that is just another reflection here of designing a life that helps you be as productive as you can be such powerful.

And I don't think that was in the book. That's such a good insight. Let's talk about the. The 10,000 hour. And again, I'm putting quotation marks up as I say, this rule that Malcolm Gladwell popularized that you talked about in the book. Can you talk to us about how that is not, in fact, a rule?

Yeah, well, especially the version that I hear from people who read Malcolm Gladwell's book. It's sort of the idea that if you just hang in there, if you're doing a profession and you've been doing it now for 10, 15 years, and then you count up the number of hours that you've Been, you know, basically a truck driver or a medical doctor or a lawyer, that somehow that accumulation of time will make you into an expert. What we actually showed in our study was that it was deliberate practice, namely those hours when somebody was working on the kind of tasks that their teacher assigned to them, working alone, which I guess is interesting because a lot of people, even our experts, said that they had much more fun socializing with their friends than basically working by themselves. So it's kind of clear here that they viewed this activity as necessary for them to develop themselves and the kind of abilities that were really important to them. So the first thing is that Gladwell talking about practice rather than deliberate practice, which is that structured, focused practice, really makes a huge difference. And I think it's interesting that even the most talented, if you believe that there are people with sort of special talent, seem to be spending that much time in deliberate practice before they reach sort of the highest levels. The other thing is it doesn't seem to be anything magical about 10,000 hours. So if you use this criteria, winning piano competitions sort of on the world level, you probably have spent more like 25,000 hours because those individuals who win are typically in their early to mid-30s. So that's basically the 10,000 hours that we talked about. Just measure the amount of sort of practice alone that these individuals had spent up to age 20. So between 20 and 35, you have even more time that they would have spent practicing based on the data that we've collected.

That's great. So the emphasis on deliberate practice, not just the normal, standard, naive practice of just simply doing something again and again. And then also the fact these are 20 year olds who were simply deemed to be potential soloists. Not necessarily. Well, they hadn't made that level yet. Right. So there was still.

Exactly.

I really appreciated that insight. And then I want to talk about adaptability, the way that you talk about homeostasis. And the fourth principle of purposeful practice was you have to leave your comfort zone. No growth occurs while you're hanging out doing something that you're already, you know, comfortable doing. You can you talk to us about the importance of leaving our comfort zone and then homeostasis, adaptability, et cetera.

Well, I think the easiest for me to describe that is for runners. And I know a lot of runners who enjoy going out jogging, but typically most of them that I talk to, they basically jog to kind of a comfortable level. And they. And one test you can probably make is, can you talk when you're running? If you can talk, you're probably not pushing yourself to the point here where you're actually putting stress on your body. And we've found, or other people have kind of looked at what happens when you actually engage in very intensive training. Well, it turns out that you will generate biochemicals that in turn will actually activate genes that are part of your DNA, but isn't typically sort of activated unless you stress various body tissues like your muscles sufficiently to actually lead to that reaction. And one of the easiest observable signs here is that after about two or three weeks of intensive training, there will be capillaries growing around those muscles that you've actually pushed to the limit. And by actually further pushing, you can actually increase the diameter of arteries. You can actually see a remodeling of the heart. And one of the kind of really surprising things is that if you stop your training, your heart will actually revert back to the sort of the normal size of hearts. But while you're training, and actually in some ways if you didn't train, it would be a pathological heart that would be a sign here of some kind of disease. But it really shows here how adaptable the body is. If you provide it now with a kind of strain that then leads it to respond and adapt and then actually giving you more power to do what, whatever task you're engaged in doing.

That's fantastic. So the adaptability that only comes once you stretch yourself and then the body says, okay, well, you want me to be able to do this, I'm going to have to get stronger, right? I'm going to have to get better.

Right. And I think it applies even to the mental part. So if you're actually trying to go beyond the best that you can do, so you're actually stretching yourself, that will actually now kind of elicit a reaction that somehow will permit you to kind of start a long term change. And I think the good thing about the 10,000 hour rule, I think is pointing out that there's this very long, gradual sort of developmental process. And I think a lot of people expect that they would be able to do something very rapidly. And if they can't do it, they infer that they don't have the innate talent that's required, when in fact they may. Well, at least that's what our evidence shows, with the right kind of practice, they will actually be able to gradually attain that kind of adaptation over time.

Key phrase there, over time, the willingness to go on the long haul to reach that peak. You've touched on it a couple times, but I'd like to hear you talk about mental representations and the role that they play in this process.

Well, if you're acquiring a new skill, what we find is that basically your thinking that helps you now kind of make changes to your existing skills. I think maybe the easiest thing is to think of a soccer player or somebody on a basketball player. They basically, there's a lot of things happening around them. What we find is that the expert players, they've actually developed now a way of mentally representing so they can scan the environment and actually mentally represent now all the different players, even the ones that they can't see where they are and where they're likely to be within the next second. And that kind of way of mentally having a description of what's going on and being able to pick out all the relevant pieces of information will make you much more able here if you get the ball, to actually do something that is going to be successful for you or for your basically teammates.

And it's only gained again through that delivered practice. And one of the other stories that was great was the chess players and their memory for mid games of actual potential games was far superior to the normal person. But if you mix those pieces up and they weren't actually anything that could ever happen in a real game, those supposed memory gains were gone. And it was all about the mental representations that was underlying the experience.

Right, Exactly. That meaningful structure of the chessboard basically is something that the expert can see and really make meaningful sense of. But if you rearrange it so that pattern is no longer there, their performance is virtually indistinguishable from less skilled players.

Yeah, mental representations. One of the things I mentioned in the video I did was that, and the note was that that's what I feel like I'm doing is just, just immersing myself in this wisdom and being able to see these different little models that come up. And I've likened it almost like a spider web or there's this different lines that are coming in and more securely harnessing all of those truths and making it easier to kind of, to, to integrate and synthesize and all that good stuff.

And I think one way that you can kind of test yourself on your mental representation is actually to try to remember what happened in some kind of activity. So if you're playing chess, basically being able to remember what kind of moves were made, because that seems to be very, very correlated with your metal representation. And sort of a beginner will only remember sort of the most immediate things. But the chess player who's actually seeing these patterns and these developments that go across moves will be able to recall all the moves in the chess game and also remember what they were thinking at the time.

That's great. Kind of the recall, the active recall, is a process of strengthening those connections. You mentioned that Homo sapiens, it's one way to look at our species, but you recommended it. Something different. Can you tell us about that?

Well, you know, we basically wanted to focus in on this adaptability. So Homer's exercise would be sort of a way of stressing the human's ability here to change themselves. And I. And I think in the future, with the development of new technology, I don't think we can really imagine how a human can really use that technology to. To amplify and then basically build new skills that really, you couldn't even imagine maybe 50 years ago. So now sometimes humans are using computer programs, so they can actually use the chess programs, but they can actually now be on top of them. And that seems to be a much stronger kind of combination than any individual chess program. So once you're actually seeing that possibility of using computers as tools for you to accomplish things, I think we can almost start seeing possible ways in which humans can achieve things that without the tools of the computers, wouldn't have been possible.

Fascinating. Well, we've simultaneously covered a lot in this short period of time and obviously still just barely scratched the surface of the book. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you think is important to highlight?

Well, I think we talked a little bit about, in the book about how adults are actually able to acquire pretty amazing skills. So some people think that you can only do that when you're young. I think we're able to review a lot of evidence showing that adults can actually acquire pretty amazing skills, even if they start in adulthood. And I think that's kind of an important thing, especially as we're talking about a society where more people will sort of be in their retired phase, which may be a really outstanding opportunity to acquire or improve some of your skills that you already have acquired and basically get the fruits and the benefits of the experience of actually reaching kind of a high level of performance, doing something where you can actually share products with all your family and the rest of the world.

That's fantastic and so important. That brings us all the way back to the first idea, which was the gift. We all have the gift. We have that gift throughout our entire lifespan. Right?

That. That's. That's true. And the saddest part is if people think that it's not really available to them, and I think by seeing examples of other people similar to them who have actually been able to, you know, acquire skills and start doing really, in some ways, enjoyable and things that people surrounding them can enjoy, you know, that provides, I think, promise for a much richer life than if you basically believe that you're just going to be a consumer.

That's powerful. I appreciate your wisdom, Anders. And I like to wrap up these chats with one final question, which is if you could share one piece of wisdom with someone passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that one piece of wisdom be? And it might be something we've touched on or talked about in depth or something new, what would that be?

Now, one piece of advice that Bill Chase gave me, which I thought was interesting, and I think it has to do for anybody who is trying to establish themselves in a field, and he argued, try to be an expert at something. It may be very, very restricted, but when people are going to talk about you and what it is that you can actually contribute, it's important to have a sentence that people can say. And I think when I started in science, I guess one of the sentences that people had about me was my work on improving memory performance. And so basically that was a relatively limited area. And I guess I was really trying to make sure here that I knew as much as anyone could about memory experts and basically how one would be able to train normal people to actually reach expert levels when it came to memory.

So finding that one domain, being specific, and then being willing to make the trade off. You didn't say this, but to extend it a little bit, to be willing to make the trade off, say, well, I can't be great at everything. I'm gonna need to put my energy into this one specific thing that I can truly distinguish myself in. And that's obviously not without risk. Right? I think that's a choice.

And I think what Bill also said was once you've established yourself, you can now actually start adding things to it. But I think the key here, and in many cases there's competition for resources where it's actually helpful to be able to sort of really attain that label. Whatever activity that you now determine, it's going to be your sort of area where you're going to be the world's expert on.

That's great. My sentence came to mind was more wisdom and less time to be able to distill this wisdom in a meaningful, practical way for busy people. And again, just so inspired by your work. I appreciate the decades that you've put into it. And as you can tell, I don't even know if I mentioned the name of the book in the intro. It's Peak. Subtitle Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Again, Peak. Find it wherever you get books. Highly recommend it. Really appreciate you and your life's work and how much that's benefited me. And I know countless people around the world, so thank you, Anders.

Well, thank you so much for allowing me to talk to you. It was wonderful.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus Common sense plus virtue plus Mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.