PNTV: Peak by Anders Ericsson (#287)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today I've got another great book that I'm really excited about. Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole. Peak Subtitle C Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Now, this book just came out, Pre ordered it, read it the day after I got it and created the note the next day. And here we are. Why was I so excited about this book? Because Anders Ericsson is literally the world's leading expert in what makes experts so great, what makes great people great, the top performers in their field. What is it about them that makes them so awesome? He's led the research for the last 30, 35 years in this field. All the stuff that you've read about deliberate practice, the 10,000 hour idea, which we're going to talk about today. Is that really a rule? Short answer? No. We'll get into some details on that. But Anders Ericsson is the man when it comes to all this research. Truly extraordinary stuff. So when I heard the book was coming out, I was obviously excited to get it. It's an awesome book, packed with big ideas. We cover a handful of my favorites in the Note. We've got five we're going to go over now. We will start with the Gift. The Gift. So the book kicks off with the introduction, which is literally called Introduction the Gift. And Anders tells us that too often we see someone who's performing at a really high level, a true expert in their field, whether that's an athletic event or competition or chess or music or whatever. We look at them and say, wow, they must have been born with a little something extra, right? They have a gift for what they do. And he says, well, unless you're looking at the gift in a different way, that's just not true. And he says, we all have the same gift. That gift is a for adaptability, which we're going to talk about throughout this little session. Adaptability. That's the gift that we all have in equal measure. The people who achieve the most are the ones who have simply tapped into our ability to improve, to adapt our brains and our bodies in the most extraordinary ways. And how do they do that? They do that through practice, which is going to be the theme throughout this book, which is the theme throughout this book and the theme throughout our chat today. So keep that in mind. We all have the gift. We do not want to have this myth of innate talent swimming around in our heads. Why it's Toxic. Because if you think that someone is doing something great, was simply born with that ability, then if you find something challenging or your kids find something challenging, they'll pick it up immediately. You're going to say, oh, you just don't have it. But the it that we want to cultivate is an awareness of and a commitment to adaptability because we all have that gift. That's our first big idea. Now, how do you actually see the benefits of that gift? Well, you practice. And Anders walks us through three different types of practice. One of the other myths that he busts in the book is the idea of naive practice. Naive practice is, oh, you just put in a ton of time, right? Whether it's 10,000 hours or whatever, just keep on showing up and you're going to get better. If you just put in more time, you will get better. He says that's naive practice. One of the examples he uses is driving. Some people think that simply driving for more years makes you a better driver. It doesn't. Just doing something again and again and again doesn't make you better at it. Sometimes it actually makes you worse than people who just started for various reasons. That works with drivers, that works with doctors. That's naive practice. That doesn't work. What does work? What does work is something called purposeful practice. Purposeful practice has four elements to it. And purposeful practice precedes deliberate practice, which was what he calls the gold standard. The gold standard, which we'll talk about more in a moment, purposeful practice. What are the four keys to purposeful practice? Well, they are these. One, you need to have a goal. You can't just kind of sort of go through the motions. You got to know specifically how you want to improve. You have a long term target of what you want your performance to look like. You break it down into different components and then you set goals and how you're going to improve each of those aspects, right? And then in this training session today, you have a purpose which is to improve in a specific way. So the first attribute is you have a goal. The second is you are focused. If you're kind of sort of showing up and you're not really engaged and you're even having fun and it's just an enjoyable experience. Those are all good signs that you're not actually purposely practicing. You need to be intensely focused on what you're doing if you want to trigger the adaptability in your brain and body. So you need to have focus on that specific goal. That's our second element. The third is Feedback, you need to get immediate feedback on how you're doing. Right. Otherwise you can't actually adjust to what's working or what's not working. That's our third component. The fourth is our comfort zone. We need to leave it. We need to exit our comfort zone. If you're just doing what you're pretty good at already and you're not stretching yourself, you, you will not trigger adaptability. And we're not going to talk about it in this little session. I talk about it a little bit more in the note and I'm going to do a micro class on this. But he has a chapter on homeostasis, which is our tendency to seek stability and we need to use that to our advantage. And what you do is you stretch out of your current homeostasis, your comfort zone, not so much that you snap, but enough that you stress yourself a little bit. Your body overcompensates or your brain, you adapt. But if you're just playing in your comfort zone, you are never going to experience that. It's a really cool look at the science of why you need to exit your comfort zone. So that's purposeful practice, deliberate practice. The gold standard has a couple other elements and it's essentially in the strictest definition. You can only deliberately practice in really established fields like chess and music and sports that have clear expert performers that you can objectively measure and clear steps on how to get there. We have a teacher and you have a very specific methodology that you follow. Right. For our purposes and for most people who aren't professional athletes, purposeful practice is what is going to be the core of what we do and then do as much of the other deliberate stuff as we can. Third big idea. What's happening? What's changing in our brains when we do this? Deliberate practice, when we have a goal, we're focused, we get and respond to immediate feedback and, and we exit our comfort zones. What happens is we change our mental representations. He uses some great examples in the book. A chess player, for example, if you show them a board midway through the game, they'll remember where those pieces are way more than someone who's not familiar with chess. Right. They have mental representations where they've seen different situations in a game so many times that they can work on that in really efficient, extraordinary ways. And, and it looks like they have extraordinary memory, but they don't actually, because if you mix those pieces up into weird would never happen in a real game positions, their memory is just as good or just as bad as the normal person. What they have are a deep set of mental representations that make it easy for them to do things that look magical to us. You can apply that to anything. Where expert performers are performing at a high level, they have done mental reps to have high levels of mental representations. In the note, I talk about the fact that that's basically what I'm aspiring to do. Every single book that I read and distill and share like this is essentially deepening my mental representation. So I see this idea again and that connects to this idea, which connects to that idea. And each deliberate practice session or purposeful practice session hopefully gives me a deeper sense of mental representation that enhances what I'm doing. We'll give that another 10,000, 20,000 hours and see how we're doing. Fourth big idea is the 10,000 hour rule. No, not so much. In the chapter he has on the gold standard, which is all about deliberate practice and the details of how to go about doing it, he has, is the 10,000 hour rule a rule? And basically says, no, it's not a rule. Malcolm Gladwell, who took this research and then popularized it in his great book Outliers, which we're going to feature, soon took a little liberty with the research in creating the 10,000 hour rule. And Anders makes some distinctions about how. Actually, that wasn't quite an accurate assessment of his research. And you can talk about that for a while. But the quick story is that there is in fact, no 10,000 hour rule. The research that Malcolm Gladwell was looking at was the violinist who, according to Anders Ericsson's research, he had three different groups, right? He had the best performers, better performers and good performers. So good, better, best. And it was true that at 20 years old, the violinists who were deemed to be the best and had the biggest chance of becoming so soloists, solo violinists, right, had put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by the time they were 20 years old. But Andrews makes the point of the fact that Malcolm Gladwell could have picked 7,400 hours, which is what they put in, by about 18. And he also failed to recognize the fact that after putting in 10,000 hours at 20 years old, they still weren't the best in the world. They were just the most capable of being the best in the world, right? They had to put in another decade or two of work in order to be a true soloist and the best at what they do, which is 20,000 to 25,000 hours, not 10,000 hours. So he makes that point. He also says that some domains have less hours than 10,000, some have more, etc. Etc. But for our purposes, what we need to know is if you want to achieve extraordinary performance, you need to put in a heck of a lot of deliberate performance practice, purposeful practice. The fifth big idea, Homo exorcisms. This is a really cool part of the final chapter. Anders makes a passionate statement about the fact that when he looks at human beings, he sees the thing that differentiates us most from any other species is the fact that we can consciously improve ourselves, we can consciously strive to get better. He says, okay, we named ourselves Homo sapiens because we have this sense that we are the knowing man, right? And we look at our ancestors and see Homo habilis, the handyman, right? Who is believed to be at the time, the first to create tools. Then you have Homo erectus, the first to stand upright. But he says, you know, I think we should be called Homo exercise, the practicing man, the man who's committed, the woman who's committed to improving themself via practice. I love that idea. Homo exorcisms, A joke in the note. Homo optimists optimizing our lives. That's what this is all about. Moment to moment to moment, we have an opportunity to make a choice, to get a little bit better, to practice that which we know to be true a little bit more. Today we show up in our field and we say, look, I aspire to be at this point. And we put in the effort homoexorcin style. Another important point he makes we haven't discussed yet is the book is called Peak, and he basically says, look, if you aspire to be at the peak, here's how to get there. But whether or not you want to be at the peak or you just want to get a little bit better, you need to know that you can get better, your kids can get better. Which brings us back to the first idea here, which is we all have the gift of being able to change, being able to adapt. We do it via practice. Just showing up and going through the motions doesn't do it. That's naive. Practice focus on the four elements of purposeful practice. Have a goal of how you want to improve. Be focused intensely so be open to and receive immediate feedback. And improve on the fly and exit your comfort zone as you do mental reps to build your mental representations in your chosen field. Then remember, the 10,000 hour rule isn't really a rule, but the general premise underlying it is a scientific fact, which is if you want to achieve expert performance, you need to put in a ton of conscious, purposeful, and ideally deliberate practice. Thank you, Anders Ericsson. And I hope you enjoyed what was your favorite big idea? What jumped out? What landed? Write it down, share it with somebody. Most importantly, figure out how you're going to embody it in your life more starting today. And I hope today is another awesome day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optymyze Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. 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