A book on how to attain expertise and mastery in anything, by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.

Summary

The pair of authors do not very much believe in the idea of innate talent. In fact, they think that it often acts as a deterrent for people to pursue skills, thinking that they have no talent, creating negative self-fulfilling prophecies. The reality is that the human brain is extremely adaptable, and according to the authors, anyone can achieve mastery at anything they want.

So why aren’t most people experts, despite repeated engagement in the activities that they want to be great at? It’s because when people get into a certain acceptable competency level, where they reach a sense of comfort, additional engagement in the activity, i.e. naive practice no longer improve the skill. Think of driving as an example: most people drive every day, but are nowhere near the level of competency of professional race car drivers, and they do not progress towards it, not even slowly.

To get better continuously and attain expertise, you must engage in deliberate, or purposeful practice. Deliberate practice:

• Involves breaking a desired skill into its components
• Requires focus, full attention
• Requires feedback, need to know when it’s done well or badly
• Requires pushing one self to just outside the comfort zone, but not too much

What makes deliberate practice effective? From various studies and experiments (some done by the authors) on experts in chess, musical instruments, sports, memory challenges, it seems that the formation of mental representations is key. Experienced people form and retain set patterns within their domain of expertise called “chunks”, and the relationships between different chunks, which make up the mental representations. It’s essentially a form of heuristics, a more efficient encoding of mastery. The formation of these valuable mental representations is what separates experts from novices, and is exactly what deliberate practice helps to achieve.

Some practical tips on how to engage in deliberate practice:

• Find a good teacher, a person who is good at the skill and teaching that skill
• The teacher serves as a model to imitate, and can show you what you are doing wrong, what good performance looks like, and help you build the mental representations
• Since deliberate practice requires focus, it can be very intense, hard and tiring to maintain for long. So maintaining motivation and commitment is key. The people who succeed are not ones who enjoy the hard practice - nobody likes it - but rather they are the ones who were able to keep practicing despite the hardship
• When hit a plateau in progression: see where you are breaking down or making the most mistake, and focus relentlessly on it, the exact thing or part that is holding you back. This is where you push yourself outside your comfort zone

Commentary

I generally disagree with the fundamental premise of the book, that innate talent is not a thing, and that anyone can be as good as the top performers of the field if they simply practiced effectively. A lot of the authors’ denial of innate talent comes from the repeated failures in attempts to define it, but this does not make a convincing argument for its nonexistence. Innate talent is much harder to quantify and measure, compared to hours and methods of practice, and just because we haven’t been able to measure it reliably doesn’t mean it’s not a thing.

I do think that most (maybe all) people can achieve a high level (but not top level) of mastery through effective training though, and the book’s version of this, “deliberate practice”, seems to be a very good way to do this. At least in some fields.

This brings me to my second problem with the book: most of the examples used to illustrate the authors’ points are from fairly narrow, single-dimensional fields, such as playing musical instruments, memorizing numbers, chess, and sports. These are all areas in which it’s relatively easy to measure competency, and to improve with sheer practice. But how well does this generalize to more complex skills? The author doesn’t really address this and simply assumes that all skills are the same, and therefore the same technique works on all of them. For one thing, more complex skills (e.g. leadership skill) cannot even be reliably quantified and broken down into the component pieces, so one cannot even begin with the process of deliberate practice on them.