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Peak - by Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool, 2016

The main problem/question posed by the book:

• How do people become expert performers?
• Can we learn from expert performers how to improve our skills?

The main takeaways:

• We are all born with a gift: the adaptability of our mind and body
  • The body's and the mind's adaptability outweights any genetic differences that may give some people advantage in the beginning
• There is no such thing as innate talent, no shortcuts, only hard work - all top performers did years of sustained practice
• With deliberate practice the average person can improve greatly (number recall experiment)

Other interesing ideas

Regular practice vs Deliberate practice

• pushing the boundaries (outside of comfort zone)
• fully focused on goal
• quick feedback
• identify weakness and fix it

Recepie - 3Fs - Focus, Feedback, Fixit:

• Break the skill down into components, that you can do repeatadly and analyze effectively
• Determine your weaknesses and figure out how to address them

Musical student who used deliberate practice, became more successful because they:

• identify errors better - apply practice better
  • better able to determine when they made mistakes
  • better able to identify difficult sections, that need more practice
  • better mental representations = better skills

The importance of Mental Representations

• meaning - preexisting mental represantations - it aids memory (random words are harder to remember then a sentence)
• preexisting patters of information, held in long-term memory - allows to process great amount of information quickly
• conceptial structure desinged to side step the limitations of the short-term memory imposes on mental processes (7-9 numbers vs 100 numbers recalled)
• infomration organized in a superior way

Innate abilities like IQ, memory, processing speed only affect the performance significantly whan you are a beginner or learning a new skill

• amongs professional performers, performance correlates with practice/training time not IQ or other innate ability (chess players)
• the body's and the mind's adaptability outweights any genetic differences that may give some people advantage in the beginning

Knowledge vs Skill

• knowledge is needed, what you know?
  • facts, concepts, rules - that are stored as individual pieces of information in long term memory, unconnected - limited use
• skill is useful, what you can do?
  • the pieces are part of an interconnected pattern of mental representations aimed at doing someting - it is easier to use
• deliberate practice is all about skill, and you pick up the knowledge along the way

Simple writing = knowledge telling Expert writing = knowledge transofrm, the process of writing adds to/changes the knowledge the writer had at the beginning

Homo Sapiens = "Knowing Man", this should be updated to "Practicing Man"