In this book Anders Ericsson (“the Expert expert”) explains just how amazingly adaptable our brains are, and how we can best leverage that fact.

TL;DR - Stay out of your comfort zone, follow an established regimen (if possible), have well-defined and specific goals, and get lots of feedback, ideally from a very good teacher.

Humans can get dramatically better at things in a short timespan

Examples:

• In 2 years Steve Faloon went from an average digit memorization ability (could remember ~7 digits at a time) to 82, a shocking increase for his time.
• Between 1973 and 2015 the world record for digits of pi memorized went from 511 to 70,000.
• In the early 1930s, Alfred Cortot was one of the best musicians, and his recordings of Chopin’s “24 Etudes” were considered amazing. Now it’s an example of horribly sloppy play.
• The marathon record in 1908 was 2 hours, 55 minutes, 8 seconds. Now the world record is 2 hours, 2 minutes, 57 seconds. The old record would barely qualify for the Boston Marathon.
• In 1908 the double somersault was nearly banned from Olympic diving for being “too dangerous”. Now it’s entry-level, and 10-year-olds can do it.

Humans didn’t magically get way faster, smarter, or more coordinated in the last few generations. These improvements were caused by an improvement in the time and techniques to practice these things.

“No matter what field you study…the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of principles.”

Our brains are amazing

Even as adults, our brains can change in dramatic ways due to stimulus.

• The part of the brain used for remembering places (part of the hippocampus) is gigantic in London cabbies.

  • The exam to become an official London cabbie is considered one of the hardest tests in the world.
  • Prior to (the years long process of) preparing for it, all subjects had average sized hippocampi.
  • After 4 years, the ones that had not dropped out had much larger hippocampi. Those that had dropped out were closer to average sized.
  • MRIs of experienced cabbies showed that the longer they had been a cabbie, the bigger that part of the brain was.

• Blind people’s visual cortex activates up when they “read” braille with their fingertips.

  • Skilled braille readers may use 3 fingers to “read” 3 lines at once.
  • They can detect much more gentle touches to those fingers than other people.

• Older people suffering from age-related farsightedness were able to train their brains to compensate.

  • Subjects spent 30 minutes 3x/week for 3 months performing an exercise where they had to spot small images against a very similarly-colored background.
  • After 3 months they could on average read 60% smaller text than before, and read it faster.
  • Every subject gained the ability to read a newspaper without glasses(!)
  • Their eyes were just as bad as before, but their brains had learned how to “de-blur” the images.

If you practice the right way, your brain (and body) can adapt to do some amazing stuff.

Mental Representations

As we get better at a task, our brains get better at recognizing patterns and encoding information related to that task.

Our short-term memory is really bad

• We can only hold about 7 things in our mind at once.

  • Most people can repeat back a string of 7 digits (plus or minus 1) immediately after hearing them, but no more.
  • This appears to be a general limit.

  • Makes it impossible to focus on many things at once. Some examples:

    • Notes in a song
    • Positions in a football play
    • Sequence of movements to shoot a 3-point goal

Mental Representations get around these limitations

• As we practice a skill, our brain rewires itself to recognize common patterns and leverage long-term memory.
• Mental Representations: Adaptations that occur in our brain to aid the brain in performing some task.

• This is why, when we walk, we don’t have to concentrate on extending and flexing our leg muscles.

  • We decide we want to walk somewhere, and our legs know what to do.
  • Our brain has stored the necessary sequence of movements in long-term memory, so we don’t have to use up precious slots in short-term memory just to walk properly.
• Mental representations are a relatively new field of study, and vary greatly between skills.
• In general, they are what allow complicated tasks to become second nature to experts.

Examples:

• Chess grandmasters

  • Tend to be very good at playing chess blindfolded without putting much practice into doing so.
  • Can remember the positions of most or all of the pieces on a chessboard after only a couple seconds of looking at the board, but if you put the pieces in a position that could not occur during a real chess game they are no better at remembering the positions than a novice.

• Pro divers

  • Must have lots of control over their bodies in a short timespan, and they do it pretty much unconsciously (after lots of practicing).
  • Similar to how when we walk we don’t have to think about which leg muscles to use.

• Other examples

  • Memory competitors encode information (like long strings of digits) in “memory palaces”.
  • Baseball players tend to not have much better eyesight or reflexes than most people, but are able to react to the pitcher’s movements muuuch faster.
  • Pro musicians can “hear” the music in their head just by reading the sheet music.

The better our mental representations are, the better we are at practicing.

Having better mental representations makes it easier to recognize what we’re doing wrong and figure out how to correct our mistakes.

The better our practice is, the more efficiently we can develop our mental representations.

“Good” practice should be designed around helping our brains form those mental representations as quickly as possible.

Most people practice the wrong way

Naive Practice: Mindlessly and repeatedly doing the same routine, expecting to get better for some reason. Research shows that once one reaches basic proficiency in the task, this is no longer effective.

Examples:

• Playing a game (Tennis, Smash, Chess, etc) repeatedly, hoping to improve
• Practicing music without feedback
• Diagnosing patients without later learning if you were correct

Better approach: Purposeful Practice

• Has well defined, specific goals
• FOCUS! Has your full attention while you’re doing it
• Direct feedback. Focus not on whether you’re correct, but on what you’re doing wrong and why
• Stay out of your comfort zone. Keep your goals just on the opposite side of what you’re capable of

Purposeful Practice has limits - trying hard and staying uncomfortable aren’t enough.

The best approach: Deliberate Practice

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate Practice is Purposeful Practice with the following additions:

• Use well-established training techniques designed and overseen by a teacher or coach.
• Make sure you have rock-solid fundamentals. You’ll be building on them.
• Do not mindlessly follow your teacher’s directions. Concentrate on your specific goal and on figuring out what adjustments need to be made to your performance.
• Modify your training in response to feedback, and gradually learn to spot your own mistakes.

• Focus on refining your mental representations.

  • What types of common patterns do you see?
  • What is most important to keep track of as you perform the activity?

What if your field isn’t well established or doesn’t have canonical best training practices?

• Study the best in the field and figure out what specifically enables them to perform so well.
• Judge who is the “best” by the most objective, reproducible metrics you can come up with.
• Tip: Seek out the judgement of people that have to work closely with many other professionals, such as a nurse that is on many surgery teams (if figuring out who’s the best surgeon), or a coach who coaches the best.

• Mimic the training techniques of the best people:

  • What do they do differently?
  • What are their mental representations?

Deliberate Practice at Work

Avoid the “business as usual” mindset! Remember:

• Your abilities are not limited by born traits. Avoid “I can’t”, or “I’m not good at ___” thinking.
• Only doing something a lot does not mean you’ll get better at it.
• Effort is not all you need to improve.

Everything is an opportunity for feedback and improvement. Make the most of it!

Seek repeatable, real-world scenarios with a low cost of failure

• In the late 60s, the U.S. Navy set up a fighter jet training program (“Top Gun”) in which the best pilots they had fought their second best fighters (without bullets).
• There was no curriculum, just many, many dogfights but without the dying.
• After 1 year, the rate of enemy fighters shot down per U.S. fighters lost went from 1 : 1 to 12.5 : 1!

Ask questions to yourself

Every day in the Top Gun program after the fighting stopped, the trainers would question the students:

• What did you notice while you were up there?
• What actions did you take? Why?
• What were your mistakes? What could you have done differently?

Eventually the students automatically would ask themselves these questions. You should, too.

Deliberate Practice IRL - tips and tricks

Can’t find a good teacher? Focus on the 3 Fs:

Focus - Be fully engaged in your practice. Concentrate intently on the details of what you’re doing. Feedback - Analyze what you’re doing and what’s going wrong. When and why are you making mistakes? Fix it - Figure out ways to practice more effectively and address your mistakes

Stuck at a plateau? Try to challenge yourself in a different way:

• Mix up the routine.
• Modify the goals/success metrics.
• Try pushing yourself harder than usual, allowing yourself to fail. What do you mess up on first? Where do the mistakes come from?

Having motivation issues?

• Develop an official regimen (Ideally at least 1 hour/day).
• Allocate dedicated, regular time for your routine in your schedule.
• Minimize distractions (turn phone off and put in another room, etc).
• Surround yourself with people who support your endeavors. (Supportive friends and/or others who are doing the same thing.)
• Focus on one small, manageable goal (can be totally arbitrary) at a time so you can see improvement more easily.

It will get easier to stick to your regimen as you mind/body adapts to the routine.

Side note: “Willpower genes” aren’t a thing

There’s very little scientific evidence that some people just have bigger “willpower reserves”. People who study obsessively in one field aren’t any more dedicated than everyone else people in unrelated fields.

Pathway of a Prodigy

Research suggests that becoming the literal best in the world at something depends more on how you were raised, rather than inherent gifts. Researchers identified 3 stages of development common to the development of 120 experts (best in their field) in piano, swimming, tennis, mathematics, research neurology, and sculpting. The patterns seem to also be present in other fields.

Sometimes you have to start young

For many fields, there aren’t any physical limitations for adults that can’t be overcome. (Usually lack of free time matters much more.) That said, there are some cases where you have to start as a child:

• Physical ability: We peak at a certain age, and if you start later your body can’t adapt as well.

  • Certain hip and knee joints calcify (turn from cartilage to bone) around 10 years old. Ballerinas have to start before then or they can never develop the same range of motion they otherwise would.
  • Skeletal adaptations (such as tennis players’ dominant arm bones becoming up to 20% denser than their other arm) will be more significant if they happen during puberty.
  • That said, the upper bound of average athlete ages is increasing with modern technology.

• Brain development: Some (not all) parts of the brain in professional musicians are only enlarged if they started before 7.

  • Science of this is not well understood yet.
  • Not insurmountable, though: perfect pitch, for example, can be improved via training.

Steps to becoming a prodigy

(Perry’s note - I do not necessarily condone treating your child as an experiment.)

1. Starting out

• Child (around age 1-3) is introduced to the field they are to become experts in.

• Introduction occurs via play. Examples:

  • Playing with Chess pieces and arranging them on a board
  • Throwing a ball
  • Organizing marbles by shape or pattern

2. Becoming serious

• In physical fields such as skating, the child begins deliberate practice with a coach.

  • The first instructors must be good with kids, to foster their enthusiasm.
  • Parents work with the kids establish practice routines and force them help them stick to it.

• In other fields like math, the students probably won’t have a tutor.

  • Their teachers still help spark their interest and intellectual curiosity.
  • More of a focus on why than how when solving problems.

• In this stage it’s important that the child gets lots of positive encouragement from parents and teachers.

  • As the child progresses, they become increasingly self-motivated.
  • Eventually the child will seek to improve without any prompting necessary, as their skill becomes part of their identity.

3. Commitment

• Around early- to mid-teens, the child makes a commitment to become the best they can be.
• The child seeks out increasingly prominent teachers - often those who have themselves reached the highest levels in the field.
• The dedication to the field basically becomes the child’s entire life.

• Motivation lies solely with the child, but the family still plays a crucial role:

  • May need to move across the country to train with the best coach
  • Often requires that the family have tons of money for lessons, transportation, tournaments, academies, etc.

Each new prodigy paves the way for other experts

• Others learn from the best in the field.

  • Maybe the best shares their techniques
  • Maybe the others just observe what the best is doing and imitate
  • Maybe just the knowledge of what is now possible is enough to motivate new challengers

The role of “Natural Talent”

The idea of being gifted from birth at something is not supported by science

Practice trumps everything

• Being a prodigy comes from focused practice, not inherent skill.
• Mozart’s father was a composer, gave him an incredibly intense musical training from an early age.
• Pablo Picasso (known for unique later paintings) started out imitating other artists and gradually developed his own style as he grew more skilled
• The skills that some “savants” have (such as rapid date calculation) have been shown to be learnable.

The “Magical high jumper” Donald Thomas

• Allegedly attempted a high jump on a dare in college, did super well, started competing and became famous for his “natural gift”. In reality:
• He actually already had some practice at high jumping from high school.
• Prior to high jump, he spent a bunch of his life practicing dunking, which develops similar skills.
• He hasn’t developed nearly as much since he was “discovered” as one would expect.
• If you look closely at the stories of other people like this, it ends up being a similar story.

(Lack of) correlation between IQ and skill at mental tasks

• IQ essentially measures how quickly one learns certain types of information.
• At low levels of Chess, people with a higher IQ tend to do better.

• At elite levels of Chess, there’s actually a slight negative correlation!

  • People with higher IQs may learn the game faster, giving them an edge.
  • Researchers hypothesize that at elite levels, the people that had to work harder to initially learn the game have already developed better practice routines than those that had an easier time early on.

When people say “I’m not good at something” it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Far more professional hockey players were born on January-March than October-December

• To play youth hockey in Canada, you must be a certain age by Dec. 13 of the previous year.
• People born early in the year are nearly a year older than the kids born later in the year, so they’re taller, heavier, more coordinated, etc.
• Those children get more praise and attention from the coaches, and the younger children just assume they’re not as good.
• The older children are more motivated to continue, so they keep getting better.

The same effect is present in other sports, like soccer.

“Tone-deafness” is incredibly rare

• 1 in 6 American adults think they can’t sing or are tone deaf.
• Real tone deafness is so rare, the discovery of such a person made it into a major scientific journal.
• The people who think they’re tone deaf usually were told that they couldn’t sing at some point, and stopped trying after that.

How many people feel the same in other areas? How many people are “bad at math”?

My Opinion

Anders Ericsson’s work is referenced in so many other books in this genre that one might feel that you already know most of the material going into the book. That said, I personally still think this book is worth a read - I hadn’t heard anything about Mental Representations prior to reading this book, and the studies he references are also pretty enlightening. It’ll end up being a much faster read if you’re already familiar with Deliberate Practice - you can pretty much skim through half the book to get to the newer information.

Meta Thoughts

Wow, this TL;DR took forever. I felt like there were two main challenges that made this harder to summarize:

• The structure of the book isn’t well suited to a direct summary. If I just summarized each chapter and threw it into this post, the order wouldn’t have made much sense. Instead I shuffled several ideas around to flow better for this format.
• This book has a ton of studies and examples and such. They’re all fascinating, and it was very hard to decide which ones to include and how detailed I should be.

Takeaways for the future:

• I should start with a high-level picture of what exactly I want to convey with my summary. That can better guide my choices for what to include, and make it less likely that I change my mind later in the process.
• I should only ask for feedback once the draft version is completely ready. I got some great feedback from a friend on how to improve the summary, but that feedback would have been more helpful if I had asked after the entire thing was “completed”.