hey you listen to the James Altucher show on YouTube you're gonna learn all about peak performance from today's greatest influencers and how you can get there as well I upload a new video every Monday Tuesday and Thursday don't forget to subscribe click on the bell notification so you don't miss a thing this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host this is the James Altucher show on the choose yourself network today on the James Altucher show and so how did you get into this like what were you my guess is at some point you were trying to get good at something maybe even a leap at something and maybe this didn't quite work out for you like what what were you trying to go for if you were prepared and you encounter something that doesn't match up now that's a learning opportunity I am obsessed with figuring out how to hack the so-called 10,000 hour rule the idea that you need 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to reach your peak potential so I was so happy that Andrews Erickson the developer of this rule which he figured out through tons of studies and research and helping people reach their peak potential of so excited when he decided to come my podcast he originally came on the show two years ago episode 162 his book peak secrets from the new science of expertise was mind-blowing to me and I had so many questions on top of it and he was so generous at answering them see he discovered the 10,000 hour rule he taught me exactly what it means to do dedicated practice I remember him telling me people have been convinced that as an adult you're pretty much fixed and that there's a limit on what you can do but this is just simply not true and we talked about every aspect of how you can achieve peak potential I think one of the best takeaways from this interview is when Anders talks to me about finding the area that you should dedicate yourself to he told me to look at the joy you get he also gives a lot of useful tips about finding a teacher learning by doing and having willingness to fail at heart and really discovering your own ability to master something which I know for myself is such a joy and pleasure in my life so please listen to this podcast episode [Music] give me the thumbs up whenever when we're rolling okay we're rolling right now good so I'm just gonna start it and we could yeah our conversation yeah I really enjoy that good so everybody I'm excited Anders Ericsson one of my personal heroes is in the studio for the podcast Anders you have this book coming out today peek secrets from the new science of expertise and welcome to the podcast well thank you so much I'm really enjoying it you know actually I'm and as I was saying to you earlier for some reason I thought we were gonna do this via Skype and then you walked in here and I'm like yes I get to meet the man we're gonna do this pocket it's so much better when it's not Skype so I'm thank you for coming up here well it's it's really wonderful seeing you and talking to you like this well you know and I remember I I don't know if everybody knows exactly who you are although they've read about you I'm sure many times I mean you've been popularized in several I want to call them oh I don't say this in a negative way about kind of pop science books like for instance Malcolm Gladwell's outliers talks about that what he calls the 10,000 hour rule and we'll have an opportunity to talk about that and maybe correct a little bit of it but this idea that with 10,000 hours of practice and again we'll elaborate on that word with 10,000 hours of practice essentially anybody talent or no talent and we'll discuss that too anybody can become an expert or maybe the best in the world at what they do and you've done a ton of research to suggest and you've researched world-class performers in many fields to discover exactly what it takes to become let's say a world-class performer and it's funny one of the studies you referred to actually 25 years ago I was in so or you were first one of the researchers fernando bay cuz i'm a chess master oh when he was at carnegie low and he's of course the swiss champion or whatever when he was at carnegie mellon pursuing his graduate degrees i was in his study that originally showed about chunks you know between differencing grandmasters chess masters and novices and so on so it's fascinating deciding to hear Wow yeah so so let's talk about it what is what Malcolm Gladwell called the 10,000 hour rule as opposed to what really might be the rule maybe I'm going to get a step back what's what do people refer to when they say talent well I think different people use that word differently I personally think of talent as innate talent something that people are sort of born with without having to attain it through any kind of training and effort and I guess what I've been finding you're looking for kind of innate talent and and and I I sort of feel it's a little bit destructive in college students they go out and look for what they're talented at whereas I think you know they would be much better off actually deciding on what they would want to become and then actually try to get there by you know the kind of training that we've found to be effective for other people who've been very successful so that's fascinating there's a lot a big question people in their 20s have is how do I find my talent how do I find my passion what would you suggest if someone was going to say okay I'm in my 20s I've got the energy I've got the time I've got the abilities what should I pursue to become a world-class or an expert class performer at how would you kind of guide them to sort of find their area you mentioned one guy Dan I forgot his last name but Dan who who decides just out of the blue he's 30 years old 31 years old he's gonna out of the blue put in his 10,000 hours on golf and he's never even played golf before and to because he wants to be a professional golf player and he's well along the way but how would someone find something to be to pursue well what I'm fascinated by and and I I think that some of these people have been sort of convinced here by some of our research that this idea here that as an adult you're pretty much fixed there's limit on what you can do is just not accurate and I think in the book we talk about this work on memory training and and I think what this key but the memory training is that the way you get better is not just by doing more of the same so it turns out that mathematicians and other people who work with numbers all day long they only have ability here to remember sort of up to about 20 digits and what we were able to show here with this college student that we more or less just encountered accidentally because he was able and willing to actually be part of the training you know with two to four hundred hours of training he was able to reproduce a list of over eighty digits and now as though was that the world record at the time that was the world record at the time exactly so it's amazing so basically with two hundred hours using and he had to kind of figure out what the training techniques were you sort of talked it through after each session he had to figure out what the best training techniques were himself on his own but but he had the deal what you call deliberate practice to kind of and I'm out you could define it differently for me I'm just working off the book he had basically you giving him feedback he had his own results he could see the immediate feedback could he did he remember the list or not you guys would discuss how to better train and what he was doing what was going on in his brain and so you were able to kind of he stayed healthy so you were able to kind of work through the principles of deliberate practice as opposed to just him randomly practicing you know lists of numbers and that's how he kept improving just to make a distinction I think we kind of would like to think of that more as purposeful practice where we gave him a particular goal and then we also arranged a training situation where he could actually do the same thing over and over and get immediate feedback so we could make adjustments so deliberate practice we try to save for when you actually have a teacher that has taught other individuals like a music teacher who then actually supervises the training and actually builds a skill based on accumulated knowledge in the domain so that's kind of where we would argue deliberate practice now obviously it's kind of deliberate practices purposeful practice under the guidance of a teacher that can actually sequence the kind of training that he knows from past experience is going to be effective to improve your performance so it's funny because so okay so really what's more and you kind of underline this quite a bit what's more important than talent and quote unquote 10,000 hours of work is this notion of deliberate practice like every time you're trying to improve it something used deliver practice so maybe define that a little bit more and and I want to back off then and kind of discuss a little bit more about talent in the 10,000 hours and the notion of prodigies with guys like Mozart and so on so what is deliberate practice well if I want to get better at learning a language what's what's deliberate practice in that well we would argue deliberate practice would be seeking out a teacher who is about experience and then basically that teacher would kind of assess where you're at so some people have some prior knowledge of the language so the key question is what would be the appropriate kind of training that you would engage in in order to kind of lay out the fundamentals that would allow you then to build and then gradually acquire your performance by engaging in you know training grammar acquiring new vocabulary and and all sorts of things and in particular I guess we're interested in your ability to use the language so you would be able to talk to other people and use the language rather than which is a norm here I guess in the school system is that you get these written tests as opposed to you're really being tested in your ability to speak the language so it's doing versus kind of sitting and learning and being tested and so on so you have to actually go out there speak you get the uuuuu start doing and the mentor teacher who already has a lot of experience is able to kind of say no don't do it this way do it this way and then you and then you repeat right and I think a very nice example here related to talent I had a friend who claimed that he couldn't learn lang and then he fell in love with the Mexican woman who didn't speak hardly any English and he actually within six months was able to acquire you know and maybe maybe not told proficiency but a remarkable improvement of his ability not to speak Spanish and and I think what's interesting is that when you have a motivating factor like that you're going to be basically now willing to do the hard things that are required to master the language and if you contrast that with a student who's maybe studying a language that they don't even think that they're going to be using that obviously is not the ideal situation to motivate them to do the hard things that will actually improve their language performance so so the motivating factor is different than motivation you kind of have to find that sort of gold at the end of a rainbow you have to have sort of at least envision that it's there to sort of get through the the journey through the raivo right and and and that I think personally I find that finding that kind of motivating kind of source that that keeps flowing and keeps you actually getting back from your efforts so you can now see the deliberate practice as an instrument by which you actually now reach a higher level but that is ultimately not through Ward in itself it's your ability now to do things like for example if you're a musician be able to play in front of an audience and actually feel how that audience is moved by your music or maybe musicians would actually take time and actually play around so they're actually creating the music that they can hear themselves and enjoy the process of actually exploring music those are the kind of driving forces that I see as being the key here to people who reach exceptional levels so so again it's the number one finding a teacher having a motivating factor doing rather than just sitting back and learning which I kind of underlines sort of I don't want to say the failure of the educational system because that sounds political but it sort of goes against the modern educational system where it's all about let's memorize facts as opposed to doing something you know it's funny like when I when I read a book let's say I read your book and then I'm talking I always think the way to really retain the information from a book is if I go and tell someone I just read this great book here's the five things I've learned that's gonna help improve myself that's what I do with a book like yours and I think that's the way I remember things later this is what I buy actually saying it out loud to somebody and trying to convince them this is how to learn I'm able to better remember the book as opposed to just trying to remember it without any doing anything else right and and I think that that's kind of the key that I see in all sorts of experts their ability of actually mentally sort of think about things to reason and be able to now kind of work with it as opposed to this idea here of this absorbing a lot of knowledge and and I guess the extreme case is this memorizing where you may be able to actually reproduce a book without actually even have understood the main ideas but I would argue that the real expert there extracting the main ideas exactly like you were talking about and that make those ideas their own by relating it now to everything else that they know and sometimes maybe even finding you know things that you know that seems to be in conflict with your generalization and then I guess that leads to more thinking and discussion I think another big factor of a deliberate practice if and correct me if I'm wrong but what I get from the book is building almost you don't quite refer to this way you refer to what's called mental representations but I want to say building a language out of whatever concepts you're trying to learn so for instance let's say I'm trying to as a basic example that's the most direct let's say I'm trying to learn how to memorize a string of letters if they were just random letters I might have a hard time remembering 50 letters in a row but if I turn those letters into a sentence like you know quote-unquote here's what I'm going to learn from this book today unquote now I can remember 50 letters in a row because it became a sentence that it's easier to remember and you the example with the guy who was remembering these strings of numbers he would build them into three or four number chunks or chess is another example the grandmasters had in their memory on each position like the king is Castle door the King is under attack or the bishop is fianchettoed they would build chunks mental representations of bigger parts of the position as opposed to his remembering where all the pieces were which is which they actually couldn't even do better than a novice if a if a diet divided up that way right and and I think there are just many different words and I think language is just one way that actually shows that you've been able to sort of internalize it so you can actually express what it is that you're seeing and and you can reason about it and and I guess some people think that language is is a key factor here for you know when you reason with yourself one could also think about images as a way here of actually seeing patterns and being able to see how various things kind of linked up to other things and I think with the test board you know thinking about how different kind of relationships between chess pieces now creates weaknesses and strengths and if you remember right you memorize those weaknesses at the list of weaknesses and strengths as opposed to all 64 squares on the board and then you're able to reconstruct the position as they were able to do in these famous studies right and how so so again how so it's one thing to say okay I'm gonna build mental representations but what's the process of doing that now and I guess you do that with an instructor you do it over time you you you apply yourself somehow but what's what can kind of kickstart this a little a little more well I think if we take chess for example I think one thing that you know and you're more of an expert than I am but as you get better in chess you're actually being able to sort of plan moves at a deeper level so that actually that kind of planning is happening in your head it's not like you're allowed to move the pieces to see what happens when various moves are being made and and I think that kind of captures my idea of a representation is something that you can manipulate and I guess we know that if you're a really good chess player you don't really need a board you can basically have it all in your head and you can still sort of think through options which I guess to me you know illustrates this internalization and the question is how do you get to that point I believe that a planning and playing chess and actually seeing here and having some kind of feedback mechanism that tells you did you see all the relevant things and and we found that playing through games against masters almost simulating you're playing against you know that what used to be the world's best players then you can actually try to predict what the move is going to be and now you can then compare your thinking with the move that was actually being made and now that gives you some degree of feedback here whether you actually were aware of all the relevant features that the world-class player obviously was aware of do you think in some cases where you like again we'll take chess as an example or you could even take language if you have like a good language program but like here let's say if I go through games of masters and I sit and think well what would the master play next and then you you you look at the next page and you see what the master played next do you think that removes as as much of a need for a teacher like you can kind of virtually create a teacher for yourself that way I think that's a very effective way of learning I think if you work with the teacher the teacher would know all sorts of related maybe positions that had similar kinds of issues so instead of working through the games the way you encountered them the teacher would be able to kind of actually help you get five other similar kinds of situations that you could then basically be working on and sort of get the chance here especially if you miss something you would then be able to get another opportunity to kind of identify it and then consolidate the changes that you need to do in your thinking to be able to next time you encounter a similar situation be aware of those aspects that you maybe initially did not pay attention to well a great example is you talk about the Polgara sisters and and I promise we'll get to an area other than chess in a second but like the so lászló polgár wanted to basically test out his theories which are similar to yours in some respects and he basically said I'm gonna have a bunch of kids and I'm gonna make them world class at whatever I want them to make be world class that and he was debating between tennis and chess he decided on chess and from what I and they all became world class two of them became you know world champion level it was unbelievable really three sisters in row became the best female chess players ever and from what I understand he did give them they had instructors among the best players in Hungary but he did also give them thousands and thousands of chess problems oh like one after they would be related to each other like let's say a thousand Bishop takes Knight problems and a thousand you know rook and two pawns problems and and so on he would basically kind of clump these problems together so they became used to over and over practicing the same thing in the similar situations yeah I actually was fortunate enough to meet Russell Polgara he's spending the winners in Miami mana these years and and and and he was telling me about he kind of had a library of test games that he actually had indexed these chess positions just for the purpose here that you were mentioning that he would be able to pull out similar kinds of positions and actually present them as a more effective way of teaching his daughters you know what the right move would be how do you think he knew that that was the right way to teach so again repetition on similar positions and I want to say it's like almost like the Bruce Lee quote and I believe you mentioned it the Bruce Lee Kuan I'd rather I'd I'd rather fight the man who's practiced 10,000 kicks and the man who's practiced one kick 10,000 times so showing that repetition on the same thing is almost more valuable for for learning a scale and and and I believe that it has to do with the depth so if you actually are working on kind of a particular problem you will actually now refine the way you're thinking about that problem if you basically encounter new problems of different kinds then it's much harder to get that sort of feedback cycle where you can attune yourself so next time when you encounter a similar situation you're prepared for it and so so now okay let's say there's something a feel that's not as measurable like let's say I want to be better at sales or better at negotiating or better dealing with people what do you think what are some ideas I can I can do to start you know building performance right on and I think sales is an interesting one this semi measurable right you know so if you basically look at the amount of money that a salesperson is bringing into the company once you deduct all their expenses you know that would be sort of an objective measure that a lot of companies like to use to measure sort of a good at salesperson is and if they can sustain that over years it really means that they're not abusing the customers they're basically being able to you know work with them for longer periods now what I found is that that the people who've been working with sales what they point out is again you know finding somebody who has proven themselves as successful and now actually studying what that person is doing and maybe even that person eventually will become you know a sales leader where where they actually are promoted from being a sales person so now they're actually working with individual sales individuals you know to improve their outcomes because everyone is obviously motivated here to increase the amount of income to the company and one of the things that I found most interesting was talking to them about how much work they would spend before they actually meet a customer so there's a lot of information that you can actually you know extract so before you actually meet the person if you have a good idea here one what are they allowed to decide and secondly what are their needs and if you can infer now what the arguments that potentially would be a very effective against any other competing sales men that would have contacted them and and that kind of extra work of actually sort of trying to be prepared for the situation strikes me as a very generalizable thing and and if you were prepared and you encounter something that doesn't match up now that's a learning opportunity so now you try to figure out what was it that basically was wrong here with my expectation here about how the interaction with the basically the potential customer would be and so so putting together an educational program on sales it's almost like they can come up build a library of like a thousand different sales situations and some of them similar some of them not so similar and run kind of the sales trainees through each situation and correct them and and modify them and have them try again on a similar situation and so on right and if you could reconstruct actual events I think that would be even more motivating to somebody to know okay so here you have the preparation situation and what is it that you're planning to do and then we actually have documentation about what happened in the sales event so it's almost like now they know that one person actually had this opportunity and they did this and basically here is the outcome that resulted from that but it I agree totally with this idea here of creating a library and and maybe sometimes you can videotape maybe other tape at times you can reconstruct it with actors so basically individuals would have that kind of realistic experience and and then I think knowing that this actually happened just makes it much less an issue here about you know did the teacher really know what's right well here we have ten cases that you can kind of experience you can see what happened in those so let me ask you this like obviously and this is you you've talked about it as quite a bit in the book that maybe the it's not necessarily ten thousand hours as Malcolm Gladwell put it but like in this case of the cells let's say someone did put together the ideal sales training program or language training or whatever how many hours of work like let's say I'm horrible at sales on my baseline zero how many hours of work do you think I can I would have to do this deliver practice with an instructor who's really put together this library of situations and I do repetition and I build these mental models or different situations how many hours of work do you think I need to do to be go from a zero to a ten well I love to be able to answer that question given that we don't have these libraries and we don't really have kind of a sales education that basically meets these criteria I think it's going to be hard to give you any numbers is it different in every industry well I would argue that maybe some of the best evidence that we have is from medicine where you can actually now start where people are actually now incorporating sort of deliberate practice in the training and and one example that we talked about in the book is so here's kind of the the setup you're performing a surgery with the supervising surgeons so basically if you make any mistakes you will be able to stop you or correct them so the patient won't be harmed but you videotape basically that surgery and ideally it would be performed now by somebody who's training to become a surgeon and then that videotape of then being analyzed so you can actually pinpoint what are the things that actually could be improved and then the basically the surgical trainee is working in a simulator where they can actually repeatedly now you know master these kinds of techniques and when they're ready they go back and do another surgery here with a supervising surgeon so now you have that feedback cycle where you have teachers who can analyze the videotapes and and show very clearly to the trainee what the problem is and then design training with a simulator that would actually you know allow them enough repetitions so they can actually perform that and you know it's very interesting what you say in the book of the medical practice let's say I'm a doctor and I don't do this I just simply do lots of surgeries and I have 30 years of experience you kind of point out that when somebody let's say a doctor gets into kind of I don't want to say a rut or a routine but they kind of just keep doing the same thing over and over without necessarily getting the feedback loop that their performance will actually decline over time as opposed to what normally people would think that they would get better with practice right and and I think if you think about drivers most people wouldn't think of 50 year olds as being substantially better than 30 year olds just because they have 20 more years of driving experience and if anything I think sometimes you actually automate it so you're not actually paying attention to the driving situations and there's some really interesting research showing that most accidents happen in particular situations where basically pedestrian is walking out you can't see them about behind say a truck or something like that but by basically now training individuals so they actually retain now this sensitivity to potential dangers you can actually see a correlation now with reduce accident rates so there's a lot of situations where the typical situation is so typical that you can actually deal with it successfully you know 95% of the time the problem is that there's a 5% of the time where there's something that looks like a normal case but it's not and there you actually see that a highly experienced individual who is going on automatic pilot it's going to be less well prepared to deal and sort of anticipate those potential problems so when it comes to expert performers that's almost defined by somebody who has a very good record what I find is that they prepare it's almost you know like they're trying now to do their utmost so by monitoring not you know basically doing a okay performance they can actually find ways here to keep themselves motivated and keep you know improving and anticipating problems and other things and that I think is really the kind of expert performer that I would like for us to promote let's stop to take a quick break we'll be right back you're probably familiar with the classic book the inner game of tennis where the author talks about the importance of visualization so you're about to make a serve you visualize it in heavy detail first how important is that for kind of expert performance or learning expert performance well I think it's key when you're engaging in any kind of sport that you actually have a plan for what's gonna happen and I think when it comes to people working at a driving range in golf and just try to hit it in a one ball after the other and just try to hit it harder and harder that's not going that's not what expert golfers do they would actually decide what it is that they want this particular ball to do and then basically you will actually monitor now whether they have enough control over that ball to make that ball do the same the thing that they intended and they keep varying that so that actually develops now the ability to control so it's not just sort of one thing where you just hit it as hard as you can and then see what happens you're actually deliberately trying now to maybe have spin on it or you're using an unusual club or whatever but as long as you have an image about what you expect then you can actually learn from it because if the ball is not doing what you intended it to do that would then start this feedback loop where you would try to refine and you know attain more control over what you're doing so I see the importance of kind of repetition and to get the control over what you're doing is there a danger that I could fall into the easy so I can control what I'm doing if the if my goal is easy so if I want to hit the golf ball 50 yards yeah at some point I'll be able to do that every single time you know 50 yards at one spot um but when do I start kind of challenging myself to do more like 60 yards seven yards 150 yards and so on well there I would argue that maybe a golf coach would be the better judge here for a particular player but but is that important though the idea itself that's definitely you know you should actually train to do things that you can't do so basically if you're an ice skater and you're trying now to do a more complex jump if you train the easy jumps what is the likelihood that you're going to be able to do the quadruple or whatever it's essentially zero so the way you actually get to do the quadruple is actually to kind of try to do a triple under more and more complex situations where you actually you know manipulate various elements so you get to a point here where you have enough air time that you can actually complete one more rotation but and you may actually have to strengthen your legs in order to be able to get that lift but it's sort of this gradual process and and I think you can see here how a teacher would be able to help you do corrections here and work on mastering these sub pieces until you're actually ready to even try the complete quadruple so there's a real important role for mentorship or teachers or somebody who's achieved expert or world-class performance who is now able to kind of assess all right you're ready to kind of jump a little bit higher you need a little bit more leg muscle work you need all these little things to add up and then we'll start to be able to do like the quadruple whatever right and there is an interesting study that actually looked at ice skaters and found this difference between the elite skaters and the sub elite skaters and they found that the sub lead skaters spent more time doing things that they already had mastered so in some sense that makes you feel better right if you're training you can do everything but it also you know doesn't allow you now to improve like the elite skaters who are constantly trying to do things they couldn't do so that was the main difference was that was what one of the biggest difference the elite was always aiming to do what they couldn't do whereas the X but we're mastering the the same thing over and over and they did master it but they weren't doing what they couldn't write you know and it's not obviously black and white but but but there was a gradation difference and I think basically that willingness to fail is is sort of at the heart because failing if you try to do something you can't do you're gonna have to start out failing but the the joy that you will get when you eventually you know are able to master it I think that is the kind of thing that I would point to if you wanted to motivate people to really do the hard work and I think the the myth of talent is often what reduces the motivation because if someone is trying let's say someone loves ice skating it may start off basically good at it and they want to improve but then they start failing over and over again at the quadruple they might throw up their hands and say I can't do this I don't have enough talent and what you're saying is you can do this with the right teaching and you know assuming you're not you know physically unfit that you can't do this you can do this with the right training the right amount of time the right amount of reputation the right amount of practice because the the talent aspect there's no such thing as I can't really write and I think what I find danger is this idea that somebody and maybe it's not a coach or trainer or but somebody's telling you that you can't do it how would you know it's almost like if if you think that they know more than you do what can you do but accept that but I think that society might do it too Society has the myth of talent the myth of the prodigy that's definitely true when and and there's a lot of cases here were and I think Russell Polgara was actually telling me about all the resistance that he encountered in Hungary when he was trying to do his training with his daughters you know they thought that he was almost a little you know abnormal and and this idea that he would be able to kind of train all three of his daughters you know seemed weird but when he had it wasn't it wasn't genetics like he was not a chess player they just kind of came out of nowhere and became a three best woman in the world exactly you know and that's pretty compelling in retrospect but I can see that while they were trying to make progress here and get resources to get help here with the training that was a sort of a difficult situation and and what I find interesting is the evidence that people cannot attain an exceptional performance that's really weak you know so if you accept your height you know with being tall as the center in basketball obviously as an advantage and being you know short when you're gymnast is sort of gonna be an advantage but beyond that we don't really know of any individual genes that are necessary for somebody to succeed so let's take you had a lot of great examples about violinists that have been studied and the world class viola and you looked at violinists that were all in the same school and then sort of analyzed which ones we're gonna end up being teachers which ones we're gonna end up being kind of second-class performers and which ones were gonna be world-class performers and there was one definite distinction between all three categories which is the world-class performers had about on average 70 400 hours of practice by the time they got to school and the teachers while still excellent or you know to protect the future teachers while still excellent had about 3800 hours of practice before and during the school so it does seem like there is this well it might not be Talent kind of driving them into this point of adulthood how much how many hours of time they put in as a child did seem to be a distinguishing factor yeah and I think that was kind of really surprising and interesting to a lot of people and by the way that seems like where the 10,000 hour myth comes from right and basically we had some data on them when they were age 20 where the the kind of the elite group out of the three actually on the average had 10,000 hours of training and and I think that that was kind of misinterpreted to say that everyone in that elite group actually had over 10,000 hours which is slightly different but but I think the key that I was trying to kind of emphasize was this idea that regardless of your talent level it's really even the most talented if that even exists are gonna have to spend you know like 10,000 hours I mean that's if you look at it that's a big chunk of time and especially we know that they're investing maybe four or five hours a day and that can't be you know basically time when you're daydreaming this is a time when you need the most energy in order to really kind of search for your outer limits of your performance to be able to keep improving well let's look at a couple of examples where the word prodigy or talent is thrown around and you mentioned some of them in your book well like Mozart for instance is considered the most talented prodigy and music history that I've seen that sentence about him and you dispute that well I think most people don't recognize that most search father was actually a pioneer in training especially children and that he was a famous musician and he was composing but at the time when Mozart was actually born and started in training he actually stopped composing and we know that he actually designed training activities for Mozart and his older sister so we know that there was a lot of early training that went into Mozart's performance and-and-and if you're really looking kind of for prodigious performance we tried to come up with a measure because music today is ranked in terms of the number of years of study that you need to have in order to perform a piece and we related now basically the public performances of pieces and the age of the child so we get kind of like a quotient and what we found was that Mozart was above average he was over you know a hundred but there was a tremendous number of more recent prodigies that were more prodigious than he was and actually the most prodigious performance that we found was a Suzuki a trained musician that was not considered to be a prodigy because it's a suki basically the training kind of assumes that this is like learning a language but something that anyone can do if they're given the right kind of training where the mother is actually using the same methods for teaching language as they're teaching now the music playing it's interesting because you were also relate the development of perfect pitch to language acquisition so you even mentioned how certain people from who speak certain tonal more tonal languages are better able to develop perfect pitch then let's say not a tonal languages so that was very interesting kind of how you were how your arrays affects this ability that many people associate with either talent or no talent right and and I think the finding now is that you need to get training between ages three and five too for any child to be able to acquire perfect pitch and there's some recent work by a Japanese researcher that showed that all the children are he trained were able to basically attain it but what about me can I get perfect pitch now like I'm 48 years old can I can I do it i have no perfect pitch right right and and i think the development the developmental window between 3 & 5 really constrains adults from from getting it so obviously you're older than 5 and and there is some adults who try to get it and they can improve their performance but it doesn't seem to be the same and they've now done research where they've scanned brains and it seems that if you actually get that training early on your brain will actually develop in a slightly different way so it's a little bit like turnout in ballet and stuff like that where it's really critical that you get the training during a particular phase of your development of your body and brain and if you don't get that training it doesn't seem like you're now able to reverse that but there's so much other things that you can do that the number of things that we know are really developmentally constrained is relatively limited so it shouldn't worry you girls in surgery becoming a better surgery probably isn't related to what age I was when I when I learned it uh basically there's no evidence that I know of that suggests that and so let's say so right now like a lot of chess player like or I don't know if you've ever studied this is not mentioned in your book but have you ever looked at like a case like Magnus Carlsen who's the best chess player in the world he was probably the best chess player in the world at a very young age maybe 12 or 13 years old was he a prodigy or of some sort uh he started training really young but many kids start training very young well I think - Carlson is a really interesting example and and I think there is a book kind of coming out that will actually talk about his early development and now old I think that we know is that he actually had a very organized kind of chess environment so he would at least you know have the best possible training now whether in fact other individuals would be able to develop similar abilities with the same kind of training conditions you know that's hard to know but I think the finding that I would emphasize is that there's a lot of things that you can learn about how to become a better chess player that you can actually learn from the training that - Carlson was involved in it's like having me at the instructor I know he had a very famous Grand Master as an instructor probably putting in time every day having a memory a motivating factor which is like winning and feeling good about that and kind of preys on that I guess those were his part of his deliberate and and I'm one of the interesting question is you know when he was introduced to chess was that similar to how other test players were introduced because I think a lot of chess players they start playing chess and at some point they get good enough and then maybe they are being trained by skilled chess players in music if you actually start up learning how to play an instrument by yourself what most music teachers would tell you is you've created a lot of or acquired a lot of bad habits that actually going to take longer to get out of you then it would have been to learn it correctly from the first time and I think that's why you know classical music trained individuals and also ballet dancers the importance is to actually start out with the correct fundamentals because now you can actually have things to build on in order to attain the highest levels so I don't know could it be that maybe - Carlson started out with the right kind of fundamentals for thinking about chess that then made actually his success possible so so let's say I want to suddenly get better I pick a field whether it's language or chess or golf or sales and again I just want to kind of take it from the top I want to get better at something I won't even be world-class at it um what should I do what's the first step I would say finding a teacher that have some experience of training individuals like yourself of the same age and the same background that's what I would recommend and I guess where I'm now trying to match up individuals who are interested in starting to acquire skills with teachers who have had some experience of training and individuals a great business idea kinda like a dating site well you know I would love to basically learn from these because I think this is actually a relatively new idea and and it's almost like people didn't even hold it as possible that they could actually reach very high so even if they started at an old age they had a very modest goals for what they actually would be able to achieve so so I think you know this provides hopefully an opportunity here to get motivated people and then we can actually learn are there any limits but before people tried to do it we're never gonna know what is possible and so so okay finding the teacher having a motivating factor like why do I want to you know be a professional golf player you know having some sort of motivating factor that you know drives me through the pain and then what's what's the next step that I can do as opposed to the teacher well you know I think by developing these representations and actually when you're training you know rather than trying to make any shortcuts here and actually reduce it you know really stretching yourself and I think that would be sort of the the key idea and I would love to learn here about you know individuals who are trying and if there really are any limiting factors because I've been out spending almost like thirty years talking to individuals who only reach the sub elite level and asked them you know what was it that was really holding you back and what I find interesting is that they thought that they could get better the reason why they stopped was that they thought there were other people who were ahead of them that they didn't really understand how they would be able to reach well I guess like in the case of the violinist the people who had reached the age of twenty with only three thousand hours they were still in the top one-tenth of one percent of performers but they realized oh my god I'm not gonna be able to put in the other four to six thousand hours so quickly as my competitors you know and honest I guess a challenge in a competitive society so if you have basically the very best to actually now learn more and put in more time practicing they're not just gonna stop for five years solo the less competitive wants to catch up so basically what you really need if you're in the lower group is somehow find a way that you can be gaining more in practice than the ones who are at the elite level so if they keep working and trying to perfect their skill they're actually going to be ahead of you and it's hard to see how you would be able to catch up with them let me offer one suggestion there so yes they might not be they might never get as good as the classically trained and classically performing violinists who go out into orchestras and who continue doing deliver practice but let's combine two fields let's take a violinist and put him in a rock and roll band and maybe kind of give him an electronic violin then BAM they might be everybody else might have done 500 hours of practice in that and combining two areas and they suddenly have 3500 hours under them and that might be combining areas to create new areas might be a lucrative way for a top performer but not alley performer to be successful and and I think that fits nicely in what we were talking about the motivation so if you would enjoy now making music with another group that I guess should be the the key goal to basically be winning international competitions or winning gold medals at the Olympics I mean even if 100 million people were training the same sport you know using all the effective that would still only be one gold medal so basically I think connecting up here with this idea that you want to actually produce something that has emotional significance for you you know your work you want to play something with friends and actually produce music that after doing that you actually feel better by yourself and and now you are motivated perhaps to go and work on certain things that would actually allow you to do an even better job when you get together next time yeah so part of it might be again figuring eight to keep that motivating factor going finding other areas you can combine and so on to create new areas where you're already and given to be an exporter you have a huge starting point right I'd start and and in some ways I mean you're really trying to produce music experience and and I think you know there may be more creative ways especially now with the technical developments where you actually will be able to find a niche for producing musical experiences that other people haven't found it seems like we we have this natural instinct to put because we're humans and primaries we put ourselves in a hierarchy whenever we do so let's say I'm interested in chess there's a chess ranking system from one to a million and I want to always figure out where I am in that hierarchy because I want to be either the Alpha and not the Omega and so on but if I can chain twins have the ability to change the hierarchy they're in and if you could kind of change the hierarchy you're in where the practice and that you've put in is either put you higher to being the alpha or whether it's it becomes easier to become the alpha because it's a new area completely I think that should be a reasonable goal for for achieving confidence in something right and and I I see that parents you know really enjoy spending time with their kids so if you actually decided to take up chess to be able to play with your son or daughter that would basically now allow for something that could develop over years and provide this precious relationship and it could be music making it could be some you know physical sport but I think that kind of interaction between a parent and a child especially when they're young provides the child and also the parent was something quite unique that I think is is really valuable and that having a teacher that can help the parent now avoiding basically putting the child into learning situations where they are going to be keep failing because you don't that's part of the teacher's job is guide the student you know up to the next level and so how did you get into this like what were you my guess is at some point you were trying to get good at something maybe even elite at something and maybe it didn't quite work out for you like what what were you trying to go for well you know I think I was always interested in trying to understand what people that I admire what they were thinking so I had a face in high school when I was reading a lot of biographies and and and and basically trying to understand the trajectory of people who were successful and and I think I kind of realized that if I were to try to be successful in any one domain that would almost preclude me from now basically becoming as good as I could be and actually researching the general process here Oh being excellent so what biographies were you reading well you know I read about you know mishel Anglo and and all the sort of pester and all the sort of the famous kind of artists and scientists and I just thought it was just striking you know this kind of process that wasn't given as much emphasis on what they had to do in order to achieve their you know eventually most recognized work well it's interesting because you you mentioned Picasso in the book how and we know him off from his let's say Cuba stays were is really kind of going out of the box but the reality is he was also before that just learning the basics was one of the best painters of his time of the basics of painting and traditional styles of painting and I think also another important thing is to to learn to master and become elite at the basics before sort of developing your own or maybe that because you the ability develop your own point of view and so on yeah I totally agree in it and I think that creativity knowing what other people have already done if you want to do something new it's gonna be really helpful to master all the things that people have previously done because then you're gonna know when you're actually doing something that goes outside of what has already been done and I think the kind of techniques that you will learn will also then help you once you know what you want to do differently to do it with the technical skill that will actually compel people and really make them see here what you've achieved I mean another great example in art is Andy Warhol like people people know him again from almost from his factory where he didn't even work on many of his own art pieces that sold for tens of millions but he was like a met in the 50s he was like a master illustrator he was the best illustrator in the advertising industry like he knew how to draw and even though that wasn't what he became famous for later like he knew the basics right and I think that helps maybe some students realize the benefits of actually learning the fundamentals as a way of actually being able now to reach that level where you will be able to see how you can make it contribution that's different from what people have previously done and what what other so obviously your book peek is really important for understanding these components of deliberate practice you break down the ideas of what talent is you're talking about the 10,000 hour rule and by the way the problem I've always had with the concept of the 10,000 hour rule is let's say I some of mian transported back to the 1800s so with current with 21st century chess training techniques within a year or two I could be at the level of the world champion level in the 1800's in chess obviously that can't happen now but it's interesting like because it's really a cuz training techniques in every field evolved as well to sort of shortcut let's say a prior centuries 10,000 hours so so presumably whatever it takes to become world-class now a hundred years from now to get world-class now it might take only a thousand hours right and that's the reason why I think it's important to talk about absolute level of performance and one way that you could potentially test that in chess is to see whether people actually can pick the right move for a wide range of test positions so that would be basically objective without actually taking into account what the current level of chess is and if we take sports you know if you ran the marathon with the times that you could get a gold medal in the beginning of the Olympic Games you know that would almost just get you into be a competing in the Boston Marathon so basically there's this change and the level of performance that people can do so to really understand you know this question here about what people can do you need to sort of look at historically what people were able to do and now you can see that you know relatively normal average people are able now to reach the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon but they obviously in order to win the Boston Marathon you're talking about something that is really not you know something that was even conceivable you know 120 years ago so what's what and this kind of a little more meta but what's the benefits of being elite what if I'm happy to just qualify like a hundred years ago I would have been in the world champion now I just barely qualified for the Boston Marathon but yet so there's it's the same performance but one would have made me elite in a hundred years ago now I'm like okay I can get into the Boston Marathon which is still great it shows I have incredible confidence but that's it so what's the benefit psychologically of being the best in the world as opposed to simply good and something that I understand the subtleties of and have mastered to an extent but not achieve world-class well I think that's a you know very good question and it gets back to this idea of what is it that would be motivating to you and I believe that that may be different you know when you're seven years old and when you're 12 years old and when you're 15 and when you're 18 and I guess if we're talking about marathon running maybe you will peak in your late 20s so there's this trajectory and I'm not sure that the motivation that actually would motivate you as you know child to basically train endurance events it's going to be similar to whatever it is if you're you know good enough so you will actually be given resources to keep training at the more elite levels so I think by really concentrating on the journey we're you know basically making sure that individuals are gaining something really important like for example go out running with your parent or something and being able now to sort of learn the value here of deciding on one thing that you're gonna train and then actually see how you by basically concentrated training maybe you only need to do half an hour a day initially but you can actually get that self-control of you being able to influence what you ultimately will be able to do so it seems like well-being or happiness or whatever you wanna call it might come from this state of improvement as Apple and and it turns out ability also comes from a state of improvement otherwise you like in the medical practice ik you could decline if you're not constantly trying to improve so this state of improvement might be what contributes the most to happiness as opposed to yes I'm number one or whatever right you know and you'll be interesting if you had measured well-being somehow in the three categories of violinist that you had identified right although I find it a little hard you know to understand what is it that people would how do you actually get well-being so we actually try to you know look at the kind of behavior and if you were willing now to invest and training that actually will ultimately allow you to reach even higher levels then basically the satisfaction here of being able to maybe help patients that is actually the thing that's going to drive you and also maybe make you feel good that you know that you actually did something beyond maybe what a normal doctor would be able to do and so tell me other than your book peek which I recommend everybody read cuz I think now this is gonna be the the Bible of how to achieve peak performance what other books would you recommend in the field that people could read well I think it probably will depend on what are the activity that they might be the most interested because I think there are some good books that are focused primarily on sports there are other books that are looking more at economics and managerial sides but I think if if somebody read our book and decided now that they were interested in a particular domain then I think it would be easier for me to kind of guide them and hopefully we would find that some people would be able to sir take on that challenge of trying to reach you know basically the highest level of performance and if they run into any limits I would love to learn about them excellent well Anders Ericsson author of peak secrets from the new science of expertise great book thank you so much for coming up to my podcast and I really appreciate it well this was just a delight thank you very very much Thank You Anders hey thanks for listening to the James Altucher show on YouTube today I have a really special brand new episode coming out next week but you can watch it early just click on the link right here or subscribe to the channel when you click on my face oh wait though don't forget to click the Bell I'll see you next time
