hi this is Brian welcome back to philosophers notes TV 2 I've got another great book that I'm really excited about Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole peak subtitle secrets from the new science of expertise now this book just came out pre-ordered it reddit 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 Andrews Eriksson 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 four 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 to our ability to improve to adapt our brains in 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 enters 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 it 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 argot 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 purposefully practicing you need to be intensely focused on what you're doing if you want to trigger the adaptability in your brain and bodice 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 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 will not trigger adaptability and we're not going to talk about it in this little session I talk about a little bit more on the note I'm going to do a micro class on this but he has a chapter on homeostasis which is our tendency to seek stability we need to use that to our advantage and what you do is you stretch out of your current home eyo stasis your comfort zone not so much that you snap but enough that you stress yourself a little bit your body overcompensates or your brain and 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 a 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 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 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 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 a 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 talked 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 in 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 he has is the 10,000 hour rule a rule basically says no it's not a rule Malcolm Gladwell who took this research and then pop you'll rise it in his great book outliers which were going to feature soon took a little liberty with the research in creating the 10,000 hour rule and Anders make some distinctions about how actually that wasn't quite an accurate assessment of his research and we talked 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 andrew's Erickson'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 Louis solo violinist 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 he malcolm gladwell could have books picked 74 hundred hours which is what they put in by about eighteen and he also failed to recognize the fact that after putting in 10,000 hours at twenty 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 of 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 in 10,000 some have more etcetera 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 practice slash purposeful practice the fifth big idea Homo exercies 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 right he says he okay we named ourselves Homo sapiens right 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 exercies the practicing man the man who's committed the woman who's committed to improving themselves via practice I love that idea homo exercies a joke in the note homo optimist 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 Homo exercies style another important 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 was your favorite big idea what jumped out what landed write it down share 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 you hi this is Brian I hope you enjoyed that P and TV episode a lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff so here's the quick look ten bucks a month join the optimal living membership program 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