The Book That Will Teach You How To Master Anything

QUOTE OF THE DAY

PEAK - ANDERS ERICSSON

432 Words | 1 Min 34 Sec Read

What’s it about?

Anders Ericsson is a peak performance coach who spent his time studying the human mind in order to uncover what makes someone good at something—a pretty broad topic, right?

The first shocking thing he found is that there is very little to no difference between doctors that have 20 years of experience and doctors that have 5 years of experience.

It all comes down to those who believe they have hit their limit within their skill and believe theres nothing else to learn, are actually likely worse than those who have less experience but feel like they have much more to learn.

This means that having 10,000 hours of experience is not a predictor of progress and improvement; deliberate practice is.

So, if deliberate practice is the key to mastering anything, how do you actually do it?

Anders says that what sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.

For example, look at grand master chess players; they are all able to play games of chess blindfolded.

In fact, the world champion between 1927 and 1935 could play 32 entire games of chess blindfolded, and he was only able to do this through his mental representations.

The same goes for rock climbers, golfers, and artists; they are all able to condense information, recreate experiences, and then make accurate predictions of the future in a split second.

Effective practice

Anders did a study to try and replicate the effects of these professionals that he called the ‘Effective Practice Study', where, in summary, he took a random university student and played them a string of digits and then asked the student to relay the numbers he heard back to him using only his working memory.

Anders did this over various sessions, and on the 4th session, the student could relay 7 digits at a time, which most people believe to be the cap of short-term memory in humans.

As sessions went past, the student slowly crept up the digits that he could recall and went through a constant cycle that he refers to as ‘the cycle of improvement’:

1. Rapid progress

2. Hitting a perceived limit

3. Prolonged fustration

4. Sudden breakthrough

That cycle was repeated over and over again until, on the 200th session, the student managed to recall 82 digits at once through a method that Anders later called the ‘core components of purposeful practice'.

The core components of purposeful practice

1. Have a specific goal.

2. Intense focus

3. Immediate feedback

4. Frequent discomfort

That was the formula that Anders believed to be the secret to getting incredibly good at anything.

TAKEAWAYS:

If you want to become the best you can possibly be at any skill, you need to attack it with purposeful practice, not just by doing the skill on autopilot but with the intention of becoming better.

You can do it using this framework:

1. Have a specific goal.

2. Intense focus

3. Immediate feedback

4. Frequent discomfort

Purposeful practice leads to creating mental adaptations and sparking creative insight (mental representations) that will help to efficiently achieve goals and improve results.

BOOK OF THE WEEK ⤵️

The book of the week is ‘Peak’ by Anders Ericsson, a book about the science behind how to hit peak performance and become the best you can possibly be using various methods and principles. Read it HERE

CREATOR OF THE WEEK ⤵️

LESSON OF THE DAY ⤵️

Be a student.

You know much less than you think you do. And when you think you know it all, you close your mind to learning anything new. That is a recipe for staying the same.

The wisest individuals are those who reach the point of knowing they will never know everything.

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