Notebook for Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise Ericsson, Anders Citation (APA): Ericsson, A. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com Introduction: The Gift Highlight (yellow) - Location 91 it’s not the Asian genetic heritage but rather learning a tonal language that makes having perfect pitch more likely. Highlight (yellow) - Location 99 The Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara recruited twenty- four children between the ages of two and six and put them through a months- long training course designed to teach them to identify, simply by their sound, various chords played on the piano. Highlight (yellow) - Location 102 The children were given four or five short training sessions per day, each lasting just a few minutes, and each child continued training until he or she could identify all fourteen of the target chords that Sakakibara had selected. Highlight (yellow) - Location 105 After completing training every one of the children in the study had developed perfect pitch and could identify individual notes played on the piano. Highlight (yellow) - Location 153 the clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of “gifted” people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have— the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us. Highlight (yellow) - Location 182 In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential. And this is true whether our goal is to become a concert pianist or just play the piano well enough to amuse ourselves, to join the PGA golf tour or just bring our handicaps down a few strokes. Highlight (yellow) - Location 194 The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else. The Power of Purposeful Practice Highlight (yellow) - Page 1 Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers. Highlight (yellow) - Page 5 He worked with me for more than two hundred training sessions, and by the end he had reached eighty- two digits— eighty- two! Highlight (yellow) - Page 12 We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn, from baking a pie to writing a descriptive paragraph. We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic. And there’s nothing wrong with that. For much of what we do in life, it’s perfectly fine to reach a middling level of performance and just leave it like that. If all you want to do is to safely drive your car from point A to point B or to play the piano well enough to plink out “Für Elise,” then this approach to learning is all you need. Highlight (yellow) - Page 12 But there is one very important thing to understand here: once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance— your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies— you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five, that a teacher who has been teaching for twenty years must be better than one who has been teaching for five. But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who’s been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who’s been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. Highlight (yellow) - Page 15 Purposeful practice has well- defined, specific goals. Our hypothetical music student would have been much more successful with a practice goal something like this: “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row.” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success. Highlight (yellow) - Page 15 Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer- term goal. If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well- defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway. That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that? An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. The key thing is to take that general goal— get better— and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement. Highlight (yellow) - Page 15 Purposeful practice is focused. Highlight (yellow) - Page 16 You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention. Highlight (yellow) - Page 16 Purposeful practice involves feedback. Highlight (yellow) - Page 17 Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback— either from yourself or from outside observers— you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals. Highlight (yellow) - Page 17 Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice. Note - Page 17 Do hard things! Highlight (yellow) - Page 18 This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. Highlight (yellow) - Page 19 Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be able to do it. Finding ways around these barriers is one of the hidden keys to purposeful practice. Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.” It is a technique issue, in other words. Highlight (yellow) - Page 20 The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. Highlight (yellow) - Page 21 Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles— points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead- stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through. In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve. Highlight (yellow) - Page 22 Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. Highlight (yellow) - Page 22 Later, after finishing the memory work with Steve and a couple of other students, I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers. None of them ever quit on me. Highlight (yellow) - Page 22 So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation. Highlight (yellow) - Page 23 When he heard the digits 907, for instance, he conceptualized them as a pretty good two- mile time— 9: 07, or 9 minutes, 7 seconds— and they were no longer random numbers that he had to commit to short- term memory but rather something he was already familiar with. As we shall see, the key to improved mental performance of almost any sort is the development of mental structures that make it possible to avoid the limitations of short- term memory and deal effectively with large amounts of information at once. Highlight (yellow) - Page 25 using long- term memory to sidestep the limitations of short- term memory. Harnessing Adaptability Highlight (yellow) - Page 36 scientists assembled a group of middle-aged volunteers, all of whom had difficulty focusing on nearby objects. The official name of the condition is presbyopia, and it results from a problem with the eye itself, which loses elasticity in its lens, making it more difficult to focus well enough to make out small details. There is also an associated difficulty in detecting contrasts between light and dark areas, which exacerbates the difficulty in focusing. Highlight (yellow) - Page 36 The researchers had their subjects come into the lab three or so times a week for three months and spend thirty minutes each visit training their vision. The subjects were asked to spot a small image against a background that was very similar in shade to the spot; that is, there was very little contrast between the image and the background. Spotting these images required intense concentration and effort. Over time the subjects learned to more quickly and accurately determine the presence of these images. At the end of three months the subjects were tested to see what size type they could read. On average they were able to read letters that were 60 percent smaller than they could at the beginning of the training, and every single subject had improved. Furthermore, after the training every subject was able to read a newspaper without glasses, something a majority of them couldn’t do beforehand. They also were able to read faster than before. Highlight (yellow) - Page 37 researchers couldn’t pinpoint exactly what those changes were, they believe that the brain learned to “de-blur” images. Blurry images result from a combination of two different weaknesses in vision—an inability to see small details and difficulties in detecting differences in contrast—and both of these issues can be helped by the image processing carried out in the brain, in much the same way that image-processing software in a computer or a camera can sharpen an image by such techniques as manipulating the contrast. The researchers who carried out the study believe that their training exercises taught the subjects’ brains to do a better job of processing, which in turn allowed the subjects to discern smaller details without any improvement in the signal from the eyes. Highlight (yellow) - Page 39 This is the general pattern for how physical activity creates changes in the body: when a body system—certain muscles, the cardiovascular system, or something else—is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis. Highlight (yellow) - Page 40 This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination. But there is a catch: once the compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the physical activity that had previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving. This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back. Highlight (yellow) - Page 41 The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone. Highlight (yellow) - Page 44 Even in the case of what we usually think of as purely “physical skills,” such as swimming or gymnastics, the brain plays a major role because these activities require careful control of the body’s movements, and research has found that practice produces brain changes. For instance, cortical thickness, a way of measuring the amount of gray matter in a brain area, is greater in competitive divers than in nondivers in three specific regions, all of which play a role in visualizing and controlling the movements of the body. Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 Although the specific details vary from skill to skill, the overall pattern is consistent: Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges. This is the basic message that should be taken away from the research on the effects of training on the brain, Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 the effects of training on the brain can vary with age in several ways. The most important way is that younger brains—those of children and adolescents—are more adaptable than adult brains are, so training can have larger effects in younger people. Because the young brain is developing in various ways, training at early ages can actually shape the course of later development, leading to significant changes. This is “the bent-twig effect.” If you push a small twig slightly away from its normal pattern of growth, you can cause a major change in the ultimate location of the branch that grows from that twig; pushing on a branch that is already developed has much less effect. Note - Page 45 Makes sense. That's why one great thought exercise is to think of what you loved doing and were good at as a child. These could give you indicators of where it is most efficient and enjoyable to invest your time. The "bent-twig effect" is a good symbol to add to my system. Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 it seems likely that practicing the piano as a child will lead to certain neurological advantages that you just can’t match with practice as an adult. Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area. Note - Page 46 Example of London cabbies who did worse than normal on a test to remember a complex figure after 30 minutes. Highlight (yellow) - Page 46 the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away. Astronauts who spend months in space without gravity to work against come back to Earth and find it difficult to walk. Athletes who have to stop training because of a broken bone or torn ligament lose much of their strength and endurance in the limbs they cannot exercise. Similar things have been seen with athletes who have volunteered for studies in which they must lie in bed for a month or so. Strength fades. Speed diminishes. Endurance wilts. Highlight (yellow) - Page 46 When Maguire studied a group of retired London taxi drivers, she found that they had less gray matter in their posterior hippocampi than did active taxi drivers, although they still had more than retired subjects who had never been taxi drivers. Once these taxi drivers had stopped using their navigational memory every day, the brain changes that had been the result of that work started to disappear. Note - Page 47 This was mentioned in the Talent Code as well. Deprive people of practice and they begin to fade quickly. Highlight (yellow) - Page 47 The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in, from writing a report to driving a car, from teaching a class to running an organization, from selling houses to performing brain surgery. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or white matter or to rewire entire sections in the way that an aspiring London taxi driver or violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can. Highlight (yellow) - Page 48 learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose. Mental Representations Highlight (yellow) - Page 55 When shown chessboards with a dozen to two dozen pieces arranged in a pattern from the middle or the end of a chess game, the master could remember the positions of about two-thirds of the pieces after five seconds of study, the novice could remember only about four, and the mid-range player was somewhere in the middle. When shown chessboards with the pieces arrayed randomly, the novice player did somewhat worse—only about two pieces correct. No surprise there. What was surprising, however, was that neither the mid-range player nor the chess master did much better than the novice in remembering the positions of pieces arranged randomly on a board. They too got only about two or three pieces right. Note - Page 56 Discussed in the Talent Code too. It's specific! Highlight (yellow) - Page 56 meaning aids memory. Highlight (yellow) - Page 60 A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player’s mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver’s mental representations will be useless for basketball. This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon. Of course, some people do become overall memory experts or athletes in a number of sports or doctors with a general set of skills, but they do so by training in a number of different areas. Highlight (yellow) - Page 63 The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties. Highlight (yellow) - Page 63 In pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well developed mental representations. In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees. Highlight (yellow) - Page 65 The ability of experienced climbers to automatically analyze holds using a mental representation allows them to climb more quickly and with less chance of falling. Again, better mental representations lead to better performance. Note - Page 66 Note to self, hold weird holds! Do rainbow! Highlight (yellow) - Page 70 a major advantage of highly developed mental representations: you can assimilate and consider a great deal more information at once. Research on expert diagnosticians has found that they tend to see symptoms and other relevant data not as isolated bits of information but as pieces of larger patterns—in much the same way that grandmasters see patterns among chess pieces rather than a random assortment of pieces. Highlight (yellow) - Page 73 more experienced surgeons generally create more sophisticated and more effective representations of these procedures. The representations not only guide the surgery, but they also serve to provide a warning when something unexpected and potentially dangerous happens in the surgery. When an actual surgery diverges from the surgeon’s mental representation, he or she knows to slow down, rethink the options, and, if necessary, formulate a new plan in response to the new information. Highlight (yellow) - Page 75 The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 78 McPherson and Renwick concluded that the differences among the students most likely lay, in large part, in how well the students were able to detect their mistakes—that is, how effective their mental representations of the musical pieces were. The saxophone player had a clear mental representation of the piece that allowed him to recognize most of his mistakes, remember them the next time, and correct them. The cornet player, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have such a well-developed mental representation of what she was playing. The difference between the two was not in desire or effort, the researchers said. The cornet player just didn’t have the same tools with which to improve as the saxophone player did. Note - Page 78 So it's not just errors but error detection. Also a side, almost unrelated note: we can learn from personal success, though it's almost like semi-freezing your mental representation and is prone to getting you stuck in local optima. Learning from others' success is like reading a book, you can "borrow" mental representations (or mental models!) but you must still course-correct based on mistakes. Random musings I sent to Steve: Beato Bongco: Random thought on (self) learning and by extension learning algos. Learn by errors, as that's where most information lies if you have a good grasp of what counts as correct. Learning from personal success is merely a freezing of weights, it looks optimal because it worked but it may not work for all cases. You are prone to being stuck in local optima and not trying anything else because it's "good enough". Learning from others' success is like reading books. You borrow others' weights or mental models. You still need to adjust it to fit your context because there are so many hidden attributes that don't "fit" you. In all types of learning, error detection is key. If you can accurately detect errors and know how to attempt to correct them, nothing stops you from progress. What correct travel and meeting new people who don't think like you does: applies randomness to your weights. Shakes you up to dislodge you from local optima. Highlight (yellow) - Page 82 PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES ARE MENTAL TOO The Gold Standard Highlight (yellow) - Page 92 The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance, followed by such things as practicing with others, taking lessons, performing (particularly in solo performance), listening to music, and studying music theory. Many of them also said that getting enough sleep was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep—and often an afternoon nap. Highlight (yellow) - Page 93 there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance. Note - Page 93 So is follow the fun a fallacy? I think not since the students need to enjoy music in the first place in order to be motivated to improve to that level of performance. Highlight (yellow) - Page 94 We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training. Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 self-monitoring requires effective mental representations. Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Highlight (yellow) - Page 100 Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level. Highlight (yellow) - Page 102 the most important element—learning from the best predecessors—and that has proved enough to generate rapid improvements in the field. Highlight (yellow) - Page 103 the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too. Highlight (yellow) - Page 104 In many fields, people who are widely accepted as “experts” are actually not expert performers when judged by objective criteria. Highlight (yellow) - Page 105 psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial “experts” in picking stocks is little or no better than the performance of novices or random chance. Highlight (yellow) - Page 108 Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start. Highlight (yellow) - Page 108 no student, no matter how motivated, can expect to figure out such things on his or her own. Principles of Deliberate Practice on the Job Highlight (yellow) - Page 121 recognizing and rejecting three prevailing myths. The first is our old friend, the belief that one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetically prescribed characteristics. That belief manifests itself in all sorts of “I can’t” or “I’m not” statements: “I’m just not very creative.”“I can’t manage people.”“I’m not any good with numbers.”“I can’t do much better than this.” Highlight (yellow) - Page 121 The second myth holds that if you do something for long enough, you’re bound to get better at it. Again, we know better. Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline. Highlight (yellow) - Page 122 The third myth states that all it takes to improve is effort. If you just try hard enough, you’ll get better. If you want to be a better manager, try harder. If you want to generate more sales, try harder. If you want to improve your teamwork, try harder. The reality is, however, that all of these things—managing, selling, teamwork—are specialized skills, and unless you are using practice techniques specifically designed to improve those particular skills, trying hard will not get you very far. Highlight (yellow) - Page 122 The deliberate-practice mindset offers a very different view: anyone can improve, but it requires the right approach. If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is. Highlight (yellow) - Page 124 For anyone in the business or professional world looking for an effective approach to improvement, my basic advice is to look for one that follows the principles of deliberate practice: Does it push people to get outside their comfort zones and attempt to do things that are not easy for them? Does it offer immediate feedback on the performance and on what can be done to improve it? Have those who developed the approach identified the best performers in that particular area and determined what sets them apart from everyone else? Is the practice designed to develop the particular skills that experts in the field possess? A yes answer to all those questions may not guarantee that an approach will be effective, but it will certainly make that much more likely. Highlight (yellow) - Page 125 The main problem that radiologists face in this situation is the difficulty in getting effective feedback on their diagnoses, which limits how much they can improve over time. Note - Page 125 Feedback, feedback, feedback! Leads to error detection, and only by attempting to correct errors do we improve. Knowing what we did correct is nice but errors are more information-rich. Be wary though that in human systems, one needs to consider feelings and purely pointing out errors will lead to a lot of ruffled feathers. Best approach: error detection + Carnegie. Highlight (yellow) - Page 126 You’d start by collecting a library of digitized mammograms taken from patients years ago along with enough information from those patients’ records to know the ultimate outcome—whether there actually was a cancerous lesion present and, if so, how the cancer progressed over time. In this way we would collect, in essence, a number of test questions in which the answer is known: Is cancer present or not? Some of the images would be from women who never did develop cancer, while others would be from women whose doctors correctly diagnosed cancer from the image. It would even be possible to include images in which cancer was present but the doctor missed it originally, as long as a retrospective analysis of the image discovered signs of the cancer’s presence. Ideally, the images would be chosen for their training value. There would be little value, for instance, in having lots of images of clearly healthy breasts or breasts with obvious tumors; the best images would be those that would challenge the radiologists by displaying cancerous or benign abnormalities. Note - Page 127 Looks familiar? Like training a neural network. Highlight (yellow) - Page 128 I believe that radiology training could be even more effective if an effort were made up front to determine what sorts of issues are likely to cause problems for new radiologists and design the training to focus more on those issues—in essence, to learn more about the role that mental representations play in making accurate diagnoses and apply that understanding in designing the training. Note - Page 128 Mental representations are key, but because neural networks have no priors their mental representations are so different from our own and thus they're not introspectable. If they were, we could find a way to modify or improve them, or study them to apply them to ourselves. This might be a stretch because computers are better at different things than human beings. One thing that's interesting: what if you could train a neural network like a child, on different tasks of increasing complexity, to increase performance? Is this what transfer learning is? Maybe I should start reading arxiv papers. Highlight (yellow) - Page 130 One of the implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your job. Highlight (yellow) - Page 131 When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 132 most people assume that as you continue to play tennis and accumulate all of those hours of “practice,” you will inevitably get better, but the reality is different: as we’ve seen, people generally don’t get much better just by playing the game itself, and, sometimes, they’ll actually be worse. Note - Page 132 A stark reminder to always be pushing hard in disciplines that matter to you. In my case, startups, programming, relationships and climbing. Highlight (yellow) - Page 133 In almost every one of the five dozen studies included in the review, doctors’ performance grew worse over time or, at best, stayed about the same. The older doctors knew less and did worse in terms of providing appropriate care than doctors with far fewer years of experience, and researchers concluded that it was likely the older doctors’ patients fared worse because of it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 134 the least effective activities were “didactic” interventions—that is, those educational activities that essentially consisted of doctors listening to a lecture—which, sadly enough, are by far the most common types of activities in continuing medical education. Davis concluded that this sort of passive listening to lectures had no significant effect at all on either doctors’ performance or on how well their patients fared. Note - Page 135 Omg validation why I freaking hate lectures! Highlight (yellow) - Page 135 From the perspective of deliberate practice, the problem is obvious: attending lectures, minicourses, and the like offers little or no feedback and little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, correct the mistakes, and gradually develop a new skill. Highlight (yellow) - Page 139 Vickers examined what happened to recurrence rates as surgeons got even more experience, and he found that the rates continued to drop up until the point where a surgeon had carried out 1,500 to 2,000 surgeries. At that point the surgeons had become essentially perfect at preventing five-year recurrence in the simpler cases where the cancer had not spread outside the prostate, while they were preventing recurrence in 70 percent of the more complex cases where the cancer had spread outside the prostate. After that, the success rate did not improve with more practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 140 Feedback like this is most likely the reason that surgeons, unlike most other medical professionals, get better as they gain experience. Highlight (yellow) - Page 143 When the researchers interviewed the surgeons after the operations about their thought processes during the surgery, they found that the main way the surgeons detected problems was by noticing that something about the surgery didn’t match the way they had visualized the surgery in their preoperative plan. Once they noticed the mismatch, they came up with a list of alternative approaches and decided which was most likely to work. Highlight (yellow) - Page 143 One standard approach for examining the mental representations that people use to guide themselves through a task is to stop them in the middle of the task, turn out the lights, and then ask them to describe the current situation, what has happened, and what is about to happen. Note - Page 143 I should do this in 1 on 1's or on shadowing to learn also. Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life Highlight (yellow) - Page 146 Deliberate practice is for everyone who dreams. Highlight (yellow) - Page 150 Dan’s later experience illustrates one final lesson about instruction: you may need to change teachers as you yourself change. Highlight (yellow) - Page 150 If you find yourself at a point where you are no longer improving quickly or at all, don’t be afraid to look for a new instructor. The most important thing is to keep moving forward. Highlight (yellow) - Page 151 the importance of engaging in purposeful practice instead of mindless repetition without any clear plan for getting better. If you want to improve in chess, you don’t do it by playing chess; you do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games. If you want to improve in darts, you don’t do it by going to the bar with your friends and letting the loser buy the next round; you do it by spending some time alone working on reproducing your throwing motion exactly from one throw to the next. You improve your control by systematically varying the point on the dartboards that you aim at. If you want to get better at bowling, those Thursday nights with your bowling league team won’t do much good. You’ll want to spend some quality alley time on your own—ideally, working on difficult pin configurations in which being able to control exactly where the ball goes is essential. And so on. Highlight (yellow) - Page 151 Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve. Highlight (yellow) - Page 151 This is a key to getting the maximum benefit out of any sort of practice, from private or group lessons to solitary practice and even to games or competitions: whatever you are doing, focus on it. Note - Page 152 Where did I read this (or did I write about this in my journal): focus counts twice! Highlight (yellow) - Page 153 Researchers who have studied long-distance runners have found that amateurs tend to daydream or think about more pleasant subjects to take their minds off the pain and strain of their running, while elite long-distance runners remain attuned to their bodies so that they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race. Highlight (yellow) - Page 154 Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration. Highlight (yellow) - Page 157 The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better. Highlight (yellow) - Page 159 To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them. Highlight (yellow) - Page 165 First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else. Highlight (yellow) - Page 169 As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration. Highlight (yellow) - Page 169 to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both. Highlight (yellow) - Page 170 Ideally you should wake up by yourself (that is, without an alarm to wake you) and feel refreshed when you do. If that’s not the case, you might need to go to bed earlier. Highlight (yellow) - Page 171 limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that—and when you’re first starting out, it’s likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break. Highlight (yellow) - Page 172 As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense. Note - Page 172 Autotelic personality? Highlight (yellow) - Page 173 if you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t. Highlight (yellow) - Page 175 Benjamin Franklin again. As a young man he was interested in all sorts of intellectual pursuits—philosophy, science, invention, writing, the arts, and so on—and he wished to encourage his own development in those areas. So at twenty-one he recruited eleven of the most intellectually interesting people in Philadelphia to form a mutual improvement club, which he named “the Junto.” The club’s members, who met each Friday night, would encourage each other’s various intellectual pursuits. Every member was expected to bring at least one interesting topic of conversation—on morals, politics, or science—to each meeting. The topics, which were generally phrased as questions, were to be discussed by the group “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” In order to keep the discussions open and collaborative, the Junto’s rules strictly forbade anyone from contradicting another member or expressing an opinion too strongly. And once every three months each member of the Junto had to compose an essay—on any topic whatsoever—and read it to the rest of the group, which would then discuss it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 179 There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door. The Road to Extraordinary Highlight (yellow) - Page 185 In the beginning, a child’s parents play with their child at the child’s level, but gradually they turn the play toward the real purpose of the “toy.” They explain the special moves of the chess pieces. They show how the golf club is used to hit the ball. They reveal the piano’s ability to produce a tune rather than just a racket. Highlight (yellow) - Page 186 Simply by interacting strongly with their children, parents motivate their children to develop similar interests. Note - Page 186 Evidenced by the Polgars developing 3 of their children into chess prodigies but of them having memories of discovering it themselves. Takeaway for me here is that children and very moldable and you can do it in a way that is not forced, allows them to have fun and actually take ownership of the skill. Highlight (yellow) - Page 189 While there are various ways that parents and teachers can motivate children, the motivation must ultimately be something that comes from within the child, or else it won’t endure. Highlight (yellow) - Page 194 expertise in some fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn’t start training as a child. Understanding such limitations can help you decide which areas you might wish to pursue. The most obvious performance issues are those that involve physical abilities. In the general population physical performance peaks around age twenty. With increasing age we lose flexibility, we become more prone to injury, and we take longer to heal. We slow down. Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their twenties. Professional athletes can remain competitive in their thirties or even early forties, with recent advances in training. In fact, people can train effectively well into their eighties. Highlight (yellow) - Page 198 When children and adolescents learn new languages, it is against the backdrop of increasing gray matter, and so their learning the additional languages may occur through the addition of gray matter, but when adults continue their focus on multiple languages—this time with an emphasis on simultaneous translation—it is against a backdrop of pruning synapses. Note - Page 198 In modern practice, comparing NN to actual human brains is frowned upon. Nevertheless one can see interesting similarities. You can say as children we are still developing optimal brain architectures, then as adults our NN is being trained. Similar to deep NN, you can perhaps learn anything but more iterations are required. Perhaps an efficient use of time is finding intersections between fun and activities that adapt well to your architecture. Architectures do not have 1 to 1 relationships with skills. Even in the ML community there is a concept of transfer learning. Perhaps this is similar to how we learn. E.g. Being exposed to reading at a young age is a general skill which can lead to perhaps being more efficient skill acquisition in writing, parsing information, or wholly unrelated things (like has been shown in some transfer learning experiments). Highlight (yellow) - Page 199 two lessons to carry away: First, while the adult brain may not be as adaptable in certain ways as the brain of the child or adolescent, it is still more than capable of learning and changing. And second, since the adaptability of the adult brain is different from the adaptability of the young brain, learning as an adult is likely to take place through somewhat different mechanisms. But if we adults try hard enough, our brains will find a way. Highlight (yellow) - Page 201 Brady had taught himself, with two months of the right sort of practice, to have perfect pitch. Note - Page 201 Context: there's a window 8-12? To develop perfect pitch but with the right kind of training (deliberate practice which is close to how we train NN), it is possible to attain. Keep this in mind always. As an adult your advantage is you have money, you know what you want, you can use existing skills and resources to bring about conditions for deliberate practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 203 how are you going to come up with a valuable new theory in science or a useful new technique on the violin if you are not intimately familiar with—and able to reproduce—the accomplishments of those who preceded you? Highlight (yellow) - Page 204 The most important lesson they gleaned from their teachers is the ability to improve on their own. As part of their training, their teachers helped them develop mental representations that they could use to monitor their own performances, figure out what needs improving, and come up with ways to realize that improvement. These mental representations, which they are constantly sharpening and augmenting, are what guides them toward greatness. You can picture the process as building a ladder step by step. You climb as high as you can and build one more step at the top of the ladder, climb up one more step, build another step, and so on. Once you get to the edge of your field, you may not know exactly where you’re headed, but you know the general direction, and you have spent a good deal of your life building this ladder, so you have a good sense of what it takes to add on one more step. Highlight (yellow) - Page 205 There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them. Even the famous “aha” moments could not exist without a great deal of work to build an edifice that needs just one more piece to make it complete. Highlight (yellow) - Page 206 That’s how it always is. The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward, to do things that others have not. And once a pathfinder shows how something can be done, others can learn the technique and follow. Even if the pathfinder doesn’t share the particular technique, as is the case with Richards, simply knowing that something is possible drives others to figure it out. Progress is made by those who are working on the frontiers of what is known and what is possible to do, not by those who haven’t put in the effort needed to reach that frontier. But What About Natural Talent? Highlight (yellow) - Page 211 I have made it a hobby to investigate the stories of such prodigies, and I can report with confidence that I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice. My basic approach to understanding prodigies is the same as it is for understanding any expert performer. I ask two simple questions: What is the exact nature of the ability? and, What sorts of training made it possible? In thirty years of looking, I have never found an ability that could not be explained by answering these two questions. Highlight (yellow) - Page 218 By training his dunking ability, Thomas was also training for the high jump. A 2011 study shows that the ability to jump off of one leg is closely correlated with the height of a high jump among skilled high jumpers. Note - Page 218 Find your old skills - existing mental representations - and see if you can use them as stepping stones to acquisition of any new desirable skills. Highlight (yellow) - Page 220 autistic people are more likely to practice obsessively a musical piece or memorize a collection of phone numbers—and thus are likely to develop skills in those areas in the same way the people engaging in purposeful or deliberate practice do. Highlight (yellow) - Page 225 People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because, for whatever reasons, they stopped practicing—or never started. There is no evidence that any otherwise normal people are born without the innate talent to sing or do math or perform any other skill. Highlight (yellow) - Page 227 Without delving deeply into that debate, I will just say that I think it is best to not equate IQ with innate intelligence but simply to stick with the facts and think of IQ as some cognitive factor, measured by IQ tests, that has been shown to predict certain things, such as success in school. Highlight (yellow) - Page 228 these studies were done in young chess players, and while they found that these young players did have higher-than-average IQ scores, there was no clear relationship between IQ and how good a particular player was. Highlight (yellow) - Page 231 Among these twenty-three elite players the amount of practice was still the major factor determining their chess skills, but intelligence played no noticeable role. While the elite group did have a somewhat higher average IQ than the average IQ for the entire group of fifty-seven, the players in the elite group with lower IQs were, on average, slightly better players than those in the elite group with higher IQs. Stop and digest that for a moment: among these young, elite chess players, not only was a higher IQ no advantage, but it seemed to put them at a slight disadvantage. The reason, the researchers found, was that the elite players with lower IQs tended to practice more, which improved their chess game to the point that they played better than the high-IQ elite players. Highlight (yellow) - Page 231 When children are just beginning to learn chess, their intelligence—that is, their performance on IQ tests—plays a role in how quickly they can learn the game and reach a certain minimal level of competence. Kids with higher IQ scores generally find it easier to learn and remember rules and to develop and carry out strategies; all of these things give them an advantage in the early stages of learning the game, when one plays by abstract thinking applied directly to the pieces on the board. This type of learning is not all that different from the learning that goes on in schools, which was the target of Binet’s original project developing IQ tests. Highlight (yellow) - Page 233 In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent. Highlight (yellow) - Page 235 Once you get to the top, it isn’t natural talent that makes the difference, at least not “talent” in the way it is usually understood as an innate ability to excel at a particular activity. Note - Page 236 It's grit and deliberate practice. Highlight (yellow) - Page 237 Perhaps, for example, some children are born with a suite of genes that cause them to get more pleasure from drawing or from making music. Then those children will be more likely to draw or to make music than other children. If they’re put in art classes or music classes, they’re likely to spend more time practicing because it is more fun for them. They carry their sketchpads or guitars with them wherever they go. And over time these children will become better artists or better musicians than their peers—not because they are innately more talented in the sense that they have some genes for musical or artistic ability, but because something—perhaps genetic—pushed them to practice and thus develop their skills to a greater degree than their peers. Note - Page 237 Like T said, just follow the fun! Where Do We Go from Here? Highlight (yellow) - Page 250 a major difference between the deliberate-practice approach and the traditional approach to learning lies with the emphasis placed on skills versus knowledge—what you can do versus what you know. Highlight (yellow) - Page 253 Begin by identifying what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step. Then give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations. Highlight (yellow) - Page 255 Most people, even adults, have never attained a level of performance in any field that is sufficient to show them the true power of mental representations to plan, execute, and evaluate their performance in the way that expert performers do. And thus they never really understand what it takes to reach this level—not just the time it takes, but the high-quality practice. Once they do understand what is necessary to get there in one area, they understand, at least in principle, what it takes in other areas. That is why experts in one field can often appreciate those in other fields. A research physicist may better understand what it takes to become a skilled violinist, if only in general terms, and a ballerina may better understand the sacrifice it takes to become a skilled painter. Highlight (yellow) - Page 258 I would argue that we humans are most human when we’re improving ourselves. We, unlike any other animal, can consciously change ourselves, to improve ourselves in ways we choose. This distinguishes us from every other species alive today and, as far as we know, from every other species that has ever lived. Highlight (yellow) - Page 258 perhaps a better way to see ourselves would be as Homo exercens, or “practicing man,” the species that takes control of its life through practice and makes of itself what it will.