Book Summary: Peak
Anders Ericsson’s book Peak examines how we can gain excellence through consistent practice instead of an ability people are either innately born with or not.
Related Book Summaries:
What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast – Laura Vanderkam
Quotes:
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.
This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it.
Peak Book Summary Notes:
- Everyone is capable of developing high level skills from a young age.
- Just as the body can grow with training and practice so can the brain. They both share the trait of being able to grow, improve and develop new abilities.
- Practice can even change the brain, as demonstrated by a study of London taxi drivers. It found that 4 years working as a cab driver in London altered the size of some areas of their brain.
- Being skilled means learning to practice purposefully. An important part of this is goal setting.
- Pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone is also important. Purposeful practice should stretch your abilities just a little further each time, this facilitates growth.
- Deliberate, purposeful practice is the key to becoming more skilled in your chosen activity and not whether you were born with some form of innate skill towards the activity.
