Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

This is one of my favourite books in a long time.

I’ve always been trying to understand how “geniuses” get the way they are and what separates them from the rest of us. I’ve tried studying different books, “Outliers”, “The Growth Mindset”, and things on IQ and geniuses and their correlation but I did not really find the secret sauce I was looking for.

I spent a considerable amount of time obsessing over IQ, wondering why mine wasn’t giving me the “powers” I expected to have. Even though I always performed well above average, I always had this feeling I could be more, I could do something more, and that’s what sent me on this search to find the missing piece.

And this book has filled it, I finally understand now. Geniuses are made not born. So simple but complete. The human brain is highly complex and plastic and can learn nearly impossible things, think, and make sweeping mathematical formulations about the universe. This incredible configuration of meat in our head is what sets us apart from others, and it can be trained, deliberately, we can mould these networks into things the like of which human beings have never seen before, into expert levels of skill.
Here are the main things I learnt from this book about becoming a true expert and genius in your field. There are a lot of good points in this book, so I couldn’t compress it more than this while making it applicable:

• You can only improve through deliberate practice. You need to find ways to constantly improve your skillset by going outside your comfort zone. This is the only way you can grow continuously.

  • Geohot, Mozart, and others developed abilities because of lots of training, mentors, and early practice. and also growing out of their comfort zone. there is no “genius” without effort. purposeful practice is very hard work. focus on what leads to skill improvement not the superfluous.

• Sometimes when you can’t find out specifically what you need to improve. spending time plotting out your path for learning is more important than grinding out things you are way past. Sometimes brute force is not enough when you hit a wall, you need to go around the barrier not break through it with a plastic spoon.

• Mental representations are what power experts in any field. over time our brains come up with complex structures for processing things we repeatedly do. This optimization is so powerful it abstracts away IQ. Learn to come up with your own structures for increasing your capacity. This can be a manual or automatic process.

  • There is no such thing as general knowledge. we create memory representations to fit the purpose, sometimes manually, like Steve Fallon who created his own representations for learning multiple digits. for complicated things.

  • We also need mental representations that help us understand and correct our mistakes. A lot of knowledge about practice can improve our error detection ability through osmosis and more knowledge/representation gain. knowing things deeply too would help detect these faults and understand/discover deeper things.

  • The best thing about it is we can get started learning these knowledge representations by learning more about how experts think in those fields. And the internet provides the best advantage for that.

• Your brain is extremely plastic. Forcing yourself to learn other things is good. It builds larger networks i.e. (learning an instrument or learning how to draw). Years of effort and practice pay off dividends in your brain.

  • The inferior parietal lobule, responsible for mathematics and spatial reasoning, grows with years of effort in studying mathematics.

  • Violinists have complex finger networks. so practice not only makes them better but also increases their ability to play from a physical and control level.

  • Sometimes these complex networks created for advanced tasks degrade over time when not regularly used or may write over existing networks i.e. The London cab drivers had reduced ability to save 3D representations in their brains even though they mastered the entire city of London spatially.

  • You have to learn new things while it is still easy to form new networks. The first two barriers in neuroplasticity are at ages 12 and 25.

• Training requires upkeep ( use it or lose it ). but in the end “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a mater of one”. Turns out that was always misquoted.

• The 10,000-hour rule is not a real thing. it was misinterpreted by Malcolm Gladwell from the research that went into this book. Of course, the violin players that were recognized as experts had put in over 7492 hours of effort while those after them had put in just half at around 3000. But if those 10000 hours were not spent on deliberate practice, noticing faults and corrections, and progressing in skill, then it wouldn’t have yielded them anything.

• Intelligence is not what separates experts and winners from mediocre people and losers i.e. (the London cab drivers didn’t have higher levels of intelligence, and master chess players aren’t of higher average intelligence, in fact, lower intelligence helps them develop more important traits like (diligence, deliberate practice…), violinists too). This could probably apply to physics and computer science in that once your IQ is above a certain threshold i.e. 120, what makes you create something special is not based on that but on your grit, skill and effort up to that point which gave you the skill.

  • IQ is only a measure of performance in school. Besides that, there is hardly any correlation in real life. It only facilitates learning the basics of something faster than others but does not provide the ability to progress farther and deeper enough ( that is hard-earned). Researchers have seen evidence of this pattern in many different fields. In music, as in chess, there is an early correlation between IQ and performance. the average IQ of scientists is certainly higher than the average IQ of the general population, but among scientists, there is no correlation between IQ and scientific productivity.

  • If some sort of innate ability were playing a role in deciding who eventually becomes the best in a particular area, it would be much easier to spot those future champions early in their careers.

• Starting young is an incredible headstart to becoming a true expert. The successful experiment carried out by the Hungarian Psychologist on his own children to become world-class chess players (all 3 of them). Even the children have memories of “discovering” chess.

• The human body is extremely adaptable. 40k+ pushups in 24 hours world record, and about 5k+ for pull-ups too.

• Focus and concentration are crucial, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100% effort for less time than at 70% 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.

• Those experts who are at the very boundary of their professions—the best mathematicians, the top-ranked grandmasters in the world, the golfers who win major tournaments, the international touring violinists—didn’t achieve their heights just by imitating their teachers. For one thing, most of them at this stage have already surpassed their teachers. The most important lesson they gleaned from their teachers is the ability to improve on their own.

• Researchers who study how creative geniuses in any field—science, art, music, sports, and so on—come up with their innovations have found that it is always a long, slow, iterative process. Research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place. For example, a study of Nobel Prize winners found that they had generally published scientific papers earlier than most of their peers and that they published significantly more papers throughout their careers than others in their discipline. In other words, they worked harder than everyone else.

• Willpower is a myth. Motivation isn’t.
  The motivation must, of course, be a desire to be better at whatever it is you are practising. If you don’t have that desire, why are you practising? But that desire may come in different forms. It may be completely intrinsic. Say you’ve always wanted to be able to make origami figures. You don’t know why, but it’s inside you. Sometimes the desire is part of something larger. You love listening to the symphony, and you’ve decided that you would really like to be part of that—a member of an orchestra contributing to that amazing sound and experiencing it from that perspective—but you don’t have an overriding desire to play the clarinet or the saxophone or any other particular instrument. Or maybe it’s for totally practical, extrinsic purposes. You hate public speaking, but you recognize that your lack of speaking skills is holding you back in your career, so you decide you want to learn how to address an audience. All of these are possible roots of motivation, but they aren’t—or at least they shouldn’t be—your only motivators.

  Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practised for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends’ compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. 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.
  Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is the belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don’t feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality.

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