Peak - Robert Poole and Anders Ericsson Flashcards
What are the four pillars of deliberate practice?
In order to perform deliberate practice, you need
- a specific goal
- intense focus
- immediate feedback and
- frequent discomfort (get out of your comfort zone)
Give me 2 examples of how you would specify a goal
- music student aiming to play a piece 3 times through without a mistake making it easier to judge whether a practice session had been a success or failure
- Golfer example - if you want to slice 5 strokes off your handicap, you need to be more specific, which area of your game can you improve? your tee off? your putting ability? and then break down even further, what is it about your putting etc that you need to work on, how do you track your success/failure in it and practice
What makes deliberate practice so effective?
The development of mental representations (mental chunks) over years of practice
List 3 myths of practice
Myth 1 - skills are based on innate talents and therefore cannot be improved
Myth 2 - practicing for a long time will lead to better results. Wrong, it will lead to stagnation and gradual decline
Myth 3 - all it takes to improve is effort
How might deliberate practice work in a business setting? while real work gets done?
- Usually a speaker will stand out in front of the room and give a powerpoint presentation while everyone watches and tries to stay awake
- A better way to do this is to choose a skill that could be developed, eg. speaking more extemporaneously, then the presenter gives the presentation with this in mind, while the audience takes notes and then gives feedback at the end. This will only offer a minor benefit unless this becomes a regular practice for the business
- Thinking in this way allows people to think of skills they want to improve and practice techniques while on the job
Where do you start with a skill that has known high performers?
Figure out the skills of the high performers
Reverse engineer them to set up practices
Push yourself outside your comfort zone
Get regular feedback
Give an example of the top gun approach
these pilots didn’t have top pilots to mimic off of, they were placed in scenarios that were as close to real-world as possible
Consider the jobs of radiologists using x-rays to detect breast cancer, usually, even if they pick up possible cancers, the results go back to the Doctors and they never receive feedback. This means that they rarely improve with experience.
Why is it important to be focused during practice?
you need to be fully focused on the task, example of a guy in group classes just “going through the motions”
if your mind is wondering or you’re relaxed and having fun, then chances are you will not improve
Practice is a conscious effort towards a specific goal
focused sessions are far more important for skill development than prolonged sessions. You should aim to stay as focused as you can, and when your mind starts to wander, stop the session.
Recovery can be just as important
Make sure you get enough sleep so you can practice with maximum concentration
Give an example of deliberate practice without a teacher
Ben franklin playing chess over and over, not getting any better is a perfect example of how not to practice - just doing the same thing over and over again without a specific step by step plan for improvement.
Franklin worked to improve his writing. He used the spectator. He was impressed by the writing in the spectator so he came up with a series of clever techniques aimed at teaching himself how to write as well as the writers.
He first set out to see how closely he could reproduce the sentences in an article once he had forgotten their exact wording. So he chose several of the articles whose writing he admired and wrote down descriptions of the content of each sentence - just enough to remind him what the sentence was about. After several days he tried to reproduce the articles from the hints he’d left himself
His goal was not to write the articles word for word, but to create his own articles that were as detailed and well written as the original. After writing his reproductions, he went back to the articles, compared them, and corrected his versions where necessary
This taught him to express ideas clearly and cogently
The biggest problem he found was that his vocab was no where near as large as the writers. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the words, he just didn’t have them at his fingertips while writing. To fix this, he tried a similar exercise writing poetry.
Lastly, franklin worked on the overall structure and logic of his writing, once again he worked with articles from the spectator and wrote hints for each sentence. This time he wrote hints and jumbled the sentences. he would then try to recreate the article using hints and sentences.
The hallmark of deliberate practice
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.
Our jobs, schooling, our hobbies, rarely give us a chance for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities.
3 F’s
Focus, feedback, fix it
Break down the skill into components that you can do repeatedly and analyse the effectively, determine your weaknesses and figure out ways to address them.
What is the new years resolution effect?
Getting started is easy. it’s exciting, it’s energising. Then after a while, reality hits. It’s hard to find time to work out or practice as much as you should, so you start missing sessions. You’re not improving as fast as you thought you would. It stops being fun, and your resolve to reach your goal weakens. Eventually you stop altogether and you don’t start up again.
What are the 2 ways to maintain motivation
strengthen the reasons to keep going and weaken the reasons to quit
It’s all about habit
set aside a fixed practice time every day
The best students were better at estimating the time they spent on leisure, which indicated that they were better at scheduling
Your body will habituate to practice and it will become less painful
