Book of the Month: Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

For decades, researchers have been trying to articulate what makes individuals more successful than others over a wide range of professions and fields. Anders Ericsson’s Peak has been one of the more notable compilations of what determines success. His research has influenced many others in seeking out detailed characteristics and theories, and some of his findings have even been redefined and repurposed on a universal scale.

At the core of Ericsson’s book is the concept of deliberate practice, which describes specific conditions of practice that have a greater effect of learning and performance. Deliberate practice requires several conditions: complete attention, practice of skills previously developed by experts, pushing outside of one’s comfort zone, well-defined goals, and feedback with the time to improve mental representations and skills. This type of practice, according to Ericsson, differs greatly from free play, deliberate play, and other types of practice, which align on the spectrum of practice but tend to allow for more freedom and often have less focus on specific skills and concepts with little to no feedback, even if they do sustain the individual’s complete attention.

Deliberate practice differs from just going out into the backyard or to the nearest court and polishing skills but arises out of one-to-one or one-to-many trainings in which a coach or experienced professional is leading the session. In these practice settings, Ericsson believes we are creating mental representations, something that separates performance levels in all activities, whether sports, music, trades, or any profession. Mental representations are mental structures that correspond to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concreate, or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.

Mental representations are enhanced through practice experiences, such as dribbling past a defender in front of a goal or cutting a line of paint along the edge of a ceiling. Each time we perform, we are getting immediate feedback and processing information. Perhaps the move didn’t work because of a bad touch or the defender guessed correctly. Maybe the paint went on the ceiling because of a twitch or because there was too much pressure on the end of the brush.

Over time, our skills improve the more we are placed in these specific settings. That’s why the kid who never plays forward isn’t likely to come into a game late and score the winner or why a team who’s never had to defend a lead against a good team fails to resist pressure. But in deliberate practice sessions, our mental representations improve dramatically.

Here, Ericsson writes about how mental representations can influence a soccer player’s ability.

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.

This is perhaps most obvious in team sports. Take soccer, for instance. You have eleven players on a side moving around in a way that to the uninitiated seems a swirling chaos with no discernible pattern beyond the obvious fact that some players are drawn to the soccer ball whenever it comes near. To those who know and love the game well, this chaos in no chaos at all. It is all a beautifully nuanced and constantly shifting pattern created as the players move in response to the ball and the movement of the other players. The best players recognize and respond to the patterns almost instantaneously, taking advantage of weaknesses or openings as soon as they appear.

To study this phenomenon, I and two colleagues, Paul Ward and Mark Williams, investigated how well soccer players can predict what’s coming next from what has already happened on the field. To do this we showed them videos of real soccer matches and suddenly stopped the video when a player had just received the ball. Then we asked our subjects to predict what would happen next. Would the player with the ball keep it, attempt a shot at goal, or pass to a teammate? We found that the more accomplished players were much better at deciding what the players with the ball should do. We also tested the players’ memory for where the relevant players were located and in what direction the w ere moving by asking them to recall as much as they could from the last frame of the video before it was hidden from them. Again, the better players outperformed the weaker ones.

We concluded that the advantage better soccer players had in predicting future events was related to their ability to envision more possible outcomes and quickly sift through them and come up with the most promising action. In short, the better players had a more highly developed ability to interpret the pattern of action on the field. This allowed them to perceive which players’ movements and interactions mattered most, which allowed them to make better decisions about where to go on the field, when to pass the ball and to whom, and so on.

Recently, I listened to a conversation between sports psychologist Dan Abrahams and a well-known soccer coach about why young players like Lamine Yamal can be so good at such a young age when compared to their older peers. Mental representations were a focal point in that conversation.

It’s not the age of the player that really matters but the time spent building skills in an environment that fosters growth effectively. While a player like Lamal has spent thousands of hours in a competitive learning environment, much like other players his same age around the world, the difference, most researchers believe, comes from the duration he’s engaged in learning during that time.

One of Ericsson’s famous studies had been quoted by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers, connecting mastery to 10,000 hours. The concept eventually became known as the 10,000-hour rule and has become a universal indicator for future success.

The famous study involved practice time between elite violinists enrolled in prestigious schools in Germany. The instrument was chosen because of its high level of difficulty as well as its competitive nature at advanced phases. What’s interesting to note is that in the study, the participants agreed that most of the important factors in improving were seen as difficult and not much fun. Despite being high-level performers, they rarely viewed practice with a positive light. They did, however, view it as important for improvement. But the defining factor, according to the study, was the amount of time the students practiced.

The music education department violinists practiced an estimated 3,420 hours before the age of 18, the next level performers practiced around 5,301 hours, and the top performers, the future soloists, practiced an average of 7,410 hours. The numbers of hours of practice time for the top group was consistent with estimated practice times for middle-age violinists in the Berlin Philharmonic and Radio-Symphonic-Orchester Berlin prior to turning 18.

The study also showed a tremendous difference in practice time during pre-teen to teenage years, when other influences and/or forms of resistance enter into a child’s life. The study failed to show a difference in the type of practice or the type of instructor, which could affect performance over time. The 10,000-hour rule is an estimate of the number of hours the top level participants practiced by the age of 20. In some fields, Ericsson believes, individuals can become experts with less than 10,000 hours, while in other fields that number could be significantly more or less. Ericsson asserts that there is nothing special about reaching a specified numbers of hours, only that higher-level performers tend to practice more than their contemporaries.

Peak provides several other characteristics for success in multiple performance fields in addition to well-researched examples of how individuals and organizations can reach higher levels in work and in life. Ericsson’s research is often cited by his peers, who continue to build on some of the concepts that he extrapolated throughout his career. One peer in particular, Angela Duckworth, whose popular book Grit, one of my all-time favorites, led to greater insight into the connections between passion and purpose over time. She often cites Ericsson’s work as a foundation for her groundbreaking research.