Transcription
Welcome to Minded Machine, where we explore the science and technology of human performance enhancement. I'm Auguste Bradley. My guest today is Anders Ericsson, author of the renowned book *Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise*. He is among the world's leading authorities on how to master new skills.
Anders is a professor of psychology and conducted much of the research on expertise and peak performance that Malcolm Gladwell famously referenced to develop the 10,000-hour rule in Gladwell's book *Outliers*. However, as we discussed today, Malcolm Gladwell misinterpreted much of the science behind the 10,000-hour rule. Anders demonstrates that talent is overrated and peak achievement is dependent on a specific type of learning called deliberate practice, and that your skill in any area is a function of the quantity and quality of mental representations you have for that activity. We explore the science of learning and the skill of mastery, how it happens, and how to do it.
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Now, let's dive in. Anders, I am excited to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
Well, I'm delighted to be here and look forward to talking.
Let's dive in. I would love to get your take before we get deep into the more central elements of your work, which I'm very much looking forward to. I'd love to get your take on the 10,000-hour rule, which has kind of been made very popular by Malcolm Gladwell. But he did that, he discovered this, as I understand, through your work. So he was really a number of your articles and the essays and publications, and he came on this and then he made it a very famous concept in the discourse of high-level achievement. But I understand you have suggested perhaps there was a misinterpretation there. What's your take on the 10,000-hour rule and how it's been popularized?
I think the most important thing that I would emphasize is that when we study these musicians, we weren't talking about just putting in the hours or even basically doing something where you try to improve. We were looking at basically that relationship between a teacher and the student, where the teacher can really guide the student to do new things that they have not yet mastered. And that, I think, is a huge difference. And unfortunately, I think some people have interpreted the 10,000-hour rule to be something like, "If I just spend 10,000 hours doing something, I will magically become an expert." And, and I think that, unfortunately, is a real misunderstanding.
I think Michael Gladwell, by picking the examples like the Beatles playing a lot of music in Hamburg as examples here of practice, and I think it's important to note he never used deliberate practice. So he talks about practice. And I guess we would ask, is when we're looking at that activity that the Beatles did, was there something that they were trying to change? Was it more like you're in your production mode? Like most people who perform a job, you know, they're trying to do the best they can, but they're really rarely trying to change things and doing it differently because very often you're gonna generate mistakes. So the only way you can actually find that time is now to be in a solitary situation where you can repeatedly engage in that activity without it having real-world consequences for you and the people that you interact with.
And then that gets to the heart of your work, which we're gonna dive into much deeper. Did Malcolm Gladwell discuss it with you, or did he just read the paper and run with it?
Well, I guess I heard him at a debate. I've never talked to him personally ever. But and and one of the kind of discussions about of this, I remember he said that what afternoon he kind of started reading about our paper, our are basically the review paper, and basically he just dotted it down. And he said that he was just totally amazed that this ended up being maybe one of the most cited and influential chapters in his book *Outliers*.
Interesting, 'cause I've heard him really promote that idea. When that book came out, he would talk about how astonishing it was, the consistency of that 10,000-hour mark. So I know it just struck me as interesting.
Well, you know, a lot of people have argued, and I think where I totally agree with Gladwell is this idea that I have yet to find something where people are really excelling at something without now having kind of a history of preparing to basically develop those abilities. So it's kind of like the kind of the fruits here of a long period of deliberate kind of efforts to improve. And and I think, you know, now, one of the problems is that if you look at sports adolescence, so individuals don't reach kind of adult maturity in their bodies. So if you know, basically invested say sometimes 10-15 years before you reach age 20, you know, that period of time, basically. But what is interesting is that it's rare to find situations where individuals are suddenly moving into a new domain where there isn't kind of a clear connection between what they have been doing before that actually allows them to now reach this level very rapidly.
But there are some interesting exceptions. Recently in chess, there have been some chess players who reached kind of this level in much less than 10 years. And people have speculated that it's the availability here of chess computer programs that now allow individuals to be in a situation where you get feedback immediately, and it's under your own control. It's not like you have to spend all that time with a master telling you essentially what the best moves are, but you can now actually use a computer as sort of the informant that will tell you about what the best move would be in certain situations.
Yeah, just seeing that that would change over time, the amount of hours in that. As we get technological tools, they can help us train. I know you talk a lot about videotaping as a feedback tool, software training, but also just our knowledge about the human mind and how learning happens in the mind, that that time would not, the amount of time it takes to become a master of something would be shrinking steadily over time.
Now, it depends on how you define. So if you define, say, winning a medal at the Olympic Games in an event, well, that's basically going to be three people, and only one gold medal winner. And I think once you start not looking at the absolute level of the performance, which have dramatically changed over the last century, but you're actually putting in the criterion here that somebody is going to be the best in the world, at least for a competition, then it's less clear how you would be able to circumvent these limitations.
Is it the relative performance that's the better measure?
Well, or essentially the absolute performance. So I guess if you wanted to help the rest of the world improve, say, their ability to, you know, read critically or something, to basically use now the standard here that you would quote be able to enter a tournament and become out as the world's best. You're really more interested now in actually increasing the level of performance. And if we look at something like, you know, the Boston Marathon, for example, the times there have just changed dramatically over time, which sort of implies to me, anyway, that, you know, people are more efficient in training and preparing for that race. And that is something that everyone can improve the level. You know, but that doesn't mean that there is a simpler road here to becoming the, you know, the best marathon runner in the world.
Okay, so getting into the actual meat of it here. Your work centers a lot on deliberate practice and purposeful practice. Can you distinguish between the two, and then let's dive into each of them?
I kind of started doing research where I was kind of interested in, you know, to what extent can people modify their short-term memory? On some of the earliest work that got a lot of attention, we trained college students from basically being able to, you know, repeat back around seven or eight numbers. And then with time, we could keep up the presentation rate, and they would be able to report back 80 to 100 digits. That seemed, you know, just totally impossible for normal people. And what we uncovered was that it wasn't a gradual improvement; it was a qualitative shift in how you actually encoded the information and then, at the time when you had to recall it, how you actually retrieved it.
Now, I would call that purposeful practice because we didn't know what these students essentially what they should be doing. So it was more like they were discovering this by themselves.
Oh, okay. So part of the practice is discovering techniques to achieve, right?
So we provided kind of an environment where they get very good feedback and, and basically we tapped into basically what they were thinking and stuff like that. So the next step was looking at, if we look at the world, how can we actually find kind of a category of people who have been producing experts for a century or more? And then we ended up with music as one of those instances, where music academies have been producing, you know, really remarkable musicians for centuries.
Now, when a music student is actually studying at an academy, it's not like they're just doing what comes to mind. I mean, like maybe some of the pop musicians, you know, they get together in a group and they generate music. It's basically accumulation of a lot of experience over centuries about what are the foundational techniques that you need to acquire in order to put to keep building and then actually reach a mastery of the most complex and difficult techniques. And that's what we call deliberate practice: was when you had a guide who had been able to help a large number of other individuals reach the level that you aspire to get to, who could then in regular meetings, basically assess, "Okay, so right now, I think the next step for you is to work on such-and-such," and "Here's basically some methods that would allow you now to kind of stretch yourself beyond your current ability and reach now this new higher goal." And that is what we kind of ended up calling deliberate practice, where you had kind of guides who were had already attained a lot of experience of what individuals needed to do in order to reach, you know, these very high levels of performance.
Okay. And then, in contrast to that, purposeful practice. So purposeful practice would be more the type of practice that a lot of professionals claim that they're doing. Some people are really interested in trying to get better, but it's not that they can find a teacher that has produced now the kind of improvement that you are hoping to attain. So this means that you're motivated to change, you maybe are looking for methods, some of which will work and some of them won't. But we wanted to distinguish that from the situation where you actually do have a teacher who has acquired knowledge here sufficient to guide you to reach these very high levels.
Deliberate practice has a a coach or a teacher giving very specific instruction. Revolving purposeful practices on your own, would other than having the teacher, would the techniques be similar between the two? Just in one case you're do-it-yourself, and the other you're in a program under guidance?
The way we define purposeful practice is a little bit, almost like the major differences that the goals that you set and basically finding the path to, you know, keep improving when you have to do that by yourself. But we would argue that purposeful practice would require this feedback loop. So, so if you're, you know, throwing darts, you can basically decide what kind of goal you should have and then basically work on being able to, being very accurate, you're reproducing basically getting the darts to a particular area of the dartboard. So that's something that I guess you can do by yourself. And it seems like the vast majority of dart players, they don't have their own coach. And I don't know to what extent there are coaches who can actually prove that they've actually been able to successfully help individuals to reach us or the highest levels when you look at the students that they worked with. I mean, so it seems like one of the, one of the central functions of the coach is to provide that feedback. So if you don't have a coach, you have to find an alternate way to get feedback on your progress or on your, your practice session, right?
And I would argue that there's two things that the coach will give you. One is helping you get the fundamentals as you're starting out, because I think both in music, and I've talked to a lot of coaches who tell me about 15-year-olds who are, you know, excited and they're doing all sorts of things. And they required basically what they're doing pretty much by themselves, maybe their parents or father has given them advice. And now the coach identifies and says, "The way you're going to be able to continue improving is actually now to relearn the fundamentals." So there may be a year where they're not making any progress, they're just basically eliminating kind of problems that as you're trying to get better would be, you know, really interfering with your improvement.
And just in these examples, if you have a ballet dancer who isn't kind of having their body completely straight, they may acquire all sorts of skills, but at some point, the fact that they don't have mastered the posture, that you're basically the core of what you're building on, then basically there's really no way for you to advance to the level that those individuals who actually got, you know, and very often a child or not, less wouldn't even know that this wouldn't make a difference. It's sort of a difference that really hurts its influence when you're trying to get to that very highest level.
If you're doing it on your own, you wouldn't even know to stop and unlearn. You would just continue on that same path endlessly.
And exactly. But on the other hand, one could argue that there have been pioneers who actually developed their own performance by themselves. And and I guess I think there's some really interesting examples from runners who actually came up with training methods that people hadn't done, that then ended up actually giving them an advantage when they competed against other individuals.
That seems like a high-risk, high-reward proposition, like you're really taking a long shot on that.
Well, you know, and and I guess once you get successful, that's the kind of person that we would learn about. We probably don't hear about the people who were motivated and tried but never really were successful in finding a training method that would give them an edge over the competition, which I would imagine is the vast majority.
Well, you know, again, it depends on how you define it. But but in terms of actually, you know, getting world fame for being excellent at something, that would be very, very few people that reach that level.
So having a coach or trainer, instructor will give you feedback quicker and with greater accuracy. It'll provide some level of motivation. It seems, just you're accountable to somebody in that. I know in my case, that makes a big difference in how committed. Yeah, if it's tough to get started one day, but I know I have to report or deliver to someone, that motivates. I think that's very important. And I think it's maybe even more important with younger children, that they kind of need now sort of the support and the directions. At some point, I think it's really key that you take more responsibility for your own development and in some sense, prepare you for the phase when you're actually going to go off and not having access to a teacher.
Actually, has shown how to guide people to an even higher level. So does that mean ultimately, the teacher is is important, but not necessarily in perpetuity forever? It's up to a certain point, right?
And and I think if there were teachers who knew how to basically generate Nobel Prize-winning ideas, you know, they probably would keep some of them for themselves. Sort of like, you can help be helped by other people who reach these high levels, but at some point, you're gonna get at the edge of what anybody in the world knows about how to go further. And that's what we talked about, sort of that phase of eminence, where somebody is understanding whatever they're doing in such a deep level that they're likely now to at least recognize when they're making a contribution that goes beyond what anybody else has done in the past. Because that's kind of what you really need in order to reach that eminence category, where students will actually, you know, read books about you and the way you did this and that.
But I think, you know, that's that's kind of the exciting part. At least I find that this is a journey that doesn't really have an end. It's more like some people just stop for whatever reason to kind of put in that energy and time and to keep improving. But that's their choice, as opposed to that there wouldn't be a possibility here to continue this journey to reach even higher levels.
In some fields, you see world-class athletes, for example, but I think it applies to a lot of categories. Who are, I mean, they're far beyond the coaches' ability, but the coach brings something beyond the ability to do it themselves, an insight in evaluating others. But even at at some point, you're suggesting you run out of what a coach can teach. If you look at basketball players, for example, they are never going to not have the coach, although that perhaps, part of being a team sport, does that make a big difference whether it's a team sport or solo activity in terms of how long you need that coach?
I think that's really kind of an interesting thing that I encounter when I interacted with some of the professional teams and different kind of sports. And as a player, the coach has two functions. One function is to kind of help you do things better. But the coach also has the role of evaluating you and making decisions about who's going to be playing next week. And that actually creates now sort of a problem. And that's when individuals have a lot of resources, they actually have now their own personal coach whose interest is completely just helping you get better. And now you can tell that coach about difficulties that you have without worrying that this may actually reduce the probability they will be playing next week. So there's a role of a political element.
It seems like what you're just talking about there applies very directly to business contexts, or you have managers you're performing for.
Yet, in fact, very few people have coaches. Though it sounds like it might be helpful.
I think that would be really interesting. Now, one of the issues that I've run into when it comes to a lot of jobs is that it's a little hard to really measure it objectively. I've been working with surgeons, where I guess especially surgeons doing very challenging surgery that often is associated with some degree of mortality. You can now basically, you know, have a measure here of a surgeon who maybe has only half of the percentage of mortality than other surgeons, being an indicator here that this surgeon is more successful in performing this surgery with a positive long-term outcome.
But once you start talking about being a manager, you're managing a particular group of people. It's almost hard not to basically know what you would like if you improved. I mean, I think there are interesting things that you can look at. And what I found maybe the most helpful is looking at more systematic activities, like leading a meeting. That if you have that videotaped, you probably could take that to people who are kind of coaches who would now be able to kind of help you see what you could have potentially done differently. And also help some other people who were in that meeting adopt sort of a more kind of constructive approach as opposed to self-enhancing. Because apparently, that's a big problem. Some people, when they generate ideas, would point out how this builds on what other people have been saying in the meeting. But then there are other individuals who present this idea as if it came out of nowhere. So if you want to build a group where people really, in some ways, are feeling like they are contributing to something that goes beyond themselves and don't really view it as an individual competition, I think you would find, and I don't know, I can't point to any research, but I would be surprised here if that group wouldn't actually function better than one where individuals are sort of just looking out for their own self-interest.
That's a great insight into, if one is in a business context or in a lot of these contexts where you have a broad range of functions and they're kind of general and they're hard to measure, to get more specific in your training, to really train on specific functions rather than the whole general suite of activities. So your example of training and how to lead a meeting makes me think of all this training out there on how to do public speaking, which you could clear the videotape and analyze and get very specific on actions you are taking, techniques you used, physical behaviors, and vocal performance. That it gets very practical at that level. That's a great insight.
Yeah, and and I think what's interesting, I talked to a few stand-up comedians, and they're, I guess, you're really looking for other people's reactions to you. But you could find environments now, sort of like lower-kind of scale restaurants where you would now have a fair amount of exposure that you would then be able and maybe you could videotape yourself. So you could now actually gradually build up. And and once you find something that really works well, well, then that may be something that you can now kind of use as a starting point for building your unique personality. Because I think with most of these comedians, it's really critical to, in some sense, have your unique personality, especially if you're gonna reach that very highest level of recognition and fame.
You're booked. In your work in general, talks a lot about mental representations as the thing that separates experts from those, you know, far off from that level of achievement. What are, what are mental representations, and how do they sort of characterize that level of knowledge and mastery?
And and I agree. I think that is maybe one of the most consistent findings that cuts across all domains of expertise, that the expert is able now to generate an image of a situation that they encountered, and then they can kind of analyze that situation and think through potentially what they could have been doing differently. And especially if you have videotapes as a way here of kind of helping you notice things that weren't part of the representation that you had when you basically were in the game. Because that's gonna be key. So if you're playing soccer or basketball, it's really key when you get the ball that you have an idea here what other players, your teammates as well as your opposing team players, are not just where they are right now, but where they're heading. So once you have a very at accurate picture of that, you will now be able to decide what might be the very best thing that you could do with the ball.
And we find that that's sort of that ability of forming imagery. Like, so for example, chess masters are able to play chess basically without seeing the chessboard. So that means that not only can they remember what the pieces are, but they can actually manipulate the pieces in their mind to play a game that is roughly a similar level as I can with a visible chessboard.
Are mental representations essentially scenarios that you might encounter that are pre-figured out?
Well, we would, if we're thinking about chess, what we find is that a very good chess player, if they were having a situation, they would now sort of explore, "If I do this, what is the best countermove that the other person can do?" And if he or she does that, what do I do? And by basically now going into the game, you know, maybe five to eight moves, what we find is that the expert actually discovers things in the process here of exploring the consequences of different potential moves that then allow them to pick a superior move for a chess position.
So how long can kind of describe that ability of now more or less having a workable? It's different from having a picture because you need to be able now to manipulate it, so you can actually see the consequences when you're making changes to it.
There's always an interactive picture, right? And it's sort of a picture that you can manipulate and use here as a planning device. In domains where you have enough time, and other sports, it seems that what you're doing is building up this mental representation. Because a soccer player can only see, you know, this much of the field. So what they found is that the middle, sort of players that they, if you look at their head, you can see how they're scanning now, essentially, you know, 270 degrees or maybe 300 degrees. So they would be able to, when they get the ball, they have a mental picture of what's happening.
I can actually see, and I would argue that that general idea of being able to build something in your mind that is vertical. Because the problem, and we see that with the less skilled chess players, when they start planning, it's almost like they can no longer see the best countermoves. They can obviously keep track of what they were doing, but actually being able now to mentally scrutinize this future position is something that seems to be a limiting factor. And I would, I I guess I haven't really seen one area where that mental representation, so for example, a professional musician would very often just read the notes and actually create something in their mind if they're preparing for a public performance, because they're interested in creating something new that other people haven't. They may then listen to what other famous musicians had done with this piece, but it's sort of the idea here of creating mentally something that's new. Once you have a sense here what you want to do, that's when you're actually now translating what you hope that the audience will hear to what you're going to be doing on the piano or the violin or whatever musical instrument that, you know, you would be playing.
These are truly dynamic models in every way that let you feel literally like you are in the the performance, like the ultimate performance context. And it seems like that lets you basically practice on stage or in the game or at the at the big meeting, more getting more time in that context, trying things out, than any person anywhere you're competing with would have in real life the opportunity to do. It gives you more critical practice in what feels like the high-performance context. Is that a fair characterization?
It's very interesting what you're saying. I would argue that when experts are performing, they typically would be just focused on doing the very best that they can do. So basically reflecting here on trying out a new thing, it's basically not something that you would do when you're competing or performing. But during that, I think that's a problem, right? When you have practice, that's when you can now do this exploration and I'm basically working on changes that maybe it will take you a couple of months before you feel comfortable actually using when you're kind of engaged now in the performance that's being evaluated. And I think that distinction between performing and actually working on trying to improve while you're in the practice room is a very important distinction.
But that then raises a problem. If you now practice something and you're really happy with it, actually, when you get into the performance situation there, it's not just executing what you did in practice. One, there's a lot of stress and other things. But also, if you make a mistake, you now have to learn methods for actually dealing with that mistake and minimize its consequences. So musicians all the time when they make mistakes, they're actually hiding that mistake. So they're not continuing playing the piece the way should be played, but they're actually diverting it. So thereby that mistake is not going to be as perceptible as basically it would have been if you kind of insisted on doing exactly what you were going to continue with.
This seems like a good takeaway from this, and at a practical level, is to sit down and try to visualize scenarios and walk through your mind what it's like in in the big day, in the big meeting, at the big game, on stage, and test yourself. Put yourself in difficult situations, think about how, and visualize yourself dealing with it. And it seems like you're just trying to eliminate surprises so that you're not caught off guard at any moment. Is that kind of the approach?
Right. And I think going back here to the meeting, I had an interesting discussion with basically a manager who argued that that in her company, they were actually trying now to force the person calling the meeting to actually have a plan and actually be able to motivate why all the people in that room would actually be able to contribute. And then also having kind of a more explicit idea, what is it that we need to accomplish in this meeting? Because apparently, there's a lot of meetings that are being called, and it's served very unclear exactly what they possibly could have accomplished, and a lot of people feel, you know, that it's kind of a waste of time. I think we've all been in that kind of meeting.
The part of your work has talked about the importance of reaching, in practice, not just doing the thing you're good at, but reaching beyond your comfort level. But at the same time, not reaching too far. Can you talk a little bit about to what degree to push yourself in practice and what sort of optimal in terms of the challenge?
And I think that's where if you were to have a teacher, I think a teacher actually will help you determine now, what is too much or what is not enough. But if you're going to change, you really need to set a goal that goes outside of what you currently can do. Because if you're just doing what you're able to do already, then why would you expect to get any better? So it's more that by now setting the goal that you really can't reach, or can't reach at least with sufficient kind of probability, that is now sort of the appropriate stretch goal.
But it also has, you know, that if the teacher knows, because there are some things that are so hard to acquire, that if somebody thought that they were going to acquire this in the next couple of months, we don't know of anybody in the whole world who was actually been able to acquire those kinds of things in that short of time. So it's almost like you're just, you know, asking for disappointment here. So having that teacher, in some ways, based on his or her experience, knowing what it typically takes, so they can communicate that, I think is key.
Yeah, I've seen quite a few people who want to run their first marathon, who basically, you know, start running like crazy for the first week, and then it's almost like they're just breaking down, and that basically is the end of that effort. So being able to kind of start out at an appropriate level, so you can actually sustain these changes and acquire them over, you know, whatever time it's gonna take for you to plausibly reach now the level they aspire to.
The passage in your book that talked about how when you pick something up, you're learning and learning, you're noticeably improving, and then you get to be good enough to play with your friends or to be on par with your friends, and you just play for enjoyment. You're not training, you're just doing it, and you just assume you're gonna continue to get better the more you do it. But that doesn't happen. You plateau. And if you're not deliberately trying to push yourself, if you're not setting goals, if you're not really analyzing what you're doing, looking at that feedback loop, the practice of just doing more and more of it, especially at a level that's enjoyable and just just fun to do, you plateau pretty quickly. And I just look across my life, I think this is something everyone can relate to. You see this everywhere in your life, something you do a lot of, but you haven't been getting better at it for a very long time.
I think one area where you see a lot of examples like that would be, you know, playing golf or tennis, where somebody can do it, you know, bi-weekly or maybe even more, and they just go out and play rounds. And golf, I mean, the number of strokes that you can do here, maybe in a three-hour time period, I mean, that's only a few. And what's sort of really remarkable is that pretty much every shot is now going to be different. And what we know is that if you want to actually increase your control, you basically would want to master something. And you could work in a sand trap or on the green or in the driving range. But the key thing is that you have a project, and you can now actually find ways here that you would be able to improve whatever aspect of the game that you're focusing in on. And again, having a teacher who would be able to point out to you that when you're actually hitting the ball with your swing, you're kind of out of balance. And so now basically working on maybe the strength of your legs and other ways in which you can actually, you know, basically maintain your balance and thereby reduce sort of the variability in the outcomes of your basically drives.
It seems like that example is analogous to so many things in our work life and in our family lives. If you think about even think writing, like we do an endless amount of writing. We type emails constantly. We're constantly writing. How many of us are actually improving our writing at this point since leaving school? I suspect very few of us, unless you actually have this goal of being a writer and you're working to improve your writing. But that's something we do a lot of, and I think most of us are just sort of at the same level and not changing. You could talk, look at how you deal with your relationships with your spouse or your family members. I suspect we're all kind of just at that same skill level and probably not changing much at all. I think it's just endemic across life that getting, reaching that level, and unless you deliberately recognize or select it as an area you want to improve in and look for ways to improve it, it doesn't just happen on its own.
I think that's fascinating. Yeah, and I have personal experience. I was working when I came from Sweden as a postdoc in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University on, and I was working on this memory project. And this senior professor that I work with, you know, basically told me that, you know, "You can be first author here. We're gonna submit it to Science, so it's gonna be sort of like a big thing." So I basically started drafting it, and he basically took a look at it and he said, "You know, here's a problem. You're not motivating this." So basically, back to working on it. And I think I went through about 40 versions before he basically said, "Well, this is good enough. I can now start actually working on it myself." And I think very often, you know, we don't give individuals the time so they can actually, you know, have this repeated development where they eventually themselves are now actually acquiring abilities. Because I remember there was a period when I felt, you know, he was just, you know, harassing me almost, you know, I needed publications here to go on. But when I look back on it, you know, it's probably one of the most influential experiences I had, where he kind of forced me. He was telling me about the problems, but letting me now try to figure out a solution. And sometimes I would have to have two or three drafts just addressing that one problem until he felt like it was good enough.
So he was giving you the feedback, he was establishing reach goals that were doable, that reaches, and but you already had the intention yourself, the desire, the motivation to achieve it. So all the ingredients were there.
Yes. And I think in a lot of parts of our life, we just don't have the intention. We haven't set that intention for ourselves.
And Robert Poole, who was a co-author of *Peak*, told me that during one period of his career when he was starting to work with these big science magazines, he had a period when he was actually seeking out exemplars of what he wanted to do. And he would almost like Benjamin Franklin, you know, sort of read it and then put it aside and then see whether he would be able to reproduce basically that presentation. And obviously, you wouldn't be able to do it, but you could not find what's different. And by iteration now, basically getting closer and closer, so you could have a better sense here of those kind of mental representations that drove these individuals or produced, you know, these excellent pieces of writing. And you could sort of work yourself so you basically are now starting to have those representations, or at least, you know, your own way to generating them.
And you've talked about the earlier in our discussion, the process of mastery comes from successfully encoding and retrieving these models and this information. What goes into the encoding from a neuroscience standpoint? How does that work in the brain? And I think you've talked about chunking as part of that.
Yeah, although I think it's sort of a theoretical issue. What we found with the guy who increased this memory was that he was able now to encode things in long-term memory, drawing on meaningful information that he had. So that actually allowed him to basically use long-term memory in the way that some people thought was only possible for kind of working memory. And and that's what we see with experts. That if you present a chessboard to a chess master for five seconds, they can actually encode it such that they can reproduce it. A less skilled individual maybe can do half of the pieces, and a beginner maybe only four or five pieces. So it's it's a little bit, and I think the best example that I found that most people are familiar with is if you're reading a sentence, that can be very long, and trying to reproduce it. If it's meaningful, actually people can do that. But if you scramble the words, then basically all the words are way too long, and people are almost limited to about five or six randomly selected words. And that was the same with a chess master, that when you rearrange the chess pieces so was this a random collection of chess pieces, then the differences were almost eliminated between the master and the beginner.
Any time when you have a task, I think the expert is able to embed that in a way that sometimes hard to understand. There's some interesting work done on professional writers. So when you actually gave them a task and compared that to college students or high school students, high school students would typically almost like just write down whatever occurred to them on the topic. Whereas the professional writer would ask, "Who's going to read this? What, what is it that I'm really trying to achieve with this piece?" And here's some different options of how I can get the reader engaged here in the first paragraph. And then basically, how can I now connect this and then really get to the end where I'm hoping here that the reader will now basically have a certain kind of mindset or experience.
Interesting. So it sounds like the critical thing here on a practical level, as someone trying to implement this, is to connect dots and to bring different dots that might be relevant. Whereas the the amateur, the newbie, might just take something in isolation and just try to expand it. The the expert is connecting as many think relevant things. I've always thought of creativity as not coming up with original ideas, but connecting just dissimilar or unrelated things. And this seems tied to that. This is taking the audience, taking these three different ideas and bringing them together as one in a new combination. And and I personally don't believe, and it's almost hard to understand how something, you know, will just emerge out of nothing. And and I guess when I've sort of looked at people who are judged by other people to be very creative, you know, and then you ask them to think out loud when they're actually producing this thing, you see a process that it's fundamentally different from before. The expert compared to the novice, who exactly what you're saying, you know, they're doing something, but it's basically they don't have an idea. They can't even reason about what are the things that they could be doing and how that, you know, ultimately will create an experience for the person viewing the painting or reading the the story.
But I would recommend for anybody who's interested in, you know, reaching a high level, you know, to try to find somebody that they really respect and maybe, you know, get some insights into what's happening with that person's thinking as they're producing it. And I think now we see on the web, there are people doing that. So at least in some domains, you would at least be able to to kind of find videotapes of kind of an expert producing sort of a very, you know, impressive piece of work. And seeing kind of all that technique and reasoning will, I hope, you know, give people a sense here of, you know, it's not just hoping here, do it, keep doing the same thing and hoping that magically it will be an expert. It's a long process. And it's almost like you have this list of things that you need to check off. You also need to try to acquire them in the right order, because conceivably, if you do certain things and you make an incorrect choice, you may for be forced here to kind of, you know, rework what you have already accomplished.
You said that there's a need not only to build your skill but also build your your passion, your commitment to the the bigger endeavor. That motivation is developed much like the skill itself, and that willpower is not the central driving factor. Could you elaborate on that and how one develops that motivation along with the skills?
Very early on, at least, I realized that if I was going to do the best possible job here in the domain that I picked, I had to really love it. And so, for example, I made this commitment to myself because I thought memorizing things was just a waste of time. So I didn't allow myself to memorize information. So on the history test, when most of my classmates were kind of memorizing the years and stuff, I would typically go to the library for three or four days and read books about this period. So actually, when we got the test, I could kind of, you know, retrieve information from those books that were sufficient for me to get a decent grade here on the test, but not being basically wasting my time by memorizing things that at least I thought were not really going to enhance sort of my understanding.
You hear over and over, and I see in my own experience, that willpower and inspiration are very short-lived. They don't take you very far, very long. And that ultimately, even look at all the the people that you've studied who became world-class performers, it was inherent in their identity. What they were doing, they, it defined who they were. They didn't, they're just the kind of person who plays violin. They're the kind of person who plays chess at a high level. That's who they are. And I think we can learn from that in that if there's something that's important to us, we need to shape our identity with that activity as part of the identity. It's the identity. We hear this all the time. I think of myself as a fit person.
I'm going to I'm not going to eat junk food but if I'm just trying to you know go off that motivational video or just force myself to do it that's just not sustainable that I observed.
I've been interested in sort of prodigies, especially in music and basically looking at individuals, young individuals who seem to be very successful. They actually were able to have this mental representation so they could actually sit down at the piano and actually try play different things for themselves. So that's actually an activity that you know you can do for yourself as opposed to the way that most music students do. They just do it for somebody else and they can often hardly hear what it sounds like when they're playing, which obviously makes it impossible for them to have that experience of discovering something new and really exciting. That I think it's associated with you're stretching yourself or exploring new ways to do things.
And and again, I can think back on my sort of development. The very often I was kind of part of a group who would maybe for an hour to to sit down and speculate about things talking about. So it was sort of like a mixture of play, but we would often try to find quests to know the answer to. And then basically the task was, you know, how could we basically use the knowledge that we have of now generating good predictions? And then you obviously needed that second step of somebody going and now learning whatever other people had and you know, you know found out about this phenomenon. And I think, you know, I I think that's part of the most fun thing is like talking to you for example, you know, I love that. And and and when you have people who are aligned and having similar goals, I think that kind of discussion and interaction that you could generate, you know, that at least to me is some of the best things that I've experienced.
I should share that enthusiasm one more for a technical question on the of learning and developing expertise is in one of your studies and I'd be interested to know if you saw this in others but you looked at a group of violinists and looked at those who became the very best and then those who became good but not extraordinary and you saw that sleep that the ones that the higher end slept more. Which was it would be a little bit counterintuitive. I would be thinking they're practicing all the time they're cutting out sleep to get more practice. Then have you found sleep as a critical part of learning digesting processing and absorbing the practice? Do you see any connection there or what's your interpretation of that result?
Well, I found that very interesting and and I have to say that personally. So if you think of deliberate practice as you really trying to do if you're going to go beyond what you currently can do, then you need to be fully concentrated and you need to basically be at your absolute best. And if you have that kind of ability to monitor your ability to concentrate, a couple of things that we found with musicians. You can't do that for more than maybe an hour and then kind of take a little break and then you can do another hour. But then you get to a point perhaps when you don't feel like you can concentrate. And what basically the musicians realized was basically putting in that hour doing, you know, 50% quality work may not even basically be any positive. In fact, it can actually interfere now with the quality and control that you basically are trying to get. And and I think I've talked now. So it's not just a musician's across the board. People who really have that sense here of that their best time is limited. And the best almost typically, if you could lead your life in such a way that you wake up feeling really refreshed and then you basically face, you know, the biggest challenge of the day, you can kind of later on go off and maybe teach or you do something else. But essentially that idea that you need to replenish kind of that energy and in order to be able to sustain that elevated concentration. And and if you're really trying to maximize that, then sleeping more or sufficient is actually really important. And actually that elite groups, you know, we found that they were napping after they had their lunch. And I think that in several other instances of people who for example athletes, sometimes, you know, the event is delayed by five uh cause of rain or something. What's the best athletes, they're actually able to take a nap during that period and then actually recharged some stuff. Someone they actually get to perform, you know, they're performing at the top level whereas a lot of the other individuals are just nervous and more or less this five hour period is depleting them of the kind of energy that they could use to perform better during the actual event.
So the most effective training approach then is to maximize your peak training hours, not your training hours in general. In that more general training hours is not going to help you as much as perhaps fewer overall training hours, but more at the very highest level of training, having not focused and then being able to identify things that you can't do. I think people realize that, you know, more client is really not the issue, but it's really finding that sort of the very quality time. And and I guess we looked at writers, the most professional writers, you know, what they do is kind of right. And when they're working on a book, it's pretty much that they work in the morning until noon and then they basically just kind of recoup, maybe take walks, let me do something social, but really avoiding doing something that would be similar or require the same resources. But the actual writing would.
I hadn't connected these two studies until just now, but you also talk about interval training where you do a sprint and arrest and a sprint and arrest is more effective than just endless jogging for a runner. And this sounds like exactly the same thing. So for a violinist or, you know, an executive, anyway, in any field, shorter periods of just all-out intense super focused practice with a rest and then a focus practice, then a rest is gonna get you further faster than just endless, you know, semi tired 70% effort. And I think that's particularly interesting when it comes to long-distance drumming because obvious that interval training would actually allow you now to increase the speed by what you're running, engaging in these kinds of very exhausting, but then basically giving yourself rest so you could actually keep doing it. That that was actually the most helpful for them to actually be able now to run, you know, very long distances at a higher level. I still think that we're understanding, you know, getting more and more understanding of the physiology that is driving the changes that you're getting from these training activities.
Thank you so much. I mean, this is so insightful and also incredibly actionable. This is stuff that people can implement in their lives. There are things from I mean, your book has been influential in my life. So this is like really tangible stuff that can change lives. So I find it super valuable and really thank you for sharing and going into it such depth.
Well, thank you. I think that's one of the most painful things is to basically hear that people they find useful in your work. So thank you so much. Where can people find out more about what you're up to or I mean, obviously there's the book Peak, which will link to in the show notes. If you go to Google Scholar, you could find often basically access to most of the papers that I've been writing recently on. But essentially, I I think I'm struggling almost to kind of just keep doing what I'm doing.
Well, there's value in focus, as we have clearly established. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was a real pleasure and thank you for tuning in. If you're watching on YouTube, leave thoughts or comments below. If you found value in the show, please like the video so it gets promoted in the algorithm. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss any of the remarkable guest lineup we have in the pipeline. If you're listening to the podcast, ratings and reviews on iTunes or wherever you listen are massively helpful. They helped us get promoted on those platforms. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive show updates, plus my newsletter essay and curated articles on transformational technologies. It comes out every three weeks. Everything is accessible at mind and machine dot. Thanks until next time.
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