Thinking books · Learning how to learn · Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool, 2016

Peak — the big ideas

The research on expert performance, and what separates practice that improves you from practice that does not.

Free — no account needed to read

The big ideas

Ordinary repetition produces a plateau quickly. What continues to produce improvement is practice targeted at a specific weakness, just past current ability, with immediate feedback.

Expertise is largely built mental representations — ways of seeing the situation that let an expert notice what a novice cannot — rather than raw speed or memory.

The "ten thousand hours" version of this research is a distortion of it. The number was never the finding; the structure of the practice was.

Practise it — no need to have read it

Name a skill you have plateaued on. Identify one specific sub-skill you are weakest at, and design a fifteen-minute repetition that isolates it with checkable feedback.

A hint: If you cannot name the sub-skill, that is the first piece of work.

Where it shows up in real life

• Any skill you have been doing for years without improving
• Coaching someone
• Designing your own practice

Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.