Peak

We have been having conversations, delivering presentations or solving similar tasks for years. We become more practised. But are we also deliberately improving? Sometimes the same difficulty persists: we explain too much, overlook important signals or repeat a mistake.

In Peak , Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool examine how exceptional proficiency develops. At its heart is a demanding idea: Development needs practice that targets a specific boundary of our current abilities.

1. Practice needs a precise goal

The book distinguishes different forms of practice. In Purposeful Practice, we work on a clearly defined difficulty with focused attention, feedback and a challenge that extends beyond what we can already reliably do.

Deliberate Practice , in its narrower sense, additionally describes individually guided work: a qualified teacher selects suitable tasks based on established training methods. This requires a field in which good performance can be identified and effective ways of developing it are known.

For everyday life, this initially means: “communicate better” is too broad as a practice goal. “Explain the central point in two clear sentences”, by contrast, can be practised specifically.

2. Feedback changes the next attempt

An exercise supports learning when we can recognise a discrepancy and adjust our next attempt accordingly. This requires feedback that says more than “well done” or “not convincing yet”.

Our own example: a colleague listens to a brief explanation and describes what she understood. If the key idea is missing, the explanation can be revised and tried again. One specific component of performance is practised, rather than the entire presentation every time.

A helpful task is challenging while remaining manageable. Overload alone does not create a meaningful learning opportunity. Nor does every everyday situation have to become training.

3. Expertise changes what we recognise

Ericsson and Pool emphasise mental representations: internal knowledge structures through which experts recognise relevant patterns, interpret situations and guide their actions. These structures also help them compare their own performance with a desired outcome.

A musician, for example, develops a precise idea of how a passage should sound. This allows her to hear differences that a beginner misses. Proficiency and the conception of good performance develop together.

This expertise is domain-specific. Someone who exercises excellent judgement in one field has not thereby acquired a general superiority in other tasks.

What we take from this

For the Future Skills Institut, Peak offers an important addition to small everyday routines: We should establish how improvement would be recognised and what feedback would change the next attempt.

An experiment for step 6 of our Seven-step method: choose a demanding idea and explain it to someone in two sentences. Then ask them to repeat the central point. Select one ambiguity, revise the explanation and try again. In step 7, reflect: what came across more accurately? What remains difficult? And does the explanation work later with another topic too?

This is our own exercise, inspired by the principles. Without expert guidance and an established training method, it does not automatically meet the narrower definition of deliberate practice.

The research also requires nuance. A meta-analysis by Macnamara and colleagues found associations of varying strength between practice and performance across domains. Ericsson and Harwell criticise its pooling of different types of practice. How practice is defined and measured therefore influences the conclusions.

A fixed figure of 10,000 hours does not guarantee mastery. For complex Future Skills, context, resources and the quality of feedback also remain important. Our aim is useful development in one’s own life—not peak performance at any price.

Which small component of an important ability do I want to improve deliberately—and who or what can show me whether the next attempt is better?

Context: This insight presents selected ideas from the book in our own words, based on publicly accessible original material, supplemented by the scientific debate. Studies of expertise in clearly defined performance domains cannot be transferred directly to every social or personal ability. Associations between practice time and performance differences do not guarantee individual progress and do not, on their own, establish causation. The communication examples and connection to the seven-step method are the Institut’s own applications.

Book: Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool (2016): Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Sources and further reading: Publisher’s book page ↗ · Book description and preview ↗ · Ericsson & Harwell: definition and research debate (2019) ↗ · Macnamara et al.: meta-analysis (2014) ↗