Reflections on "Peak"

“Peak”

A book recommended by Lu Su — very interesting and well worth recommending.

Success always comes from large amounts of continually improving training, and deliberate practice is precisely targeted training.

In 2000, British scientists observed London taxi drivers. A taxi driver has to memorize the map and all the landmark buildings every day. Using MRI to compare 16 taxi drivers with 50 ordinary men, they found that the hippocampus, which stores memory, was clearly much larger in the drivers. They also observed 79 drivers who had just taken the taxi exam. At the start of the exam, everyone’s hippocampus was at the same level. A few years later, 41 of the 79 were still taxi drivers, while the other 38 had given up along the way; it turned out that the hippocampus of those 41 taxi drivers was clearly larger than that of the 38 non-drivers.

Several mistaken views:

1. Genius is not innate (nor determined by genes). The probability of someone having perfect pitch is one in ten thousand, and conventional wisdom holds that people with perfect pitch are all born geniuses. Mozart had perfect pitch and is regarded as a born musical genius. But on closer analysis, Mozart was born into a musical world and began intensive musical training at age 3, which gave him perfect pitch. Likewise, in 2014 a scientific experiment was conducted in Tokyo, Japan: 24 ordinary children aged 2 to 6 were given musical training (chord recognition), and within a year and a half, surprisingly, all 24 of these children developed into people with perfect pitch. In other words, any ordinary person, given professional training, can develop certain abilities that seem like genius.
2. The ten-thousand-hour theory. With repetitive ten-thousand-hour training, once a skill reaches a certain level (and becomes unconscious), further repetitive training brings no improvement to the skill, and may even cause it to regress. Take driving: once you’ve learned to drive, and have driven for a year so that driving becomes a kind of conditioned reflex, no matter how much longer you drive, your skill won’t improve much and may even regress.

Only targeted practice can achieve the goal of improvement:

1. You need a goal. Only with a goal does training have a sense of direction; a large goal can be broken down into many small goals.
2. Practice requires focus. Only with focus can you break through your own limits.
3. Practice requires continual feedback — what you’re doing well, what you’re doing poorly — so you can keep adjusting your practice and overcome your weaknesses.
4. Practice requires continually challenging yourself, forcing yourself out of your comfort zone. If you stay in the comfort zone indefinitely, you can never make progress; the brain has a tendency to favor stability. Only by leaving the comfort zone can you unlock greater potential.