Peak Ch. 4

Question 1

purposeful practice among people

Answer 1

• Purposeful practice as done by different people can have very different results
• Ex. Steve and Renee’s performance in Ericsson’s memory study

Question 2

what is the gold standard of practice?

Answer 2

Deliberate practice is the gold standard of practice that everyone should aspire to

Question 3

common characteristics of fields with widely accepted training methods:

Answer 3

• There are objective or at least semi-objective ways to measure performance
• They tend to be competitive
• They are generally well-established
• Teachers or coaches have developed increasingly sophisticated training techniques that make increasing one’s skill level possible

Question 4

Ericsson et al. violin study method

Answer 4

studied the performance of great, very good, and good musicians to see what differentiated them

Question 5

Ericsson et al. violin study findings

Answer 5

• Most factors that the students identified as being important to their improvement were seen as labour-intensive and not very fun
• The only major difference between the groups was the amount of time they devoted to solitary practice
• The largest differences in practice time came in the preteen and teen years

Question 6

Ericsson et al. violin study takeaways

Answer 6

• Becoming an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice
• Even among gifted musicians, those who spent more time practicing were more accomplished

Question 7

Ericsson et al. ballet dancers study

Answer 7

found a similarly strong relationship between practice time and accomplishments in ballet dancers

Question 8

2 ways deliberate practice is different from purposeful practice

Answer 8

• It requires a relatively well-developed field
• It requires a teacher who can provide practice activities that have been designed to help a student improve their performance

Question 9

principles of deliberate practice

Answer 9

• Develops skills through established training techniques
• Takes place outside one’s comfort zone
• Involves well-defined, specific goals
• Requires a person’s full and conscious actions
• Involves feedback and the modification of efforts in response to feedback
• Involves producing and depends on effective mental representations
• Involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically

Question 10

can you use deliberate practice in a field that is not well-established?

Answer 10

yes

Question 11

example of deliberate practice in a field that is not well-developped

Answer 11

Feng Wang used images of objects and maps of physical locations to encode digits in his long-term memory

Question 12

problem with subjective judgments

Answer 12

they are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases

Question 13

are “experts” always experts?

Answer 13

In many fields, people who are seen as experts are not experts

Question 14

Hodgson’s wine experts and expertise study

Answer 14

Hodgson found that wine experts will rate the same wine differently; their ratings aren’t consistent

Question 15

Dawes psychologists and expertise study

Answer 15

found that licensed psychologists and psychiatrists were no better at performing psychotherapy than people who had received minimal treatment

Question 16

financial experts and expertise study

Answer 16

Many studies have shown that financial experts are no better than novices or random chance of picking stocks effectively

Question 17

general practitioners and expertise study

Answer 17

General practitioners with several decades of experience perform worse on several objective measures of performance than newly-trained doctors, likely because younger doctors attended medical school more recently and remember their training better

Question 18

how can you identify an expert performer in a field?

Answer 18

• Seeking out those who work closely with many other professionals and can help you identify the best
• Seeking out people that professionals talk to when they need help with a particularly difficult situation

Question 19

what should you do once you’ve identified an expert in a field?

Answer 19

• Figure out what they do that separates them from less accomplished people in the same field
• This can be difficult because mental representations are not directly observable
• In some cases, you can bypass this by figuring out what sets their training apart

Question 20

importance of a good coach or teacher

Answer 20

• They can help a student develop a good foundation and gradually build on it
• They can help a student get through challenges
• They can give a student valuable feedback that they couldn’t get any other way

Question 21

Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule

Answer 21

it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything

Question 22

problems with the 10,000-hour rule

Answer 22

• There is nothing special about 10,000 hours
• 10,000 hours at age 20 for the best violinists was only an average
• Doesn’t distinguish between deliberate practice and practice
• Many people have interpreted it as a promise

Question 23

the core message of the 10,000-hour rule

Answer 23

in pretty much any endeavour, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance as long as they train the right way