Peak: How to Master Almost Anything by Anders Ericsson Robert Pool

Author:Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool [Ericsson, K. Anders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143196464
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

FIRST, FIND A GOOD TEACHER

Another of my favorite correspondents is Per Holmlöv, a Swedish man who started taking karate lessons when he was sixty-nine years old. He set himself a goal of gaining a black belt by the time he was eighty. Per wrote to me after he’d been training for about three years. He told me that he thought he was progressing too slowly, and he asked for some advice on how he could train more effectively.

Although he had been physically active all of his life, this was his first experience with martial arts. He was training in karate five or six hours a week and spending another ten hours a week in other exercise, mainly jogging in the woods and going to the gym. What more could he do?

When hearing about Per, some people’s natural reaction might be, “Well, of course he’s not progressing too quickly—he’s seventy-two years old!” But that wasn’t it. No, he wasn’t going to improve as quickly as a twenty-four-year-old or even a fifty-four-year-old, but there was no doubt that he could get better more quickly than he was doing. So I offered some advice—the same advice I would offer to that twenty-four-year-old or that fifty-four-year-old.

Most karate training is done in a class with a number of students and a single instructor who demonstrates a movement, which the class imitates. Occasionally, the instructor might notice a particular student performing the movement incorrectly and offer a little one-on-one tutoring. But such feedback is rare.

Per was taking just such a class, so I suggested he get some personal sessions with a coach who could give advice tailored to Per’s performance.

Given the expense of private instruction, people will often try to make do with group lessons or even YouTube videos or books, and those approaches will generally work to some degree. But no matter how many times you watch a demonstration in class or on YouTube, you are still going to miss or misunderstand some subtleties—and sometimes some things that are not so subtle—and you are not going to be able to figure out the best ways to fix all of your weaknesses, even if you do spot them.

More than anything else, this is a problem of mental representations. As we discussed in chapter 3, one of the main purposes of deliberate practice is to develop a set of effective mental representations that can guide your performance, whether you are practicing a karate move, playing a piano sonata, or performing surgery. When you’re practicing by yourself, you have to rely upon your own mental representations to monitor your performance and determine what you might be doing wrong. This is not impossible, but it is much more difficult and less efficient than having an experienced teacher watching you and providing feedback. It is particularly difficult early in the learning process, when your mental representations are still tentative and inaccurate; once you have developed a foundation of solid representations, you work from those to build new and more effective representations on your own.

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