Skill Mastery & Peak Performance via Deliberate Practice with Psychologist Anders Ericsson

August Bradley's guest today is Anders Ericsson, author of the renowned book "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise". He is among the world's leading authorities on how to master new skills. Anders is a Professor of Psychology and conducted much of the research on expertise and peak performance that Malcolm Gladwell famously referenced to develop the 10,000 hour rule in Gladwell's book Outliers. However, as we discuss today, Malcom Gladwell mis-interpreted much of the science behind the 10,000 hour rule. Anders demonstrates that talent is overrated and peak achievement is dependent on a specific type of learning called "deliberate practice", and that your skill in any area is a function of the quantity and quality of “mental representations” you have for that activity.
We explore the science of learning and of skill mastery -- how it happens, and how to do it.

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[nirmalmanoj]

Anders Ericsson passed away on 17 June 2020.

[CigdemBirgul]

Thank you for this enlightining interview ; I am a yoga trainer and this video gave me a new perspective...Thank you🙏🏻 May Prof .Anders Ericsson rest in peace✨️

[artturock]

I was privileged to have my work on bringing deliberate practice to busines to be included in Peak. I found my contacts with Anders Ericsson to be enlighening and with his suggestions for improving . He walked his talk. Let's acknowledge his massive contribution to the importance of practice over sheer talent. MASSIVE

[DustinMillerPolyInnovator]

I am a swim instructor, and I've been teaching for nearly a decade. I can certainly say that there are some basic areas that if people don't know, they could totally do other strokes and swim fast, but they would never improve past that point if they didn't go back and relearn fundamentals.

[MidoriyaIzuku-hsxy]

49:00 diffrience between expert and amatör on process

[ericchang]

"A messy desk is a sign of genius"...never a more true statement

[Simone_vittorini_]

4th best book that I've ever read.

read it and apply it both with ultralearning. It will change your life.

[IntuitionwithIvan]

Super inspiring!
Thank you for this informative discussion.
I'm sorry to hear of the passing of Anders Ericsson.
He contributed so much to the science of performance and expertise in different domains.

[mpcc]

I think motivation and support systems that help sustain motivation makes for how much someone gets to the top of a field. If you can motivate yourself to always exhaust all of your resources and time of highest productivity then you will move your performance into rarer to domains of outcome which will increase your opportunity to develop and perform as x. If you start with no teacher at such pursuit, then with time as you build more skill you will acquire a teacher. You need a teacher until you learn all you can and need from them to be able to outperform them. Once you can outperform an expert teacher, then you need to take over your learning for one more round and decide exactly what world class goal you want to achieve and move towards it.

[lacsativ]

This episode is golden, really should have more views. I imagine you'd have many more views if you interviewed the likes of Gladwell or Cal Newport. It seems that it is the ones who popularize these concepts that get traction within the mainstream rather than the ones who actually researched/discovered them. And that's a pity because much of the depth and key insights are lost in popular self-development. It has become even more clear to me recently after having read Atomic Habits - it's always the same behavioristic experiments being referenced and a variation of the same underlying principles. Rarely do they come with a new idea. The most recent one is Indistractable which I just finished reading thanks to your podcast, and I was very happy to see a book in genre question the over-glorified concept of "Willpower".
In the end it's outliers and insiders like Anders Ericsson who truly have something new to add to the conversation, be it a new concept/idea or a new take on the way this research is portrayed in the mainstream literature.
As always, thanks for the podcast and please keep bringing non-mainstream experts into the spotlight. I believe that soon there will be an increase in demand for deeper conversations, a trend which can be observed with the rise of channels like Rebel Wisdom.

[ryantjy]

Wow, so glad that I found your channel as I was searching for Anders Ericsson. Love your interviewing style, to rephrase/reflect, and cover key points without it seeming forced.
More to interviews with underrated leaders of psychology and the likes please haha!

(Would be really interested if you could interview experts from Industrial and Organizational psychology ... as you'd mentioned about managers/businesses being hard to assess, that intrigued me)

[eusouoleonardo]

Thank you so much for sharing this! It's a masterpiece... I love so much the deliberate practice and I'm an amateur high performance runner.
It was so helpful for me, I admire your work a lot! Keep doing great things to the world, you're amazing!

[nicholaswickman]

Just discovered this channel. Really wonderful choice of subjects and people to interview, and great execution. Please keep them coming.

[ZupaTrpa]

I was specifically researching deliberate practice with the hope of creating a plan to improve at darts. I didn't expect to actually get a darts example! You guys touched on some key points here and it was interesting to hear massive amounts of Ericsson's time and effort condensed into such a short amount of time. He'll be a big miss in the psychology of learning community.

[vehillerdwindt]

Excellent interview, thanks for sharing this knowledge

[futurez]

The more I think about this, the more I believe that it's the intensity of _concentrated_ work, which must come from the intensity of interest in the subject, that is the key. An hour of training probably looks very different from one person to the next, even among experts.

Even within expertise there are elite performers, and sometimes even just _one_ single outlier who raises standards beyond anything that came before. If it were just about following the steps, these outliers wouldn't exist. So, IMO, it's either someone who took their training beyond what anyone has done before, or else that thing called 'talent' does in fact exist.

So you're left wondering which is more likely.... I'm leaning towards talent. But I'd rather believe it isn't talent.

It could be that the willingness/tolerance to do super intensive work _is_ the talent. If there are different thresholds to that, then it could explain elite performance and the outliers who attain it.

[TorupHodl]

Very good sirs, Everyone should be sharing this stuff to think and learn 101%
Honestly I was a little distracted waiting for that hoard of books to fall...

[jimdimitroff]

Researching Deliberate Practice, I enjoyed the video and subscribed to your channel. Holy-Moly, look at that pile of paper junk behind him while talking about performance expertise. I assume that being organized does not help with his Peak Performance Process. That is one reason I switched to all digital media, books, cd music, and dvd's take up far too much space in a home.

[mailepedersen]

Mr. Ericsson's pile of books in the background is increasingly making me itchy.

[link]

LOL, This guy is the anti-Jordan Peterson with that room.