Thoughts on Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise
Aug 8, 2016 8:59:36 GMT -5
lindymoone and shelley like this
Post by lou on Aug 8, 2016 8:59:36 GMT -5
www.goodreads.com/book/show/26312997-peak
Book by Anders Ericsson, one of the scientists who has been publishing about “deliberate practice” for some time now.
His thesis: There is no such thing as “talent.” You work your ass off to become good at something, period.
Capsule Review for Writers: this book is useful up to a certain point of a competence, and then...you’re on your own.
He provides interesting examples from mostly sports and music and chess, a little from ballet, and the only writing example he uses is Benjamin Franklin’s deconstruction and reconstruction of articles he admired, and how he set about to practice his way to become a good article writer. He debunks every popular image of “natural talent” and “prodigy” you’ve heard of. Neither exists. Every time, it’s practice that makes a Mozart. (In his case, the combination of intensely driven father, older sister, and multiple-hour practice days from age three or so made him appear a genius at seven, but he was just well-trained by seven.)
Bullet points:
Practice alone won’t do it. You have to practice to improve, not just repeat the same mistakes four hours a day.
You improve by finding experts to give you immediate feedback.
You devise a sensible plan, made up of small bits of learning strung together to add up to expertise.
Practice must be focused.
There aren’t any short cuts. You have to put in the hours of practice.
Nobody thinks the practice is fun. He never found a violinist, or a free-shot expert, or anyone who thought “wow, four hours of scales/four hours of free-shots per day is just a hoot!”
Get plenty of sleep and take naps.
My thoughts. First, problems I saw. I think he underestimates natural limits. He tells these “inspirational” stories of two older people looking to conquer a sport, but in both cases, they got injured or couldn’t keep it up, which he sort of sweeps under the rug. Truth is, once you hit 50 or so, you just can’t train like younger people can, and if you try, all you’ll do is keep a bunch of sports doctors in Mercedes. And he talks about guys who did stuff like do the most consecutive pushups ever (46,000, in case you wondered), and my first thought was “at what cost?” At what physical cost, long-term, first of all? (I’d like to see this guy’s medical bills when he was 60, too. Did you know the life expectancy for NFL players is less than 60? Sometimes, excellence for a brief time comes at a terrible cost.) Also, I suspect this pushup guy had a mom or wife doing all the cooking cleaning and childrearing for him. That is, there are limits to how many hours there are in a day. Without being independently wealthy or having a doting wife, normal people simply can’t dedicate the time required to excellence. Children who are the top in their sports by 14 also don’t have normal lives or social development, either. So he had this “gung-ho” sort of attitude that ignored reality and actual limitations of physics and time that bothered me. No, people can’t do “anything.” If people could do anything, we’d be able to jump to the moon, eh? And learn to breathe underwater. Sorry, but there are limitations.
As to writing: this would be great advice to someone learning to be a writer, terrific advice to take through the first ten years of developing your craft.
Another random thought: practicing writing is actually much more fun that practicing scales or free-throws. We're lucky that way.
But after that first ten years (or 10,000 hours, if you like), a problem arrives. It’s nearly impossible to find an expert to give good feedback. I’ve taught writing. I can tell a new writer where there are lapses in POV, or where they missed an opportunity for character development through description of environment, or cross off dull pages for them. (If they’re willing to listen, they learn quickly.)
And peer critique groups can be good if you can find people at your level who critique well--but again, this works best in the first ten years of your writing life. And every time you encounter a writing exercise in a how-to book, you should do it.
So once you’ve put in your ten years of apprentice writing, and once you have 100 mainstream publications or 50,000 indie sales or whatever, it’s pretty much impossible to find someone to give you good feedback. It’s why a really good beta is golden. Reviewers are often wrong, and the mix of right and wrong in reviews does not make them a good place to look. There are certainly content editors who will charge you $5,000/ book...but I am not convinced they are better than most random people. (They probably got fired from the publishing industry, after all--and I’m not sure if a fired person is really the one I should hire, and certainly not for that kind of money.)
While I was hoping for some hint of how I can continue to improve my craft now, twenty-five years after my first pro publication, and beyond the self-directed things I do as a matter of course...I didn’t find any useful advice in this book.
I did, however, feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction at all I'd done to get here. Sometimes, people made fun of me for some of my work. (One person did when he found me doing scansion on a literary story. "What? You're counting syllables? hahahaha." Another person ridiculed another exercise. But I suspected then, and I know now, it all added to my skill, and the book reminded me of that. It seems I'd stumbled toward inventing "deliberate practice" on my own years ago.)
Fast read, though. It took me 4-5 hours, and the second name on the book, the actual writer who was given equal credit (speaking of my dislike for ghosting...this is the opposite, credit where credit is due), must be due most of the praise for that. It was a page-turner.
(Pretty first draft writing above. Sorry 'bout that!)
Book by Anders Ericsson, one of the scientists who has been publishing about “deliberate practice” for some time now.
His thesis: There is no such thing as “talent.” You work your ass off to become good at something, period.
Capsule Review for Writers: this book is useful up to a certain point of a competence, and then...you’re on your own.
He provides interesting examples from mostly sports and music and chess, a little from ballet, and the only writing example he uses is Benjamin Franklin’s deconstruction and reconstruction of articles he admired, and how he set about to practice his way to become a good article writer. He debunks every popular image of “natural talent” and “prodigy” you’ve heard of. Neither exists. Every time, it’s practice that makes a Mozart. (In his case, the combination of intensely driven father, older sister, and multiple-hour practice days from age three or so made him appear a genius at seven, but he was just well-trained by seven.)
Bullet points:
Practice alone won’t do it. You have to practice to improve, not just repeat the same mistakes four hours a day.
You improve by finding experts to give you immediate feedback.
You devise a sensible plan, made up of small bits of learning strung together to add up to expertise.
Practice must be focused.
There aren’t any short cuts. You have to put in the hours of practice.
Nobody thinks the practice is fun. He never found a violinist, or a free-shot expert, or anyone who thought “wow, four hours of scales/four hours of free-shots per day is just a hoot!”
Get plenty of sleep and take naps.
My thoughts. First, problems I saw. I think he underestimates natural limits. He tells these “inspirational” stories of two older people looking to conquer a sport, but in both cases, they got injured or couldn’t keep it up, which he sort of sweeps under the rug. Truth is, once you hit 50 or so, you just can’t train like younger people can, and if you try, all you’ll do is keep a bunch of sports doctors in Mercedes. And he talks about guys who did stuff like do the most consecutive pushups ever (46,000, in case you wondered), and my first thought was “at what cost?” At what physical cost, long-term, first of all? (I’d like to see this guy’s medical bills when he was 60, too. Did you know the life expectancy for NFL players is less than 60? Sometimes, excellence for a brief time comes at a terrible cost.) Also, I suspect this pushup guy had a mom or wife doing all the cooking cleaning and childrearing for him. That is, there are limits to how many hours there are in a day. Without being independently wealthy or having a doting wife, normal people simply can’t dedicate the time required to excellence. Children who are the top in their sports by 14 also don’t have normal lives or social development, either. So he had this “gung-ho” sort of attitude that ignored reality and actual limitations of physics and time that bothered me. No, people can’t do “anything.” If people could do anything, we’d be able to jump to the moon, eh? And learn to breathe underwater. Sorry, but there are limitations.
As to writing: this would be great advice to someone learning to be a writer, terrific advice to take through the first ten years of developing your craft.
Another random thought: practicing writing is actually much more fun that practicing scales or free-throws. We're lucky that way.
But after that first ten years (or 10,000 hours, if you like), a problem arrives. It’s nearly impossible to find an expert to give good feedback. I’ve taught writing. I can tell a new writer where there are lapses in POV, or where they missed an opportunity for character development through description of environment, or cross off dull pages for them. (If they’re willing to listen, they learn quickly.)
And peer critique groups can be good if you can find people at your level who critique well--but again, this works best in the first ten years of your writing life. And every time you encounter a writing exercise in a how-to book, you should do it.
So once you’ve put in your ten years of apprentice writing, and once you have 100 mainstream publications or 50,000 indie sales or whatever, it’s pretty much impossible to find someone to give you good feedback. It’s why a really good beta is golden. Reviewers are often wrong, and the mix of right and wrong in reviews does not make them a good place to look. There are certainly content editors who will charge you $5,000/ book...but I am not convinced they are better than most random people. (They probably got fired from the publishing industry, after all--and I’m not sure if a fired person is really the one I should hire, and certainly not for that kind of money.)
While I was hoping for some hint of how I can continue to improve my craft now, twenty-five years after my first pro publication, and beyond the self-directed things I do as a matter of course...I didn’t find any useful advice in this book.
I did, however, feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction at all I'd done to get here. Sometimes, people made fun of me for some of my work. (One person did when he found me doing scansion on a literary story. "What? You're counting syllables? hahahaha." Another person ridiculed another exercise. But I suspected then, and I know now, it all added to my skill, and the book reminded me of that. It seems I'd stumbled toward inventing "deliberate practice" on my own years ago.)
Fast read, though. It took me 4-5 hours, and the second name on the book, the actual writer who was given equal credit (speaking of my dislike for ghosting...this is the opposite, credit where credit is due), must be due most of the praise for that. It was a page-turner.
(Pretty first draft writing above. Sorry 'bout that!)
who habitually say "I feel/think" rather than "here are the figures." They don't let their wishful thinking guide them, nor are they full of "knowledge" from 1990 that was based in "expertise" that ended up being nothing more than lousy guessing by a handful of inbred publishing people in New York, or "wisdom" passed from writing group to writing group that is purely nonsense. 
