Book of the Week: Peak

07 Aug 2016

peak This weak I read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, because I want to become an expert too just like the machine learning expert. If you do deliberate practice, you too can become an expert and gain super powers. It turns out that you can indeed learn perfect pitch and it is not an innate genetic ability. You just need to spend a year and a half at it. I’ve also learned recently that you can become as fit as a Navy SEAL by just religiously following the Navy SEAL training program. Deliberate Practice

Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.

Just practicing doesn’t get you where you want to be. If you’re spending time practicing, you might as well take the effort to make it deliberate practice. You want concrete measurable goals, where the difficultly is high enough to put you in the flow state. It is better to train at 100% for less than than to train at 70% for longer periods of time. You should make sure you get plenty of rest and limit sessions initially to an hour. Having low IQ also helps since people with higher IQ will be less inclined to practice. It is practice which differentiates people in the end. Higher IQ people only have an initial boost. Practicing a lot gives you a mental representation that you can leverage as a shortcut. Talent Talent is bullshit. Bobby Fisher had 9 years of practice before becoming a grandmaster. Bill Gates broke into the University of Washington computer labs to get computer time before he even started at Harvard. Nobody practice and trained as much as the GOAT, Jerry Rice. You know those autistic savants who can tell you day of the week if you give them a date. Well, you can train a graduate student to do the same thing in about 16 practice students. Sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic to people who don’t know how things work. If I want to approach the peak, I need to put in the practice. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGDBR2L5kzI&w;=420&h;=315] Purchase Peak from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.