Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson is a great read. I won’t categorise it as a self-help book (My thoughts on Self-Help content) as it summarises the findings of Ericsson’s 30 years of research into the field of Expert Performance. It’s a book for those that want to excel at anything let it be a hobby or a profession.
Some feel-good cut from the book:
- If you want to learn a new language:
“Another professor at Florida State University, who worked with ESL (English as a second language) students, told me about a student of his who went to the mall and stopped a number of shoppers, asking each the same question. In this way she was able to hear similar answers over and over again, and that repetition made it easier for her to understand the words being spoken by native speakers at full speed. If she had asked different questions each time, it’s likely that her comprehension would have improved little, if at all. Other students who were trying to improve their English would watch the same English movies with subtitles over and over again, covering the subtitles and trying to understand what was being said. To check their comprehension, they would uncover the subtitles. By listening to the same dialogue over and over, they improved their ability to understand English much more quickly than if they’d simply watched a number of different movies.
Note that these students weren’t simply doing the same thing over and over again: they were paying attention to what they got wrong each time and correcting it. This is purposeful practice. It does no good to do the same thing over and over again mindlessly; the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.”