The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance
"This is the first handbook where the world's foremost?experts on expertise? review our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries" -- publisher website (July 2007).
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- This list of books may sum up my entire personhood, some I read at a young age.
Thinking Fast and Slow. After you read it take a course on statistics & probability.
The Art of Strategy
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
Armor by John Steakley Great book of fiction, helped me understand PTSD.
Read a lot of Asimov, robot series, foundation and short stories starting with The Last Question.
Jules Verne
Mark Twain, various stories but particularly the Diary of Adam & Eve
The Jungle Book by Kipling
Lost Horizon
Robinson Crusoe
Dune Series
Enders Game and sequels.
The Odyssey
The Count of Monte Cristo
Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card because it helped me understand that a cultures internally consumed fiction tells you about its values.
The book of Ecclesiastes. The book of Job. Leviticus 25. Galatians 5:22-23. Romans 2:15. Luke 18:1-8. The minor prophets. Bible generally if you want to deep dive, I did once upon a time.
25th chapter of the First Epistle of Clement of Rome
Aristotle, Socrates.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Through Gates of Splendor Peace Child
Let Freedom Ring. I was working illegally (as I recall) as a 15 year old teenager for Sean Hannity (as a w2 employee through a proxy) when this book came out and along with my personal interactions with him at the time it helped clarify that he is not a person whose opinion holds any weight or even much thought. I remember at the time thinking it was unbearably poor reading.
Farmer Giles of Ham. If you've already read the hobbit, LOTR, etc. it helped me understand the framing of Tolkien way better.
Then read Pride and Prejudice through the lens of Farmer Giles of Ham. Calling it a romance novel is a disservice.
A James Bond Novel. I can't remember the name but there is one in particular that describes why he always acts so overtly and not spy-ish at all. The explanation helped me understand why you should throw yourself fully into work projects and helped me get over fear of mistakes. It made me a far better consultant as well while I was doing that.
So good they can't ignore you & deep work.
How to win friends and influence people.
Run Silent, Run Deep.
The Communist Manifesto
The Christian Manifesto
From Dawn to Decadence.
Romance of the 7 kingdoms.
Life together.
There's a big yellow book about the 6 day war, it's very detailed and blow by blow, I can no longer remember its name but it impressed upon me the chance and vagaries of war.
The Free Will Defense. Alvin Plantinga (and the various philosophic revuttals/conversations)
In Defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. William Lane Craig (and the various philosophic revuttals/conversations)
No little people. Francis Schaeffer
The Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich.
The Rails Way. 1st edition.
Javascript. The good parts.
Visual quick start guide to SQL.
^These three are probably the most important books I ever read, they probably changed the trajectory of my life more than any others on the list.
Midnight's Children. Rushdie
Roberts Rules of Order.
The four loves
Love languages
A once popular anti catholic tract called "The Trail of Blood".
Basically there is truth, falsehood, history, emotion and understanding in all these works, synthesizing these particular books made me who I am today. There are many others but these are the ones that come quickly to mind and whose titles I can still mostly recall.
- You might be interested in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
- First, congratulations on learning the guitar, I'm really happy that it brings joy to your life.
However, research in the area of expert performance shows that when it comes to this practice, not just the amount, but the type of practice matters tremendously. How practice is done is such a major factor in improvement that taking the 10,000 hour rule by itself is like solving physics problems with the formula F = a instead of F = ma.
Research in the area shows that performers usually plateau after reaching competence, which is the point they no longer struggle with regular operations. At this point, automaticity takes over, which for example is the reason that whilst most people can walk, few get consistently better at it despite walking a lot. This means, that out of the 10,000 hours put into learning the task, 9,000 are potentially wasted.
In order to leave plateaus, one needs engage in "deliberate practice", a term coined by the cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson. It's presence, or lack thereof has been shown across a wide variety of disciplines between masters and people who are merely good after having spent similar amounts of time on practice.
Deliberate practice is practice where you consciously strain for a point that is just outside your current skill level. In the case of musicians for example, it can manifest as slowing down a song to a crawl until every note is hit in the right way, and then slowly speeding up or slowing down again at the line where one starts making mistakes.
My point is that whilst the 10,000 hour rule is useful for setting time expectations to become a master at a task and helps illustrate how expertise is attainable for all of us if we put in the time and work, it lacks predictive power for whether you will become great at something after spending this amount of time.
For a hobby, this may only result in some wasted practice time getting to competence(I've eyeballed this at about a factor of 2 doing some testing learning the piano, unscientific, I know), which is perfectly fine. You're doing it for fun. Pain periods and all.
For an occupation, however, it can lead to endless grief. You've read about the 10,000 hour rule, you want to become very good, but after a year of work, you don't ever become significantly better. You sit there, grasping at the problem, but it's elusive, like you're wildly tweaking screen settings things to fix a kernel bug.
I am also oversimplifying a bit for brevity here, but there's some books on the topic. For an in depth review, there's the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance"[0].
For a lighter book more along the lines of Outliers, theres "The Talent Code"[1] by Daniel Coyle. AFAIK, both draw from the Cambridge book.
Both of them are worth a look, the 10,000 hour rule might tell you "I can do it", but these will tell you "How to do it".
[0][https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handb...] [1][https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown/dp/0...]
- Malcolm Gladwell does not have a body of work. He is scientifically ignorant to such an extent that he had articles with "igon values".
I'm unfamiliar with the literature, real scientific literature Blink was based on. 10,000 Hours or whatever it's actually called is based on the study of expertise in psychology. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance covers it in depth. K. Anders Ericsson founded the field.
- Replying to self here to add some references.
I wish K. Anders Ericsson put as many of his papers up on the Web in freely downloadable form as Jelte Wicherts or Eric Turkheimer or other psychology researchers do, but at least his faculty webpages provide a lot of references to his studies of the acquisition of expert performance.
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html
As a research program continues, reasonable minds can differ about how much is well demonstrated and how much still needs more research to become a confirmed finding, but I consistently find Ericsson's papers interesting, and have enjoyed reading and thinking about them since long before the first time Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Ericsson's research. Google Scholar notes some of his most-cited papers,
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ym0clGUAAAAJ&hl=en
and there is a whole book, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance about that line of research that is well worth a read.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cog...
- The 10,000 hours rule isn't someone's fantasy, it's based on an increasingly large body of evidence, but this article just dismisses the evidence with a wave of the hand and some assertions. A good selection of research is in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Other people here have mentioned also that it's a specific kind of practice that's called for, not just mindlessly amassing hours, but rather relentlessly working on your weak spots and on skills that are just a bit outside what you can currently do.
The Grandin book looks interesting, but this excerpt just seems lazy.
There is also the recent research on grit by Angela Duckworth who is demonstrating that success depends on perseverance. That observation probably seems pretty intuitive, but she's demonstrating it with research. The "I was hopeless" reaction to something hard is just a failure of grit. The author has no idea how they would do if the ground it out through the really tough parts.
I also find that when I talk to people about this they are often very resistant to this model of essentially talent-free skill development. It makes a lot people uncomfortable, and just seems wrong to them. I think maybe the notion that it's all innate talent absolves them of the need to work hard to develop advanced skill. Instead nature capriciously doles out talent and that's the story of why I'm not ...
