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Peak
A book on how expertise gets built, by the researcher whose work inspired the 10,000-hour rule
Why it’s worth your time
You can do a task every week for years and get no better at it, and this book explains why. Anders Ericsson spent decades studying expert performers, and with science writer Robert Pool he argues that improvement comes from a particular kind of practice, aimed just past what you can do now. It can change how you think about any skill you've stopped improving at.
How to practice a work skill on purpose
The book · About 8 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Start with the authors' free excerpt.
Their 2016 Salon piece, adapted from the book, is a fair test of the book's style and its main argument. If it holds your interest, go on to the book.
- Plan one practice session with feedback.
Pick one skill you use every week, such as presenting, writing a summary or running a meeting. Choose one small part you're weak at, practice just that for 20 minutes, and ask someone whose judgment you trust for advice on that part only.
Good moments for this: when you've stopped getting better at somethingat the start of a new rolebefore a skill will matter in a review
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Ericsson's research centers on fields like music, chess and sport, with teachers and long-tested methods. At a desk job you often build the practice yourself: pick the sub-skill, find the input, set the next slightly harder attempt.
What might make this harder
Turn work you already do into practice. Before your next presentation, decide on one thing to do differently, and afterwards ask one person about that one thing.
Questions people ask
What is deliberate practice?
Ericsson's term for practice that pushes just past your current ability, targets specific weaknesses, often follows activities an expert designed, and uses feedback to adjust.
Is Peak about talent?
Mostly about training. Its publisher goes further: it says what drives mastery is focused, purposeful practice, and not talent.
Is Peak worth reading?
If you want to get better at a skill on purpose, it's a clear and practical place to start.
What it says, and how it holds up
Ericsson's research reached a wide audience through a rule he didn't write. In 1993 he and two colleagues published a study of violin students in Berlin, and in 2008 Malcolm Gladwell turned one of its averages into the 10,000-hour rule. Peak, written with Pool and published in 2016, is partly his correction. In their telling, the kind of practice matters far more than the number of hours.
The book's key idea sits underneath that practice: mental representations, the internal models of a field that experts build, which the authors treat as the heart of expertise and which the right practice refines. Much of the book separates deliberate practice from a related kind it calls purposeful practice. It was reviewed in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.
The science has been argued over. A 2014 meta-analysis led by Brooke Macnamara concluded that deliberate practice matters but less than had been claimed, with a much smaller share in education and the professions than in games, music or sports; Ericsson disputed the analysis, and the authors replied. At a desk job, the fair reading is that this kind of practice helps without being the whole story.
Deliberate practice needs a skill to build and a picture of what good looks like. When you're unsure what your role rewards, or whether you want to get better at this work at all, that question comes first, since practice tends to pay off only once you know what it's aiming at.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.