2025 I will be reading and listening to a lot more books so I’ll write up reviews for the #bookstr hashtag of worthwhile content. Expect spoilers, my goal is to inform you whether this is worth your time and attention.

Peak is a book about how expertise is developed. The author is behind the study which Malcolm Gladwell turned into the 10,000 hour rule (which isn’t strictly true, but it sounds good).

My best takeaways from this book:

1. Perfect pitch can be trained in children. I had NFI that was possible but it’s been proved that you can train young children to hear and identify tones which is very cool.

2. Doctors get worse with age. You don’t want an older doctor, their health outcomes for patients get worse with age HOWEVER you do want more experienced surgeons as their health outcomes improve with more surgeries.

You will get sick of the phrase “deliberate practice” by the end but it’s the central tenet of the book. If you want to improve in anything, you need “deliberate practice”.

This is differentiated from “practice” and “performance” by being targeted towards specific outcomes to overcome weaknesses with measurable improvements.

This is useful in the context of “plateauing” where you reach a certain level and stop improving; something we’ve all experienced. The book provides some practical advice on how to break through and keep getting better.

I’m skeptical of the claim that there’s no such thing as inherent talent even with the evidence presented, but it’s overall good to see how people succeed in becoming the best.

Worth a read/listen if you want to better understand how learning actually works, what it takes to become one of the best in a given field, and what it might take if you want to make your kids into child prodigies 😂