Getting the most out of one’s self

Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. By Charles Duhigg. Random House; 380 pages; $28. William Heinemann; £20.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. By Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 307 pages; $28. Bodley Head; £18.99.

THE world has quietly been undergoing a performance revolution. In nearly all areas, people are continuously getting better at what they do. This is obvious when measured on running tracks and tennis courts. But it is happening in myriad other areas as well, from surgery to management—and even violin-playing. Better training is largely responsible, by breaking down activities into discrete parts, and measuring how people perform best.

Two new books promise to help people improve their abilities with a generous mix of fascinating anecdotes and a romp through the academic literature. In “Smarter, Faster, Better”, Charles Duhigg of the New York Times looks at the numerous ways that people can become more effective, whether in improving motivation, setting goals, making decisions or thinking creatively. Basically, Mr Duhigg’s is a self-help book for white-collar professionals.

Readers learn how the American army welcomes new recruits who have little drive and teaches them to take responsibility and achieve goals. (The secret: transform mundane tasks into decisions that need to be made.) One learns how organisations like Google and the original cast of “Saturday Night Live”, an American comedy show, produce great teams. (The crux: create a feeling of trust so people can freely express themselves; this is more important than having superstars in the group.) And one finds out how Toyota took over one of the worst carmaking factories from GM and turned it into one of the best. (The solution: give line workers more control.)

One of the best vignettes is on the making of the children’s film “Frozen”. It’s 18 months before the release and the creators have hit an impasse: Anna is a bossy brat, Elsa is a jealous prat and Olaf the cynical snowman conspires in a coup d’état. In short, the draft storyline is a wreck. No one sympathises with the main characters. “I f’ing hate Olaf,” confesses one writer after an early screening. “Kill the snowman.”

How did Disney turn it around? Part of the method, readers learn, was to get the team to tap into their own life experiences, try new combinations and sense what felt right. Such advice is mildly plausible when applied to Hollywood screenwriters; it is doubtful the rest of humanity could employ it successfully. However, another approach rings more true: Disney shook things up by generating even more creative tension: a new co-director was added. A little disturbance to the customary workflow helped turn the grit into a pearl.

Mr Duhigg is an effective storyteller with a knack for combining social science, fastidious reporting and entertaining anecdotes. It is the same technique he used in an earlier book, “The Power of Habit”, in 2012. Yet in his latest work the stories jump around so much that they produce mental whiplash. No sooner is the reader knee-deep in Israeli military analyses in the 1970s (to understand goal-setting) than the narrative swerves to General Electric’s human-resources woes. And by distilling individual performance down to eight main traits—each with its own chapter—the book oversimplifies its subject.

“Peak” by Anders Ericsson, a psychologist studying expertise, and Robert Pool, a science writer, avoids these shortcomings. The book is a popular-science telling of Mr Ericsson’s research. Most notable is the “10,000 hour rule”: the idea that anyone can become an expert if they put in the time, a theme popularised by writers like Malcolm Gladwell.

At the heart of Mr Ericsson’s thesis is that there is no such thing as natural ability. Not for Mozart, nor for Garry Kasparov. Traits favourable to a task, such as perfect musical pitch, help at the outset but confer no advantage at higher levels. Rather, after a basic ability, it all comes down to effort.

Such mastery is possible because of what Mr Ericsson calls “deliberate practice”. This is focused training with an expert who can push an individual to a higher understanding of the craft. The key ingredient is mental representations: the ability to perform a task excellently without needing deliberate thought because similar situations have been so well practised that they seem second nature.

Both books offer an optimistic anti-determinism that ought to influence how people educate children, manage employees and spend their time. Both place stock in developing mental models of activities, aspiring to an ideal form of the task at hand. And both emphasise setting “stretch goals”. The good news is that to excel one need only look within—provided one buys the books to learn how.