This article suggests that Johansson is confusing commercial success with mastery of a skill.
Mastery of a skill does not guarantee commercial or financial success, nor does a lack of mastery guarantee failure. We see this in our own trade - just because you're a mega awesome super-ninja rockstar software developer, it doesn't mean the software you develop is actually worth billions. Summly, when it was acquired by Yahoo, came in for a lot of criticism for being equivalent to a crappy weekend project, but it made Nick D’Aloisio a heap of cash. I doubt that he was master of his craft at the time.
Similarly, the number of beautiful autotuned popstars who, without their army of producers and songwriters wouldn't even be fit to grace the stage in the back room of a pub, vs the number of highly skilled musicians whose genre or instrument lacks popular appeal or whose appearance makes them more suited to the radio era, and whose biggest gig is a crowd of 50 in a provincial arts centre.
Sid Vicious was in no way a master of the bass guitar, but his band enjoyed success all the same, due to the intersection of their music and the zeitgeist, and some good publicity work by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.
Richard Branson may now be a master of business, but he's also definitely had his 10K hours. Had he already been masterful in the early days of Virgin Records, perhaps Virgin Group would number 4000 companies by now and Virgin Galactic would already be planning trips to Mars from their well-established moon base. Who knows?
I never took his rule too literally. I always thought of it as an explanation for how people become the best at something: practice. I still believe it is true. Though you can't study entrepreneurship, practicing (i.e. gaining experience) makes you better at running companies. The same can be applied to other activities which don't involve rigid structure which can be learned.
The article is about the degree to which deliberate practice helps you in various fields, it's not actually about the specific 10,000 hour rule. The thesis of the article is that, essentially, deliberate practice does not have a large effect on your effectiveness in fields which do not have unchanging, rigid structures (like games whose rules don't change).
As a rule, I reserve judgement about any "new study", but also as a rule I think that anything Malcolm Gladwell says is bullshit, so I'm torn on this one.
I had the same torn reaction, but upon reading the full text (thanks, Gwern!) I'm no longer conflicted: it's not really a new study, so much as it is a systematic review of roughly a decade of relevant literature. Malcolm Gladwell seems to have based his claims mainly on a widely-cited Hot New Study from 1993, which has since turned out to have been overblown: later studies on the importance of deliberate practice have almost all come up with lower values for the correlation between deliberate practice hours and performance.
So, it looks like ignoring Malcolm Gladwell was the right answer here. It usually is.
> later studies on the importance of deliberate practice have almost all come up with lower values for the correlation between deliberate practice hours and performance.
What's also really interesting is the differences in the kind of data used to measure deliberate practice: daily logs, which you'd think be the most accurate, showed the least correlation with performance, while retrospective interviews showed the most. Biases in recollection or researcher allegiance?
Gladwell's paper was so explicit that I thought it couldn't possibly be true, despite the niceties of "We'd like practice to be important"
The best programmers (and martial artists, and runners, and basketball players) I personally know are the ones who practiced the most, but I've struggled with causation and correlation. They generally got early head starts, and kept plowing ahead.
That's possible, but it should also be easy to test, shouldn't it? Just measure how much people improve over time based on practice. Or how "naturals" compare to people who weren't very good at first, but kept practicing.
Competitive multiplayer video games would have this kind of data. Or even all types of video games.
The direction of causation is key. I think people with natural propensity (what you might call "talent") are more likely to practice hard than those who struggle to see results from their practice.
I am wary of anyone who makes blanket statements like "anything Malcolm Gladwell says is bullshit."
You simulataneously discount his entire canon of work and also every single underlying scientific paper he has quoted, cited or referenced. That is a lot of work to label bullshit.
Obviously not everything that Malcolm Gladwell says is bullshit, that was hyperoble. If he said the sky was blue I wouldn't disbelieve him, but I would check my watch to see if it's sunrise or sunset. It's also ridiculous to jump from "anything Malcolm Gladwell says is bullshit" to discounting everything he quotes, cites or references. He draws conclusions and makes cases from these things, in a way that is, frankly, not justified.
Also, what are you wary about? You can check every statement I've made on this subject by reading the article. It's not long. You don't have to bother deciding whether or not to be suspicious of me.
Why is it ridiculous to take your statements as you say them? I am at a loss. Your hyperbole continues with "He draws conclusions and makes cases from these things, in a way that is, frankly, not justified."
So nothing that Gladwell writes has justification? Seems like you have a deep hatred of his writing and are unable to critique his ideas objectively.
I read the article; I have read the 10 years/10,000 hours peice and it's detractors numerous times. I don't use that one argument to tear down a man's work though. People fixate on one part of one chapter.
His study of the Gore-Tex working practices and racism in the Caribbean I thought were particularly excellent.
You didn't take his statements as he said them. He said, "as a rule, I think", but you dropped that part, increasing the drama and giving you something to yell at. The guy was clearly indicating a general skepticism of Gladwell, not saying that every single sentence he had ever written was false.
Protip: If somebody apparently smart says something that you interpret as being completely idiotic, take some time to see if you can find another interpretation.
I'd go further recommend you do that for anyone, not just people you know are smart. You never know what random useful thing someone else knows that you don't. But do prioritize it for the ones you know are smart.
Why does the precursor "as a rule..." change anything?
I have not increased the drama at all. Someone posted a totally hyperbolic statement. I called them on it. It was upvoted numerous times I suspect because a consensus agrees with me.
It is not intelligent to tear down popular things because they are popular. You could have very well removed Gladwell and added Apple, Microsoft or French wine.
I haven't yelled, have I?
Your protip is baffling. Who is apparently smart? The OP? How have you reached that conclusion? By the possession of a HN account?
My heuristic is that non-anonymous persons get more conversational leeway. I'm more willing to invest time in conversations with people who have invested in their identity.
Your current level of argumentative dickishness would probably disqualify you as a useful interlocutor for me regardless of how much you stand behind your words. E.g., the "you never asked me my name" bullshit. So I'm done with you.
How about "everything I've ever heard or read Malcolm Gladwell to say is bullshit"? He usually isn't actually saying anything, so the fact that so many words are involved automatically qualifies... As one might imagine given our opinions of the man, many of us haven't subjected ourselves to all of his latest communications, so if we're missing some specific non-bullshit please let us know!
Your definition of 'practicing' is different from the publication's - the publication specifically looks only at deliberate practice:
>This view holds that expert performance largely reflects accumulated amount of deliberate practice, which Ericsson et al. defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain.
As an entrepreneur or programmer, I think that it's very hard to do deliberate practice - there are few structured activities you can do to improve your skills, as both fields, even in their more basic tasks, incorporate various skills and approaches.
For example, you wouldn't say 'today I practice for-loops' and then do nothing but write for-loops all day. You can say 'today I write a program that uses while loops instead of for-loops', but I think that wouldn't count as deliberate practice anymore - the structure of the task changes with the focus and task of your program (you'd also have to do more like de-bugging, tests etc.)
As a tennis player, however, you can say 'today I practice serves' and then do nothing but serve balls all day, that's a structured task that doesn't change. Apparently it just doesn't help that much.
I'm coming from music as a profession to programming as a profession.
In music you can craft repetitive exercises to improve small aspects of your skillset, but in computer science you can't do that exactly (or sanely). However, I do find myself directing my study in a similar way. I have various high-level goals and I try to find some way to get at them on a daily basis. I use concrete projects like reading a book, doing exercises, or taking on a hobby project. It feels very similar to practicing music, but I wouldn't call it practicing. It's my practice!
Thanks for your insight, I really appreciate hearing comments from people who weren't born coding, because these often contain very interesting insights!
I would suggest that revisiting code which you have previously written, and trying to re-factor it, or at least considering how this could be done (and its impacts), is a very useful tool to help you 'practice' coding. I know that this is imperfect, but I have personally learned a lot from applying new lessons (from books, experience, or code reviews) to my own prior work.
> Thanks for your insight, I really appreciate hearing comments from people who weren't born coding, because these often contain very interesting insights!
Sites like topcoder and Project Euler are actually very good at building skills... they're much like playing arpeggios or similar exercises... they're small, may take 30 minutes to two hours to complete, and the more you do the more used to solving problems you get, and you also find out what you need to improve upon.
I've been somewhat interestedly following the guy who is very literally putting this to the test by attempting to become a professional golfer after 10,000 hours of practice, having never played a round of golf before he started. He's about halfway through his hours now and has shot a round of 70.
Thanks for the link, I love checking up on his progress from time to time.
Small note, he seems to have downgraded his goals though from "winning a PGA tournament" [1] to "obtaining PGA tour card" [2]. Understandably, since the former would be incredible hard, but still...
The 10000 hours rule might be bogus, but the examples given are unconvincing. Sid Vicious not being able to play bass well means just that - hes not good at it, probably because he didn't practise. That it didn't matter for him to become successful is a different story.
Slash of G'n R fame practised very hard to get to his level by literally doing nothing else from morning to evening.
Yes. This. Sid Vicious was nowhere near world-class at the bass. He may be world-class at playing up to the media and managing social situations. But after seeing that example, I feel it made me believe more in the 10,000 hours!
Being an exceptionally good instrumentalist is not how you get to become a world famous rock band (or band in general). If that were true, people like Steve Vai would be more famous than Slash and Guns and Roses.
Yes, but Vai is a bad artist -- no cultural sensitivity, no sense of melody, restrain, etc.
Now, technique is great for classical music, because the pieces are given and are masterpieces in themselves. Beethoven is there, and you just play it as best as you can.
But when you write our own stuff yourself based on your advanced guitar hero skills, you end up only interesting people impressed with flashy technique.
Well that's what I said. Being a really good instrumentalist has little to do with popular success. I deliberately chose the word "instrumentalist", not "artist". I don't understand why you start with "Yes, but [...]" when you aren't contradicting anything I wrote.
Incidentally, "cultural sensitivity, melody, restraint" are things that are harder to deliberately practice than raw instrumental skill.
"I think that it is also a mistake to assume that the ten-thousand-hour idea applies to every domain.
...
The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly."
It's asinine to write about and promote such a result as "10,000 hours"[1] when the result was really that it varies a lot from skill to skill. Using some constant number like 10,000 gives exactly the idea that there is some hard-and-fast rule to the amount of time needed to practice in order to attain some skill in some endeavour.
[1] Whether that was the author himself or the various people that that wrote second/third hand articles about it.
I always thought this "rule" sounded like something pulled completely out of thin air.
Of course practice is necessary to become proficient, and lots of practice is necessary to achieve mastery.
But, the amount needed has to vary depending on the person, and some people will never achieve mastery in some areas. There is such a thing as native skill. And the inverse.
According to Matthew Syed in Bounce (a very good read) there are numerous fields in which native or genetic skill is considered the norm (sports, chess, math) but no studies support that hypothesis.
Conversely a number of studies actively disprove that native skill exists. Ultimately, barring true genetic freaks (Michael Phelps wingspan for instance) anyone could achieve any level of any pursuit with enought focussed practice and a degree of luck.
Matthew Syed's thesis is fundamentally challenged by reality. Certain activities/sports have a clear bias towards certain body types (as a reductive but clear example who would you favour to get an item off a high shelf unaided, the 6 foot 4 inch tall person or the 5 foot 6 inch person?).
It is true that training dominates 'talent'/'genetic biomechanics'. But, at similar levels of training some other factor will play a part in determinnig who is best, and at the elite end everyone is basically at the same levels of training so 'talent'/'genetics' will be the deciding factor. There is a reason why each discipline in pro-athletics seems to attract such a homogeneous collection of body shapes and why the people who 'break the mould' are often the most successful at the sport.
> Certain activities/sports have a clear bias towards certain body types
None of which are significant enough to not make someone a master. You don't have to be The Best to be a master at anything, as this is again conflating success with mastery.
Being arguably masters at the most remotely similar activity to your example in a tall guys field, [0], [1] and [2] beg to differ, and were also successful on top of it:
It's not challenged by reality at all, you are just misunderstanding it (probably because you have not read the book and probably because of my terrible simplification).
You keep referring to talent. Which does not exist, has never been proven and has been disproven numerous times by taking sportsman out of their chosen sport but into a new sport requiring similar talent and testing their performance which is always sub-par and hovering around average.
The primary example used is table tennis players are famed for having naturally quick reflexes. In every academic study, table tennis players performed no quicker than average in any reflexes test and in some cases performed worse than various random individuals from the street.
There are others but you should read the book before discounting a hypothesis. I have read enough to convince me natural talent is a myth; the equivalent of a rain dance is the reason for rain.
This is Syed's stawman, as I state - training is dominant over any innate 'talent' and there isn't anyone seriously engaged in the debate that disagrees with this.
Hard work and dedication will make anyone good at anything - no-one disputes this. But Syed wants to apply this to the elite level as well. The elite level is where outliers live on an everyday basis
The studies he cites goes the wrong way to draw the conclusion that he wants to draw - it's not about saying table tennis players have super quick reflexes that apply generally it's that some people have super quick reflexes of a type that apply to table tennis. So, whilst Table Tennis players' 'quick reflexes' are clearly trained for the specific situation of Table Tennis rather than being the results of having 'talented' generalist quick reflexes there will be, in the pool of all of humanity, people who's natural bio-mechanic disposition makes them have Table Tennis appropriate quick-reflexes. So if that person applies hard work and dedication to Table Tennis then they will be better than someone without the bio-mechanical advantage who puts in the same hard work and dedication. But if they apply hard work and dedication to another discipline that require fast reflexes they won't be any better as their 'talent' doesn't apply.
I follow rugby, rugby is littered with players who were really good but who's body could not take the strain of the training and broke down through the effort. Clearly hard work and dedication alone was not enough for them - they needed a body that could respond favorably to the punishment they were taking.
You need to read the book, you disagreeing with the hypothesis with nothing to back up your assertions other than your opinion.
Do you think human beings with super quick reflexes exist? That does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. I fear we are at an impasse, you have your views and it appears they preclude reading anything that challenges them.
Interestingly, I had similar views before reading the cited studies.
No, I am saying that people have physiological maximums. No matter how hard I train I am not going to become taller (or shorter), no matter how hard I train my knee and ankles will only support a certain mount of force and torque I cannot push past that (without suffering repeated and continual injury) - this is law of the universe stuff.
At the level of becoming very good indeed these limits have no effect on becoming better as you do not reach them, but at the elite level, at becoming the best they do. Do you really believe that the guy who came 2nd to 7th in the 2012 Olympic 100m sprint trained an appreciable, measurable, amount less than Usain Bolt - with less dedication, application and rigour? Do you think, say, Gatlin, Gaye and Bailyey trained in a worse environment less conducive to success than Bolt?
Are you really saying you can go look Donnie MacFadyen in the face and say he just didn't train with enough dedication?
Elite athletes are already outliers within the human race however within athletics there are extreme outliers like Bolt and Phelps who have astronomically rare genetic advantages. To be representative they need to be discounted. Not even the Olympics is N number of Usain Bolts racing against each other. It is N number + Usain Bolt.
Donnie McFayden may have trained as hard as he thought he could. That does not mean he was in the optimum training environment, he apportioned his time correctly or he trained with focus required to be better than he is. His training habits may have become effective simply too late in his career (Maybe he took training seriously at 8 years old but his competitors (in team and other team) took it seriously at 4. Maybe he is absolutely outstanding but the team failed him.
The factors are numerous. It might just be he is unlucky; his coaches didn't recognise his brilliance or they played him out of position. The point is not why is Donnie not the absolute best in history. It is 'Can anyone with the basic requirements reach the level of playing international rugby with the right focus and training and luck - the answer is yes, yes they can.'
They literally just have to want it enough and have the resources (time, money, family, coaches) in place to achieve it.
Anyone can be a Chess Grandmaster with enough study. Proven by Laszlo who specifically taught his children chess in order to prove geniuses are made/trained, not born."
Also proven by the Williams sisters whose father decided* they would be tennis champions and worked them mercilessly towards that goal using any equipment to hand. Unless your hypothesis is that -
Two genius tennis prodigies were born with the gifts required to be a tennis prodigy and their father just happened to settle on the sport of Tennis? I think those odds are considerably more unlikely than "anyone can be a Tennis champion with the basic requirements and dedication which is what the Williams sisters had."
You are literally accepting my premise and then telling me I am wrong.
If you accept that Usain Bolt is a astronomically rare genetic freak (which you just have) then you accept that some people have innate genetic factors that make them better at a sport than others.
Because people exist on a continuum and not in discrete boxes that means for a given subset of people, some people in that group have innate factors that advantage them over others in a particular tasks, just not at the extreme level of Phellps.
That means some people have 'talent', or as I like to say physiological factors that give them greater maximum potential.
Not quite. You are focussing on 1 in 6 Billion type athletes and discounting the 99.9999%.
The Olympics is not full of Usain Bolts. It is professional athletes AND Usain Bolt. Unless you think none of the other 100metre runners are professional athletes because they don't reach Bolts performance?
I think if what you were saying were true, than anyone with more practice could beat anyone with less practice.
Is this the case? No, it's not. Sometimes people who practice less do better than those who practice more.
People manifestly and undeniably vary in their native attributes. Do some people have faster reflexes than others? Absolutely.
If there is a book that says everyone has the same reflex speed, it may be worth looking at how the research was cherry picked to support a point.
Over a suitably finite series a person with more practice will beat someone with less practice.
In actual fact, studies have been done whereby sports athletes with greater levels of practice were asked to play less accomplished opponents whilst carrying out a simultaneous task unrelated to the sport (foot tapping X times in a minute, mental calculations) etc.
Even under a completely new cognitive load the atheltes were so well drilled in their sport they consistently beat amateurs who were focusing on nothing except trying to win.
Soldiers can do similar feats regarding drill and drivers do similar feats constantly. An accomplished driver can navigate a busy and hazardous environment whilst listening to music and daydreaming whilst a newer driver will struggle even if solely concentrating.
People who practice less very very rarely ever beat those more practiced and even then environmental factors are likely playing a massive part.
Once again, native attributes are largely myth. Barring disability almost all humans start on a relatively level biological playing field. The true modifier is self determination and environment.
No, no they aren't. At all. A simple glance around a crowded room shows this to be the case.
And if it were true, little girls and grandmas could successfully join the NBA if they just had enough determination. People who had been in the computer industry longer would be the billionaires since they had more experience rather than it being someone in their 20's.
(I'm not saying practice and experience aren't important).
You think being a child or
Growing old is the same as genetic advantage?
Why would industry experience of IT automatically result in monetary reward? Your argument is straying way way beyond anything to do with the original comment.
Focussing on children versus adults or elderly people versus professional athletes is not a fair comparison.
Just to be clear, are you trying to say females are not good enough to play in the NBA?
"Just to be clear, are you trying to say females are not good enough to play in the NBA?"
Yes, I'm saying exactly that. Because... there is such thing as native talent and it's not just how much one practices.
In general, men are stronger and can run faster than women... training being equal. And men are statistically taller than women. So... they have an advantage in a game where height is an advantage.
I don't even know why you would argue that point. It's biological fact.
Growing old or being a child is the same as genetic advantage? No, and I never claimed it was. The point was simply to illustrate the ridiculousness of the claim of humans being homogenous. Very clearly some people have an advantage over others in some activities. These people may require less practice to become "experts" than others... thus the 10,000 hour rule is at once nullified as "rule".
As for training in IT let me re-iterate the point... those with more practice in both tech and business didn't necessarily make more money while young people with less practice did. Presumably money was the goal of more than got it... even those that really really believed and tried very hard.
There is native grace. Believe it. Accept it. Know your strengths. Know your limitations. This is the key to survival and success. No... sorry in spite of what they told you in grade school, you can't be any thing you want to be if you simply put your mind to it and work really hard. That line might motivate some, but at the end of the day it is inherently and obviously untrue.
You have just written the biggest pile of unsubstantiated bullshit I have read on HN.
You are quite simply wrong. Not just your conclusions, but your entire understanding of native talent is incorrect.
It is not surprising you hold the viewpoint you do. If I started off thinking 2 + 2 = 5 then I would argue 4 + 4 = 10.
That is essentially what has happened here. You have misunderstood native talent, how it is defined and measured and are now arguing from a position of factual incorrectness. No point continuing really. It is obvious you will never read anything to change your own mind.
"Ultimately, barring true genetic freaks (Michael Phelps wingspan for instance) anyone could achieve any level of any pursuit with enought focussed practice and a degree of luck."
I doubt that is self-selection/cultural (you're too short for the NBA, so it isn't worth trying) or correlation vs causation (your lung volume is high because you trained so much)
The sport has a height bias towards height given the goal location. But if you just assess skills... Dribbling, shooting, etc I think that there are a lot more sub 5'9"master players.
I don't see what that explains. The 100m has a bias towards fast people, but if you just assess skills...
Weightlifting has a bias towards strong people, but if you ignore the fact that you have to lift heavy weights to win...
The OP's claim was that with enough effort and some luck, anybody could play at any level (including top level) at any sport, not "at any sport, after changing the definition of winning".
That is a silly example to the point that it is hard to relate to my original comment.
100metres has a bias towards fast people? What does that mean?
I wager if two males born on the same day on opposite ends of the earth trained 8 hours per day to run the 100 metres eating exactly the same diet and following the same training regime to the same intensity they would post almost identical 100 metres results.
The difference comes from the application of focussed practice. It is the mental intensity through which you train.
Jack Nicklaus famously said he has never just "hit a ball" in his life. Every single stroke of every single session was a genuine attempt to accomplish a defined goal. Every shot analysed. That is why he is arguably the greatest (or second greatest golfer) of all time. 99% of golfers just hit the ball.
Schwarzenegger pioneered the idea that you can literally will your muscles to grow larger by thinking about them tearing and rebuilding. Subsequently proven almost three decades after he was laughed at. [1]
Natural talent is the witch doctor name we give to those who practise harder, longer and better than we do. Syed also subsequently disproves the idea of Kenyan runners as champion long distance athletes. Another cognitive dissonance.
"That is a silly example to the point that it is hard to relate to my original comment."
It is a comment on a comment to your comment, so it need not relate strongly to it.
"100metres has a bias towards fast people? What does that mean?"
It is analogous to the remark that basketball has a bias towards height, and IMO apt, because your claim was about any sport.
"I wager if two males born on the same day on opposite ends of the earth trained 8 hours per day to run the 100 metres eating exactly the same diet and following the same training regime to the same intensity they would post almost identical 100 metres results."
In the "nature vs nurture" debate, that is extremist towards nurture, to such an extent that I haven't heard it before, and find it hard to believe that anybody would hold that a view that extremist. One of those men might have been born without legs, with cystic fibrosis, or just with genes that predispose him towards long distance running rather than sprinting. And yes, those Kenyan runners may not have a genetic advantage in long distance running over other lightly built athletes (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22634972), but they surely have one over, say, Samoan men or pygmies.
In a highly competitive sport, you need both talent, hard work and a good environment for training (food, trainers, gym, etc) to become exceptional. You can compensate talent with hard work or a good training environment, and some do, but even for those, having more talent would (all other things being equal) make them even better.
Again, you are misunderstanding - encapsulated with the statement you wrote;
"In a highly competitive sport, you need both talent..."
There is no such thing as talent.
This is where our arguments are diverging. Disproving talents shows that anyone in possession of the minimum required attributes (legs, eyes etc) can become World Class at a sport given optimum training conditions and luck.
Claiming that an Olympic sprinter is more naturally talented than someone born without legs is absurd and a hijacking of the word talent beyond all legitimate understanding.
The argument is not about Heavyweight Boxer versus Featherweight. It is about can Person A become a world class boxer at all? The answer is yes, they can with the correct training, mindset and luck.
To argue otherwise is not consistent with scientific research.
Exactly this. Basketball sits in a quasi-unique category because it rewards height immediately with very few ways to neutralise that.
The point that Syed is making is not Play A of X height and Player B of Y height are equal. He reports (cited academic studies) that given the same height Player A and Player B have no intrinsic native advantages over each other - all advantages are cultural and luck. Player A may have a great coach, a great basketballing school etc or Player B may just simply work harder.
There are a legion of examples to back up his claims including the Williams sisters. Two prodigies who came from a family that had not even heard of Tennis until their father decided they would be tennis champions.
There is also Syed himself who played in the Olympic and Commonwealth Games at table tennis. Curiously enough 50% of the national team for table tennis also came from his street...
...lucky enough to be born next to a world class club.
And then you have someone like Rupeni Caucau who by everyone's accounts (including himself) is one of the laziest professional rugby players ever to get a contract, repeatedly missing training, unexplained absences, incredibly poor diet and conditioning and yet can do stuff like this:
I am not disagreeing - in every sport there is going to be an outlier. We are referring to the majority.
Although to be fair, the stories of Rupeni Caucau are anecdotal. Contrast with the weightlifter and actor Carl Weathers who maintained he was just naturally muscled and athletic when he was in fact getting up at 3am to train and returning to bed at 430am so his co-stars never suspected his regime.
It infuriated Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarznegger to the point of on-set arguments. Weathers would just flex and claim "genetics does not need to lift weights."
When I look at a field like sports, I assume the genetic advantages are not so direct to the routine tasks.
For example, significant genetic factors may be: healing or failing to heal without permanent damage or being flexible in a way that causes or prevents a frequent injury.
For many star players the fact that they can keep playing at all may be the freak of genetics or initial behavior that allowed them to get to their level.
For example, football helmet impact data seems to support the direction that many should be dropping out due to traumatic brain injury. Yet some players deteriorate remarkably slower than medical science previously predicted.
I think this 10,000 hour idea is a vast oversimplification.
For example, it's often difficult to differentiate rate of progress from final ability.
As someone who has been involved with elite athletics, there are people out there who are simply better at absorbing training, in terms of biomechanics (mostly injury resistance), recovery, and compensation (getting stronger). I've seen lots of folks, new to a sport, with little training, absolutely crush mush more seasoned/conditioned folks. There are many examples of this (see: Chrissie Wellington). For each of them you can contrive some story "well, she lived at altitude", but that's the point, these people exist. And to be clear, I take nothing from Chrissie's worth ethic, etc. She's simply better than a whole host of other elite athletes that have worked hard their whole lives and she went out and clowned them for several years.
The difficult question is, if an average person kept at it for 10,000 hours, would Chrissie plateau and that average person catch up? And here you can substitute math, chess, coding, whatever.
I don't know, but both my sporting and software engineering experience (anecdotally, N=1) says no. Different people are sometimes differently suited to tasks. I'd love to understand the causation.
I was suggesting that it's more common for humans to be physically "gifted from birth" with certain physical attributes that make them excel more at athletic activities, compared to mental activities. Physical prowess is somewhat more nature-driven instead of nurture-driven, even though practice is still very important.
It's not common at all. 99.99999% of humans possess no physical "gifts" at all. Anyone can train to become world class at almost any sport barring those we have placed arbitrary systems in place.
The same is true for maths, languages, chess, science - anything you care to name.
He's a writer, and his business is to write books that people want.
I love his work! Similar to Dilbert's Scott Adam's books. After reading them, I don't walk away thinking "you weren't 100% correct, therefore I am going to ignore everything else you've said".
I find both authors highly entertaining. I think both would happily bend the truth if it helped the spirit of the work sound better.
"practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in various domains" is not contrary to "10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed to become world-class in any field".
For example, A) 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed to become a professional chess player, B) practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in professional chess. A and B can both be true at the same time.
And yet, (A) is simply not true, see the other mentioned study of chess players in the fulltext, a previous study involving Hambrick which found many top players falling short of 10k and many inferior players exceeding 10k, for a net explained variance of not-that-much.
I believe that Gladwell was merely suggesting that talent is not innate and the difference is somebody's ability was due to the amount of time they put into it.
The top players might have spent several hours on a related field, like what futsal is for football.
> I believe that Gladwell was merely suggesting that talent is not innate and the difference is somebody's ability was due to the amount of time they put into it.
Neither is true. Everything is heritable, as the behavioral geneticists like to say, and increasingly the genetics are being defined and nailed down; and the latter is completely refuted by the OP study and the previous Hambrick study - time spent on a field has only a weak relation with results.
> The top players might have spent several hours on a related field, like what futsal is for football.
Chess players study chess. There is no related field from which meaningful transfer will happen - at the top levels of chess, the problems are only about chess.
I can think of three main suspicions to keep in mind when evaluating the credibility of a meta-analysis:
1. Are the studies it analyzes picked with a bias? For example, if you're looking for meta-analyses of the effects of gun control on crime, and one was published by the National Rifle Association and the other came from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, then you might as well just throw up your hands and go home, because each will probably have suspiciously convenient criteria for what constitutes a reasonable study worthy of inclusion in their meta-analysis.
2. Do the studies themselves suffer from publication bias? A meta-analysis purporting to show a positive effect should arouse some suspicion, because negative results often simply don't get published, and can not be included in the meta-analysis due to their nonexistence.
3. Are the methods of analysis reasonable? There are a horrifying number of ways to pull positive results out of random noise through poor application of statistics.
In this particular case, the authors don't seem to have an axe to grind, their result is negative, and their analysis is very straightforward.
Mastery of a skill does not guarantee commercial or financial success, nor does a lack of mastery guarantee failure. We see this in our own trade - just because you're a mega awesome super-ninja rockstar software developer, it doesn't mean the software you develop is actually worth billions. Summly, when it was acquired by Yahoo, came in for a lot of criticism for being equivalent to a crappy weekend project, but it made Nick D’Aloisio a heap of cash. I doubt that he was master of his craft at the time.
Similarly, the number of beautiful autotuned popstars who, without their army of producers and songwriters wouldn't even be fit to grace the stage in the back room of a pub, vs the number of highly skilled musicians whose genre or instrument lacks popular appeal or whose appearance makes them more suited to the radio era, and whose biggest gig is a crowd of 50 in a provincial arts centre.
Sid Vicious was in no way a master of the bass guitar, but his band enjoyed success all the same, due to the intersection of their music and the zeitgeist, and some good publicity work by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.
Richard Branson may now be a master of business, but he's also definitely had his 10K hours. Had he already been masterful in the early days of Virgin Records, perhaps Virgin Group would number 4000 companies by now and Virgin Galactic would already be planning trips to Mars from their well-established moon base. Who knows?