I think this confirms what a lot of us intrinsically felt: Some people are just better at certain things than others. Jeff Bezos came to this realization while he was in college:
"Intent on becoming a theoretical physicist and following the likes of Einstein and Hawking, he discovered that although he was one of the top 25 students in his honors physics program, he wasn't smart enough to compete with the handful of real geniuses around him. 'I looked around the room,' Bezos recalls, 'and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at it than I was, and it was much, much easier for them. It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently.' The pragmatic Bezos switched his major to computer science and committed himself to starting and running his own business." [1]
I would have thought it pretty obvious that some people have in intrinsic "gift" in certain areas. This is completely obvious in physical sports and I don't see why - considering that our minds are underpinned by the physical structure of our brains - that this wouldn't also be the case when it comes to mental activites as well.
Just because I may not have the intrinsic gift that allows me to become the best physicist or investor in the world doesn't mean that I couldn't get pretty damn good at it if I put the time in, though. It doesn't necessarily mean that I would enjoy what I was doing any less.
I remember hearing about a study that I think was by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck[1] that basically found that praising kids for being smart (i.e. having an intrinsic gift) was far less effective than praising them for putting in a good effort (i.e. putting in the time and practice). While it is incontrovertable that some people do indeed have an intrinsic gift for certain activities, I think we should not lose sight of the apparent fact that just about anyone will do better when this view is at least not assigned greater importance than the need to put in a good effort. Lest we unintentionally start sending messages something like "Oh, well you're obviously not as gifted as Michael Jordan at Basketball, so you should probably not even bother learning the game at all." That's an intentionally exaggerated example to get my point across, but particularly when it comes to early childhood development I believe we should not underestimate the effect of even a stray word of encouragement/discouragement. I know that such words had a definite effect on me at an early age if they were from the right person - e.g. an authority figure - and often more of an effect than the authority figure assumed their words had at the time.
There are things you can become damn good at it if you put the time in. Those are definitely worth doing professionally. But, there are also things you can get mediocre at best if you put in excessively lot of time. Those are not worth trying to do professionally, although hobby is another matter.
On the other hand, I think that we underestimate childrens ability to get up again after failure or isolated stray word of discouragement. Telling children they sux one too many times will lower their self-esteem, sure. However, most of them will recover from hearing something slightly discouraging once in a while just fine.
> On the other hand, I think that we underestimate childrens ability to get up again after failure or isolated stray word of discouragement. Telling children they sux one too many times will lower their self-esteem, sure. However, most of them will recover from hearing something slightly discouraging once in a while just fine.
For sure, I would even go so far as to say discouragement is a normal part of life and if one was to shelter a child from all forms of discouragement - assuming that's even possible - then that child would probably not be very well equipped for life generally. This is an interesting issue as well, but I think it's orthogonal to the main point I was trying to make.
> But, there are also things you can get mediocre at best if you put in excessively lot of time. Those are not worth trying to do professionally, although hobby is another matter.
Or maybe not. Quite often, a mediocre competency on something (or several things) is necessary for applying your incredibly good competence in anotehr thing.
The point being made is about the danger of the wrong type of praise, not avoiding criticism. A child that is told repeatedly that they were born with a gift for mathmatics may gave up too early on music if they don't show immediate talent (or vice versa).
The only criticism there is self-criticism, which is a lot harder to escape.
Doing good for mankind always has been a heart's desire for me. The idea that I might just need a few years more practise is what keeps me working hard. If something innate is required to excel I simply don't have it, though. Therefore it would be really painful if the 10k hour rule doesn't apply.
The logical conclusion for me therefore always has been to believe that more work will result in way better results. Maybe the "obvious" part is where your own confidence/talent comes into play.
I guess I just don't see it as this binary situation where you either have to be the absolute best in the world at what you do, or you're not contributing at all to mankind. And that's the feeling I often get when people discuss these kinds of topics (not that I'm implying I get that feeling from your response specifically, or if I do I'm probably overlaying it with other discussions I've had on this topic).
I personally think one can excel from hard work alone. Maybe you can't excel to the degree of a Hawking or a Jordan in their relevant fields, but does that necessarily invalidate anything you have achieved? There's always going to be someone better at X than you are, for some value of X, at some particular time and place. I see an unfortunate possibility of unrealised potential if people - particularly young people - get it in their heads that if they can't be the absolute best at something then they may as well not even try.
Additionally, even Hawking or Jordan don't operate in a vacuum. What about all the people that have supported them over their lives, all the people they learned from, who - in isolation - the world might consider to be "lesser" people. Would Hawking/Jordan have been able to do what they've done without all that support?
On the other hand not having Michael Jordan-like talent would be a good reason to discourage a teenager from practicing basketball for hours a day at the expense of their studies.
Jordan didn't have Jordan talent as a youth. He didn't make his varsity team as a sophomore. But I heard he was always the first one in and the last one out of the gym. The hard work seems to have paid off.
Potentially yes. But I would not agree in all cases. Does the teenager enjoy the activity? That could be reason enough for him to pursue it. And there's shades of grey here we're not addressing... OK so he doesn't have Jordan's innate talent, but does that necessarily mean he has no chance at all of pursuing a pro Basketball career? Of course not. There are many still valid and useful skill levels between the two extremes of "not fit for the NBA" and "Michael Jordan".
Certainly. But if we're viewing the scope of the spectrum under discussion as covering the skill levels of the people who play in the NBA - which was pretty clearly my intent in that instance - then they are the two extremes. I'm not sure how anyone could interpret my statement as meaning that the group of elite athletes playing pro Basketball in the US are not exceptional. But if that needed clarification, fair enough.
Muscle type you possess is pretty much given and make difference between talented sprinter and talented weight lifter (speed vs strength). Possible body flexibility depends on muscles and joints too and you can influence it only up to the point. You can do only so much to make your attention span longer and better attention span is advantage in some sports too (say race driving).
Whether your body can sustain extensive training or whether it will break depends partly on your genetics too. If you are low on red cells in blood, you will be at disadvantage too.
Bigger hands are an advantage in swimming, longer hands in climbing. Some people learn technique easier then others although I do not know what is the difference there. Your sensitivity to pain is not only a question of will power, it depends on genetics too - lower pain sensibility is advantage too.
There are plenty of individual variances that make difference between who can succeed in professional sport and who not.
It doesn't confirm that at all. The original study was that practice counted for much more in fields where the rules and values were stable (like musical instruments or games) and much less where the basic ground rules couldn't even be described (like business or war).
That part makes a lot of sense: practice and correcting errors only matters when you will be doing something basically the same next time and you have a fixed target of what "good" looks like to shoot for. It also explains a big question I had with the original study: what constitutes a "field"? Does 10,000 hours get me mastery of "software software", or "frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering using Angular.js"?
I think a better explanation is that practice is indeed the key to mastery - of fixed, seldom-changing skills where the goalposts are known and widely agreed upon. But most "fields" rely on combinations of many individual skills, along with a good number of exogenous factors. I may be a master at Chrome Javascript & rendering performance because I've spent a lot of team with the Chrome team understanding exactly how the rendering engine works. This makes me great at building a weekend-long demo or acing an interview, but is only a small component of being an effective frontend engineer. And then when I scale that up from "being an effective frontend engineer" to "founding a successful business", there's also all sorts of luck involved, like who I meet, what industry I target, how popular my initial customers are, what the rest of the technology industry does, etc.
The original study doesn't say that there aren't people who are better than others at a task. It says that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice made one an expert. I have no doubt Bezos would become an expert in physics with 10,000 hours of study.
But there are people with gifts and the 10k hours. Those are the Newtons and Feynmans.
It could also be that those three people had started practicing earlier than him (AP classes, community college, retaking the course after failing), had tutors which provide knowledge at a vastly higher pace, or had related knowledge (highly advanced math, physical chemistry) that gave them an initial advantage. Also, a college class provides nowhere near 10,000 hours of practice. Perhaps things would even out after the first 5,000 hours.
Yes, many endeavors (sports, music, science, business, writing, etc.) rely on an array of talents and skills. Through deliberate practice we can move forward along these some axes, while others we cannot (e.g. height, for basketball).
But even among the set of mutable attributes, there are clearly individuals who can improve much faster than others, or who can reach further extremes. And sometimes these qualities align in a way that makes a given person extremely capable at a given task. All other factors and external variables being equal, they just have a natural advantage.
This seems painfully obvious; our bodies are diverse, our minds are diverse, and so should be our capabilities. And this is good, as it leads to a well-rounded population. Some people are well-suited for lifting very heavy things, others for running very quickly, yet others for thinking about abstract mathematics, or organizing people, while most are well-suited for doing a wide variety of things reasonably well.
But despite evidence to the contrary, it's enchanting to believe that we could all be the best in the world at something, if we just put in enough time and effort.
The tragedy of this entire way of thinking is that being one of the top 25 in your honors physics program is perfectly fine. He was still excelling.
People get hung up on the slight variations that make the difference between first and second place, completely ignoring the fact that there are plenty of extremely high levels of achievement aside from being "the best". To think that you shouldn't practice something you love just because it's easier for the guy above you is absurd.
Perhaps I am wrong, but my take on that was that, although he would most likely have had a successful career in physics, he didn't seem to be content with just being another physicist in the crowd. His decision to switch paths may have been more predicated on his drive to become an "alpha dog" of his field, rather than his self-perceived "averageness" in physics.
Maybe those people around him just put more time into studying. Maybe we routinely underestimate how much time the good people spend on the things they are good at.
That's not saying everybody could do that. Maybe it takes some special inclination to be able to spend so much time on one thing.
Except the my experience in University with the absolute top people in mathematics, (Not the top 10, but the top 1 or 2) is that they did almost no studying, took no notes, and completely mastered the material that took me 15-20 hours a week to get a B grade in.
I realized pretty quickly that there were people who were wired very, very differently than myself.
I think Mathematics is different from other fields, in that the top performers can reach "Expert" levels with much less effort than the experts in other fields.
I don't know the answer here, but it's something I've considered often, so:
Is it possible that those top 1-2 people just knew so much more than you, going into the class, and had such a strong foundation in closely related material, that they picked it up more quickly? I mean, if the scenario was "my twin brother and I went into a math class with the same level of math knowledge, and he didn't study and got an A, while I studied 15-20 hr/wk and got a B" then I would find that much stronger evidence to conclude that these differences may be innate. But to me it seems likely that the 1-2 people who vastly outperformed everyone else may have just been setting themselves up to do that for the previous 10 years. By which I mean, they were intensively studying math throughout high school (and likely before), so that although they may not have known the course material going in, after seeing it once they think, "oh, yes, that's an obvious result based on x, y, z things that I already know. And it's a very nice way of thinking about w." Whereas you, not knowing x, y, z, or w, don't have any of that intuition. So they can make connections and learn by analogy "effortlessly" while you have to study much more to understand these concepts.
Ed Witten (of M-Theory fame) famously did the entire undergrad physics syllabus in his own time one summer after completing a different degree. Then he applied as a postgrad, aced his interviews, and got in.
The tragic thing about the 10k myth is that it makes people who aren't the best of the best underestimate just how good the really talented people are.
Most people simply cannot do what Witten did. No amount of personal tutoring or practice time is going to give them that kind of cognitive ability.
The reality is that you can take them a random selection of kids, hothouse them in any subject, and most of them will turn out to be good at best. Not brilliant, not geniuses - just good.
There's certainly an argument to be made that a lot of talent is wasted, and education is much better at destroying ability than nurturing it. But that's a different point.
The bottom line is some people just get it - whatever it is - and they're outstanding.
I'd guess most people here get technology like that to an extent that most of the population can't imagine. I'm certainly not brilliant, but I'm much better at getting technology to work than my friends and neighbors.
Take an aptitude like that, level up ten times or so, apply it to math or physics or music, and you get some idea what 'brilliant' might mean.
Not my experience at university (maths degree). The people who were very good also put in a lot of time. But not in a forced way, they simply enjoyed the subject so much.
It's possible the people you saw had already mastered the subject even before you took the lecture. Or it had so much similarity to something else they had already mastered that it became easy for them.
It is the same with foreign languages, some learn it easier then others.
I had plenty of schoolmates that learned them much faster then me. We all started with no previous foreign language skills. We did the same set of exercises in school and they ended up knowing most of the material while I had to study a lot just to keep up.
But before learning about 'deliberate practice', I had first heard a saying that "practice makes permanent". You have to practice with the actual intention of getting better and perfecting your technique, otherwise you're just strengthening the old habits.
Some context for the rest of the text: my hobbies are aikido and an old Japanese sword art, so I practice sword cuts a lot (wooden sword, no target -- yet).
Deliberate practice is hard, it's taxing, both physically but also mentally. It requires not only that you focus on what you're doing but also consciously focusing on how you're doing it. By focusing on what and how simultaneously, you can draw a causal connection between the result (what) and how you achieved it. If you're not satisfied with the result, then you try to modify the "how" in a variety of ways until you feel the result has gotten better.
This is mentally taxing and absolutely not fun. You're watching yourself making mistakes in real time, the mind wants but the body cannot (yet). Sometimes you even need to get a fundamentally new idea about "what" or "how" in order to break the (current) barrier. Suddenly an advice that you got from a teacher a year ago, and which didn't make sense then, makes sense NOW.
And after having practiced for a while (usually up to 50 min; different exercises), I notice that I have reverted to "blind" practice, that I can no longer focus on "how", regardless how much I try. That's when I stop, regardless of how much "real time" has elapsed.
---
Trying to write ten thousand different sentences will make you a better writer than writing the same sentence ten thousand times.
This resonated a lot with me as a golfer. Golf is a very individual-focused activity, with a large amount of minutiae to consider. Each shot is a new opportunity, and no two shots are ever alike. Mechanics are massively important, but focusing on them in the moment is often disastrous. It's more important to observe, in a meditative way, the body's motion after the mental decision and assess, learn, and grow in preparation for the next shot.
In (slight) contrast to your ending quote, I offer Bruce Lee (un-verified, but interesting nonetheless):
":I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
That's the thing that stuck out for me in the article. It mentions practice, but there is no distinction from deliberate practice. It may well be that the highest performers did more deliberate practice, which totalled less practice overall.
The last sentence of your comment sums up my thoughts exactly.
It's completely unfalsifiable and therefore useless. There's no objective way to categorize practice as deliberate or not. It's just some stupid buzzword.
I assumed it was not because they only talk about "time spent practicing" surveyed from 88 different papers, which may include "practice" and "deliberate practice", and further down they write:
> She hopes to investigate such factors as basic abilities, age when starting to learn the skill, confidence, positive or negative feedback, self-motivation and the ability to take risks.
This doesn't seem to cover the introspective / deliberate part of practice.
Though, I asked myself: if practice is not deliberate, is it "practice" at all? If not, what should we call it?
I think it is meat to be difference between putting headphones on and going to run for an hour versus having good training plan that is based on training best practices and focuses on your weaknesses.
Or a difference between just playing songs you like and between playing 30 seconds of some difficult song over and over not because you like it, but because you need to learn that kind of notes sequence to progress.
To me one factor that matter a lot is motivation, or a goal to achieve something.
In my field I see a lot of people coming into CS just because it's trendy and they will sure have a job after graduation. But they lack the motivation to do something in that field. A lot are just in it because the pay is great and you can around computers all day..
I remember when I was 9 I had a goal, I wanted to make a game. I didn't even have a computer back then, but I knew I wanted to make a game so others could play it. I remember spending afternoons drawing level design, characters and how the game would work once I had my own computer. I never actually made a game but I loved the idea of creating something for other to use.
When I was 14 (now with a Pentium 100mhz good times) I wanted to be an hacker (hehe), so I learned C, Socket programming, I wet my feet into Linux, I started messing around deamons like email, web server.
When I was 18 I needed money, my parents couldn't afford to pay my tuition. So I created an app, to add my empty Resume and got hired by a software company to develop web apps.
Tens years fast-forward and here I am today, still making apps that people can use and still learning everyday, working for an awesome company, having my own small software-shop on the side and doing what I love to do.
I may not excel in my field, I may not be disruptive (haha), but I truly love what I do and can't honestly see myself doing anything else.
I just wanted to say that's fine not to excel or to be in the top 10. If that's your goal, go for it, but as long as you love what you do and have something that motivate you I'm pretty sure you will do just fine.
A funny thought: this is a very obvious thing for people who follow the competitive scenes of (valid) multiplayer games. There are lots of cases where progamers get to a high level of skill after an amount of practice that absolutely would not be enough for other people. In the end it's not dark magic, they just tend to already have the right mindset (and experience from other games for example) to make the most of their practice.
An iconic example is the team (Na`Vi) that won the first big DotA2 tournament. The game was in closed beta and professional DotA1 teams got a key at different times. Navi got their key just 1 month before the tournament while other teams got theirs way before. Still, 1 month was enough to beat all other professional teams.
There's a lot of interesting things that one can learn from esports, even just from the sheer amount of data generated (dota2 has almost 10M unique monthly players).
Quality of practice is also important, and probably a major factor in your example. My knowledge and skill will be vastly different if I spend 500 hours playing against the best players in the world, compared to spending 500 hours playing in Bronze league (does Dota2 have a bronze league?).
If we believe in evolution as expression of genetic traits,
And we believe that intellectual capacity has evolved,
Then we believe that intellectual capacity is a generic trait.
(Remains to determine whether intellectual capacity genetic trait varies like "has two arms," or like "height," and of course to try to pin down how to measure it, and count how many "its" there may be.)
And our best theories indicate that genetic disposition for intellectual capacity varies between individuals much in the same way that "has two arms" varies between individuals. That is, there are a lot of genes involved and if one of them is changed, you're more likely to end up with missing or malformed arms than you are to end up with super arms.
Or what I'm trying to say is that there's no gene for "smart", just like there's no gene for "has two arms".
That is reassuring. But do you have any references for that? The only study I can think of is the one where it was showed that Ashkenazi Jews had higher intellectual aptitudes than other ethnic groups. Which would prove that intelligence is on a scale and not on/off. Of course, the result is highly contentious and was criticized on various grounds. One of them being that it is very hard to discover whether a trait is due to genes or the environment.
Yes feedback is the most important thing. One thing I notice between people who get good at something and people who don't is that the people who don't just keep doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expect different results. However the people who do get good at something, keep making small little tweaks day in and day out based on their performance.
Except this test doesn't actually test musical expertise. Recitals make way more sense. Out would be like testing how good one programmed by how fast they typed.
I've thought about this for years, since hearing about Gladwell's 10khrs rule. I recently started reading The Inner Game of Tennis, and I think it's clarified what's going on here. It's obvious the trend is related to physical, not intellectual, skills. Playing violin, soccer, archery, etc. The 'deliberate practice' concept basically boils down to clearing up interference between Self 1 & Self 2 [1]. You have to maintain the constant feedback loop, where you are aware of what you are playing, you hear the notes, and you make small adjustments to Self 1. The opposite of this, the useless kind of practice, is where you tell Self 2 to shut up and keep making endless adjustments, never listening to the feedback.
This state of mind, 'conscious unconsciousness', trains your Self 2 to execute. I don't know why it takes so long for the subconscious to learn, but muscle memory does develop.
Most people think these people are training their Self 1, as if studying music theory will guide their hand, unconsciously, up the scales. It doesn't work that way. You can't memorize a compound bend on guitar, you can't memorize a double stop on a violin. Self 1, as important as it imagines itself, cannot play music all by itself. There are far too many notes in any song to consciously focus on each one as it passes. You have to rely on muscle memory to get you through.
Keeping that feedback loop open is about as hard as maintaining averted vision in the night sky. Or staring into a Magic Eye. You've got to relax and focus.
[1] you'll have to read the book. Self 1 observes & directs, Self 2 executes. Roughly, Self 1 is conscious, Self 2 is subconscious.
“But Macnamara and her colleagues found that practice explained 12 percent in mastering skills in various fields, from music, sports and games to education and professions. The importance of practice in various areas was: 26 percent for games, 21 percent for music, 18 percent for sports, 4 percent for education and less than 1 percent for other professions.”
This is just stupid. Suppose I take a test to see how many pairs of three digit numbers I can multiply correctly in one minute. Then I practice multiplying three digit numbers for one hour twice a day for two weeks. Then I take the test again. How much will I improve? 100%, 200%, 1,000%? How close will I be to having “mastered” the skill of multiplying three digit numbers? Is 28 hours enough? Maybe I am just not able to master a skill that is so difficult to master. Let’s suppose I’ve got the right stuff and I am able to master this particular skill. Now convince me that practice explains only 12 percent of my success!
There are many threads here discussing the influence of genetic factors but this is not what the article is about. Genetic factors are not mentioned in the article. One of the last paragraphs states other possible factors explicitly:
> Her next step is to find out what factors contribute to being an expert on an instrument, playing field, in the classroom or at work. She hopes to investigate such factors as basic abilities, age when starting to learn the skill, confidence, positive or negative feedback, self-motivation and the ability to take risks.
I think the whole nature vs nurture discussion in relation to intellectual aptitude is shaped to much by peoples own biases which leads them to ignore the overwhelming evidence for the importance of nurture/culture/eduction/...
Maybe it's easier to believe some people are born smart.
I don't think anyone who has ever truly excelled at something would attribute all the success solely to practice, but I don't think anyone who truly excelled did so by not practicing either.
Sports are a great example of this. A great athlete is often...
One part genetic gifts - if you are tall basketball might work well for you, if you're short maybe a horse jockey would be a more sensible sport.
One part intuitive skill or affinity - some people naturally are good at throwing a baseball fast or really love to kick a soccer ball. Some people just aren't.
One part opportunity - I've never had an opportunity to do curling, but I've played football and basketball. If my parents were world class martial artists, I'd probably be pretty good at martial arts.
One part practice and experience - a good amount of skill acquisition can only come from doing and refining that skill. You can read about how to run long distances, but at some point you just have to put in the miles. The more you do, the more you learn.
One part obsession - to be the best in the world, you have to have a ridiculous amount of determination. Most people don't have that for most of what they do. The ones who reach the highest levels tend to go beyond determination to obsession. Read about how Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan practiced and prepared and you realize that they weren't just doing "deliberate practice", they were obsessed with greatness and that obsession drove them beyond what anyone else was willing to do.
One part luck - even if everything else aligns you can get hurt, something else could sideline your career, you might fight a drug addiction or have family problems or an illness. Also, being lucky enough to get certain opportunities come your way at the right time often plays a big factor.
When you have all of those things come together you have something special. We can all recognize it simply because it's rare.
When we try and reduce everything down to a simple idea like "deliberate practice" that might sell a lot of books, or make for interesting papers, it really doesn't tell the whole story.
I think the human mind wants to reduce complexity to simple things because it makes the story we tell ourselves about the world easier to understand, but it's the complexity that makes it all so fascinating in the first place.
I suck at music. But I suck 1000x more when I started. I love the enlightenment phases a non-genius like me goes through when he passes a landmark. First swing, first rubato .. Even without excellence, it's totally worth it.
It would be interesting to know a way to pick the skills one can excel in. 10000 hours of deliberate practice is a huge investment. I'd rather invest it in something I can excel in.
The discussion here sort of disheartens me. Does it mean that I will be what I was born with? I would like to believe otherwise as it gives hope to achieve greatness, in spite of it not being in my genes.
The difference with humans is that we can modify our environment, which means we can and do modify the fashions of greatness. Hence the many opinions telling us what is cool today.
To exercise free will one must decide which "choices" are deterministic (i.e. not actually choices) and which are open to imaginative innovation. It is the definition of greatness which is personal, not its achievement.
You can be realistic and at the same time strive for self improvement. The main thing is if you enjoy doing something, you can engulf yourself in the process, and the results will come. Everyone is not born with the same ability and some will get farther than others because of this. Deliberate practice will even the playing field some and should still be used in order to gain mastery in whatever skills you desire.
Why can't we just admit that some people are born with certain genetic traits that allow them to excel in certain fields? Practice would accentuate those gifts and is vitally important, but let's not pretend everyone is capable of everything if they just practiced more.
Hell, even the ability to commit to extended periods of practice requires certain genetic ability. Most people are not born with the ability to hyperfocus like Bill Gates and work for 24 hours straight like he was able to do during the early days of Microsoft.
We accept ADHD has genetic components, and so the ability to focus for extended periods of time (which is what practice entails) is inherently easier for certain people.
Because the ramifications of that simple and obvious fact are probably too painful for most people (and for society as well).
But, in defense of this reality rejection, you never know until you try. If you follow the nonsense kindergarten line of "You can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough and dream!" you likely are going to be better off than if you give up early because others are better than you are.
But yes... far too many people wind up in areas they don't belong, and they struggle, meanwhile they have real gifts in other areas that remain unused.
The ability to sync your natural talents with your efforts are probably one of the unspoken keys to success.
Optimistic: its often repeated that everyone has some real gifts. Just not true. The vast majority of people are average. That's the meaning of the work 'average' - most people are like that.
An average person has one real chance: work their butt off at something they actually like doing (so they don't get discouraged so fast) and get better than average. So I call it good advice to follow your dream. Beats following someone else's dream anyway.
> let's not pretend everyone is capable of everything if they just practiced more
From the article:
Her next step is to find out what factors contribute to being an expert on an instrument, playing field, in the classroom or at work. She hopes to investigate such factors as basic abilities, age when starting to learn the skill, confidence, positive or negative feedback, self-motivation and the ability to take risks.
A great practice musician could freeze up in front of an audience, she said. Yet someone less skilled but with more confidence could shine.
> Why can't we just admit that some people are born with certain genetic traits that allow them to excel in certain fields?
Because throughout all of world history there are many examples of people taking that logic too far in order to consider certain races, certain sexes, and people from certain lands as inherently mentally inferior, and in the worst case, exterminating them in the form of a proposed "solution" to the "problem".
People strongly hesitate around this sort of talk for a reason.
It's scientific fact that intelligence as measured by any manner of g-factor psychometry has heritability correlates of between 0.4 and 0.5. Furthermore, studies such as the Minnesota transracial adoption study show clearly that these correlates apply within racial groups, having fully negated socioeconomic and parenting factors. We have willfully ignored reality per the ideological dictates of progressivism for the last fifty years.
Feelings and ideology trumping reality may work for a while, but it can't last forever when faced with competition from groups and nations that harbor no such illusions, such as the Chinese, who are investing in their genetic research labs to investigate the genetic origins of intelligence so as to benefit their own population generations hence. We, on the other hand, are too frightened to even talk about such investigations. Much to the detriment of our own future.
This is the problem. Intellectual ability should never correlate to the inherent worth of an individual. You can be an idiot and still have the same right to happiness and everything else that comes along with being a human being. But this doesn't mean we should not accept certain realities based on how people might interpret science. Science just is. What we need to fix is how people act towards one another.
About that ADHD part... I have ADHD but I don't have problems focusing for extended periods of time as long as the task is mentally engaging.
I have problems starting and switching tasks. In fact, my inability to switch contexts delays the task stoppage, allowing me to focus longer!
Many ADHD patients don't have problems attaining focus, but actually only directing it.
Not related to your point and probably supports it (I'm a good programmer because I hyperfocus, what some people call being in the zone). I just wanted to point it out.
Because it still doesn't explain what is driving the aptitude. It's sort of like how multiverse theories of the universe attribute the values of various constants to random chance. It may be the case, but it's only interesting as theory insofar as it generates experiments, and we're just not there yet with our understanding of genetics and neuropsychology (but I suspect we will end up there).
That's because being a master at something requires something science can't quantify: you need to care.
I don't mean pedestrian caring. I mean a deep, rich relationship between you and what it is you practice. That caring translates into focus, attention, deliberation etc.
"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." - Albert Einstein
"Intent on becoming a theoretical physicist and following the likes of Einstein and Hawking, he discovered that although he was one of the top 25 students in his honors physics program, he wasn't smart enough to compete with the handful of real geniuses around him. 'I looked around the room,' Bezos recalls, 'and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at it than I was, and it was much, much easier for them. It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently.' The pragmatic Bezos switched his major to computer science and committed himself to starting and running his own business." [1]
[1] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/bezos_pr.html