The best way to become good at something might surprise you - David Epstein
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DownloadMany of you here have probably heard of the 10,000 hours rule.
It’s the idea that to become great in anything takes
10,000 hours of focused practice.
So you’d better get started as early as possible.
The poster child for this story is Tiger Woods.
His father famously gave him a putter when he was seven months old.
Fast forward to the age of 21— he’s the greatest golfer in the world.
Quintessential 10,000 hours story.
Another is that of the three Polgar sisters,
whose father decided to teach them chess in a very technical manner
from a very early age.
Two of his daughters went on to become grandmaster chess players
I got curious: if this 10,000 hours rule is correct,
then we should see that elite athletes get a head start
in so-called deliberate practice.
And in fact, when scientists study elite athletes,
they see that they spend more time in deliberate practice.
Not a big surprise.
When they actually track athletes over the course of their development,
the pattern looks like this:
the future elites tend to have what scientists call a sampling period,
where they try a variety of physical activities.
They gain broad general skills and delay specializing
until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.
That doesn’t really comport with the 10,000 hours rule, does it?
So I started to wonder about other domains that we associate
with obligatory early specialization, like music.
Turns out the pattern is often similar.
The exceptional musicians didn’t start spending more time in deliberate practice
than the average musicians until their third instrument.
They too tended to have a sampling period.
Even musicians we think of as famously precocious, like Yo-Yo Ma.
So this got me interested in exploring the developmental backgrounds
of people whose work I had long admired.
Duke Ellington shunned music lessons as a kid
to focus on baseball and painting and drawing.
Mariam Mirzakhani wasn’t interested in math as a girl,
dreamed of becoming a novelist,
and went on to become the first and so far only woman to win the Fields Medal,
the most prestigious prize in the world in math.
Vincent van Gogh had five different careers before flaming out spectacularly,
and, in his late 20s,
picked up a book called “The Guide to the ABCs of Drawing.”
Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan
who took a philosophy course just to fulfill a requirement.
And in it he learned about a near century-old system of logic
by which true and false statements could be coded as ones and zeros
and solved like math problems.
This led to the development of binary code,
which underlies all of our digital computers today.
Frances Hesselbein took her first professional job at the age of 54,
and went on to become the CEO of the Girl Scouts.
Here’s an athlete I’ve followed.
He tried some tennis, some skiing, wrestling.
His mother was actually a tennis coach,
but she declined to coach him because he wouldn’t return balls normally.
And he kept trying more sports:
handball, volleyball, soccer, badminton, skateboarding.
So who is this dabbler?
This is Roger Federer.
Every bit as famous as an adult as Tiger Woods.
And yet even tennis enthusiasts don't usually know anything
about his developmental story.
Why is that?
I think it’s partly because the Tiger story is very dramatic,
but also because it seems like this tidy narrative
that we can extrapolate to anything that we want to be good at in our own lives.
But it turns out that in many ways, golf is a uniquely horrible model
of almost everything that humans want to learn.
Golf is the epitome of what the psychologist Robin Hogarth
called a kind learning environment.
Next steps and goals are clear; rules that are clear and never change.
When you do something, you get feedback that is quick and accurate.
Chess, also a kind learning environment.
On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments
where next steps and goals may not be clear— rules may change.
You may or may not get feedback when you do something,
it may be delayed, it may be inaccurate.
Which one of these sounds like the world we're increasingly living in?
So if hyper-specialization isn’t always the trick in a wicked world, what is?
That can be difficult to talk about,
because sometimes it looks like meandering or zigzagging or keeping a broader view.
It can look like getting behind.
But if we look at research on technological innovation,
it shows that increasingly the most impactful patents are authored
by teams that include individuals
who have worked across a large number of different technology classes
and often merge things from different domains.
Someone whose work I've admired, who was sort of on the forefront of this,
is a Japanese man named Junpei Yokoi.
Yokoi didn't score well in his electronics exams at school,
so he had to settle for a low-tier job as a machine maintenance worker
at a playing card company in Kyoto.
He combined some well-known technology from the calculator industry,
with some well-known technology from the credit card industry,
and made handheld games.
And it turned this playing card company,
which was founded in a wooden storefront in the 19th century,
into a toy and game operation.
You may have heard of it, it’s called Nintendo.
His magnum opus was the Game Boy.
We probably don't make as many of those people as we could,
because we don't tend to incentivize anything that doesn't
look like a head start or specialization.
And naturally, I think there are as many ways to succeed as there are people,
but I think we tend only to incentivize and encourage the Tiger path,
when increasingly, in a wicked world, we need people
who travel the Roger path as well.
Or as the eminent physicist and mathematician and writer
Freeman Dyson put it:
“For a healthy ecosystem, we need both birds and frogs.
Frogs are down in the mud seeing all the granular details.
The birds are soaring up above, not seeing those details,
but integrating the knowledge of the frogs.”
And we need both.
The problem, Dyson said, is that we’re telling everyone to become frogs.
And I think in a wicked world, that's increasingly shortsighted.
Key Vocabulary (50)
toward
"Go to school."
belonging
"Cup of tea."
also
"You and me."
inside
"In the house."
specific
"That book."
A third-person singular pronoun used to refer to an object, animal, or situation that has already been mentioned or is clear from context. It is also frequently used as a dummy subject to talk about time, weather, or distance.
A function word used to express negation or denial. It is primarily used to make a sentence or phrase negative, often following an auxiliary verb or the verb 'to be'.
A preposition used to indicate that something is in a position above and supported by a surface. It is also used to indicate a specific day or date, or to show that a device is functioning.
A pronoun used to refer to a male person or animal that has already been mentioned or is easily identified. It functions as the subject of a sentence.
A conjunction used to compare two things that are equal in some way. It is most commonly used in the pattern 'as + adjective/adverb + as' to show similarity.
Used to refer to the person or people that the speaker is addressing. It is the second-person pronoun used for both singular and plural subjects and objects.
A preposition used to indicate a specific point, location, or position in space. It is also used to specify a particular point in time or a certain state or activity.
Used to identify a specific person, thing, or idea that is physically close to the speaker or has just been mentioned. It can also refer to the present time or a situation that is currently happening.
A coordinating conjunction used to connect two statements that contrast with each other. It is used to introduce an added statement that is different from what has already been mentioned.
This word is used to show that something belongs to or is associated with a male person or animal previously mentioned. It functions as both a possessive determiner used before a noun and a possessive pronoun used on its own.
Description
Are we building skills the wrong way? Explore how having a wide range of experience can be better than early specialization. -- There’s a common idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice...
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