Talent Is Overrated (11 page)

As for the second principle, the activities that would make us better are usually not highly repeatable. When we face new or unusual challenges—a competitor's innovation, a shift in customer attitudes—we typically find little past experience to guide us because we've had so few chances to deal with those situations. We're golfers encountering the buried-lie sand shot two or three times a year, but we haven't practiced it two hundred times. Even in jobs where we do the same few things—negotiating with suppliers, administering benefits—we face few (if any) incentives to get better at them by exceeding our limits and discovering what we can't do well. On the contrary, while deliberate practice demands that we push ourselves to the point where we break down and then develop a solution, in our business lives the cost of mistakes is often high. Every incentive urges us to stick with what's safe and reliable.

Feedback? At most companies this is a travesty, consisting of an annual performance review dreaded by the person delivering it and the one receiving it. Even if it's well done, it cannot be very effective. Telling someone what he did well or poorly on a task he completed eleven months ago is just not helpful.

You could say that work, like deliberate practice, is often mentally demanding and tiring. But that's typically not because of the intense focus and concentration involved. Rather, it's more often a result of long hours cranking out what we already know how to do. And if we're exhausted from that, the prospect of spending additional hours on genuine deliberate practice activities seems too miserable to contemplate. Similarly, work is often not fun. But again, that's not because we're trying to push beyond the edge of our abilities. It's because getting anything accomplished in the real world is a grind.

If that's life in most companies, then the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance, individually and organizationally, would seem to be huge. In fact they are, and in later chapters we'll look in detail at how that can be done. But first it's helpful to consider a bit more deeply just what deliberate practice is. Indeed, what's especially surprising about the cluelessness of most organizations with regard to deliberate practice is that the principles are not counterintuitive or hard to grasp. On the contrary, once we hear them enunciated, we start seeing them—and their effectiveness—in many domains.

Consider, as one example, how the comedian Chris Rock prepared for a high-profile, high-stakes performance he was to give on New Year's Eve before an audience of twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden. A newspaper article sets up the story as follows:

 
It sounds like the article will be a classic example of the divine-spark theory, but in fact the article's point is exactly the opposite. This is some of its remarkable description of how Chris Rock prepared for his appearance:

 
Here we see all the elements of deliberate practice. Rock designed all those small-club appearances for the sole purpose of making himself better; because he already performs at a very high level, he's completely qualified to design his own practice. The high repetition in the process is particularly striking—appearance after appearance, working the material “over and over.” Feedback happens to be no problem in Rock's profession; the reaction of the audience—the only thing that counts—is immediate and continuous (and brutally honest). It's clear that Rock must be focusing intensely on the process and that it can't be much fun, especially when new material doesn't work, as must happen often. The result is Rock's vast success; as the article put it, “if he is not the funniest man alive, then the other guy is doing a good job of hiding.”

 
A particularly dramatic illustration of deliberate practice is useful because it highlights the principles so clearly. It's the story of the Polgar sisters.

Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian educational psychologist, formed the view in the 1960s that great performers are made, not born. His research persuaded him that the greatest performers had all been made to focus and work on their field of eventual achievement from an early age, and he believed he understood the process well enough that he could make it happen himself. He wrote a book about how to do it (English translation of the title:
Bring Up Genius!
) and publicly asked for a woman who would marry him, have children with him, and help him conduct the experiment. Amazingly enough, he found such a woman, a Hungarian-speaking schoolteacher in the Ukraine named Klara.

Laszlo and Klara soon had a daughter, Susan, and when Susan turned four the experiment began. Exactly why Laszlo decided to turn Susan into a chess player is not clear. By some accounts it was because progress in chess is apparent and easy to measure from the beginning. By other accounts it was because chess is heavily male-dominated, and the prevailing view was that women were simply incapable of competing at the highest level—so this would be the ideal realm in which Laszlo could prove his theory.

Laszlo and Klara devoted their lives to teaching Susan chess, and when two more daughters followed—Sophia and Judit—they were put into the program as well. All three daughters were homeschooled—the parents quit their jobs to devote themselves to the work—and the schooling consisted largely of chess instruction. The family accumulated a library of ten thousand chess books. A giant pre-computer-age filing system of index cards cataloged previous games and potential opponents. The daughters learned other subjects as well; the Hungarian authorities insisted that they all pass regular exams in school subjects, and all three daughters spoke several languages. But chess was the main thing—hours and hours of it every day.

The results: At age seventeen, Susan became the first woman to qualify for what was then called the Men's World Championship (though she qualified, the World Chess Federation wouldn't let her compete). When Susan was nineteen, Sophia fourteen, and Judit twelve, they competed as a team in the Women's Olympiad and scored Hungary's first-ever victory against the Soviets, becoming national heroes. At age twenty-one, Susan became the first woman ever to be named a grand master, the highest rank in world chess. Soon thereafter, Judit became a grand master at age fifteen, the youngest person of either sex ever to win that designation, beating Bobby Fischer's previous record by a few months. As of this writing Judit is the world's number 1 woman player, and for years she ranked consistently in the top ten of all players worldwide.

The Polgars' story is exceptionally useful because it illustrates the principles of deliberate practice through what the sisters achieved as well as through what they did not. Overall, of course, their tremendous success would seem to validate emphatically what their father believed. There was no reason to suppose that Laszlo or Klara passed on any innate chess ability to their daughters; Laszlo was only a mediocre player, and Klara had demonstrated no chess ability at all. The children's success would seem to have resulted only from their years of intensive work, which met the definition of deliberate practice in every particular.

At the same time, it must be noted that the daughters did not achieve equal levels of success, and none of them reached the very highest level, the world championship. But these facts are also consistent with the principles of deliberate practice. The middle sister, Sophia, did not reach the heights scaled by her two sisters (though she did become the sixth-ranked woman in the world), and everyone seems to agree that she was the least committed. A lengthy magazine profile of the sisters quoted chess champion Josh Waitzkin as saying Sophia “was a brilliant speed player, sharp as a tack. But she didn't work as hard as the others.” Susan said that Sophia “was lazy.” And even Sophia agreed: “I could give up easier than Judit. I never worked as hard as she did.” Similarly, everyone seems to agree that Judit, who rose highest, worked hardest at practice. It would also stand to reason that by the time Judit, the youngest, came along, Laszlo had refined his methods of practice design.

As for the fact that none of the sisters became a world champion, it may be hazardous to speculate on why things work out as they do in the rarefied air of the very highest levels. But it's certainly worth noting that when they were in their twenties, when future champions are typically still fighting for their shot at the top, all three sisters decided there was more to life than chess. (As Sophia was quoted as saying: “It's not that chess was too much for me; it was too little.”) They got married, had kids, gave time to their families, and eased up on the unrelenting chess-focused work that had filled their lives until then.

Their own stories have convinced them that their father was right. Susan said, “My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that [success] is 99 percent hard work. I agree with him.” More specifically, the story of the Polgars illustrates how the principles of deliberate practice, when carried to an extraordinary level, produce extraordinary achievement.

It's easy to find more familiar stories that reinforce the validity of the deliberate practice framework. We can quickly see, for example, that Jerry Rice was a near-perfect example of the principles through what he did, and the intensity and focus with which he did it. We see that the story of Tiger Woods's development, described in chapter 2, conforms exactly to these principles. They are exemplified in the stories of almost every other top-level athlete, as well as in the lives of eminent musicians and many others. In particular, there are countless stories of people who not only seemed to lack any natural advantage in a field where they eventually excelled but were clearly disadvantaged—yet through these principles overcame the obstacles. One thinks of Wilma Rudolph, hobbled by polio as a child, who won three Olympic gold medals in track and field. Or the lisping Winston Churchill, who became one of the twentieth century's greatest orators by practicing his many speeches intensively and with great precision over a period of many years.

With the deliberate practice framework in mind, examples are everywhere. But questions immediately arise. The most pressing:

 
Does deliberate practice fully explain high achievement? Will someone who does twice as much of it as someone else be twice as successful? The answer to these questions is clearly no. Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement—real life is too complicated for that. Most obviously, we're all affected by luck; time and chance happeneth to us all, as it says in Ecclesiastes. While it has often been observed that those who work the hardest seem to be the luckiest, the fact remains that if a bridge collapses while you're driving over it, nothing else matters. Less dramatically but much more significantly, a person's circumstances, especially in childhood, can powerfully affect his or her opportunities to engage in deliberate practice. We may say that Tiger Woods is a textbook illustration of the deliberate practice principles, but we could also say that he was breathtakingly lucky to be introduced to them. In this sense, it's perfectly fair to say that the real reason you'll never be Tiger Woods is that your father wasn't Earl Woods. In chapter 10 we'll look more closely at the importance of the supporting environment, much of which may be outside a person's control, especially in youth.

Beyond simple luck, we know that physical changes are inevitable over time. It turns out that deliberate practice can extend one's ability to perform at high levels far longer than most people believe, as we shall see in chapter 10. But ultimately we're all mortal, and our faculties decline. This fact may be more significant than it seems. A person's total lifetime hours of deliberate practice can never decline, so if that were the only factor that determined performance, no one would ever get worse at anything they've learned. Since everyone does get worse eventually, even if only at a very advanced age, then it must be possible for factors outside our control to affect our performance. We'll look into this more deeply later.

In addition, even though performance seems to improve with increased deliberate practice in a wide range of research studies, it must also be true that the relationship cannot be simple and direct in every case. That is, there must be qualitative differences between my practice and yours. In many cases these will arise from the varying quality of teachers, coaches, and mentors. Practice is designed, so it can be designed well or badly.

Regardless of how well it's designed, another important variable is how much effort a person puts into it. We've all engaged in deliberate practice at something—a musical instrument, a sport, or something else—so we all understand Leopold Auer's remark about practicing with the mind. Some days we were sharp, focused, and working hard; other days we were tired, distracted, and going through the motions. Measuring the intensity of practice may be difficult, but it's clearly significant. A study of singers found that when amateurs took a voice lesson, they experienced it as an enjoyable release of tension, but when professionals took a lesson, they experienced it as an intense, difficult effort. Seen from the outside, they were doing the same thing, but on the inside they were doing completely different things, and that's what mattered.