Talent Is Overrated (15 page)

As for chess players, we now see that their amazing memory is based on more than just an ability to perceive pieces in groups. The best players also understand the strategic importance of each group, its role in attacking, defending, and distracting the opponent, and so on. In the letters-versus-words analogy, it isn't just that novices see letters while experts see words; the experts also know the meanings of the words.

It's clear that the superior memory of great performers doesn't just happen. Since it is built on deep understanding of the field, it can be achieved only through years of intensive study. It further requires consistently relating new information to higher-level concepts, which is hard work. It's also easy to see why experts' superior memory doesn't extend beyond their field of expertise: It is a central element of their expertise and can't be separated from it. Far from being a general ability, it is ultimately a skill that is acquired through many years of deliberate practice.

 
We've seen how extensive, well-structured, deliberate practice develops the specific abilities of great performers to perceive more, know more, and remember more, and how these abilities are critical to exceptional performance. But these aren't the only ways in which practice works. It exerts an additional, overarching influence that in a way is even more impressive: It can actually alter the physical nature of a person's brain and body.

This effect is not the obvious one in which a person's muscles get bigger as a result of weight training, for example, but rather involves characteristics that most people might think couldn't be changed. Endurance runners, for instance, have larger than average hearts, an attribute that most of us see as one of the natural advantages with which they were blessed. But no, research has shown that their hearts grow after years of intensive training; when they stop training, their hearts revert toward normal size. Athletes can change not just the size of their muscles but even the composition of them (the proportion of fast-twitch fibers to slow-twitch) through years of practice. Ballet dancers gain their ability to turn their feet out more than average people, and baseball pitchers their ability to extend their throwing arm farther back, through extensive practice at ages before their joints calcify.

Even brains can be changed. When kids start practicing a musical instrument, their brains develop differently—the cerebral cortex changes. Brain regions that hear tones and control fingers take over more territory, and the younger the age at which a person starts practicing, the greater the effect. The brain's ability to change is greatest in youth, but it doesn't end there. A study of London taxi drivers, who train rigorously for two years on average, found that their brains had grown in the areas that govern spatial navigation. Particularly important in such changes seems to be the buildup of a substance called myelin around nerve fibers and neurons, which work better with more myelin around them. The brains of professional pianists, for example, show increased myelination in relevant areas.

It's significant that myelination is a slow process. Building up myelin over a nerve fiber that controls, say, hitting a particular piano key in a particular way involves sending the appropriate signal through that fiber over and over. This process of building up myelin by sending signals through nerve fibers, which occurs in purely intellectual fields like business as well as in sports and music, needs to happen millions of times in the development of a great performer. In other words, the process of myelin development seems an exact parallel to how deliberate practice works, and illustrates in a new way why it takes many years of intensive work to become a top performer. Research on myelin is still in its early stages, but it appears possible that at the most fundamental, molecular level, myelin may be the connection between intense practice and great performance.

 
We've all had the powerful feeling, when watching or contemplating an extraordinary performer, that in some deep way this person is simply not like us. Whether studying Buffett's investing performance or listening to a recording of Pavarotti or watching Roger Federer hit a tennis ball, we cannot find a way to relate our own performance in their fields to what they do; we cannot imagine any conceivable path that would get us from here to there. That's why we always fall back on the same metaphors in describing such people: They're from another planet; they're superhuman; they're incredible.

What we've seen is that in a sense our natural reaction is right—great performers really are fundamentally different. Their bodies and brains are actually different from ours in a profound way. In addition, their abilities to perceive, organize, and remember information are far beyond anything that most of us possess. But we're wrong in thinking, as many do, that the exceptional nature of great performers is some kind of eternal mystery or preordained outcome. It is, rather, the result of a process, the general elements of which are clear.

There is in fact a path leading from the state of our own abilities to that of the greats. The path is extremely long and demanding, and only a few will follow it all the way to its end. No matter how far one goes, however, the journey is always beneficial and begins by applying the elements of the process. The question, then, is how.

Chapter Seven

Applying the Principles in Our Lives

 
 
Benjamin Franklin was “America's first great man of letters” in the view of David Hume and many others, so we might naturally wonder how he came to be the extraordinary writer he was. His own account of it in his autobiography is well known—most of us read it in school—but in light of what we now know about how great performers develop, several elements of the story seem more significant and instructive than we may have realized.

As a teenager, Franklin seemed to think he wrote well enough, but then one day his father found an exchange of letters between Ben and a friend, John Collins, arguing a point back and forth. (The argument was whether women should be educated, Collins contending they were naturally unable to learn as much as men, Franklin taking the other side.) Ben's father first told his son what was good about his letters; they were better than Collins's in spelling and punctuation. Then he told him and showed him specifically how they were inferior: “in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances,” as Franklin recalled. We must note in passing that when it comes to giving people evaluations—offering praise first, then supporting criticisms with examples—old Josiah Franklin could be a model for us all.

Ben responded to his father's observations in several ways. First, he found examples of prose clearly superior to anything he could produce, a bound volume of the
Spectator,
the great English periodical written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Any of us might have done something similar. But Franklin then embarked on a remarkable program that few of us would ever have thought of.

It began with his reading a
Spectator
article and making brief notes on the meaning of each sentence; a few days later he would take up the notes and try to express the meaning of each sentence in his own words. When done, he compared his essay with the original, “discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”

One of the faults he noticed was his poor vocabulary. What could he do about that? He realized that writing poetry required an extensive “stock of words” because he might need to express any given meaning in many different ways depending on the demands of rhyme or meter. So he would rewrite
Spectator
essays in verse. Then, after he had forgotten them, he would take his versified essays and rewrite them in prose, again comparing his efforts with the original.

Franklin realized also that a key element of a good essay is its organization, so he developed a method to work on that. He would again make short notes on each sentence in an essay, but would write each note on a separate slip of paper. He would then mix up the notes and set them aside for weeks, until he had forgotten the essay. At that point he would try to put the notes in their correct order, attempt to write the essay, and then compare it with the original; again, he “discovered many faults and amended them.”

What is so striking about Franklin's method is how closely it conforms to the principles of well-structured deliberate practice in the circumstances he faced. He did not have a teacher to guide him, but his father was able to identify some specific faults in his writing; Ben in effect created his own teacher by finding examples of prose that were beyond his own abilities. He could scarcely have chosen better;
Spectator
essays were exactly the type of engaging, topical, innovative writing that Franklin wanted to produce, and they were so good that the volume he studied is still widely available almost three hundred years later. So Franklin identified the aspects of his performance that needed to be improved and found a way to stretch himself, the essential core of deliberate practice.

Significantly, he did not try to become a better essay writer by sitting down and writing essays. Instead, like a top-ranked athlete or musician, he worked over and over on those specific aspects that needed improvement. First came sentence structure, which he attacked precisely in accord with deliberate practice principles. His method of summarizing and reformulating
Spectator
sentences one by one was designed ingeniously for that purpose. He repeated this routine at high volume, there being lots of sentences in an essay, and he got immediate feedback by comparing his sentences with the original. When he decided to work on another element of performance, vocabulary, he again designed a brilliant practice structure, versification, with high volume and immediate feedback. Note also that since he eventually converted his rhyming essays back into prose, he was continuing to work on sentence structure. His approach to a third element, organization, was again extremely clever in allowing him to stretch himself repeatedly on that specific skill while also maintaining the others.

One further feature of Franklin's approach to better writing is important to note. He pursued it diligently. When people today hear about what he did, they generally marvel not at the brilliance of his practice design but at his ability to carry it through. It seems like so much work. The truth is that in theory anyone could have followed his routine; anyone still can, and it would be highly effective. But nobody does it, not even students who are studying writing. And Franklin was not a student. He was then an apprentice in his brother's printing business, a demanding job that left him little free time. He practiced writing before work in the morning, after work at night, and on Sunday, “when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone.” Raised as a Puritan, he knew he was supposed to be in church on Sunday, but “I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time” to go.

The details of how Franklin taught himself to write well are worth our attention for two reasons. First, they provide a particularly clear example of how deliberate practice works—in this case how it helped form one of the most effective and influential writers of English prose of his era. Second, they're an inspiring illustration of how to apply these principles on one's own in circumstances far from ideal—which unfortunately are just the circumstances in which most people in companies and many other organizations find themselves today.

We saw earlier how hostile to the principles of well-structured deliberate practice most companies seem. That's all the more puzzling when you consider how many high-profile organizations apart from businesses embrace these principles. We're awed by the performances of champion sports teams or great orchestras and theater companies, but when we get to the office, it occurs to practically no one that we might have something to learn by studying how some people became so accomplished. The U.S. military has made itself far more effective by studying and adopting these principles, and it funds some of the most important research in this field. But at most companies—as well as most educational institutions and many nonprofit organizations—the fundamentals of great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.

That's the reality at most organizations, though not all. We'll see in the next chapter how some organizations apply these ideas in diverse ways, and how they could do so even more. But since most organizations don't understand or apply these principles, and since most people aren't in a position to change how their employer operates, we'll look first at what individuals can do on their own, like Ben Franklin, to become much better in their fields.

Step one, obvious yet deserving a moment's consideration, is knowing what you want to do. The key word is not
what,
but
knowing.
Because the demands of achieving exceptional performance are so great over so many years, no one has a prayer of meeting them without utter commitment. You've got to know what you want to do, not suspect it or be inclined toward it or be thinking about it. In the final chapter we'll look more closely into the mysterious question of where that commitment comes from. For now we'll assume that you're settled on what you want to achieve, even if it's only the next step in a general direction.

The first challenge in designing a system of deliberate practice is identifying the immediate next steps. In a few fields those steps are clear. If you want to play the piano, the exact skills you must learn and the order in which to learn them have been worked out by many generations of teachers. It's similar in highly structured professions; at least the initial steps in becoming an accountant, lawyer, or doctor are well established, and you have teachers to guide you.