Talent Is Overrated (25 page)

Seen from that perspective, the idea of adults deciding to sacrifice their child's broad education in order to put little Max or Ashley through hours of daily training to become a top-notch business executive by age twenty-one seems barbarous. And maybe it is. But as we think about it, let's keep a couple of points in mind.

First, our society has very little problem with kids being directed toward fields other than business at early ages. No one seems to think that Earl Woods was a bad father for directing Tiger emphatically toward golf from the age of eighteen months. On the contrary, he seems to have been a wonderful father, and his son adored him. Nor do we seem to mind when young achievers in other fields sacrifice a broad education in order to focus on their chosen domains. A bit of tut-tutting followed LeBron James's decision to go straight from high school to pro basketball, but now that he's enormously wealthy and popular, that's all forgotten. The Polgar sisters learned enough about nonchess subjects to pass the required exams, but they never went to school at all; nonetheless, the Hungarian public hailed them as national heroes. In these and other cases of high achievement at early ages, the brilliance of what has been achieved blots out any sight of what has been given up. If similar techniques were applied to early training in business, and similar results produced, would the same effect follow?

Second, even if we reject the notion of purposefully turning five-year-olds into future banking executives or textile plant managers or retail strategists, other societies may not hesitate. Fast-developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will view the research on early development from their own perspectives, and there's no reason to assume they'll be just like ours. If governments or families in some of these countries decide to focus on turning out managers who are whizzes at age twenty-one and will just keep getting better, we will have to confront that reality and perhaps think again about our own views.

Our look at how some people reach remarkable heights at early ages should not obscure an important fact about age and achievement: Even when young people perform exceptionally, they usually develop further. Yo-Yo Ma was a world-famous cellist at age twenty, but he was much better at forty. Jamie Dimon was an amazingly accomplished financial services executive at age twenty-nine, but he was much better at fifty, as CEO of JPMorgan Chase. The reality of continued improvement over many years has led researchers to study how great performers develop over their lifetimes. The findings illuminate how performance is—and isn't—affected by advancing age.

One of the best established and least surprising findings in psychology is that as we age, we slow down. Remembering things, solving unfamiliar problems—these take about twice as long in our sixties as they did in our twenties. We move more slowly. Coordinating our arms and legs is more difficult. We've all seen it happen, and anyone in their thirties or beyond has experienced it. So we might reasonably suppose that this unavoidable trend spells doom for excellent performance. If our minds and bodies deteriorate with the march of time, there would seem to be nothing we can do to maintain top-level performance beyond a certain number of years.

Thus it's surprising to find that this isn't true at all, and not just in a few notable cases, but generally. Somehow, excellent performers manage to continue achieving at high levels well beyond the point where age-related declines would seem to make that impossible.

Example: On January 10, 2008, the New York Philharmonic made an announcement that shocked those who were intimately familiar with the orchestra as well as those who knew nothing about it. The news was that Stanley Drucker, the Philharmonic's principal clarinetist, would retire after the 2008-2009 season. That surprised aficionados, because Drucker was such a fixture of the Philharmonic that it was hard to imagine the orchestra without him. But it surprised nonfans even more because it seemed impossible to believe: By the time of his retirement, Drucker would have been performing with the Philharmonic for sixty-one years. Possessing what must be one of the working population's shorter résumés, he joined the orchestra at age nineteen and would be retiring at eighty.

Cases of people working for the same employer for extremely long times are not rare, but this is different. How could anyone as old as Drucker possibly perform at the level required of the lead clarinetist in one of the world's preeminent orchestras? How could he move his fingers fast enough? How could he remember long clarinet concertos, which he continued to perform from memory as a soloist?

Research reveals an answer that applies across fields. Studies in a very broad range of domains—management, aircraft piloting, music, bridge, and others—show consistently that excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise. For example, a study of older expert pianists found that their general processing speed had declined just as their age would predict. Among the general population this decline is evident in many ways. Psychologists measure how fast people can push a button in response to a question on a screen or how fast they can tap their fingers or coordinate finger movements; all these things slow down with age. But while excellent pianists slowed down like everyone else in how fast they could respond to a choice on a screen, which is not a skill that makes much difference to a pianist, they didn't slow down at all when it came to piano-related skills like finger tapping or finger coordination. They could do those things as if they hadn't aged at all. It's the same story in many other fields. When it comes to tasks that are part of their domain of expertise, great performers can keep performing at a high level even after their skills outside their domain have deteriorated.

In light of what we've seen about the nature of great performance, this finding shouldn't be surprising. After all, we've seen repeatedly that great performance doesn't come from superior general abilities; it comes from specific skills that have been developed in a particular way over a long period of time. So it makes sense that when general abilities decline with age, that decline need not affect the specific skills that undergird great performance. It need not affect them—yet there must be more to the story, because of course there are plenty of great performers whose skills do indeed decline with age. For every Stanley Drucker, there are many others whose names we've forgotten, high-level performers in many fields who faded away after brief, successful careers. So why do some carry on, but not others?

The explanation seems to be the factor that made them excellent performers in the first place, deliberate practice. Just as mere experience, even decades of it, is not enough to make anyone a great performer, neither is it enough to defy the effects of age, even in a person's field of specialization. Several studies have shown that just continuing to work at a job is not enough to stave off age-related declines. Architects have presumably developed strong spatial abilities, for example, but in a study of architects who were not distinguished except by continued employment, those abilities declined predictably with age. It takes something more, and what it takes is effortful, focused, designed practice. Those expert pianists who maintained their piano skills as they aged were compared with a sample of amateur pianists, some of whom had forty years of experience but had long since given up anything that could be called deliberate practice. The amateurs, unlike the experts, suffered predictable, across-the-board age-related declines.

The reason deliberate practice works in this way is no mystery, for we've already seen the effect. In general, well-designed practice, pursued for enough time, enables a person to circumvent the limitations that would otherwise hold back his or her performance, and circumventing limitations is the key to high performance at an advanced age. In a study of excellent chess players, the older ones chose moves just as well as the younger ones, but they did it in a different way. They didn't consider as many possible moves because they couldn't, but they compensated through greater knowledge of positions.

More generally, continued deliberate practice enables top performers to maintain skills that would otherwise decline with age, and to develop other skills and strategies to compensate for declines that can no longer be avoided. That approach can work for a long time. The piano virtuoso Wilhelm Backhaus said that in his fifties he increased his practice of études, which he felt he needed in order to maintain his technical skills. At a later age, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein felt that he could no longer play as fast as he used to, but he developed a strategy for compensating: In the passages preceding the fast ones, he would slow down more than he used to, so the following passages, even though he played them slower than in the old days, would seem faster by contrast. He continued to perform publicly, to great acclaim, until he was eighty-nine.

Just as improved methods of practice have raised standards of performance in virtually every field over time, they are also enabling top performers to continue achieving at high levels for more years than previously thought possible. We see the effect dramatically in sports, where the average age of professional players has been edging up for years. In baseball, Julio Franco played for the Atlanta Braves in the 2007 season at age forty-nine, thanks to a regimen of intense exercise and carefully designed diet that's unlike anything that was used in baseball decades ago. His trainer told the
New York Times,
“When I got acquainted with him, I learned quickly that you can't associate him with people of his age. His discipline is unlike anything I've ever seen.” Franco is by far the oldest player in major league baseball, and that's assuming you believe he was born in 1958, as his official bio states. Early bios said 1954, which would make him a fifty-three-year-old major league player.

Other sports have their Methuselahs. In pro football, Atlanta's Morten Andersen is forty-seven, and in pro basketball, Houston's Dikembe Mutombo is forty-two; each is at or near his sport's all-time-record age, and as of this writing, each is still playing. The same phenomenon is happening in amateur sports—running, swimming, and others. Researchers are finding many examples of runners who, through harder and better-designed training, maintain performance as they age at levels never previously matched, and even some who improve, running faster at sixty than they did at fifty. A seventy-four-year-old man in 2004 ran a marathon in 2:54:44, which is four minutes faster than the gold medal performance in the 1896 Olympics.

We can also train our mental abilities far later in life than previously believed. For decades the conventional view in medicine was that once we reach adulthood, we can only lose neurons, not add them, and our brain's ability to adapt itself to new challenges, known as brain plasticity, shuts down. More recent research shows that none of this is true. Our brains are perfectly able to add new neurons well into old age when conditions demand it, and brain plasticity doesn't stop with age. Give your brain the right kind of training—for example, by making it try to do two things at once—and plasticity will increase in the regions that normally show the greatest atrophy in later years.

A phenomenon like the aging of professional athletes may be occurring in purely cognitive fields as well. Certainly we're seeing businesspeople performing at the highest levels at advanced ages. Warren Buffett continues to run Berkshire Hathaway brilliantly in his late seventies. Rupert Murdoch, at about the same age, is aggressively expanding his huge media conglomerate, News Corporation. Henry Kissinger continues his work as a consultant in his mideighties, and Sumner Redstone continues to run Viacom and CBS at the same age. This is not merely an instance of life expectancies increasing generally; what's significant is that these executives and others are able to continue working effectively at the top echelons of business ten or twenty years past what used to be considered normal retirement.

Even Benjamin Jones's study of top scientific innovators may be worth updating. Recall his finding that the upper limit of their ages at the time of their innovations wasn't increasing; achievement fell off sharply after about age forty, and the average age of the whole group was about thirty-nine. His study period ended in 1999, but if one looks at Nobel Prize winners in physics since then, one finds a noticeably older group. Their average age at the time of their achievement was about forty-one, and in this discipline where Nobelist Paul Dirac thought a person was “better dead than living still” after age twenty-nine, we find among the twenty-two winners from 2000 through 2007 some who made their mark at ages fifty-eight, sixty-one, and sixty-five.

Our insight into how it's possible to maintain top-level performance into the later decades of life helps us understand those cases in which it doesn't happen. Most people stop the deliberate practice necessary to sustain their performance. We can't necessarily criticize them. It may be a completely rational decision, for example in the case of a pro athlete who has earned millions of dollars and has little to gain but much to lose, in the possibility of serious injury, by continuing to play. Businesspeople who get rich early may see no further reason to keep challenging themselves.

More broadly, every high performer is continually making a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to deliberate practice, and as the years go by, the costs increase while the benefits diminish. Improving performance becomes more difficult, and the performer focuses more on just maintaining a given level; as even that become unrealistic, the performer seeks ways to compensate for the encroaching weaknesses. The hours required for all this remain punishing, and it's easy to understand how elite performers may come to feel the effort is no longer worth what it produces. The key concept, however, is that for many years in a person's life—more years than most of us believe—performance deterioration in our chosen field isn't an inexorable process. It is, rather, a choice about how much effort we want to invest in our performance. As Karl Malone, the NBA's second all-time top scorer, told the
Los Angeles Times
about aging athletes, “It's not that their bodies stop, it's just that they've decided to stop pushing it.”