Talent Is Overrated (9 page)

The result was a vast trove of data. A layman looking at it all would simply conclude that the lives and behaviors of these violinists had been analyzed thirteen ways from Sunday. But as it happened, the results that emerged from all this analysis were particularly clear and strong.

By many measures, all three groups of violinists were about the same. They all started studying the violin at around age eight and decided to become musicians at around age fifteen, with no statistically significant differences among the groups. By the time of the study, every subject had been studying the violin for at least a decade.

Perhaps most striking, all three groups were spending the same total amount of time on music-related activities—lessons, practice, classes, and so on—about fifty-one hours a week. The researchers found no statistically significant differences among the groups on this measure. That is, all three groups were getting up every morning and putting in the hours, throwing themselves at their chosen career in a fairly committed way with a demanding workweek equal to what a great many people clock in a wide range of fields.

The violinists were quite certain which activity was most important for making them better: It was practicing by themselves. When asked to rate the relevance of twelve music-related activities and ten non-music-related activities (such as household chores, shopping, leisure) to their progress, solitary practice was number one with a bullet.

They all knew it, but they didn't all do it. Though the violinists understood the importance of practice alone, the amount of time the various groups actually spent practicing alone differed dramatically. The two top groups, the best and better violinists, practiced by themselves about twenty-four hours a week on average. The third group, the good violinists, practiced by themselves only nine hours a week.

This finding becomes even richer with meaning when we consider other aspects of practice. Just as the violinists were sure that it's the most important activity, they were also quite clear that it's hard and it isn't much fun. When they rated activities by effort required, solo practice ranked way harder than playing music for fun, alone or with others, and harder than even the most effortful everyday activity, child care. As for pleasure, practice ranked far below playing for fun and even below formal group performance, which you might reasonably guess would be the most stressful and least fun activity.

Practice is so hard that doing a lot of it requires people to arrange their lives in particular ways. The two top groups of violinists did most of their practicing in the late morning or early afternoon, when they were still fairly fresh. By contrast, violinists in the third group practiced mostly in the late afternoon, when they were more likely to be tired. The two top groups differed from the third group in another way: They slept more. They not only slept more at night, they also took far more afternoon naps. All that practicing seems to demand a lot of recovery.

Solo practice is unusual among music-related activities in that it's largely within the individual's control. Most other activities—taking lessons, attending classes, giving performances—require other people's involvement and are therefore constrained. But with 168 hours in a week, a person can practice by himself or herself just about without limit. In fact, no one in the study came anywhere near spending every available hour on practice.

So all the violinists understood that practicing by themselves was the most important thing they could do to get better. Though they didn't consider it easy or fun, they all had virtually unlimited time in which to do it. On those dimensions, they were all the same. The difference was that some chose to practice more, and those violinists were a great deal better.

The advantage of practice was cumulative. You may have noticed that at the time of the study, the best and better violinists were practicing about the same amount, twenty-four hours a week. While this was enormously more practice than the merely good violinists were doing, the researchers didn't find a significant difference in practice time between the two top groups. That lack of difference would seem to pose a problem. If more practice equals better performance, then why isn't the best group practicing any more than the middle group?

The answer lies in the students' histories. All the research subjects were asked to estimate their weekly practice hours for each year of their violin-playing lives, enabling the researchers to calculate cumulative lifetime totals. The results were extraordinarily clear. By age eighteen, the violinists in the first group had accumulated 7,410 hours of lifetime practice on average, versus 5,301 hours for violinists in the second group and 3,420 hours for those in the third group. All the differences were statistically significant.

Again, the implications are even stronger than they may first appear. Yes, more total practice is very powerfully associated with better performance. But now imagine the situation of a violinist in the third group who decides at age eighteen that he wants to become an international soloist, the next Itzhak Perlman or Joshua Bell. The hard reality is that the best violinists of his age, the ones he'll have to match or beat, have already racked up more than twice as much practice time as he has. If he wants to catch up, he'll have to practice far more than they do, even though he's currently practicing far less (nine hours a week versus twenty-four). So he'll have to multiply his practice time by a huge factor if he wants to catch up before he's an old man, and he'll have to make this all-consuming commitment at just the point in life when a person is expected to take on adult responsibilities and start becoming financially independent. In short, it may be possible in theory for our young man or woman to vault into the world of elite violin soloists, but as a practical matter it will be nearly impossible. The issues implicit in his situation turn out to be highly significant for individuals and organizations generally.

This study was extraordinarily persuasive in answering the question of why some violinists are so much better than others. It was part of a landmark paper on the larger question of why certain people in any field—business, sports, music, science, arts—were extremely good while most people were not. The lead author of that paper—“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”—was Anders Ericsson, the man who fifteen years earlier had helped conduct the experiment with the screaming undergraduate who could remember eighty-two random digits. The implications of that research had never left Ericsson's mind. Now, in this new paper, he and his coauthors, Ralf Th. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, were proposing a new theoretical framework for understanding why some people are so remarkably good at what they do.

They proposed this new framework because the existing one, which relied heavily on the concept of innate talent, was so clearly unsatisfactory. We've already seen many of the problems with it, such as the numerous cases of great performers who showed no evidence of precocity or natural gifts. In addition to these problems, Ericsson and his coauthors had noticed another theme that emerged in research on top-level performers: No matter who they were, or what explanation of their performance was being advanced, it always took them many years to become excellent, and if a person achieves elite status only after many years of toil, assigning the principal role in that success to innate gifts becomes problematic, to say the least.

The phenomenon seems nearly universal. In a famous study of chess players, Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon and William Chase (Ericsson's coauthor on the memory study) proposed “the ten-year rule,” based on their observation that no one seemed to reach the top ranks of chess players without a decade or so of intensive study, and some required much more time. Even Bobby Fischer was not an exception; when he became a grand master at age sixteen, he had been studying chess intensively for nine years. Subsequent research in a wide range of fields has substantiated the ten-year rule everywhere the researchers have looked. In math, science, musical composition, swimming, X-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature—no one, not even the most “talented” performers, became great without at least ten years of very hard preparation. If talent means that success is easy or rapid, as most people seem to believe, then something is obviously wrong with a talent-based explanation of high achievement.

As researchers went further down this road, they noticed something else: Many scientists and authors produce their greatest work only after twenty or more years of devoted effort, which means that in year nineteen they are still getting better. That fact posed additional problems for the talent-based view of exceptional achievement. Francis Galton was absolutely convinced that every person is born with various limits that he simply cannot get past: “His maximum performance becomes a rigidly determinate quantity.” Those limits apply to every kind of endeavor, physical or mental. A person bumps up against his or her limits fairly early in life, Galton believed, and after that, “unless he is incurably blinded by self-conceit, he learns precisely of what performance he is capable, and what other enterprises lie beyond his compass.” At that sobering moment, Galton said, the wise person literally gives up trying to do more. “He is no longer tormented into hopeless efforts by the fallacious promptings of overweening vanity. . . .” He discards the foolish notion that he can ever do better, makes peace with the idea that he's as good as he'll ever be, and “finds true moral repose in an honest conviction that he is engaged in as much good work as his nature has rendered him capable of performing.” At least Galton made it sound noble.

Yet a hundred years later, abundant evidence showed clearly that people can keep getting better long after they should have reached their “rigidly determinate” natural limits. The examples were not just great writers, artists, businesspeople, inventors, and other eminences producing their best work three or four decades into their careers. By the late nineteenth century, scientific research was showing repeatedly that ordinary people in various lines of work could keep getting better even after their performance had apparently plateaued. Typists, telegraph operators, typesetters—highly experienced workers in all these jobs, whose performance hadn't improved in years, suddenly got markedly better when they were offered incentives or given new kinds of training. This evidence was obviously a big problem for the you've-got-it-or-you-don't view of achievement.

Summing up the extensive evidence, Ericsson and his coauthors observed that “the search for stable heritable characteristics that could predict or at least account for the superior performance of eminent individuals has been surprisingly unsuccessful.” Yet at the time of their article, the talent-based view of high achievement was still the explanation most widely favored. Why? The authors offered a simple reason: “The conviction in the importance of talent appears to be based on the insufficiency of alternative hypotheses to explain the exceptional nature of expert performers.”

That is, no one had a better idea. So here was their better idea.

It could be put very simply: What the authors called “deliberate practice” makes all the difference. Or as they stated it with stark clarity in their scholarly paper, “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

This position was highly significant for two reasons. First, it explicitly rejected the you've-got-it-or-you-don't view. It explained high achievement without the concept of talent playing any role. The authors accepted that the great performers in any field really are qualitatively different from the rest of us but disputed the common view of where those differences come from. As they stated, “we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent.” So here was a fundamentally new view of why some people are so extremely good at what they do.

The second reason why Ericsson et al.'s new framework was significant is that it resolved the huge contradiction in the body of scholarly research on performance and high achievement as well as in our everyday experience. On the one hand, we see everywhere that years of hard work do not make most people great at what they do. If all we did was open our eyes and look around, we would probably agree with Galton: The vast majority of people we work with, or play golf with, or play Doom with, got better for a while and then leveled off, having apparently reached the limit of their abilities; years of further work have not made them any better. On the other hand, we see repeatedly that the people who have achieved the most are the ones who have worked the hardest. How can both sets of observations be true?

The framework advanced by Ericsson and his colleagues goes to the heart of this contradiction. The problem, they observed, is that “the current definition of practice is vague.” Their framework is not based on a simplistic “practice makes perfect” observation. Rather, it is based on their highly specific concept of “deliberate practice.”

Precisely what this means turns out to be critically important. It does not mean what most people think it does. An understanding of it illuminates the path to high achievement in any field, not just by individuals but also by teams and organizations. And by the way, it shows, among many other things, that Jerry Rice knew exactly what he was doing.

Chapter Five

What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn't

 
 
We all know what practice is. I do it all the time. Odds are good that you do it in a similar general way, regardless of what you're practicing. When I practice golf, I go to the driving range and get two big buckets of balls. I pick my spot, put down my bag of clubs, and tip over one of the buckets. I read somewhere that you should warm up with short irons, so I take out an 8- or 9-iron and start hitting. I also read somewhere that you should always have a target, so I pick one of the fake “greens” out on the range and aim for it, though I'm not really sure how far away it is. As I work through the short irons, middle irons, long irons, and driver, I hit quite a few bad shots. My usual reaction is to hit another ball as quickly as possible in hopes that it will be a decent shot, and then I can forget about the bad one.