10 ms·

I have my own theory. The idea is that there are lots, lots and lots of tiny unspoken things which could make huge difference in long run. And those who success

I have my own theory. The idea is that there are lots, lots and lots of tiny unspoken things which could make huge difference in long run. And those who successful doesn't necessary know their own tiny things they got right. Let's say there are two persons A and B who is training in chess. Person A trained for X hours and became chess master. Person B trained for 10X hours and didn't get even close to master level. The truth is that person A got some tiny unspoken ideas right (may be he even discovered them by coincidence). And person B got this tiny things wrong. No matter how much person B is training, he or she won't improve in chess until B find right way. Sad story is that A couldn't even realize what exactly he got right and take it for granted. So when A explains B how he train/play, he or she could say very high level things (which you can find in any grandmaster book) skipping huge unspoken context. That's why many people who read books written by chess grandmasters, don't become grandmasters. Chess grandmaster could try to explain you how he or she plays but these words has very limited power since unspoken context matters most. So if you didn't progress much in chess after learning theory and practising and reading grandmaster's book, it could mean that you just missed something very fundamental tiny thing which nobody speaks about. May be your spatial representation of how pieces move in the board is not suitable that's why for you it requires more computational power to imagine whole dynamics of some given chess position. May be if you play other similar games and then return to chess, you fix your spatial representation of chess in your head. May be even solving math geometric puzzles will help you with that. My point is that if you don't progress don't give up but don't bang your head against the wall. Instead think about more delicate things happen in your brain. Your goal is to find tiny thing in your head and fix it. I do believe if you find this needle in haystack, then you could make huge breakthrough. I think true intellect lies in metacognition. I mean how you think about thinking, how you think about learning.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
djaychela 10y ago
Absolutely. I'm a guitarist, and have been for over 30 years. I'm good, but not REALLY good, and I hit a wall in terms of technical ability / speed a long time ago - after about 5 years of playing. Nothing I did improved my speed and I didn't have the accuracy of a Malmsteen or MacAlpine, despite practicing religiously for hours at a time. I thought I had a speed limit and that was that - everyone I consulted felt the same. It's only been in the last few months and via complete luck on YouTube that I appear to have discovered the missing piece of the jigsaw (two way pick slanting) - had I known this when I was 18 I would have been of a much higher level. Being 45, having old bad habits to overcome and the demands of a family with 4 kids and a chronic bad back means I don't have the time to devote to the improvements I'd love to make, but from my experience, I know that "practice" is not enough, it needs to be the right practice, and sometimes that means a subtle nuance which is not apparent to some, maybe for years. I've helped some of the kids I teach in a similar way, with them then "getting" an idea they've not understood for a long time, so there needs to be more analysis than simply "practice", in my opinion.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Was it just luck, or are you actually not creative enough to figure out new and useful things in your own? (say, extended guitar playing techniques) An open question so far.
  - gknoy 10y ago
    In the history of skills (guitar playing, mastery of swordplay, music composition, etc), it's not inconceivable that someone could go a long time and not happen to notice the same things that masters of the discipline have been taught. Most human endeavors and learning comes not by independent discovery of everything, but by building on what the people before us have learned. It's a rare genius who can skip that. Swordmasters in the renaissance studied each others' books and teachings, much as physics students might study the publications of others in their discipline. The insights they each made might not have all been in technique itself, but sometimes in new ways of teaching it, or describing the nuances of what their masters ("no, do it THIS way ...") had told them in a different way which made it easier to teach. For many physical endeavors, it seems like there are often a few Good ways to do something Right -- shoot a bow, hold a calligraphy pen, etc. You MIGHT stumble upon the best way to do it on your own, but it seems a little ridiculous to scoff that someone is "not creative enough" to figure out what nuance of technique they have been missing.
    - hal9000xp 10y ago
      > Most human endeavors and learning comes not by independent discovery of everything, but by building on what the people before us have learned. That's correct! Like Isaac Newton said - if I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants. Link: http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/9285 http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/o...
  - djaychela 10y ago
    No, I've figured out LOADS of stuff on my own and then found others had done so, or had different names for it. I started doing hybrid picking when no-one I knew was doing it, and other techniques. Remember as well, this was in the 80s - there just wasn't the access to information that is available today; the kids I teach now say "how are you so good at working things out?", but it was the only way to play most of the music I liked when I was a kid; good transcriptions were like hen's teeth, and I remember having to negotiate with the guy who owned the paper shop (where I had a paper round - remember I was 14-15 at the time!) to speak to his distributor to order american guitar magazines so I could get the good stuff. I'd go to London once every couple of months and buy a VHS instructional tape. It wasn't like today when you can find an in-depth lesson from a world master within 5 minutes. But the point is that it was one specific (and subtle) technique that I missed, and everyone else missed, or didn't instruct people to do - that completely stalled my playing. And I know I'm not the only one!
klum 10y ago
I think in a similar way, and one of the nice consequences of this is, as you mention, that there's hope: you can try to attack your problem in as many ways as possible from as many angles as possible and find the "tiny unspoken thing" in a context one might not normally expect it.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Might be that creativity is a heritable part of talent too. Generating multiple contexts, finding those tiny inspirations. An interesting counterpart is that our current education systems are trying their best to suppress creativity and give fish instead of a fishing rod.
nylsaar 10y ago
Your theory suggests all people are equivalent, but learn by happenstance. To further your theory, would people in a set of skills have random attributes? It would be interesting to see if all chess grandmasters share any common traits, or not.
- hal9000xp 10y ago
  My theory doesn't suggest that all people are equivalent. As I stated pure intellect lies in metacognition. I also think that learning or solving problems is not deterministic algorithm, it's a heuristic. If it's heuristic there are lots of random elements and tuning. Obviously, everybody have their own "hardware" limit determined by genes but often people make big mistake thinking they already reached their limit by simply getting stuck in some topic without seriously and very fundamentally reconsider their whole approach to the problem or learning process itself. I think often in these situations, possible limit is much, much, much higher than one might think.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  I'm not OP, but I don't think that was an intended implication. It is my understanding that the genetic component of intelligence is widely acknowledged. I think the OP's model is still valid and useful, despite genetically-driven differences.
- joe563323 10y ago
  True. Gene matters. But that does not mean we should give up hope. This is not being stubborn. This is just logical. Its like running two operating systems on a same hardware. One of them must be really faster than the other just because it has the instructions in different order and that's meta cognition. Keep changing the order of instructions, because we don't have a proof for the limit on the hardware.
neom 10y ago
In my opinion, this is why dyslexic folks think differently and neurodiversity is real.
ljk 10y ago
That's why it's important to work hard AND work smart.
bernardlunn 10y ago
Absolutely. I think you just described what in short hand is normally called talent.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mehwoot 10y ago
By coincidence, I just finished Anders Ericsson's (the person mentioned in the article as arguing in favour of practice) book and he mentions pretty much exactly this. It's not that it's just about practice, but it's about practicing in the right way and having the correct mental models of what you're doing in order to improve. He believes that if you practice without focusing on the correct things and without knowing how to get better (usually by having a good coach who knows what it will take and what techniques you need to learn) then you can't expect to get as good as other people.
joe563323 10y ago
Very Thoughtful comment. Some things we knew intuitively but have never spoken out in words to oneself and those kind of thoughts kind of fades away or lies in very deep in the memory. This comment is one of those kind of Things. Thanks for putting it in words.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
Yup. Best thing I ever did for my dancing was reading "The Inner Game of Tennis".
groaner 10y ago
This is basically how I feel about dating.
cko 10y ago
I like this view, that there are many subtle things that one person got right and another didn't - couldn't you say that person A was just naturally (genetically advantaged) to discovering those things in their field of mastery? I would also add to that curiosity, which leads to desire, which makes mastery that much easier.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  You could settle for a genetics explanation, but why would you? Other hypotheses are much more easily testable, and certainly more inspiring to the newcomer, and haven't been scientifically exhausted yet. If everyone just said "it's probably not in my genes" they wouldn't even try, disregarding tons of historical factors that may have stopped their ancestors from creating a record.
blfr 10y ago
here are lots, lots and lots of tiny unspoken things which could make huge difference in long run The technical term for these tiny unspoken things is, I believe, "alleles."
joaorico 10y ago
Absolutely, and this is right at the center of Ericsson's theory of excellence, learning and deliberate practice [1]. He calls this 'mental representations', and together with the 'brain's flexibility' they form the 2 pillars of his theory. The rest of the theory (e.g., deliberate practice) stems from these 2, that is, how can we actually change our brain to record in our long-term memory the most and best (pre-computed) mental representations. That's what distinguishes an expert: the quantity and quality of the mental representations. The method involves 6 factors that have to be adapted to the specific skill: * 1. having specific goals * 2. getting slightly out of your comfort zone * 3. focus and concentration during practice (ideally close to 1 hour) * 4. feedback * 5. practising a sufficiently developed human activity * 6. having a teacher/coach (and keep getting a better one, adjusted to your current level) * 7. (additional point: starting early in life) Point 5 is the difference between practising, say, the violin (for which we have literally centuries of the best performers teaching the following generations, always improving, up to a near threshold) to practising say skateboard which is a few decades old of serious practice or any recent boardgame, say. No one knows what are the best tactics and strategies. Even sports: consider how many world records from some years ago would not qualify you for the olympics today. Naturally if you're not learning the violin but something else less developed, you just try to find the best current method and mental representations, and discover better ones to gain a decisive edge on your competion (with perhaps less practice time or talent (eg, height)). I also agree with your point on metacognition, but that's an even broader subject to discuss. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp/0544456238 https://smile.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Prad 10y ago
Great comment. One thing I believe is worth mentioning is that even if a person practices to find this "tiny thing" in their heads and fix it, they may not find it for a very long time. Some people can practice something for decades and still not be professional with whatever they are doing. They could also figure one "tiny thing" out but their may be many more "tiny things" to uncover after that.
uola 10y ago
While I agree with your overall point, that's not the way I would express it. Mistakes that make a big difference are by definition not tiny. It's just that a less sophisticated practitioners don't realize that it matters. Being better at something is often realizing what does and what doesn't matter.
laurieg 10y ago
I encountered this in real life in a completely different field. As a schoolboy I studied the trumpet. My teacher was an excellent trumpeter. He gave me exercises every week and said "Just play these for an hour a day and you'll have no problems". I would go away and put in my hour a day practice and get no where. I wanted to play the high notes like those jazz bands but I would get no where. I'd go back to my teacher and he'd give me another set of exercises. Diligently I go away and repeat the same process. Other students of his seemed to do well, but not everyone. It seemed really rather random. He was a great player but I believe he had very little introspection and didn't really know what made him great in a pedagogical sense. He was likely making minute movements with the muscles of his mouth that he had no idea about but he just stumbled across with his hours of practice. After this experience I realised how skill in a topic and teaching ability are quite different. Sometimes a person has both at a high level and is really an excellent teacher, but often there are times where someone is a player, not a teacher.
- tomca32 10y ago
  Coming from the world of classical ballet, this is a very familiar issue. In ballet, it is often said that the best dancers are the worst teachers. The very best teachers are the ones who had no talent and spent insane hours trying to figure out which muscles to use, at what moment and with what intensity. They are the ones who will tell you that you need to push the opposing arm in the turn in order to have enough force for multiple turns without falling over. The best dancers will tell you to "just turn". They have a natural sense for balance in turns and don't understand why you keep falling over.
danblick 10y ago
Anders Ericsson (mentioned in the story) wrote an accessible book ("Peak") about his research.* He says that the route to optimal performance is "deliberate practice" and that one of the components of deliberate practice is supervision by a coach who can provide feedback and personalized challenges. I think that kind of fits with your idea, except that he suggests that the source of feedback should be another person. * Incidentally, he also debunks the whole "20000 hours" thing and seems not too keen on Malcolm Gladwell.
Natanael_L 10y ago
There's a term for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

djaychela 10y ago

Absolutely. I'm a guitarist, and have been for over 30 years. I'm good, but not REALLY good, and I hit a wall in terms of technical ability / speed a long time ago - after about 5 years of playing. Nothing I did improved my speed and I didn't have the accuracy of a Malmsteen or MacAlpine, despite practicing religiously for hours at a time. I thought I had a speed limit and that was that - everyone I consulted felt the same. It's only been in the last few months and via complete luck on YouTube that I appear to have discovered the missing piece of the jigsaw (two way pick slanting) - had I known this when I was 18 I would have been of a much higher level. Being 45, having old bad habits to overcome and the demands of a family with 4 kids and a chronic bad back means I don't have the time to devote to the improvements I'd love to make, but from my experience, I know that "practice" is not enough, it needs to be the right practice, and sometimes that means a subtle nuance which is not apparent to some, maybe for years. I've helped some of the kids I teach in a similar way, with them then "getting" an idea they've not understood for a long time, so there needs to be more analysis than simply "practice", in my opinion.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Was it just luck, or are you actually not creative enough to figure out new and useful things in your own? (say, extended guitar playing techniques) An open question so far.
- gknoy 10y ago
  In the history of skills (guitar playing, mastery of swordplay, music composition, etc), it's not inconceivable that someone could go a long time and not happen to notice the same things that masters of the discipline have been taught. Most human endeavors and learning comes not by independent discovery of everything, but by building on what the people before us have learned. It's a rare genius who can skip that. Swordmasters in the renaissance studied each others' books and teachings, much as physics students might study the publications of others in their discipline. The insights they each made might not have all been in technique itself, but sometimes in new ways of teaching it, or describing the nuances of what their masters ("no, do it THIS way ...") had told them in a different way which made it easier to teach. For many physical endeavors, it seems like there are often a few Good ways to do something Right -- shoot a bow, hold a calligraphy pen, etc. You MIGHT stumble upon the best way to do it on your own, but it seems a little ridiculous to scoff that someone is "not creative enough" to figure out what nuance of technique they have been missing.
  - hal9000xp 10y ago
    > Most human endeavors and learning comes not by independent discovery of everything, but by building on what the people before us have learned. That's correct! Like Isaac Newton said - if I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants. Link: http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/9285 http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/o...
- djaychela 10y ago
  No, I've figured out LOADS of stuff on my own and then found others had done so, or had different names for it. I started doing hybrid picking when no-one I knew was doing it, and other techniques. Remember as well, this was in the 80s - there just wasn't the access to information that is available today; the kids I teach now say "how are you so good at working things out?", but it was the only way to play most of the music I liked when I was a kid; good transcriptions were like hen's teeth, and I remember having to negotiate with the guy who owned the paper shop (where I had a paper round - remember I was 14-15 at the time!) to speak to his distributor to order american guitar magazines so I could get the good stuff. I'd go to London once every couple of months and buy a VHS instructional tape. It wasn't like today when you can find an in-depth lesson from a world master within 5 minutes. But the point is that it was one specific (and subtle) technique that I missed, and everyone else missed, or didn't instruct people to do - that completely stalled my playing. And I know I'm not the only one!

klum 10y ago

I think in a similar way, and one of the nice consequences of this is, as you mention, that there's hope: you can try to attack your problem in as many ways as possible from as many angles as possible and find the "tiny unspoken thing" in a context one might not normally expect it.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Might be that creativity is a heritable part of talent too. Generating multiple contexts, finding those tiny inspirations. An interesting counterpart is that our current education systems are trying their best to suppress creativity and give fish instead of a fishing rod.

nylsaar 10y ago

Your theory suggests all people are equivalent, but learn by happenstance. To further your theory, would people in a set of skills have random attributes? It would be interesting to see if all chess grandmasters share any common traits, or not.

hal9000xp 10y ago
My theory doesn't suggest that all people are equivalent. As I stated pure intellect lies in metacognition. I also think that learning or solving problems is not deterministic algorithm, it's a heuristic. If it's heuristic there are lots of random elements and tuning. Obviously, everybody have their own "hardware" limit determined by genes but often people make big mistake thinking they already reached their limit by simply getting stuck in some topic without seriously and very fundamentally reconsider their whole approach to the problem or learning process itself. I think often in these situations, possible limit is much, much, much higher than one might think.
dwaltrip 10y ago
I'm not OP, but I don't think that was an intended implication. It is my understanding that the genetic component of intelligence is widely acknowledged. I think the OP's model is still valid and useful, despite genetically-driven differences.
joe563323 10y ago
True. Gene matters. But that does not mean we should give up hope. This is not being stubborn. This is just logical. Its like running two operating systems on a same hardware. One of them must be really faster than the other just because it has the instructions in different order and that's meta cognition. Keep changing the order of instructions, because we don't have a proof for the limit on the hardware.

neom 10y ago

In my opinion, this is why dyslexic folks think differently and neurodiversity is real.

ljk 10y ago

That's why it's important to work hard AND work smart.

bernardlunn 10y ago

Absolutely. I think you just described what in short hand is normally called talent.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mehwoot 10y ago

By coincidence, I just finished Anders Ericsson's (the person mentioned in the article as arguing in favour of practice) book and he mentions pretty much exactly this. It's not that it's just about practice, but it's about practicing in the right way and having the correct mental models of what you're doing in order to improve. He believes that if you practice without focusing on the correct things and without knowing how to get better (usually by having a good coach who knows what it will take and what techniques you need to learn) then you can't expect to get as good as other people.

joe563323 10y ago

Very Thoughtful comment. Some things we knew intuitively but have never spoken out in words to oneself and those kind of thoughts kind of fades away or lies in very deep in the memory. This comment is one of those kind of Things. Thanks for putting it in words.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago

Yup. Best thing I ever did for my dancing was reading "The Inner Game of Tennis".

groaner 10y ago

This is basically how I feel about dating.

cko 10y ago

I like this view, that there are many subtle things that one person got right and another didn't - couldn't you say that person A was just naturally (genetically advantaged) to discovering those things in their field of mastery? I would also add to that curiosity, which leads to desire, which makes mastery that much easier.

RodericDay 10y ago
You could settle for a genetics explanation, but why would you? Other hypotheses are much more easily testable, and certainly more inspiring to the newcomer, and haven't been scientifically exhausted yet. If everyone just said "it's probably not in my genes" they wouldn't even try, disregarding tons of historical factors that may have stopped their ancestors from creating a record.

blfr 10y ago

here are lots, lots and lots of tiny unspoken things which could make huge difference in long run The technical term for these tiny unspoken things is, I believe, "alleles."

joaorico 10y ago

Absolutely, and this is right at the center of Ericsson's theory of excellence, learning and deliberate practice [1]. He calls this 'mental representations', and together with the 'brain's flexibility' they form the 2 pillars of his theory. The rest of the theory (e.g., deliberate practice) stems from these 2, that is, how can we actually change our brain to record in our long-term memory the most and best (pre-computed) mental representations. That's what distinguishes an expert: the quantity and quality of the mental representations. The method involves 6 factors that have to be adapted to the specific skill: * 1. having specific goals * 2. getting slightly out of your comfort zone * 3. focus and concentration during practice (ideally close to 1 hour) * 4. feedback * 5. practising a sufficiently developed human activity * 6. having a teacher/coach (and keep getting a better one, adjusted to your current level) * 7. (additional point: starting early in life) Point 5 is the difference between practising, say, the violin (for which we have literally centuries of the best performers teaching the following generations, always improving, up to a near threshold) to practising say skateboard which is a few decades old of serious practice or any recent boardgame, say. No one knows what are the best tactics and strategies. Even sports: consider how many world records from some years ago would not qualify you for the olympics today. Naturally if you're not learning the violin but something else less developed, you just try to find the best current method and mental representations, and discover better ones to gain a decisive edge on your competion (with perhaps less practice time or talent (eg, height)). I also agree with your point on metacognition, but that's an even broader subject to discuss. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp/0544456238 https://smile.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Prad 10y ago

Great comment. One thing I believe is worth mentioning is that even if a person practices to find this "tiny thing" in their heads and fix it, they may not find it for a very long time. Some people can practice something for decades and still not be professional with whatever they are doing. They could also figure one "tiny thing" out but their may be many more "tiny things" to uncover after that.

uola 10y ago

While I agree with your overall point, that's not the way I would express it. Mistakes that make a big difference are by definition not tiny. It's just that a less sophisticated practitioners don't realize that it matters. Being better at something is often realizing what does and what doesn't matter.

laurieg 10y ago

I encountered this in real life in a completely different field. As a schoolboy I studied the trumpet. My teacher was an excellent trumpeter. He gave me exercises every week and said "Just play these for an hour a day and you'll have no problems". I would go away and put in my hour a day practice and get no where. I wanted to play the high notes like those jazz bands but I would get no where. I'd go back to my teacher and he'd give me another set of exercises. Diligently I go away and repeat the same process. Other students of his seemed to do well, but not everyone. It seemed really rather random. He was a great player but I believe he had very little introspection and didn't really know what made him great in a pedagogical sense. He was likely making minute movements with the muscles of his mouth that he had no idea about but he just stumbled across with his hours of practice. After this experience I realised how skill in a topic and teaching ability are quite different. Sometimes a person has both at a high level and is really an excellent teacher, but often there are times where someone is a player, not a teacher.

tomca32 10y ago
Coming from the world of classical ballet, this is a very familiar issue. In ballet, it is often said that the best dancers are the worst teachers. The very best teachers are the ones who had no talent and spent insane hours trying to figure out which muscles to use, at what moment and with what intensity. They are the ones who will tell you that you need to push the opposing arm in the turn in order to have enough force for multiple turns without falling over. The best dancers will tell you to "just turn". They have a natural sense for balance in turns and don't understand why you keep falling over.

danblick 10y ago

Anders Ericsson (mentioned in the story) wrote an accessible book ("Peak") about his research.* He says that the route to optimal performance is "deliberate practice" and that one of the components of deliberate practice is supervision by a coach who can provide feedback and personalized challenges. I think that kind of fits with your idea, except that he suggests that the source of feedback should be another person. * Incidentally, he also debunks the whole "20000 hours" thing and seems not too keen on Malcolm Gladwell.

Natanael_L 10y ago

There's a term for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge