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Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

78 points by jeffmiller 16y ago

jasonshen 16y ago
The Talent Code is an incredibly good book - I recommend anyone interested in excellence read it. Another thing that's brought up in the book is the idea of commitment. The people who are most committed to the long term improve the most at whatever they do. Wrote more about this here: http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-you-400-percent-better/ http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-you-40...
joshrule 16y ago
I'm especially interested in the statistic that great performers rarely spend more than 4.5 hours/day on their craft. I believe it, but I wonder where he pulls that number from. Any ideas? It's the sort of thing that seems especially important to my goal of doing great science without neglecting my family and other interests (http://wayofthescholar.com http://wayofthescholar.com). The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?
JabavuAdams 16y ago
I'm looking for the one key to being excellent at everything.
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  Live forever?
- jasonshen 16y ago
  I'm afraid you're setting yourself up for disappointment there. As the saying goes "if it were easy, everyone would do it."
- joshrule 16y ago
  I'd guess that there's some irreducible complexity that leaves the number of key traits to excellence at X > 1. If you figure it out, though, be sure to report back.
xiaoma 16y ago
Here's an alternate view. Practice methods matter a great deal because our biology allows us to be extremely adaptive. However, not everybody's biology is identical and those differences will dominate in competitions between groups of highly motivated and well coached individuals. Phelps is a particularly clear example: Phelps, the six-times Olympic swimming champion, has size 14 feet, which act like flippers to propel him through water. He is 6ft 4in tall but has arms that span 6ft 7in from fingertip to fingertip. “If you’re putting a human being together from science this is what you want,” said Rowdy Gaines, the winner of three Olympic swimming gold medals in 1984. Phelps is also faster at processing lactic acid, the fluid which makes muscles ache, than any other known human. After a race, most swimmers measure a lacticity of between 10 and 15 millimoles per litre of blood. Phelps’s count after breaking a world record last year was 5.6. Genadijus Sokolovas, the Team USA physiologist, has measured 5,000 international swimmers and failed to find another with a post-race lacticity count of less than 10. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-michael-phelps-so-good http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  I have in other fora predicted that in future, the Olympics will be reduced to geneticists submitting the genetic profile of individuals in their country. As an Olympic-style weightlifter I can tell you that genes play a distinguishable role in outcomes at the elite level. Muscle vs tendon length, tendon insertion point geometry, muscle bundle geometry, ratio of fast-twitch to slow twitch, neural drive efficiency, length of limbs vs torso, size of hip bones ... But for ordinary human beings like me it's mostly about practice. You might never beat Phelps in a pool, but with dedicated practice you could beat, say, 99% of the human population. Being in the top percentile is as good a definition of 'excellence' as you might want. Likewise I will never beat Hossein Rezazadeh, but there's a reasonable chance I will wind up as one of the strongest 5% of people alive.
  - thesz 16y ago
    >with dedicated practice you could beat, say, 99% of the human population. Exactly. And you will still have time to practice some other field or two to beat there another 98% (or twice that) of people. I mean that such practice leave time for other fruitful pursuits. Often they help each other, like weightlifting and programming.
Jabbles 16y ago
I'm skeptical of this. I see no evidence that the statement "10,000 hours of practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise" is anything but a tautology. Excellence is vaguely defined at best. Perhaps the people that dedicated 10,000 hours to developing a skill are sufficiently rare that we recognise them as experts simply because few other people have put in so much effort. xiaoma mentions Phelps as an example of someone who has a biological advantage over other swimmers, even though they must put in comparable effort/hours of practice. I imagine that if Phelps had been an amateur swimmer, racking up only 1000 hours of practice, his biology would put him at a considerable advantage over similar amateurs. If an objective definition of an "expert swimmer" existed, I imagine Phelps would have obtained that level with significantly fewer hours of practice that any others. I think the biological/mental differences will dominate at every stage, not just at the top level. The article mentions "scientific research", but does not cite any.
- nick_dm 16y ago
  Here's one, and they cite some others in the paper: K.A. Ericsson et al. "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (1993). http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169.9712&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169... It studied the links between the practice habits and attainment levels of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. They concluded that practice was the dominant factor in attainment and there were no individuals who's "talent" would make up for reduced practice. Of course other factors (e.g. talent, quality of teaching) could have affected admissions to the academy in the first place, but the studying suggests that these are not significant once a certain level has been achieved. This was mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" which mentions other studies including the birthday distribution of professional ice hockey players (clustered towards the start of the academic year) that suggest that practice is more significant than genetic ability.
  - Jabbles 16y ago
    That looks like an extremely interesting article. Thank you. A quick skim through showed that the number of violinists they examined was 10, so I am still highly skeptical, but at least after reading this I will be more informed.

78 points by jeffmiller 16y ago

The Talent Code is an incredibly good book - I recommend anyone interested in excellence read it. Another thing that's brought up in the book is the idea of commitment. The people who are most committed to the long term improve the most at whatever they do. Wrote more about this here: http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-you-400-percent-better/ http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-you-40...

joshrule 16y ago

I'm especially interested in the statistic that great performers rarely spend more than 4.5 hours/day on their craft. I believe it, but I wonder where he pulls that number from. Any ideas? It's the sort of thing that seems especially important to my goal of doing great science without neglecting my family and other interests (http://wayofthescholar.com http://wayofthescholar.com). The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?

JabavuAdams 16y ago

I'm looking for the one key to being excellent at everything.

jodrellblank 16y ago
Live forever?
jasonshen 16y ago
I'm afraid you're setting yourself up for disappointment there. As the saying goes "if it were easy, everyone would do it."
joshrule 16y ago
I'd guess that there's some irreducible complexity that leaves the number of key traits to excellence at X > 1. If you figure it out, though, be sure to report back.

xiaoma 16y ago

Here's an alternate view. Practice methods matter a great deal because our biology allows us to be extremely adaptive. However, not everybody's biology is identical and those differences will dominate in competitions between groups of highly motivated and well coached individuals. Phelps is a particularly clear example: Phelps, the six-times Olympic swimming champion, has size 14 feet, which act like flippers to propel him through water. He is 6ft 4in tall but has arms that span 6ft 7in from fingertip to fingertip. “If you’re putting a human being together from science this is what you want,” said Rowdy Gaines, the winner of three Olympic swimming gold medals in 1984. Phelps is also faster at processing lactic acid, the fluid which makes muscles ache, than any other known human. After a race, most swimmers measure a lacticity of between 10 and 15 millimoles per litre of blood. Phelps’s count after breaking a world record last year was 5.6. Genadijus Sokolovas, the Team USA physiologist, has measured 5,000 international swimmers and failed to find another with a post-race lacticity count of less than 10. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-michael-phelps-so-good http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece

jacques_chester 16y ago
I have in other fora predicted that in future, the Olympics will be reduced to geneticists submitting the genetic profile of individuals in their country. As an Olympic-style weightlifter I can tell you that genes play a distinguishable role in outcomes at the elite level. Muscle vs tendon length, tendon insertion point geometry, muscle bundle geometry, ratio of fast-twitch to slow twitch, neural drive efficiency, length of limbs vs torso, size of hip bones ... But for ordinary human beings like me it's mostly about practice. You might never beat Phelps in a pool, but with dedicated practice you could beat, say, 99% of the human population. Being in the top percentile is as good a definition of 'excellence' as you might want. Likewise I will never beat Hossein Rezazadeh, but there's a reasonable chance I will wind up as one of the strongest 5% of people alive.
- thesz 16y ago
  >with dedicated practice you could beat, say, 99% of the human population. Exactly. And you will still have time to practice some other field or two to beat there another 98% (or twice that) of people. I mean that such practice leave time for other fruitful pursuits. Often they help each other, like weightlifting and programming.

Jabbles 16y ago

I'm skeptical of this. I see no evidence that the statement "10,000 hours of practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise" is anything but a tautology. Excellence is vaguely defined at best. Perhaps the people that dedicated 10,000 hours to developing a skill are sufficiently rare that we recognise them as experts simply because few other people have put in so much effort. xiaoma mentions Phelps as an example of someone who has a biological advantage over other swimmers, even though they must put in comparable effort/hours of practice. I imagine that if Phelps had been an amateur swimmer, racking up only 1000 hours of practice, his biology would put him at a considerable advantage over similar amateurs. If an objective definition of an "expert swimmer" existed, I imagine Phelps would have obtained that level with significantly fewer hours of practice that any others. I think the biological/mental differences will dominate at every stage, not just at the top level. The article mentions "scientific research", but does not cite any.

nick_dm 16y ago
Here's one, and they cite some others in the paper: K.A. Ericsson et al. "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (1993). http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169.9712&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169... It studied the links between the practice habits and attainment levels of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. They concluded that practice was the dominant factor in attainment and there were no individuals who's "talent" would make up for reduced practice. Of course other factors (e.g. talent, quality of teaching) could have affected admissions to the academy in the first place, but the studying suggests that these are not significant once a certain level has been achieved. This was mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" which mentions other studies including the birthday distribution of professional ice hockey players (clustered towards the start of the academic year) that suggest that practice is more significant than genetic ability.
- Jabbles 16y ago
  That looks like an extremely interesting article. Thank you. A quick skim through showed that the number of violinists they examined was 10, so I am still highly skeptical, but at least after reading this I will be more informed.