Penelope Trunk points to an article in the Harvard Business Review that describes why time is more important than talent for aspiring experts.
Back in 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, published a landmark book, Developing Talent in Young People, which examined the critical factors that contribute to talent. He took a deep retrospective look at the childhoods of 120 elite performers who had won international competitions or awards in fields ranging from music and the arts to mathematics and neurology. Surprisingly, Bloom’s work found no early indicators that could have predicted the virtuosos’ success. Subsequent research indicating that there is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports, and medicine has borne out his findings. The only innate differences that turn out to be significant—and they matter primarily in sports—are height and body size.So what does correlate with success? One thing emerges very clearly from Bloom’s work: All the superb performers he investigated had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years. Later research building on Bloom’s pioneering study revealed that the amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved. Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born. These conclusions are based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible. Most of these studies were compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, published last year by Cambridge University Press and edited by K. Anders Ericsson, one of the authors of this article. The 900-page-plus handbook includes contributions from more than 100 leading scientists who have studied expertise and top performance in a wide variety of domains: surgery, acting, chess, writing, computer programming, ballet, music, aviation, firefighting, and many others.
So let's look at the three things required for mastery of a domain.
1. Intense practice. Frequent, focused practice in the domain you are mastering. In "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell proposed a "10,000-hour rule" and claimed that the key to proficiency in any field is to spend 10,000 hours practicing it. Additional hours of practice no doubt lead to diminishing returns, but if you want to be a world-class expert you'll need every bit of incremental improvement.
2. Devoted teachers. Finding someone better than you who is willing to coach you can be difficult, but is critical for success. Research and and practice are great, but a coach can provide immediate constructive feedback that will multiply the value of your R&P. In addition to finding a good coach, you must cultivate yourself as a good student and be open to honest criticism. A good coach can tell you when you just don't have what it takes to make forward progress and that you should adjust your focus.
3. Enthusiastic support from family. If your family doesn't support you, then you need to choose between them and your quest for mastery. It's as simple as that. Intense practice takes time and energy, and if your family is not supportive then no one will be happy, and you will not be effective. No matter how supportive your family is, you will sometimes need to make a trade-off between your family and your quest -- and every time you choose your family you will fall one step behind the people who didn't. It's harsh but true. For myself, I'm fine with sacrificing incremental mastery for my family, but my eyes are open and I recognize the cost.
What I crave most are teachers and mentors... not just one, but as many as I can get my hands on. Most of the people who can teach me are on their own quest for mastery, so I have to position myself as a student who can be taught without distracting them from their own ambitions.
Do these keys to mastery ring true in your life? Have you found the perfect teacher for your domain? How do you balance your quest and your family?
I once went to a seminar that, among other things, brought up this kind of research. The seminar was offered by "life coaches" for free as a really elaborate pitch for their services. (I didn't sign up in the end). They took what they learned from studies on people who are very successful in certain fields, and applied it to normal people who want to be more successful in life (in careers, relationships, finances, health, etc). I had been exposed to most of these ideas before but never saw them woven together so well. So now when I hear about one, I think about the others:
- this "10,000 hours of mastery" idea (and other similar ideas, like what you wrote in this post);
- Carol Dweck's research on how, when you see failures as learning opportunities and see challenges as informative tests (rather than as scary occasions when you look bad by not knowing what you're doing), you can learn almost anything, and improve almost any skill. I.e. people who are good at things are people who keep trying and aren't afraid of making mistakes (and NOT so much the people who have natural in-born talent).
- Ideas by Jonathan Haidt, and Chip and Dan Heath, about how to make changes that stick, be it in yourself as an individual or in a group you're trying to lead. Google "The Mahout The Elephant And The Path" for more details. The basic idea is that your rational self only goes so far when you try to motivate yourself; you also need to engage your irrational, animal, emotional side. And, ideally, you need to change things in the world around you to make it easier to do the right thing.
- Some research on virtuosos, and on camps that train Olympic athletes (and athletes-to-be, and young musicians, and other people who want to start early at becoming the best). Out of all the stuff mentioned in that seminar, this is the research I had NOT heard of, and I've been meaning to look it up. The key idea supposedly is that these people are motivated to put so much work at improving themselves because they can SEE themselves as being really good in the future. You might try playing the piano, and drop it after a while because it's hard and you're not having fun with it. But if you know a very good piano player, and if you're confident that you can get to that level by trying, and if that image is well-developed in your mind, then it will be motivating. I know that's true for me; Silly as it might sound, when I was a little kid I saw fictitious "inventors" like Doc Brown and Gyro Gearloose and thought "I really, really want to be like that when I grow up". When I was a little older, it was Kelly Johnson and Paul MacCready and Burt Rutan. And now I'm almost there. Anyways, I still want to read more about this idea of how people are motivated by an image of future mastery. The coaches giving the seminar made it sound like a very powerful idea.
And back to what you wrote about here... If you give me a complicated structure (like an airplane tail) and tell me how it's loaded, I can tell you (before I do any math) that "This part is going to bend this way, that part is going to twist that way. These are going to be the most highly loaded parts, and if anything breaks, it will be them, unless you make them thicker than the rest. But if you make them too thick they won't stretch, and you'll see failure where they meet the thinner parts. If this part breaks, then most of the load will be taken by that part", etc... or, at least, "I'm not sure whether the part in tension will tear before or after the part in compression buckles, but it will be pretty close". This intuition doesn't give me numbers, but it's still very valuable when I set up my structural simulations, since it tells me when the results are not right, and saves me the time of modeling the failure events that are least likely. My intuition has actually sometimes been better than those of my team's leads; when we disagree on how a simulation will turn out, I'm usually right. The reason I'm writing this here is that I'm fairly sure that this ability comes from having built things (such as elaborate LEGO structures, and large things out of foam) since I was a little kid. I really think that a childhood of building things (out of materials that were barely stiff enough to hold together) gave me a huge advantage in being a structures engineer.