Tourist in NYC: Officer, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?
Police Officer: Practice, practice, practice.
Everyone assumes that Einstein, Beethoven and Michael Jordan achieved remarkable success because of some genetic advantage they had over other people. K. Anders Ericsson, psychologist at Florida State University, has different ideas. He says that talent is not born but made, and is more the result of an investment of effort. Other factors are at work as well, such as supportive environments and skilled mentors.
Ericsson says, however, that not just any kind of effort produces extraordinary talent; rather you must be engaged in what he calls deliberate practice. Haphazard effort won't do. Deliberate practice is activity that is designed to improve performance, that is, it reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. In fact, Ericsson claims that 10, 000 hours of deliberate practice will make anyone an expert in any field.
Now someone has stepped forward to put Ericsson's theory to the test. Dan McLaughlin, a photographer of dental equipment who had never before completed a game of golf, has decided to take up Ericsson's challenge. With the help of a professional coach, he is intent on spending 10, 000 hours of deliberative golf practice. His goal: becoming one of the roughly 250 men on the PGA Tour. It should take him about six years. See 10,000 Hours To Golf Stardom.
In any event, however it comes out, we will soon know whether it's genetics or effort that makes expertise.
4 comments:
I've told this story many times, but I'll put it on record here. When I was working at Carnegie Mellon, we often had lunchtime lectures from various professors and others working in education. These were usually small gatherings in a classroom which allowed us to learn about and critique the current project of the lecturer while we ate our lunch.
One of our lunchtime lecturers was Ericsson. He spoke on his research concerning 'experts'. Just as Myk explains in his post, a lot of his talk was spent debunking the idea that experts are born with some genetic advantage. For example he stated that much has been made of Mozart publishing talented musical compositions by age 6. However, Ericsson says that Mozart's father and teacher just happened to stop publishing music when his son started, so he probably contributed significantly to his son's compositions.
Ericsson's research concentrated on athletes and musicians since they were easier to quantify in accessing whether they were 'experts' than, say, a businessman or engineer. Also, as Myk says, Ericsson promoted the 'hard work through practice' idea as more important than 'genetic talent'.
After the talk was over he stayed and chatted. I suggested that all of these 'experts' had one thing in common—motivational drive that allowed them to work extraordinarily hard. I asked him if, perhaps, that was the genetic trait required to become an expert. While I fully expected him to give all kinds of reasons why that was not the case, all he said was, "Hmmm, well, maybe so."
So, while I'm sure Myk's last sentence was partially 'tongue in cheek', as is this one (again, partially): The real question is whether or not motivation is a genetic trait. We won't know that result through Dan McLaughlin, and I don't think Ericsson will be doing the research on the question either.
If past history is any indication, Dan McLaughlin doesn't appear to have much of a genetic disposition toward motivational drive. To quote one article:
"Dan played competitive tennis as a boy, and was good at it, and then quit. He ran one year of cross country in high school, and was good at it, and then quit. He wanted to run on his own. He followed his brother to Boston University for a year and was a physics and math major, and then quit. Instead, he traveled, alone. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in photojournalism and was a photographer for a newspaper in Chattanooga, Tenn., for a year, and then quit.
He has started five novels.
He took one piano lesson."
But, who knows? The McLaughlin experiment (or the Dan Plan, as he calls it), hardly accounts for all the variables. So, after all this is done, we may not know much more than before and will be forced to admit, echoing Wallace Stevens, that "palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began."
By chance this was in the news today.
Post a Comment