"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all."
-Michelangelo
The talent myth is built on the idea that innate ability, rather than practice, is what
ultimately determines whether we have it within us to achieve excellence.
This is a corrosive idea, robbing individuals of the incentive to transform themselves through effort.
Why spend time and energy seeking to improve, if success is only available to people with
the right genes?
This is the question general public asks themselves.
So what is talent?
Many people feel sure they know it when they see it.
As the managing director of prestigious violin school put it: "Talent is something a top
violin coach can spot in young musicians that marks them out as destined for greatness."
But how does the teacher know, that this accomplished young performer, who looks so gifted, has
not had many hours of special training behind the scenes?
As studies have shown, he doesn't know.
And most of the time, special training by their parents seems to be the case for their "gift".
An investigation of British musicians found that the top performers had learned no faster
than those who reached lower levels of attainment.
For hour by hour, the various groups had improved at almost identical rates.
The difference was simply that top performers had practiced for more hours.
Let me say that again: the top performers, had practiced for more hours.
In 1991 Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University conducted the most
extensive investigation ever undertaken into the cause of outstanding performance.
He was looking for "talent".
The funny this is, he couldn't find any.
His subjects - violinists at the renowned Music Academy of West Berlin in Germany - were
divided into three groups.
The first group comprised the outstanding students: the boys and girls expected to become
international soloists, the pinnacle of musical performance.
These were the kids who would normally be described as super talented, the youngsters
supposedly lucky enough to have been born with special musical genes.
The second group of students were extremely good, but not as accomplished as the top performers.
These were expected to end up playing in the world's top orchestras, but not as star soloists.
In the final group were the least able students: teenagers studying to become music teachers,
a course with far less admission standards.
The ability levels of the three groups were based on the assessment of the professors
and by objective measures, such as success in open competitions.
After a painstaking set of interviews, Ericsson found that the biographical histories of the
three groups were remarkably similar and showed no systematic differences.
But there was one difference between the groups that was both dramatic and unexpected.
The number of hours devoted to serious practice.
By the age of twenty, the best violinists had practiced and average of ten thousand
hours - over two thousand hours more than the good violinists and over six thousand
hours more than the violinists hoping to become music teachers.
These differences are not just statistically significant, they are extraordinary.
Top performers had devoted thousands of additional hours to the task of becoming master performers.
But that's not all.
Ericsson also found that there were no exceptions to this pattern: there was nobody who had
reached the elite group without copious practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off
had failed to excel.
Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest.
Ericsson and his colleagues were astounded by these findings.
That it is practice, not talent, that ultimately matters.
The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long persistence
of deliberate effort to improve performance.
So the question is: How long do you need to practice in order to achieve excellence?
Extensive research has come up with a very specific answer to that question: from art
to science and from board games to tennis, it has been found that a minimum of 10 years
and 10,000 hours is required to reach world class status in any complex task.
In chess for example nobody had attained the level of an international grandmaster with
less than a decade's intense preparation with the game.
An analysis of top nine golfers of the twentieth century, showed that they won their first
international competition at around twenty-five years of age, around ten years after they
started golfing.
The same finding has been discovered in fields as diverse as mathematics, swimming and long
distance running.
This holds true even in academia.
In a study of 120 most important scientists and 120 most famous poets and authors of nineteenths
century, it was found that ten years elapsed between their first work and their best work.
10 years and 10,000 hours are the magic number for attainment of excellence.
But is the time we put in all there is to it?
Short answer: No.
Think on how most of us go about our lives.
When we learn a new task, like driving a car, we concentrate hard to master the skills necessary.
At first we are slow and awkward, and our movements are characterized by conscious control.
But as we get more familiar, the skills are absorbed in implicit memory, and we no longer
give much though to them.
What happens is we become content with our current skills and stop with the conscious
attention.
We cruise along, attending to other things at the wheel.
Basically, we are on autopilot and we're not improving.
That's why we don't necessarily become better drivers as years go by.
It's the same way with our jobs.
We do it with our minds absent and just go through the motions.
This is why length of time in many occupations is only weakly related to performance.
Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence.
In many jobs and sports, it is possible to clock up endless hours without improving at all.
Take me for example.
I play basketball every Friday with friends.
It is fun and sociable, but it has nothing to do with the kind of practice undertaken
by aspiring NBA players.
I have not improved in basketball in three years.
Why?
Because I have been cruising along on autopilot.
I'm not working on my free throws.
I'm not trying to improve my aim.
I don't check my stance, before I try to hit the hoop.
I'm just having fun.
This shows us that not all practice is equal.
When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly.
Expert practice is different.
It consists of considerable and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well.
Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can't do, that you
turn into the expert you want to become.
This is called "deliberate practice."
So the hours we put in are meaningless if we are not trying to improve on our weak spots.
World class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach and not quite
making it.
It is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again.
The paradox of excellence is that it is built upon the foundations of necessary failure.
Now to summarize: We are not born talented, we become better at a certain skill by practicing it.
It's not like you have some special gene that makes you a god at playing the guitar, but
you don't know that, because you never played it before.
There are no world class performers that became world class without practice.
The violinists didn't just pick up a violin and started playing complex symphonies.
They had to learn step by step.
This is the iceberg illusion.
We only see the fruits of labor, but not the hours someone put in, to achieve their excellence.
Now that you know that world class performance comes from thousands of hours of deliberate
practice, you just may one day become one of these so called "talented people".
Thanks for watching.
Let me know if you believe in talent or practice in the comments below.
I hope you've learned something new and became better than yesterday.