Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-keys-to-being-excellent-at.html

by jeffmiller • 16 years ago

78 16 16 years ago

blogs.hbr.org

jasonshen2• 16 years 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-40...

JabavuAdams• 16 years ago

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

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

Live forever?

jasonshen2• 16 years ago

I'm afraid you're setting yourself up for disappointment there. As the saying goes "if it were easy, everyone would do it."

joshrule2• 16 years 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• 16 years 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-... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece

jacques_chester• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

"Phelps is also faster at processing lactic acid, the fluid which makes muscles ache, than any other known human."

I wish I could recall some details, but that comment reminded me of something I heard about Lance Armstrong, that he possessed some way-out-of-the-norm physiological characteristics that provided some key advantages for bike races.

You have to wonder how common this is, plus the odds of someone with some physiological gift also being attracted to and motivated to pursue a well-matched sport.

msbmsb• 16 years ago

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6273202.stm

Larger lung capacity, larger heart, lower lactic acid levels, higher Vo2 max.

Also: "Spaniard Miguel Indurain, who took five successive [Tour de France] titles, had lungs so big they displaced his stomach, leading to his trademark paunch. Indurain's lung capacity was eight litres, compared to an average of six litres."

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

I think it's fair to draw a distinction between being excellent at something and being the best in the world at something. Any number of people who possess an adequate combination of innate ability and proficiency can qualify as excellent - and beyond a certain threshold, slightly greater proficiency can make up for slightly inferior innate ability.

There are some winner-take-all contests in life in which a tiny advantage in innate ability translates into total victory over everyone else, but in most cases, good enough is just that. Those tiny advantages in innate ability are less significant than the general benefits of training-based proficiency for most activities where excellence is required.

For example, my doctor doesn't have to be the best in the world to diagnose an illness accurately and prescribe an effective treatment. She merely has to be competent enough to accomplish that task.

gchucky• 16 years ago

Actually, there was an article in the NYTimes four years ago about lactic acid, and it turns out that "lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid." (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm...)

So maybe that explains why Phelps can train as he does: if he's producing fuel faster than anyone else, presumably his body is also better adapted to absorbing and using it.

Jabbles2• 16 years 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• 16 years 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...

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.

Jabbles2• 16 years 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.

joshrule2• 16 years 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).

The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?

Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

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