Talent Is Overrated (12 page)

Comparing hours of practice by large numbers of people reveals important trends, but comparing hours put in by specific people may not tell us much if we don't also know the intensity of practice. Which leads to a related question . . .

 
What determines who does it?

 
Considering that deliberate practice is so demanding and in itself unrewarding, and that high achievement demands thousands of hours of it over a period of many years, why do some people put themselves through it while most do not? If the road to extraordinary performance is apparent, then why do so few people choose to follow it? This turns out to be a very deep question, so deep that we devote an entire chapter to it (chapter 11). For the moment we note that merely raising the question introduces another significant issue . . .

 
The whole notion of deliberate practice has for many people created the notion of a nature-versus-nurture battle, with practice advocates pitted against proponents of the divine-spark hypothesis. But it's important to note that advocates of the deliberate practice framework have never excluded the possibility of a genetic role in high-level performance. Their stance has been that they have not yet seen the evidence supporting it. Certainly if we're looking for specific DNA components that make someone an exceptional oboist or fighter pilot or salesperson—or, to put the same idea another way, if we're seeking specific DNA that limits a particular person's ability to excel in these fields—then the search has come up dry so far. But practice proponents do not dispute the possibility that genes could play a role in a person's willingness to put himself or herself through the extremely rigorous demands of becoming an exceptional performer.

Some people, especially those who favor explanations based on innate talents, just don't like that possibility, even though it's genetically based. They call it “the drudge theory.” For now all we can say is that it's a hypothesis that has not been tested, let alone proved or disproved. We may well gain new insight into it as DNA research gallops forward. At the same time, that research is revealing many ways in which DNA and the environment interact from the moment of conception all the way through life, and suggesting increasingly that the concept of strict nature-versus-nurture conflict is unhelpful in understanding how people actually develop. This also is part of what we'll consider in chapter 11, after we've looked more closely into how deliberate practice works.

 
What is all that practice doing?

 
While it's clear that extensive deliberate practice will make someone a superior surgeon or billiard player or public speaker, it's natural to wonder if the effect can be understood in some general way. Beyond simply making a person better at the specific task they're practicing, is it doing something that applies across cases? The answer is yes, and it's worth identifying because it's the opposite of what most people think.

If you're a golf fan, you may have seen videotape of Tiger Woods in a particular situation that has occurred a few times in his career. He's in a tournament, standing over the ball, about to hit his shot. At some moment after he has begun his swing but before he has hit the ball, a major distraction happens—a fan yells, someone moves sharply, the crowd roars elsewhere on the course. Woods stops himself in midswing, steps back from the ball, recomposes himself, and then steps forward and hits the shot.

Ordinary golfers respond with awe when they see this happen because they know what they'd do in the same circumstance: Unable to stop their swing once they'd started it, they would carry through and hit a terrible shot or maybe miss the ball completely.

Why is this significant? Frequently when we see great performers doing what they do, it strikes us that they've practiced for so long, and done it so many times, they can just do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.

When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It's automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.

For most of the things we do, including driving, that's not a problem. We don't need to be great at such things, just good enough to carry on with our lives. That category of activities includes golf for most people who play the game. They don't need to earn a living at it; they just want to be able to have fun with it. Not having to devote much thought to such activities is a blessing, since it frees our minds to focus on other matters that we consider more important. But it does mean that our brains have pretty much checked out when we're doing these things. If your golfing opponent jingles his change at the top of your back-swing, he can probably reach the part of your brain that responds instinctively to sudden noises; since you're on autopilot, you're helpless to stop your now-doomed swing.

By contrast, great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested-development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice—avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible. It's certainly true that a great performer is able to do many things in his or her field with far fewer mental demands than a novice performer; an excellent pilot lands a 747 without breaking a sweat. But ultimately the performance is always conscious and controlled, not automatic.

Avoiding automaticity through continual practice is another way of saying that great performers are always getting better. This is why the most devoted can stay at the top of their field for far longer than most people would think possible. We'll examine this phenomenon more closely in chapter 10.

 
How does it work?

 
While it seems intuitively right that extensive deliberate practice would make someone very good, we cannot fully understand what's happening, and cannot put it to best use, unless we know how it works. What specifically is going on inside a person as a result of these activities? What changes? How can we help it along? We turn to these important questions next.

Chapter Six

How Deliberate Practice Works

 
 
At this point the evidence seems strong that the right kind of practice can turn someone of unremarkable endowments into a much better, even exceptional performer. But we're still left wondering how it happens. Until we understand that, the theoretical framework can't be entirely persuasive, and we cannot apply it in the most effective way. It would be like knowing that an engine is what makes a car go—extremely important to know, but if we don't understand how the engine works, we can never make the car go faster or run more efficiently. So—what makes deliberate practice work?

 
In general, we've seen that practice is all about pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do. Now we need to get more specific. We need to know which systems, physical or mental, the great performers overstrain and build up. It turns out the answer is the same whether we look at business or sports or any other field, and it isn't what you might expect.

Indeed, the most important effect of practice in great performers is that it takes them beyond—or, more precisely, around—the limitations that most of us think of as critical. Specifically, it enables them to perceive more, to know more, and to remember more than most people. Eventually the effects go beyond even that. Many years of intensive deliberate practice actually change the body and the brain. There's a good reason why we see the world's great performers as being fundamentally different from us, as operating on a completely different plane. It's because they are and they do. But they didn't start out that way, and the transformation didn't happen by itself.

Let's examine each of the major ways deliberate practice changes a person.

In his book
Blink,
Malcolm Gladwell describes the uncanny ability of Vic Braden to predict when a tennis player is going to double-fault. You get two chances to make a legal serve in tennis, and if a player had faulted on the first attempt, then on the second serve, at a moment after the player had tossed the ball into the air but before he or she had hit it, Braden would predict whether it would be a fault, and he was almost always right. Braden was then a very famous tennis teacher, having spent a long career as a professional player. In Gladwell's book, Braden says he's baffled by this ability, has no idea where it comes from. Gladwell does not venture to explain it and presents it as an intriguing mystery.

No research seems to have been conducted on Braden, so we can't say for sure how he did it. But as it happens, research on other excellent tennis players shows that in general they know where a serve is going to go earlier than average players—like Braden, they know even before the ball is hit—and explains quite clearly how they do it. This is important because it's a good example of how most of us misunderstand what makes exceptional performers so good.

A top-ranked male tennis player will serve the ball at speeds approaching and occasionally exceeding 150 mph. (Andy Roddick seems to hold the record in competition, 155 mph.) At that speed, the ball will travel from the server's racket to the opponent's service line in just over a quarter of a second. Most of us, facing such a serve, would have a hard time turning our heads fast enough to watch it shoot past us. Yet top players routinely return those serves. The conclusion we tend to draw is that top players have incredible reaction times, enabling them to watch that ball come at them and get themselves in proper position in a quarter of a second.

Top professionals do indeed have very fast reaction times, and reaction speed can be improved with practice, so professionals work on it. The problem is that improvements in reaction speed follow what scientists call a power law (because there's an exponent in the formula) and what the rest of us call the 80-20 rule. That is, nearly all the improvement comes in the first little bit of training. After that, lots more practice yields only a little additional improvement. Top tennis pros have all pushed themselves to the point where it's tough to achieve any more reaction speed. The very best, however, have found a way to get around that limitation.

Researchers showed tennis players films of opponents serving at them, and used sophisticated equipment to track precisely their eye movements. Average players focused on the ball. But in the brief period between the start of the serving motion and the moment when the racket hits the ball—the period when Braden could detect the impending fault—the best players weren't looking at the ball. They were looking at the opponent's hips, shoulders, and arms, which foretold where they would hit the ball. The researchers then stopped the film at the moment of contact and asked the test subjects where the serve was going to go. The average players, being focused on the ball, had no idea. But the best players knew, and as a result, they could start positioning themselves to return the serve even before the serve was hit. By the time the ball landed, they were already there.

They had found a way to react faster without improving their reaction time.

Researchers have uncovered the same phenomenon in many kinds of sports and in a wide range of other activities. Top performers can figure out what's going to happen sooner than average performers by
seeing more
in badminton, cricket, field hockey, squash, and volleyball. Beyond sports, we see a similar result in the mundane but instructive field of typing. Why, specifically, can some people type so much faster than most? As in tennis, a person can go only so far in increasing reaction speed. The very fastest typists achieve their advantage by looking farther ahead in the text, which enables them to keep moving their fingers into place for the next keystroke just a little bit ahead of time (and, in particular, to hit successive letters typed with opposite hands especially fast, which is their most effective way of outrunning average typists). When researchers prevented top typists from looking farther ahead in the text, they performed scarcely better than novices.

Sometimes excellent performers see more by developing better and faster understanding of what they see. For example, accomplished and novice drivers were tested for their reactions to hazardous situations; they were shown films of various dangerous incidents from the driver's perspective. Again, the accomplished performers, facing the familiar limits on response time, didn't react any faster than the novices, but they understood what they were seeing much more quickly. The novices remained fixated on the hazardous situation much longer than the experienced drivers did, trying to comprehend it. The better drivers got it right away and thus had more time available to respond.

Even jugglers display similar abilities. Juggling—which is how most of us describe how we manage our lives—is a skill of continual monitoring, watching the balls and making constant tiny adjustments. Good jugglers don't need to see the whole path of the balls. When their vision is restricted, they can make the necessary adjustments as long as they can see just the apex of each ball's trajectory. Though seeing very little, they see more than average jugglers and understand all they need to.

Time and again we see the same themes, and so far we have considered just one type of situation in which top performers see more—cases requiring rapid responses. In fact the superior perception of experts shows up in many other ways.