What it takes to be great?
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large
October 17 2006: 3:29 PM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it – or you don’t.
Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.
The article continues with…
No substitute for hard work
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.
Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.
So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?
Practice makes perfect
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
You can read the rest of this article here.
TO LOVE and WORK hard in whatever you do with honesty and fairness
There was a similar major article in the August 2006 issue of Scientific American.
Here is a link to the online article:
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945
The cover was pretty cool looking:
http://sciam.com/issue.cfm?issueDate=Aug-06
That was a good article Susan, As a fellow chess enthsiast I enjoyed it.
The concept of “deliberate practice” is known since the early 80’s, when it was introduced by Swedish pedagogue and psychologist Ericsson. Can anyone tell me, what part of this is “new”?
This article is a part of the mindset that is very popular in America- each man controls his destiny, while talent and chance barely exist. Also, it contains a built-in self-defence – if somebody works really hard, but does not achieve much, well, the practice was not deliberate enough. I think it is plausible that deliberate practice is a necessary component of success, but in many fields natural gifts really do help. Think of Mozart – he was bursting with music talent from early childhood. Practice made it possible to realize the talent to the full, but you need that something to realize. Another example is great singers. Sure, practice is necessary, but a natural gift of a good voice is equally a must.
What an gross misunderstanding of the situation:
“Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success”
Without natural talent, the hard work will have no effect. A stupid person will not become great even if they work hard.
A mediocre person mentally, average say, can become a decent professional, such as a doctor. But can NEVER become great in something requiring competitive talent.
The nature-nurture debate has raged for decades (maybe centuries). What would be new is if someone definitively resolved it. The case of Mozart is interesting because he was raised in an early environment entirely devoted to his musical development (as was his, arguably equally talented, sister). Was Mozart so gifted because of his environment, or because of his genes? The answer is probably some of both, the real question is how much is nature and how much is nurture? 50/50, 60/40, 80/20?
The famous piano teacher Rubinstein apparently said, when asked if he’d prefer a student with great ability to one who would work prodigiously, that the student who worked hard had a better chance of achieving greatness!
It’s good to know that you only need mediocre intelligence to do my job though (psychiatrist), I’m suitably humbled! I did try posting on this thread a couple of hours ago without success, presumably my mediocre intelligence at work!
Gordon.
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work.
A very politically correct finding. Please someone prove it by making his local village idiot the next chess world champion.
I agree with gordon that the nature vs nurture debate has been going on for a very long time.
In the end, I think that it is irrelevant which one plays the biggest role. The equation is multiplicative, rather that additional. Thus the talent deficient (or is the word “challenged”?) person not working hard will struggle all his life. The untalented person willing to work hard will rise to the limits of his talent. The talented person idling would look for get-rich-quick schemes, and mostly fail, while the truly great has both a generous helping of talent and is willing to put in the hard work to maximize that talent.
Think: if a chess player does not have a good memory, and does not have logical skills, what benefit would all the hard work be?
Likewise, if a brilliant chessplayer does not spend the time in analysis and preparation, he would never rise to the top. No-one is born a chess player.
In addition, the personality of the person plays a big role: concentration, patience, fighting spirit, foresight – all play a role, which is not quantifyable. Even a person’s mood at the time of the game, and maybe a dollop of luck also come into the equation.
And I would not have it otherwise. This is what makes chess interesting! The human being does not lend him/herself to simple explanations. We are the most complex of God’s creations.
well you know this article has some good points but if the 9 or 10 year thing is an absolute to become a expert in your field then please explain how we are getting 12 year old grandmasters 🙂 im sure they dont start their intense chess training at age 2 or 3 LOL. i think with chess as in other aspects of life there is a balance between ingenuity and practice. It does take some talent to become one of the top players in the world, but talent is just one aspect. it takes hard work, perseverance, help!, money!, and exposure!. without any of these i challenge any 6 yr old “ill mate u in 8 moves”, to succeed.
Actually the article is right on the money. As Soltis reviewed in his very interesting book (the best chess book trivia I have ever read) “Karl Marx played Chess” the average amount of years a person needs to become a GM is 8 (plus or minus 2). So a 12 year old GM has obviously practiced since he/she was 6 years old (or maybe 4, remember that you can learn to play chess since at least 3 years of age!). As for Carlsen “never practicing” this is hogwash, the same myth was perpetrated by Capablanca and Alekhine. When people aked Alekine if he practiced hard he said “I never practice”. But then, everyone who knew him said that he practiced for ten hours daily!. When you are very good at something it is very comforting to be considered a “natural” talent. For example, bodybuilders like to boast about their “natural” talents and they use all kinds of drugs to achieve those physiques! (and many of the great ones started as very skinny “pencil necks”). I bet that Carlsen has a very tight practicing schedule and that his parents are very supportive and actually enforce it much more than anyone thinks. You are forgeting that all these research on expertise is based on empirical science, the “experiments” (statistics, etc.) show that it is hard work and specifically NOT natural talent that determines expertise. If you want to refute this finding you have to refute the research. For better or for worse we are as good at something as we deserve to be.
well boys and girls, after 40 years or so of playing on various basketball teams as well as winning and losing, all I can say is that I once could run, leap and touch the rim (10′ regulation height), but as time progresses I find that I can no longer touch it; and that my quest to stuff a basketball is doomed to failure. On the other hand, I have seen kids 6 foot 6 inches tall who have never touched a basketball stuff on their first or second try.
So, what is my point?
That Susan’s article is kind, but naive. As others have mentioned, there are times when there be no substitute for athletic, mental, dexterity, or some other native talent while attempting a task. At other times, their truly be no substitute for wisdom, planning, execution, skill, sociability, and putting it all together. Perhaps what humans have the hardest time accepting is that there be times when there is simply no substitute for luck–being in the right place at the right time–or rather, chaos management.
Finally, for every rule, there are acceptions, for every truism there exists fallacy, for every theiry there be qualification. While many claim that there be “no free lunch,” some people still win the lottery or stumble upon a discovery (like Bill Gates and Paul Allen/Microsoft and Seattle Computer Products) or find a pot of gold (like the Arabs and oil in the desert) and retire.
Perhaps, the only human-created rule that be without exception is that no human-created rule is absolute.
The idea that natural talent is irrelevant to success is ridiculous.
Measuring the amoutn of talent versus practice needed is pretty much impossible because we can never measure exactly how much “raw talent” someone has (at any moment they will have had SOME practice with the thing) and we can’t measure the quality of practice either.
I spend a lot of time writing and know lots of writers. I’ve been in undergrad and grad school for writing. I can say without a doubt that there are people with little talent who will never become great writers. No amount of practice will fix their lack of talent. OTOH, there are people who are lazy and don’t work hard at their art yet still produce good works.
Those in the second catagory will never be great without constant practice, but people in the first catagory will never be great period.