Gives some context for the kinds of fields where deliberate practice improves performance.
There are 10,000 amazing marathoners in the world. If you gave them all the same training, they would all be absurdly good, as they got better and better. But 9,990 or so of them would get injured and wash out.
So it seems at least in some sports, your limiter is not how genetically gifted you are the SPORT, but how genetically gifted you are at recovering from training so that you can train more.
So perhaps this guy has the genetics to be a pro golfer, but his body can't take the strain and recover between sessions.. so he would never quite make it.
It's become such a problem, that it's basically become the biggest issue the pedagogy community as a whole is actively trying to address. This is interesting, because there has been a lot of progress made in injury-preventive technique.
Even in running, a quick Google search revealed that injury preventive techniques exist.
So I guess, I'm not convinced that injury isn't technique related and that not being injured doesn't have more to do with luck (in terms of natural technique) than genetics.
Could you please give me some references for this? Guitar has loads of famous people who encourage people to do things that will cause injuries. Having some actual research to fight against this would be really useful.
An egregiously bad example: Paul Gilbert (who is like 6'5" and has enormously long arms and fingers) actually SELLS an especially long guitar strap that is practically guaranteed to give you RSI. I wish I were joking: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+gilbert+gu...
Side note: this made me hugely disappointed in Paul Gilbert. Prior to this, I thought of him as an amazing guitar player with a very wry/dry sense of humor who was simply making fun of the guitar stereotype crowd. Actually encouraging something which is damaging in order to profit from it crosses the line whether he is serious or joking--too many people will listen and believe him.
Certainly luck is a factor, but genetics is an important factor as well. Many studies have linked genetics to a predisposition for inflammation, wound-healing, and other injury-related phenomena.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160302135149.h...
Some sporting activities are just outside the scope of design of our bodies, it would seem. Much like trying to use a Japanese chef knife to prise open jar lids. It will work up to a point, but not being the core design of the tool, you are guaranteed of breaking the knife at some point, or at least severely damaging it.
It would appear that the human frame is not suited to short, explosive, twisting action of the arms and shoulders while the lower body remains planted.
No need to narrow this down to genetics. Just say "how fast you recover", thanks.
I mean, unless you give specific insights into how detrimental slack after training and superb wound healing are directly genetically correlated, you might as well not mention it.
Edit: Also, you seem to presuppose a benefit from wounding. I do doubt that.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-dan-p...
Not everybody can get to 10k hours without getting hurt and/or managing to work through it
But the root problem is inequality - science has begun to see itself as an immaculate priesthood that mustn't mix with the plebs. Scientists should have been presenting their results to the public, but snobbishness now prevents this.
If I look at deliberate practice in musical proficiency amongst the general populace, it'll look like deliberate practice is responsible for almost all of the proficiency. However, if I look at the top 100 musicians in the world, they would have all practiced thousands of hours and I expect practice to have diminishing returns, so it should be responsible for very little of the variation in their ability.
I would expect also that in more multifactorial activities which are often the basis of professions that it is both A) difficult to ascertain what expertise is (often reducing to an empty social credential) B) difficult to evaluate what good deliberate practice is.
The meta-analysis talks about such factors as the predictability of the environment correlating with the effect size of deliberate practice. I think that's just the tip of the iceberg.
http://www.lowlatentinhibition.org/what-is-lli/
(And those who force themselves to practice are going to get injuries like repetitive strain which are really a kind of 'inner rebellion' against this forcing.)
I'll try to keep this light hearted - so as a guitarist, one learns the rules, and practices them, then grows and grows and grows. Eventually, one learns how to break a rule, but over time, bend it into something that resembles an existing rule or otherwise still interests an audience, and create rules whereby none existed before. Sometimes minor mistakes or oddities become wholesale innovations in the right hands (ex: Jimi Hendrix, Tom Morello) but are very much a byproduct of deliberate, routine, intense attention and practice.
My experience is that music performance has an incredible power to both be-shaped-by-and-reciprocally-shape the human brain. The inherent elasticity and plasticity cross cultures. Generations. One of the most consistent observational effects though is that practice makes better in most cases.
I think you're talking about two different things here. There are lots of musicians and artists and writers who have mastered their craft but have no amount of creativity. The opposite is also true. There are quite a few writers and musicians and artists who are rather poor from a technical perspective, but they manage to use what they have to create enduring pieces of art. Peanuts would be a great example for art. Snow Crash for writing.
Technical skill is one thing, but the ability to create an emotionally engaging piece of art is something else. Deliberate practice can only help with the former. As for the latter, John Cleese has an interesting perspective seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g