Keys to Being Excellent at Anything | Hacker News Reader

Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

blogs.hbr.org

179 pointsdyc42 comments

I dropped everything and went to a tennis academy for high school when I realized I was lucky enough to live have the family to support me financially, and where I lived wasn't a great place to achieve whatever potential I had.

After going to the academy for two years and getting consistently better, I started hearing more and more from people about my "potential", although I wasn't one of the "stars" who would go on to make great money playing professional tennis.

I had finished high school that year, and instead of going to college I decided to take a year off and continue playing international tournaments on the junior circuit. I had done decent and was in the top 1000 worldwide, but wanted to really see how I could do. I had the rest of the year in eligibility (it was June when I graduated, and you can play until the year you turned 19, which started the next January), so I packed my bags and played something like 25 tournaments that fall in a number of different countries.

I did poorly. I made it inside the top 650 or so, far from my goal or realizing any potential I thought I had. It seemed that I just didn't have quite the talent necessary to make it, nor do anything noteworthy with my tennis.

This was disheartening, but I had six more months before I would have to go off to college while keeping full eligibility, so it seemed like my best bet was to practice- with a new perspective that I didn't quite have years earlier.

So this time I got a private coach along with the normal academy practices. Every afternoon when everyone else was in school, we'd keep working. I figured that even though I wasn't a natural talent like some of those guys, a few hours' edge on them every day would help my case. My coach was great, super intense and helped push me when I was tired. I hit my physical capacity a few times and had to take a day or afternoon off every once in a while, but the fact that I was doing more than those supposedly untouchable natural talents was ACTUALLY working. I was noticeably better, a "friggin' moose on the court" as my coach would say, and I started really competing with and even beating some of the guys ranked in the top 100.

I think too few people really work very, very hard, which is what's required to make up for natural talent. This causes the huge amount of naysayers, who never see anyone with little talent exceed expectation. Because of that, too few of the untalented work hard. It's a vicious cycle.

We're fortunate enough in first world countries to have the luxury of having forgotten what hard work really means, and most people are too lazy to really dedicate themselves to anything.

Getting to the bottom, he describes how he no longer beats himself up about not being better at tennis since he knows he could be better if he was willing to invest the time in it.

The same realization about foreign languages is what caused me to gradually stop studying them. The value in being near-fluent in something is pretty clear, but the value of being sub-conversational is usually not. Once I realized I was unlikely to travel and live in the countries whose languages I was studying, it made more sense to give them up.

The whole 10000 hour thing is both exciting and depressing. Exciting because it means you can do anything ("any (one) thing") you dedicate yourself to. Depressing because it suggests limits to how many areas you can reasonably excel at.

I read your comment from my iPhone while stuffing my face with cookies. Reading from the iPhone implies zooming in heavily if I want to upvote. Eating cookies implies having one hand covered in crumbs. Thus, I had to finish my current cookie, clean my cookie hand, and then zoom in before being able to upvote your comment. However, I found your comment worthwhile enough to do so—thank you!

Best story of the day, bar none. Many thanks!

The cookie monster reads Hacker News! (and has an iPhone) =)

yeah, but didn't we already know that we couldn't excel at everything? For me, its enough to know that I can excel at the thing I care about most and then excel at as many things after that that I care to devote myself to.

Remember: the 10000 hour rule doesn't mean you can't be very good at something without putting in the hours. If you want to be the very best, then the rule applies.

Also: a very important point for entrepreneurs (imho) is to focus on what you're doing. This means shouldn't have to worry too much about choosing on which thing you'll spend the hours.

The 10,000 hour thing pre-supposes you are genetically predisposed to it in the first place. The example I always give is Michael Phelps. It wasn't his 10,000 hrs of training that gave him his flipper-like feet or extraordinarily long arms.

Anyone at the top of any field has both.

Along those lines, it is not enough to force yourself into something you Think you may become top of field with. Although it is from Wired, many top performers "find" their niche through varied sports or actions before committing to becoming an expert. They have more access to a diversity of subjects and can identify their strengths on a larger sampling. Perhaps some similarity to failed startups / job hopping. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/how-to-raise-a-sup...

You don't need anything like 10000 hours to attain reasonable fluency in any language:

http://learnalanguageortwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-long-doe...

I think it's mostly a matter of motivation. In my experience, Native English speakers are much less likely to learn a foreign language even when they're living abroad. In Japan, most non-anglo foreigners will learn Japanese to some extent and in fact they might communicate among themselves in Japanese. On the other hand, many anglos don't need to speak much Japanese in their jobs and, in their personal life, would rather restrict themselves to the tiny English-speaking population than go to the trouble of learning Japanese.

Steps 1-3 and 5-6 are "easy", but how do you step 4?

4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses

It would be great if my company did code reviews on everything a la Google, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. I code in my spare time, but what expert is going to want to check out my spare time projects, project euler solutions, or what have you, and give feedback? So, how do I go about getting expert feedback?

Join an open source project? Find someone at work that's willing to do reviews for you if you do them for him? (slow-motion pair programming, kind of). Read code written by your company's best programmers and compare what they did with how you would have done it?

You need to get involved with the right communities, I think, and reach out to mentors.

I think you might be surprised. I'm not sure where you'd go to find these people, however. Is there something like stackoverflow for code reviews? I just posted a related Ask HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632965

but sadly got no responses. I just procrastinated half an hour reading HN. I probably would have preferred to review some young, eager programmer's code.

It is as hard to find great students as it is to find great masters.

Yes, as the Asian proverb goes:

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

At my company we have a mentor/mentee system in place, where you can get advice from others in the company that aren't necessarily in your discipline or product group. To be honest, I haven't found a ton of value in it, but I have found that others in my group are more than suitable mentors for me.

You could always try setting up something like that where you work (or informally ask around for a potential mentor). In fact, an external site that paired up mentors/mentees together could be quite valuable.

Just out of User Interface curiosity how many other people immediately scrolled down to the six bullet points and ignored the rest?

Flow:

1. While the page is loading, look at the utm_source crap in the URL and wonder why the submitter couldn't be bothered to clean that up.

2. Read the first sentence and identify this as a writer of the "I should start with a personal anecdote to make people like me" school of writing (a US thing? not sure), and start skimming for the actual content.

3. Slow down when the "Anders Ericsson" anchor appears, and wait for the mandatory "10,000 hours" reference.

4. Skim the six points, and realize that there's nothing new here -- you've read the same article before, only written by someone else.

(yeah, yeah, I'll log off now.)

I wonder, on a site like this, what measurement they're looking for - time spent on article, etc? Maybe virality of the post to FB / linked in buttons?

I'd love to run a split-test of all bullets no header vs. current format - would be informative, maybe will try in one of my own blog posts . . .

Yeah, who upvoted this article? Downvote me but jesus, there is nothing new in this post. And it's a list post. Does Harvard auto-get you front page karma?

Flow:

1. Decide to read comments before the article.

2. Read your comment.

3. Decide I don't need to read this again.

4. Decide to leave a thank you before going elsewhere.

Thank you for your informative summary.

Flow:

1. Read article, throw up.

2. Read comments, then realize that the comments made this substandard post worthwhile.

3. Upvote many comments.

4. Return to regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for pointing out the comments. I was about to dismiss the article as well but there are some great contrarian comments as you pointed out. My favorites:

-Innate talent > Practice. Painful to admit, but better if you can own up to your weaknesses early on and focus things you are better at.

-Extensive practice only applies to single tasks, not complex activities such as business which requires being good at multiple disciplines plus coordinating and understanding the interaction between those disciplines

What's HN etiquette about asking people to critique posts in contexts like this? I've got some posts I'm not sure about, but don't know if I should submit it to HN through the normal channels.

I had to click past the interstitial first, but besides that, spot on.

Yep.

The Key to Being Excellent at Skimming has an arrow pointing down.

Yep. Mainly because I wanted to know if I was going to have to concentrate on reading the article to disect the 6 points. Found that they were actually listed, read them, and left.

Sure did. The problem with that type of post is they can often be a bunch of filler with a handful of "stating the obvious" bulletpoints. Heading straight for the bullet points lets you filter more quickly either way.

I did, when i read the heading it said six keys, i automatically scrolled to the six keys, then realized this is just like the books i read, "outliers" and "talent is overrated". I then looked at the links at the bottom and realized that there were two new books on the same topic that came out in 2010, how many more do they need to make to tell us the same thing.

This is true, but no matter how much he wants to a 5'5 guy is not going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. Hard work can certainly get people beyond their limits, but people born with a special talent in one area can push that boundary even farther just by working as hard as everyone else.

No, but he could be excellent in his weight class.

I think basketball would have been a better example but the point stands. If you are 5'5 and really good at sports you should play soccer instead of basketball if you want to reach the highest levels.

This is a motivational article. And a good one with great specific tips on how to optimize your workload. But obviously wrong in that natural talent has little to no effect on skill. But of course you have to say that in a motivational "working hard gets results" gist type article.

If you spend 10,000 hours playing Trivial Pursuit it's called cheating.

Great... but don't forget key number 7. - Don't give up too early.

This! I once gave up a business after thinking it wasn't any good. A year later I checked the analytics (after I removed the front page and let the domain expire) I found that traffic picked up from articles I wrote earlier, and had been high for over right months. Of course, with no site there, they all bounced right off. D'oh!

Once can combine numbers 2 (hard work first), 3 (intense practice), and 6 (regular/ritualized practice) by doing some "deliberate" and challenging study first thing every morning. For example, find a true classic in the field of interest, and consume it for 1-2 hours immediately after waking up.

I've been doing that with SICP and it's been an immensely rewarding experience.

Relevant:

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

-Psychological Review

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

Inspirational. Thanks for posting this.

summary:: loop(time)

    if(good_time_of_day)
      practice_what_u_like_to_do;
    else
      do_other_stuff;

end-loop;

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