Keys to Being Excellent at Anything
blogs.hbr.org
blogs.hbr.org
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you figure it out, though, be sure to report back.
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?