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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've found fairly shocking as a parent of an 8-year-old: the deep commitment on the part of other families to really commit to a specific sport or hobby. I don't know if I just grew up in too small of a rural town to have access to these opportunities (or if they're even healthy).

As an example, one of the girls on my daughter's volleyball team is on 3 separate volleyball clubs simultaneously. She plays 5 days a week at least an hour a day.

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Without proper training (i.e., taking care of all the stuff that is not Volleyball but supports you playing it, like back muscles, shoulder mobility and stability, stretching, school), it is certainly not healthy at a certain level/age. Otoh, playing five hours of volleyball alone a week is not that much if the level is not too demanding.

There was pretty good econtalk about this topic http://www.econtalk.org/david-epstein-on-mastery-specializat... . But generally there are these sports with very narrow skills like chess which you has to specialize very early. Then there is these sports with very width skills like soccer where generally get best outcomes when you specialize rather late like 16 year old.

It’s a wonderful episode and I’m sure it’s an interesting book but I’d take it with more than a pinch of salt. Most people can’t get to a world class level in anything, whether they specialise early or not. I’d be more inclined to read K. Anders Ericsson’s book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters, or both.

For most areas of human expertise we don’t have the kind of knowledge about what to do and why, or the coaching infrastructure for youth prodigy breeding grounds like sports or playing a musical instrument. The number of doctors who started preparing for their career in any real fashion before they were twelve might be numbered in the hundreds, ditto financiers. Most things you can start at as an adult.

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