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Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

Sport is going this way. There's a growing body of evidence that early specialization produces less champions. Kids are encouraged to participate in other sports well into their teen years. Less burn out, lower injuries and this approach creates more athletes that can be described as "naturals". They have skills and abilities that seem magical and unexpected.

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Some people are actually legit naturals though. There was this one kid I knew that didn't play sports growing up, but if you gave him a basketball in gym class you could nail every 3 pointer. He was asked to come out to compete in an important track meet because he was known to be fast and he ran a 400m hurdles race in 53 seconds with the worst possible form. For reference, in the men's World Championships earlier in the month the winner ran 47.4 with most others finishing before 49. He just didn't care for sports though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Makes me wonder who else is out there with this kind of talent and what kind of records could be broken/made if they tried or had the opportunity.

You also have the case where natural ability is a hindrance. If the kid is used to not having to work at a particular sport, they will have trouble when they get to a point that they have to involve deliberate practice in order to get beyond their current level (something they never had to do before).

This is illustrated with Billy Beane’s story in Money Ball

I was especially curious about this for education. If you explain things too much you may get more good students but they may drop on the first struggle.

This applies to academics as well. A lot of people have stories of being the best in their class/school at something, but when they get to college they are average, or even below average because they never had to deliberately study.

ESR wrote a semi-famous email to Linus Torvalds about exactly this phenomenon:

http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3

I think this is a serious issue for intelligent people.

The curriculum is tailored towards people of average intelligence, so if you are one, two, or three standard deviations above that, you won't be under pressure to develop a work ethic because you can get good grades without it.

Of course, if your intelligence is above average, then you probably are interested in a career that attracts other intelligent people.

And then you are in a serious trouble, because now you are in an environment where everyone is of similar intelligence, so you don't have your competitive advantage anymore, plus some people have a work ethic that you lack.

And even if you are still a standard deviation above most people, there are likely other people who are at the same level as you, and they might have a work ethic.

I think this is something that people who have intelligent children need to pay attention to.

I wasn't the best in HS, but I never had to study...ever. Got to college and nearly failed out my first semester while I taught myself how to study.

A related thing happened to me in grad school: I had always done well in academics, and I even had a strong work ethic in addition to “natural” talent. But I had never really needed to exercise creativity in an academic domain, and I more or less fell flat on my face when I had to define my own novel problems.

Even after grad school, in industry, I’ve been much more of a strong executor than an idea generator.

At my boxing gym every few months some kid would show up and after a week he would be much better than everybody else. These guys just understood the sport immediately and also had physical ability. A lot of these guys dropped out but if this level of talent meets with interest and work ethic then you get super athletes like Michael Jordan or Michael Schumacher in F1.

My ex coach knew sugar ray Leonard pretty well in his youth and he said that Ray started beating up people already in his first day at the gym without having learned boxing technique. He just watched once and knew what to do.

That's why I think that trying to be the best in the world at something almost certainly means setting yourself up for failure.

At the top, you have genetic freaks with insane work ethic that are obsessed with that particular skill. Can you compete with that? No.

I'd guess that if you have average talent, you can probably get to the top 10%, mainly through outworking everyone else. But you will never be the best in the world.

Anecdotally, during the years I effectively spent the entirety of my time playing competitive multiplayer games, I reached the top 0.1% level in 4 different games with player counts far above a million. 3 of those being entirely different genres many skills did not directly transfer between.

And you know what I learned? 1. 750+ hours of "practice" is always required and 2. The difference between top x.x% and #1 is astounding.

There are very few areas of skill in which putting in several thousand hours of consistent practice will not land you in the top 1% at least, assuming you have close to the average physical/mental aptitude of people who usually take up this skill.

But you will never be Magnus Carlsen. The skill difference between 0.01% and #1 is far greater than the skill difference between 50% and 1%.

> There's a growing body of evidence that early specialization produces less champions. Kids are encouraged to participate in other sports well into their teen years.

This is the subject matter of the book "Range":

https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized...

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