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Comment by mcone | Hacker News Reader

I think this confirms what a lot of us intrinsically felt: Some people are just better at certain things than others. Jeff Bezos came to this realization while he was in college:

"Intent on becoming a theoretical physicist and following the likes of Einstein and Hawking, he discovered that although he was one of the top 25 students in his honors physics program, he wasn't smart enough to compete with the handful of real geniuses around him. 'I looked around the room,' Bezos recalls, 'and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at it than I was, and it was much, much easier for them. It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently.' The pragmatic Bezos switched his major to computer science and committed himself to starting and running his own business." [1]

[1] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/bezos_pr.html

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I would have thought it pretty obvious that some people have in intrinsic "gift" in certain areas. This is completely obvious in physical sports and I don't see why - considering that our minds are underpinned by the physical structure of our brains - that this wouldn't also be the case when it comes to mental activites as well.

Just because I may not have the intrinsic gift that allows me to become the best physicist or investor in the world doesn't mean that I couldn't get pretty damn good at it if I put the time in, though. It doesn't necessarily mean that I would enjoy what I was doing any less.

I remember hearing about a study that I think was by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck[1] that basically found that praising kids for being smart (i.e. having an intrinsic gift) was far less effective than praising them for putting in a good effort (i.e. putting in the time and practice). While it is incontrovertable that some people do indeed have an intrinsic gift for certain activities, I think we should not lose sight of the apparent fact that just about anyone will do better when this view is at least not assigned greater importance than the need to put in a good effort. Lest we unintentionally start sending messages something like "Oh, well you're obviously not as gifted as Michael Jordan at Basketball, so you should probably not even bother learning the game at all." That's an intentionally exaggerated example to get my point across, but particularly when it comes to early childhood development I believe we should not underestimate the effect of even a stray word of encouragement/discouragement. I know that such words had a definite effect on me at an early age if they were from the right person - e.g. an authority figure - and often more of an effect than the authority figure assumed their words had at the time.

1. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

On the other hand not having Michael Jordan-like talent would be a good reason to discourage a teenager from practicing basketball for hours a day at the expense of their studies.

Potentially yes. But I would not agree in all cases. Does the teenager enjoy the activity? That could be reason enough for him to pursue it. And there's shades of grey here we're not addressing... OK so he doesn't have Jordan's innate talent, but does that necessarily mean he has no chance at all of pursuing a pro Basketball career? Of course not. There are many still valid and useful skill levels between the two extremes of "not fit for the NBA" and "Michael Jordan".

"not fit for the NBA" is not extreme, it is normal. Anyone who plays in NBA is highly skilled highly above average individual.

Certainly. But if we're viewing the scope of the spectrum under discussion as covering the skill levels of the people who play in the NBA - which was pretty clearly my intent in that instance - then they are the two extremes. I'm not sure how anyone could interpret my statement as meaning that the group of elite athletes playing pro Basketball in the US are not exceptional. But if that needed clarification, fair enough.

Jordan didn't have Jordan talent as a youth. He didn't make his varsity team as a sophomore. But I heard he was always the first one in and the last one out of the gym. The hard work seems to have paid off.

Doing good for mankind always has been a heart's desire for me. The idea that I might just need a few years more practise is what keeps me working hard. If something innate is required to excel I simply don't have it, though. Therefore it would be really painful if the 10k hour rule doesn't apply.

The logical conclusion for me therefore always has been to believe that more work will result in way better results. Maybe the "obvious" part is where your own confidence/talent comes into play.

I guess I just don't see it as this binary situation where you either have to be the absolute best in the world at what you do, or you're not contributing at all to mankind. And that's the feeling I often get when people discuss these kinds of topics (not that I'm implying I get that feeling from your response specifically, or if I do I'm probably overlaying it with other discussions I've had on this topic).

I personally think one can excel from hard work alone. Maybe you can't excel to the degree of a Hawking or a Jordan in their relevant fields, but does that necessarily invalidate anything you have achieved? There's always going to be someone better at X than you are, for some value of X, at some particular time and place. I see an unfortunate possibility of unrealised potential if people - particularly young people - get it in their heads that if they can't be the absolute best at something then they may as well not even try.

Additionally, even Hawking or Jordan don't operate in a vacuum. What about all the people that have supported them over their lives, all the people they learned from, who - in isolation - the world might consider to be "lesser" people. Would Hawking/Jordan have been able to do what they've done without all that support?

There are things you can become damn good at it if you put the time in. Those are definitely worth doing professionally. But, there are also things you can get mediocre at best if you put in excessively lot of time. Those are not worth trying to do professionally, although hobby is another matter.

On the other hand, I think that we underestimate childrens ability to get up again after failure or isolated stray word of discouragement. Telling children they sux one too many times will lower their self-esteem, sure. However, most of them will recover from hearing something slightly discouraging once in a while just fine.

> On the other hand, I think that we underestimate childrens ability to get up again after failure or isolated stray word of discouragement. Telling children they sux one too many times will lower their self-esteem, sure. However, most of them will recover from hearing something slightly discouraging once in a while just fine.

For sure, I would even go so far as to say discouragement is a normal part of life and if one was to shelter a child from all forms of discouragement - assuming that's even possible - then that child would probably not be very well equipped for life generally. This is an interesting issue as well, but I think it's orthogonal to the main point I was trying to make.

The point being made is about the danger of the wrong type of praise, not avoiding criticism. A child that is told repeatedly that they were born with a gift for mathmatics may gave up too early on music if they don't show immediate talent (or vice versa).

The only criticism there is self-criticism, which is a lot harder to escape.

> But, there are also things you can get mediocre at best if you put in excessively lot of time. Those are not worth trying to do professionally, although hobby is another matter.

Or maybe not. Quite often, a mediocre competency on something (or several things) is necessary for applying your incredibly good competence in anotehr thing.

"completely obvious in physical sports"

How so? Maybe some extreme cases, like being tall qualifies you for being a basketball player. But in general?

Muscle type you possess is pretty much given and make difference between talented sprinter and talented weight lifter (speed vs strength). Possible body flexibility depends on muscles and joints too and you can influence it only up to the point. You can do only so much to make your attention span longer and better attention span is advantage in some sports too (say race driving).

Whether your body can sustain extensive training or whether it will break depends partly on your genetics too. If you are low on red cells in blood, you will be at disadvantage too.

Bigger hands are an advantage in swimming, longer hands in climbing. Some people learn technique easier then others although I do not know what is the difference there. Your sensitivity to pain is not only a question of will power, it depends on genetics too - lower pain sensibility is advantage too.

There are plenty of individual variances that make difference between who can succeed in professional sport and who not.

Why was this downvoted?

Absolutely agree. Why was this downvoted again?

It doesn't confirm that at all. The original study was that practice counted for much more in fields where the rules and values were stable (like musical instruments or games) and much less where the basic ground rules couldn't even be described (like business or war).

That part makes a lot of sense: practice and correcting errors only matters when you will be doing something basically the same next time and you have a fixed target of what "good" looks like to shoot for. It also explains a big question I had with the original study: what constitutes a "field"? Does 10,000 hours get me mastery of "software software", or "frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering using Angular.js"?

I think a better explanation is that practice is indeed the key to mastery - of fixed, seldom-changing skills where the goalposts are known and widely agreed upon. But most "fields" rely on combinations of many individual skills, along with a good number of exogenous factors. I may be a master at Chrome Javascript & rendering performance because I've spent a lot of team with the Chrome team understanding exactly how the rendering engine works. This makes me great at building a weekend-long demo or acing an interview, but is only a small component of being an effective frontend engineer. And then when I scale that up from "being an effective frontend engineer" to "founding a successful business", there's also all sorts of luck involved, like who I meet, what industry I target, how popular my initial customers are, what the rest of the technology industry does, etc.

The original study doesn't say that there aren't people who are better than others at a task. It says that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice made one an expert. I have no doubt Bezos would become an expert in physics with 10,000 hours of study.

But there are people with gifts and the 10k hours. Those are the Newtons and Feynmans.

The original study claimed that factors other than practice were ultimately not significant, and this study appears to contradict that.

This study is measuring something else. 10,000 hours to expertise is not the same thing as measuring the contribution of practice.

The original study was about practice and not just the 10,000 hours claim

It could also be that those three people had started practicing earlier than him (AP classes, community college, retaking the course after failing), had tutors which provide knowledge at a vastly higher pace, or had related knowledge (highly advanced math, physical chemistry) that gave them an initial advantage. Also, a college class provides nowhere near 10,000 hours of practice. Perhaps things would even out after the first 5,000 hours.

Yes, many endeavors (sports, music, science, business, writing, etc.) rely on an array of talents and skills. Through deliberate practice we can move forward along these some axes, while others we cannot (e.g. height, for basketball).

But even among the set of mutable attributes, there are clearly individuals who can improve much faster than others, or who can reach further extremes. And sometimes these qualities align in a way that makes a given person extremely capable at a given task. All other factors and external variables being equal, they just have a natural advantage.

This seems painfully obvious; our bodies are diverse, our minds are diverse, and so should be our capabilities. And this is good, as it leads to a well-rounded population. Some people are well-suited for lifting very heavy things, others for running very quickly, yet others for thinking about abstract mathematics, or organizing people, while most are well-suited for doing a wide variety of things reasonably well.

But despite evidence to the contrary, it's enchanting to believe that we could all be the best in the world at something, if we just put in enough time and effort.

The tragedy of this entire way of thinking is that being one of the top 25 in your honors physics program is perfectly fine. He was still excelling.

People get hung up on the slight variations that make the difference between first and second place, completely ignoring the fact that there are plenty of extremely high levels of achievement aside from being "the best". To think that you shouldn't practice something you love just because it's easier for the guy above you is absurd.

Perhaps I am wrong, but my take on that was that, although he would most likely have had a successful career in physics, he didn't seem to be content with just being another physicist in the crowd. His decision to switch paths may have been more predicated on his drive to become an "alpha dog" of his field, rather than his self-perceived "averageness" in physics.

Maybe those people around him just put more time into studying. Maybe we routinely underestimate how much time the good people spend on the things they are good at.

That's not saying everybody could do that. Maybe it takes some special inclination to be able to spend so much time on one thing.

Except the my experience in University with the absolute top people in mathematics, (Not the top 10, but the top 1 or 2) is that they did almost no studying, took no notes, and completely mastered the material that took me 15-20 hours a week to get a B grade in.

I realized pretty quickly that there were people who were wired very, very differently than myself.

I think Mathematics is different from other fields, in that the top performers can reach "Expert" levels with much less effort than the experts in other fields.

Might be the case in physics as well.

It is the same with foreign languages, some learn it easier then others.

I had plenty of schoolmates that learned them much faster then me. We all started with no previous foreign language skills. We did the same set of exercises in school and they ended up knowing most of the material while I had to study a lot just to keep up.

I don't know the answer here, but it's something I've considered often, so:

Is it possible that those top 1-2 people just knew so much more than you, going into the class, and had such a strong foundation in closely related material, that they picked it up more quickly? I mean, if the scenario was "my twin brother and I went into a math class with the same level of math knowledge, and he didn't study and got an A, while I studied 15-20 hr/wk and got a B" then I would find that much stronger evidence to conclude that these differences may be innate. But to me it seems likely that the 1-2 people who vastly outperformed everyone else may have just been setting themselves up to do that for the previous 10 years. By which I mean, they were intensively studying math throughout high school (and likely before), so that although they may not have known the course material going in, after seeing it once they think, "oh, yes, that's an obvious result based on x, y, z things that I already know. And it's a very nice way of thinking about w." Whereas you, not knowing x, y, z, or w, don't have any of that intuition. So they can make connections and learn by analogy "effortlessly" while you have to study much more to understand these concepts.

Thoughts?

Nope.

Ed Witten (of M-Theory fame) famously did the entire undergrad physics syllabus in his own time one summer after completing a different degree. Then he applied as a postgrad, aced his interviews, and got in.

The tragic thing about the 10k myth is that it makes people who aren't the best of the best underestimate just how good the really talented people are.

Most people simply cannot do what Witten did. No amount of personal tutoring or practice time is going to give them that kind of cognitive ability.

The reality is that you can take them a random selection of kids, hothouse them in any subject, and most of them will turn out to be good at best. Not brilliant, not geniuses - just good.

There's certainly an argument to be made that a lot of talent is wasted, and education is much better at destroying ability than nurturing it. But that's a different point.

The bottom line is some people just get it - whatever it is - and they're outstanding.

I'd guess most people here get technology like that to an extent that most of the population can't imagine. I'm certainly not brilliant, but I'm much better at getting technology to work than my friends and neighbors.

Take an aptitude like that, level up ten times or so, apply it to math or physics or music, and you get some idea what 'brilliant' might mean.

Not my experience at university (maths degree). The people who were very good also put in a lot of time. But not in a forced way, they simply enjoyed the subject so much.

It's possible the people you saw had already mastered the subject even before you took the lecture. Or it had so much similarity to something else they had already mastered that it became easy for them.

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