Something I feel that I can add to this is that kids are able to put in time (practice) without it feeling like it’s work. Their brains are very malleable. I think adults excel more at concepts, which requires deeper, more focused, thinking.

“The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance.”

In poker you receive immediate feedback (win/lose the hand), but it’s not necessarily informative. Just because you won a hand or your opponent folded their hand does not mean you played your hand CORRECTLY — I’ve won plenty of hands that I played incorrectly. The lack of complete information (not knowing what someone had when they folded), in addition to the variability of outcomes (you can win with the worst hand sometimes) makes it hard to determine if you played a hand correctly.

“The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.”

It’s extremely rare that you will play a hand the exact same way in poker. When you take into account the variability of the cards, your position on the table and the players you’re playing against, the number of different situations is insanely high. Contrast playing poker to something like playing a piece of sheet music over and over again until you master it. With music, it’s very easy to repeatedly perform the same task over and over again.

The tricky thing with poker is you need to abstract these unique, individual situations into more general situations. But if you abstract incorrectly, you’ll end up misapplying logic to the wrong situations and losing. This, in my opinion, is what makes improving your skill at poker so challenging.

They don’t entirely oppose the idea that innate talent is what initially attracts people to an activity. But their point is that the amount of accumulated deliberate practice is so good at explaining differing abilities—on its own—that differences in initial ability are quickly overtaken by differences in practice quality, frequency, etc.

So one of their predictions—and this you could test—is that a parent need only pretend that their kid is coming along well as a violinist (or whatever), regardless of his actual ability, and as long as this encouragement causes the kid to practice deliberately and with a coach, etc., he might as well have been genuinely promising.

The trouble with a lot of the historical examples of such behavior is that in most cases, the parents who sort of blindly encourage their kids to go into discipline X were themselves great Xers, so it’s hard to tease out the genetic factor. But anecdotally, I think exposure to good coaches/tutors, lots of easily available reading materials, and an early habit of deliberate practice account for most of the “father’s son” type of career paths. Example: what’s more likely, that there is a “lawyer gene,” or that a judge’s son becomes a good lawyer because he is groomed as one?

And finally, they do make a big point of the fact that domain-specific abilities really boil down to one general ability, that is, the ability to endure lots of deliberate practice. This they are willing to accept as innate.

It’s like what Paul Graham says about entrepreneurs: the best predictor of success is determination. Smarts, ideas, hacking ability, etc., take a backseat to grit. He has lots of evidence to substantiate that claim. Which makes sense in the deliberate practice framework, especially since “entrepreneurship” is such an obviously acquired ability (unlike, say, piano playing, which seems like it might depend more on genetic factors—though again, the authors handily dismiss a lot of this genetic talk).

That’s enough for now.

I love that your comments section knows to treat my enumerations as numbered lists. That is

(a) Awesome. (b) Useful. (c) Aesthetically pleasing.

The question is whether or not it recognizes different enumeration styles.

I haven’t read the paper and perhaps I should. But I wanted to voice a similar point to Jimmy’s about innate ability not being worth much. I am wondering how they corrected for the self-selection and other selection mechanisms that would come about in this paper?

To be more explicit about these selection mechanisms:

1. How do we know that the youngsters who began to play violin at a young age simply weren’t the most talented to begin with?

2. How do we know that those youngsters who practice deliberately are not precisely the ones who are the best naturally? Couldn’t we assume that those youngsters who never saw measured improvement from deliberate practice would have simply quit? I think there comes a point where most of us see our limits and so choose to quit trying to do something we never can.

3. Preemptively: It seems like the way they broke apart #1 + #2 was by asking talented individuals to perform tests for skills that were related to their craft, but were not the craft itself. E.g., pianists were asked to perform tests of reaction time and they fared no better than normal individuals. This seems fair but I’m wondering how they defend the use of this against the counter claim that a battery of tests for parts of an action is not the same as testing that action.

E.g., perhaps our pianist does not have faster reaction time when hitting a button, and perhaps he doesn’t have a better feel for rhythm than any other music aficionado, and finally perhaps an IQ test reveals that his mean analytical abilities are no higher than anyone else’s. BUT, perhaps when he needs to do some weird balance of these things, he does them better. And perhaps he did them better at age 7, before his father bought him a piano. And perhaps by age 9 he was still doing better than the other boys, and as they dropped out of piano school only him and fellow precocious 9 year olds were playing. And so by 10 years of age it’s just a bunch of super gifted pianist

Selection biases like these are a staple in the social sciences, so I’m sure they were dealt with. I guess I’m asking you to enlighten us so I don’t have to read an entire paper to find something that is probably mentioned casually as a caveat somewhere in the Methodology Section.

~Sharon

1) Your post reminds me of how easy it is to forget the (perhaps increasing) marginal returns to consistency. That is, there’s a large difference between my saying, “I’m going to write for an hour everyday!” and “I’m going to write for an hour everyday, at 9 AM everyday.” Namely, in the latter case I’m much more likely to follow through. It’s funny how aiming for higher rigidity actually makes it more likely you’ll be rigid at all.

2) “Anyway, the overall picture that emerges from this (quite long) paper is that innate talent counts for very little.”

I’m not so sure we should be so quick to make this kind of claim, as I think the influence of innate talent can still manifest itself in subtle ways. Namely, even in the cases in which deliberate practice seems to account for nearly everything, it’s possible that those who have more innate talent find it much easier (i.e. much less painful) to engage in deliberate practice. For instance, if, as an 8-year old, a much higher percentage of the feedback I receive during my four hours of violin practice is positive, I’m much more likely continue practicing. The assumption here, of course, is that those with innate talent are more likely to receive positive (encouraging) feedback, especially early on. So yes, it appears that those who are less talented can compensate by engaging in more deliberate practice, but unfortunately, it may be true that the less talented find it much harder to practice deliberately. On this view, innate talent may have nearly as tight a strangehold on performance (as it does under the standard, “geniuses are born” view); it just exerts its force indirectly, by determining the painfulness of deliberate practice.

3) “(And it makes one yearn for the writerly equivalent of chess or poker software, like a program that spat out a quality metric for each of your sentences as you typed.)”

God, if only such software existed. Even with the ease of information transfer today, how many students train their writing skills under a mentor who reads their work on a daily basis? Granted, I don’t know the world of writing so well, but I would assume that work is reviewed at most every week or two, and such work is in the form of well-honed drafts. If writing is like chess in this way (and I don’t know why it would be different), it would be much more helpful, as you say, to have writing reviewed after every chapter, page, or paragraph even.

Here’s an idea: perhaps we can start a “writing circle,” in which 5+ people agree to edit the other members’ writing, on demand, with a <24 hour turnaround. When person A finishes a piece of writing he would like reviewed, he can post it to a communal pool, from which others can download the piece, edit it, and re-post it. A specific person must edit A’s piece (i.e. he is assigned as A’s official editor this time around), while the other people can edit it if they so choose. Alternatively, editing can always be “optional,” so to speak, but the more pages (or words) you edit, the more pages (or words) of your own you can have edited (you can call these points). So if everyone starts off with 10,000 points in the bank, and if one person receives edits on 10,000 words but does no editing of his own, he’ll be barred from posting any more words to the pool until he does some editing. There are, of course, many considerations in designing such a writing circle. You want:

a) High quality writers/editors (writers should meet some criteria for admittance) b) Timely responses to editing requests c) High quality edits d) Willingness to offer and receive sharp criticism, with nothing “taken personally”

Anyway, I think such a circle provides a structure for the deliberate practice of writing when no such structure seems to exist today. As I said, I presume that the best that students can do today is send their essays to mentors with whom they had to put in much effort to establish a relationship (the effort necessary explains why so few students have such mentors); moreover, this mentor is just one person (and thus, the student receives just one point of view), and one mentor will not likely be able or want to read essays on any frequency higher than once every >3 days.

So to sum up, a high-quality writing circle provides a writer more diverse, more frequent feedback. This feedback, in turn, encourages him to write more often and enables him to write better.

What do you think man? Want to whip up a writing circle program? I’m serious.