I tend to collect inspirational stories of people who have done amazing things and who have learned how to be an expert at something, because you read about them and you can’t help but think, ‘I could do something like that too’. The success of others inspires you to do great things yourself.
Now this inspiration is helpful, invaluable even, but even more useful I think is an examination of the mechanics of how they became experts at the things they do.
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
The consensus is that hard work is the single most important factor in becoming truly great at something, and innate talent is a lot less important than you might think:
The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that “genius”, “talent” or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born.
“It’s complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it’s so rare,” says Anders Ericsson, the professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee who edited the handbook. “But it isn’t magic, and it isn’t born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery. These people don’t necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort.”
This is mixed news, says Ericsson. “It’s funny, really. On one hand it’s encouraging: it makes me think that even the most ordinary among us should be careful about saying we can’t do great things, because people have proven again and again that most people can do something extraordinary if they’re willing to put in the exercise. On the other hand, it’s a bit overwhelming to look at what these people have to do. They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent. It’s not something everyone’s up for.”
This has led scholars of elite performance to speak of a 10-year rule: it seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused work to master something and bring greatness within reach. This shows starkly in a 1985 study of 120 elite athletes, performers, artists, biochemists and mathematicians led by University of Chicago psychologist Benjamin Bloom, a giant of the field who died in 1999. Every single person in the study took at least a decade of hard study or practice to achieve international recognition. Olympic swimmers trained for an average of 15 years before making the team; the best concert pianists took 15 years to earn international recognition. Top researchers, sculptors and mathematicians put in similar amounts of time.
It’s daunting, but I think it’s inspiring too, to know that in just about all cases, the only thing that stands between you and the label of ‘genius’ or ‘expert’ within whatever field you choose is hard work and a mentor.
In fact, it was partly because of this book that I chose to set the goal of becoming an expert at adventure racing by winning Primal Quest, which is widely considered to be the ‘World Cup’ of adventure racing.
And after I win Primal Quest, I’m going to start working on my next 10 year conquest.
Further Reading:
- How to be a Genius
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Good luck, Stu! I have a copy of the Cambridge Handbook in my desk. I think that Ericsson’s work presents a lifeline for anyone who has the stomach to work hard but fears that they’ll never be as good as they want to be in their chosen field. But it also chastises us — in a good way — when we don’t live up to what we can be.
A while back I started collecting links on Ericsson’s “deliberate practice” work here — I’ve added this post to the list.
That’s a great collection of links Tim, thanks for adding me!