Daniel Coyle's Blog, page 7

Talking Nature/Nurture with David Epstein, Author of The Sports Gene

If you were asked to pick two people on opposing sides of the nature/nurture debate, you might pick myself and David Epstein, author of the new book The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. If you haven’t bought it already, you should: it’s a fascinating, thought-provoking look at the leading edge of sports performance, written by a guy who knows the territory. David, besides being a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, was  a collegiate runner for Columbia University. More to the point, he’s a terrific researcher and a fine, thoughtful writer.

Last week David and I had a wide-ranging barroom-style chat that covered Jamaican sprinters, the 10,000-hour rule, and the secret role of David’s mother in his new book. You might think we would spend the entire time hurling barstools at each other. You would be wrong. Partly because David is an incredibly nice guy, and mostly because science is shining new light on this area: when it comes to raw athletic skills (endurance, speed, leaping ability) genes are a difference-maker, particularly at the world-class level. With complex athletic skills (basically everything else), it’s far more about environment (quality practice, coaching, motivation, etc.).

Here’s how our chat went:

DC: David, let me start by saying how much I admire the book, your work, and how it made me appreciate physical talent in a different way. I can only presume that the skill you show in writing this book is mostly genetic.

DE: It’s funny — my friends think of me as a guy who thinks that training is a miracle, because it can totally transform someone. But the questions I get on TV are mostly, “What’s the gene for this, what’s the gene for that?”  Like this TV show I went on yesterday tweeted “David Epstein thinks that there’s an actual sports gene that separates athletes from the rest of us.” I totally don’t think that.

DC: I’m especially interested in this notion of trainability you write about — how when some people exercise, they get a lot more fit, and other people who follow the exact same regimen don’t improve at all, and it seems controlled by genes. I wonder if you found any evidence whether these same sorts of variances apply to the brain and the process of learning skills.

DE: Yeah, I didn’t get into skills as wide ranging as you have, but I did look at twin studies, fraternal and identical twins, heritability and things like that. Experimenters would have them doing skills like balancing on a plank that has a ball under it, and the identical twins would usually progress in a way that was similar to each other and different from the fraternal twins, and sometimes significantly different. But it depended on the tasks. For tasks that were really simple, everyone would get better at the same rate, fraternal and identical, and everybody would end up in a pretty similar state. But if the tasks were pretty complex, sometimes people would actually get more different from one another with practice. Identical twins would move together, and they would move away from the fraternal twins. So it seems, even though we don’t know the genes for all that, that in complex tasks there was usually a trainability phenomenon, or almost always a trainability phenomenon.

I had to cut 40,000 words from the manuscript, and some of the material I cut involved some studies like this. One of the genes was the BDNF gene, which stands for “brain-derived neurotrophic factor.” There’s studies with versions of BDNF called val and met, and they’d have people do a driving simulation and people with a certain version would tend not to repeat their mistakes as much, so when they would bring them back, a day or month later, they’d remember the course better. The same thing happened with putting pegs in holes.

In one specific case, in a motor-learning task, there were suggestions that one version of the BDNF gene coordinates the reorganization of the brain that happens when skills are learned. I remember one 2006 study where people practiced motor skills with their right hand, like putting pegs in holes as quickly as they could, and the activated area of the brain that represented the right hand increased in size with practice only in people who didn’t have the met version of that gene. So all the subjects started with similar-size motor maps, but only the non-met carriers experienced a significant change with practice. So there was some sort of proof of concept there, but not so much repeated work that when it came down to what I had to cut from the book, it had to get cut.

I think there was one other study… can I read you a paragraph?

In 2010 a group of scientists led by neurologist Steven C. Cramer set out explicitly to test whether the BDNF gene impacts the kind of memory involved in motor skill learning, and their findings suggest that it does. In that study, people drove a car along a digital track 15 separate times in one day. All of the drivers improved as they learned the course, but the met carriers did not improve as much. And when all the drivers were asked back four days hence and made to drive the course once more, the met carriers made more mistakes. When scientists used fMRI to look at the drivers’ brains as they practiced simple motor skills, they found different patterns of activation in the people who had a met version of the BDNF gene.

So I think there’s some proof of concept. And also the fact that competitive table-tennis players with mental handicaps actually failed to learn the anticipatory cues to effectively return shots. I found the fMRI literature to be so, sometimes all over the place and contradictory, so it suggests to me that there’s more to look at there, but I didn’t feel like it was nailed down. It feels to me that it might work on a skill by skill basis, because individual skills are so different. I ended up actually cutting all of that because I think there needs to be more done. Sorry, that’s a long-winded, wishy-washy answer to your question.

DC: Backing up for a second. When we first started talking, we talked about the response to your book, and the fact that people are reacting to the idea of this sports gene, and how you’re put in the position of pointing out that things are a bit more complicated. Are you surprised at the reaction to your book?

DE: Totally surprised. I was really leaning on family members to buy copies. When I pitched the book, a lot of publishers lost interest when there wasn’t a takeaway message. The first question was always, is this another Born to Run? That was the first. Next, was where are you going to come down on nature versus nurture? My answer was, I don’t know where I’m going to come down, but I can tell you that it will be nature/nurture-plus. I guess I thought the complexity of the book would deter other media from covering it at all, and that would in turn deter people from reading it, and I guess that’s turned out not to be the case, though it’s been difficult because some of the coverage will take one side or the other. I hope people read the book. Some of the coverage has made it seem like I believe there’s some specific sports gene that separates great athletes from the rest of us, but I definitely don’t believe that.

DC:  Although some companies out there would love parents to believe that that sports gene is out there and can be tested for.

DE: Some of the direct-to-consumer marketing is total rubbish. Sometimes the genes that the companies market do have scientific principles behind them, like they do impact capillary growth when you train, but they’ll say, “We’re gonna test you for these three genes, for cardiovascular response to training so we can tell you whether your kid is going to be an endurance athlete.” Those three genes might explain just two percent of the variance. Even though, for research purposes, that’s an interesting number, for parents or athletes it’s completely useless.

DC: I was fascinated by was the chapter on the Jamaican sprinters. Because if there was a part of the world where you could say, yes, there’s a gene  for speed and the Jamaicans seem to have it, that would be the story. But that’s not the story you found.

DE: One of the ways I got curious about this, other than the fact that there were a lot of Jamaicans on my track team who were really fast, was that a demographer told me that there were more people of Jamaican descent in America than there are in Jamaica, so if it were just down to Jamaican genetics, American should be winning — and we’re not.  And so, when I went to Jamaica and I kept hearing this story of how this group called the Maroons, these warrior slaves who beat back the British army and cloistered themselves in the northwest corner of the island where all the great runners come from, Ben Johnson and Usain Bolt and all the others, that these warriors had given rise to the great track and field athletes, but so far the genetic data doesn’t really support that.

So Jamaicans are a very mixed group of West Africans, and Maroons look genetically pretty much like other Jamaicans, which is to say like West Africans so all the studies that have been done to date show that people from that part of the world tend to have a higher-than-average proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, and every 100-meter male Olympica finalist since the boycott in 1980, no matter what country they’re running for, they’ve all been from that tiny area of West Africa, and they all have proportionally longer limbs, for cooling purposes.

That said, I like to think of the Usain Bolt example. In what other country in the world would a six-foot-four 15-year-old end up in track? I think the answer is the Bahamas, Trinidad, and maybe Barbados and Jamaica, and that’s it. So while you can think of Usain Bolt as a genetic freak, I think he does have physical gifts that are pretty rare, and his mentality allows him to capitalize on those gifts in a certain way, but I absolutely think there are other Usain Bolts out there. I think Randy Moss might be another Usain Bolt. But you’re not going to find them outside Jamaica, because they’ve forced everyone to sprint. I mean, the chances of a great sprinter slipping through the cracks in Jamaica is like the chance of a great high-school football player slipping through the cracks in America.

DC: You say forced to sprint, but is it forced, or something else? The scene you describe in that stadium… I mean, if I went to that stadium as a ten-year-old kid, it would light me up, I’d start dreaming of being a great sprinter. The way that culture sends out this clear shared signal that creates this motivational response is the interesting part to me.

DE: Right. Forced is the wrong word, because it starts with sports day at school when kids are five years old, and of course they want to take part in that because it’s fun and everybody gets a pat on the back and everyone takes a crack at sprinting from the time they’re little. The kids start to get to know who’s fast. As they get older, all the enthusiasm in Jamaica is for youth track. Prior to Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell facing off before the 2008 Olympics at the Jamaican national trials, [Jamaica] didn’t care about pro track at all. The sportswriters there were telling me that they had empty stadiums for pro track.

And so all the emphasis is on youth track, which is amazing. So kids get recruited… I remember going around the track at the high-school national championships and asking coaches how recruiting worked, and they’d tell me without me asking, “Well, we’re not allowed to give refrigerators to parents anymore.” It was like their version of shady boosterism, they’d give fridges to parents to try to get their kids to come to a certain school. So kids are looking at high school as a place where they can gain local renown and compete in a stadium where there is a World Cup atmosphere. The atmosphere was like being at the Olympic final in London. There weren’t quite as many people because the stadium isn’t that big, but it was more energetic. I was sitting next to former Olympian Sandie Richards, and her high school was catching up in a relay, and she’s digging her nails into my leg.  This is an Olympian on the edge of her chair watching her high-school team! So it’s really cool, and the alums are still part of the program, it’s something that anybody in sports would want to be a part of.

DC: That’s amazing. That brings us to the idea of motivation and how that happens. As an Alaskan, I like the chapter on the sled dogs and the idea that it’s possible to breed dogs for motivation. Which makes me wonder: what’s more powerful, to have a gene to help your motivation along, or to have an environment — like being in that stadium?

DE: That’s a good question, and I don’t totally know the answer, and I’m sure it’d a different answer for different people, but we know intuitively that we respond differently when we’re in different training groups, with different partners. Some people require a heck of a lot more management to get them to train the way they should, and other people who you have to manage in order to get them to stop training. So I think it’s a sliding scale. The less innate it is for someone… and I hope that chapter doesn’t come off so that people read it and say, “Oh, I’ve got coach-potato genes, I’m just not going to exercise.” When I’ve been interviewed about it, I say, “No, that means you might have to work harder to form your environment in such a way as to make it more conducive to exercise.” I know that about myself. I know I can get really lazy really easily, so I look for training groups because I know that’s something that works for me. I tell you, if you don’t get excited by being at National Stadium in Kingston during Champs, check your pulse.

DC: Another thing in the oxygen these days is the 10,000-hour rule. It’s clear, though your work in the book and the work of others,  that this number represents an ideal, not some kind of magical scientific threshold. Did you find anybody who defied the 10,000 hour completely, either as a raw athlete or as one with more complex skills?

DE: I think the more complex a skill is, the more unlikely that is to occur, for a variety of reasons that you cover in your book. But from a raw athletic standpoint, I think, yeah, I think I saw it quite a bit with guys like [high jumper] Donald Thomas, for example, as compared to a guy like Stefan Holm. Stefan Holm estimated his own training at 20,000 hours, and Donald Thomas was close to zero, so those guys average 10,000 hours. If somebody had done what Donald Thomas did at the high school level, my eyeballs would have popped out of my head. But to see someone do it at the world-championship level, just like knocked my socks off. I think the lower the level you go to, the more you see that, like the study at York University on aerobic capacity.  They kicked people with even a light training background out of the study, and six people out of the 1,900 in the study had aerobic capacities in the sixties without any training history whatsoever.  So that’s where I think you look for these people, when they haven’t achieved anything, people who have had no training whatsoever, so you can catch them when they don’t know they have it, or haven’t practiced. Mid-sixties is really high aerobic capacity for people who haven’t trained at all. I think those people are out there.

Right now we’re watching the world championships and  Ashton Eaton, world-record holder in the decathlon, I think he didn’t have a deep athletic history when he won, but he was able to do the decathlon because he was small. Or Bolt, who won the world junior championships I believe when he was 15, and that’s an under-19 competition, which is crazy when you think of the developmental differences there. In the book there’s the story of [world-champion triathlete] Chrissie Wellington didn’t sit on a road bike until she was 27 years old. So those people are out there.

DC: Most of those examples and those in the book involve speed, endurance, and aerobic capacity — you’re talking about primal qualities of the human body. Are there any that jump out at you that were succeeding in that way with what we might call more complex skills?

DE: Not really, not in more complex skills. I don’t think that anyone’s born knowing complex skills. I make the case in the book that in tennis, general athleticism seems to speed the learning curve for sports-specific skills, but even those players who were tracked from the time they were youth, even Steffi Graf and Boris Becker had to put in a ton of time in order to learn those sports-specific skills. They were superior on tests of raw athleticism, but they were also superior on tests of focus and concentration, and they were tied for the highest in ambition with some other players. So no, I don’t think… the idea that someone knows how to hit a tennis ball or a baseball when they are dropped on earth, and I don’t think the most deterministic geneticist would think so.

DC: You mention ambition, and you’ve spent time around some top performers through your day job at Sports Illustrated and through this book. The self-narratives of these top performers is really interesting, which leads me to a question: with a great performer, do you want them to know the scientific truth about what’s happening? We’re obviously in the barroom portion of this conversation now, but I often think that they function better when they don’t know the truth, when they’re immersed in some other narrative, which gives them more power than just the scientific facts.

DE: I’d agree with that on a number of levels. One principle I have for sportswriting is, “Just because you’re a bird doesn’t mean you’re an ornithologist.” When I see sportswriters, they often ask athletes how they do what they do, because they think the athlete is the expert. And the athletes don’t know. Albert Pujols really thought he was going to hit the ball off [softball pitcher] Jennie Finch.

DC: They don’t know! They’re in the worst position.

DE: Exactly. They’ve automated it. They have no idea what’s really going on. So they’ll naturally find the narrative that’s best for them, and they should be allowed to embrace it. Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper, is a really interesting example. He was sort of, and maybe this crosses lines that I shouldn’t get into, but he was extremely religious and saw triple jumping as a way to give him a platform to spread certain religious values, and when he retired he had a crisis of personality, and ultimately looked back on it and said, “Oh, I think that believing that just helped me stay focused on my training. “ Now, he’s not religious at all. So it’s a very strange thing, and I think those narratives can be important. Where I think knowing some of the science could help is in knowing and figuring out the best kind of practice to do, in terms of helping people know that skills develop in certain ways and you do need to put in this time to let those skills develop.

A college friend of mine was world-ranked in the 800 meters and just picked up cycling recently.  He’s really good for a beginner, but he’s  getting mad because he’s not winning the race. I’m like, come on, man, you don’t pick it up overnight! With respect to genetics, the danger is that we tell people, “You have these genes, you have to do this.” I hope that it leads to more options. Where we say, “You have these genes, you can do whatever you want, but your machinery might be really adept at improving at this other thing, so if that training over here isn’t working for you, and you aren’t getting the joy and progress you want, don’t be afraid to try this other thing.” So I hope it leads to more options.

DC: It’s interesting that people really, really want there to be a sports gene, that this sense of pre-destination is almost built into our culture. That there’s a magic thing out there that I was born to do. And that probably is the case with a tiny percentage of extraordinary athletes. But for most of us it’s about exploring and tweaking things this way and that to optimize.

DE: Exactly. That tweaking thing. I love this quote I came across for the book by a guy named J. M. Tanner who was a world-class hurdler the world expert in body development and growth. His quote was something like, “We all have an absolutely unique genome, so for optimal development we would want a completely unique environment.” There are certain principles that apply across all sorts of training. But I also think great coaches know that different people respond to things in different way.

I have a friend who was in special forces, and when he got to a certain level of training, every guy had a one-on-one coach. Every guy, so their training was tailored to them. Obviously that requires a lot of resources, but I hope people take sort of a trial-and-error approach to their training. I know that I was a better cross-country runner on 30 miles a week of targeted training in college than I was on 80 or 85 miles a week in high school.

DC: With that in mind, let’s go to the lightning round portion of this, where I ask you to rank the relative impact of several factors on performance, for a few hypothetical athletes. For the purposes of this experiment, I want you to picture them as average Joes and Josephines. No Usain Bolts allowed.

Here are the four qualities I want you to rank, from most important to least important:

Genes
Quality of Coaching
Motivation/Mindset
Quality of Practice

DE: OK, ready.

DC: First, for an average high-school soccer player — which factors matter most, and least?

DE: I’m gonna say, I’d put quality of practice first. Quality of coaching second, genes third, and motivation/mindset last.

DC: Okay, now for a world-class golfer — same question. Which factors matter most, and least?

DE: This one I’m going to say, quality of practice, genes, then motivation/mindset, and last, quality of coaching.

DC: Okay, how about a weekend tennis player — someone like you and me, in his thirties or forties, trying to get better, to do well in club tournaments.

DE: In this case, I think quality of coaching would go first. Then I think quality of practice and genes tied for second, then motivation/mindset last. Man, I’m really sticking it to motivation/mindset, aren’t I?

DC: It must be your coach-potato gene speaking. Okay, how about an Olympic marathoner?

DE: Genes first, quality of coaching last — because most of the Kenyans don’t even have coaches –  quality of practice, motivation/mindset, and quality of coaching.

DC: Lastly, how about for the author of a new book called The Sports Gene. How do you rank those factors for your own skills, your own performance in writing the book.

DE: This one, I think motivation/mindset is really important. I’m gonna put it on top of this one. Then I’m gonna say quality of coaching last. Then I’ll put genes second, and quality of practice third — wait, no, no let me switch those. Can I tie genes and quality of practice or is that lame?

DC: You can have a tie. That’s definitely permitted.

DE: I did notice, when I was digging through some stuff for my acknowledgments I recently found a letter from my mother and though she’s never done any writing, she’s really quite good

DC: That’s awesome. So we can thank her for making today possible, then.

DE: I read somewhere that the point of all this science is so that we can figure out whether to blame our genes or our parents [laughs]. I don’t know if we settled anything, but it’s been fun.

How to Be Creative, Starring Jackson Browne’s Teakettle

I absolutely love this video. It’s from Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney’s new Eagles documentary on Showtime (and if you’re my age, here’s a warning: you will watch this obsessively,  because it’s a time machine to your teen years, and because it’s wildly entertaining for reasons that Bill Simmons details here.

But what I really love about this clip is that it shows how lead singer Glenn Frey began to master the creative skill that underpinned the band’s success. And he did it in an unusual way: by listening through his floorboards to his neighbor, Jackson Browne.

Here’s Frey:

 I didn’t really know how to write songs. I knew I wanted to write songs, but I didn’t know exactly, did you just wait around for inspiration, you know, what was the deal? I learned through Jackson’s ceiling and my floor exactly how to write songs, ’cause Jackson would get up, and he’d play the first verse and first course, and he’d play it 20 times, until he had it just the way he wanted it. And then there’d be silence, and then I’d hear the teapot going off again, and it would be quiet for 20 minutes, and then I’d hear him start to play again … and I’m up there going, so that’s how you do it? Elbow grease. Time. Thought. Persistence.”

It goes on from there, all great stuff. For me, the takeaways are:

1) Proximity. Glenn Frey didn’t read a book about songwriting, or hear a talk. The breakthrough started with his social network — on making friends with a guy who was involved in the same craft, and at a slightly higher level. Frey and Jackson Browne became neighbors, and the lessons began.

2) Habit. Through Browne, Frey learned a lesson that eludes many creative types: it’s not about inspiration. As the artist Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us show up and get to work.” Browne’s teakettle goes off at 9 a.m., the process starts.

4) Looping. Browne’s creative process is built on the act of circling back through the structure — changing a small piece and looking at the entire thing, then doing it over and over. This is the pattern with any creative act, whether it’s writing or juggling or comedy. It’s an act of construction, where each piece impacts the whole structure.

5) Repetition. Frey learns the repetition isn’t boring; it’s actually kind of thrilling, because it’s the tool that builds songs.

There are also a few other valuable lessons in the documentary having to do with peyote, groupies, and Stevie Nicks — but I’ll leave those for you to enjoy.

Speaking of enjoying, I hope you’ve all been enjoying the summer. Now that September almost here, I’ll be posting more often, starting with a Q/A with David Epstein, author of the new book The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. If you have any questions for David, please let me know (we’re talking on Weds Aug 14).

To Improve Faster, Think Like a Startup

Whenever we take on a new project, our first instinct is to behave like a student — to seek out the best teachers, to immerse ourselves in information.

This instinct makes perfect sense. But it might be the worst thing you can do.

Meet Karen Cheng, a California woman who spent the past year transforming herself from an awkward beginner to a remarkably skilled dancer.  Click this video (2.7 million views and counting) to see a cool time-lapse version of her improvement.

Cheng’s real accomplishment, however, is giving us a useful blueprint for changing the way we think about practice. She didn’t focus on receiving knowedge; instead she focused on action — specifically on constructing a lean, focused, entrepreneurial plan to construct her skill. (You can read more here.) Her plan has four basic principles:

1) Set small process-oriented goals, not big performance goals. Instead of aiming at grand achievement (being chosen for a dance troupe, for instance), Cheng’s initial goal was modest: to practice for at least five minutes each day. The allowed her to keep expectations low and avoid disappointment. As she improved, she increased the goal to two hours per day. She controlled the goals, instead of being controlled by them.

2) Be opportunistic. Rather than set aside a prescribed time to practice, Cheng constantly smuggled moments of practice into her everyday life. As she writes:

Here’s my secret: I practiced everywhere. At bus stops. In line at the grocery store. At work — using the mouse with my right hand and practicing drills with my left hand. You don’t have to train hardcore for years to become a dancer. But you must be willing to practice and you better be hungry.

3) Be your own coach. Keep a journal, use videotape, find ways to be organized about evaluating and strategizing your strengths and weaknesses. At every turn, Cheng sought out ways to take honest, realistic assessments and use them as platforms for learning.

4) Connect to people. Find good teachers on YouTube and in person; seek out places to watch good performers and learn from them. Here’s she plays the role of a student, but it’s anything but passive. She’s active, engaged, and targeted. She doesn’t worship at the altar of a single teacher’s wisdom; instead she hunts and gathers useful stuff she can apply.

The real payoff, however, is enjoyment. Check out the expression on Cheng’s face as she improves (especially between days 30 and 86). She’s intense but smiling, radiating hard-won satisfaction. In other words, she’s exactly where a good startup wants to be: utterly lost in the challenge, in control, and loving it. 

What’s Your LQ (Learning Quotient)?

In sports, business, and education these days, you can’t go a hot minute without hearing talk of “character” and “work ethic.” In an increasingly quantified world, we use these terms as a catch-all to explain unexpected patterns of success and failure.

For instance, whenever an underrated person becomes a star, you will hear about how they were propelled by their resilient character and gritty work ethic. When a “can’t-miss” superstar falls on their face? Exact same story in reverse.

I think most of us would agree that character and work ethic clearly matter, and matter hugely. But the real question is: what do those terms really mean?  More important, is it possible to translate them into a measurable, identifiable skill set?

As it happens, we get a beautiful case study of this right now in the baseball world in the form of Arizona Diamondbacks slugger Paul Goldschmidt. You might not have heard the name, but you already know the story: completely overlooked as a young player, didn’t start until his junior year of high school, drafted in 49th round, attended tiny college — and then (insert inspiring music here) worked incredibly hard, kept improving and improving and really improving, and is now one of the league’s brightest young players.

Why? That’s where it gets interesting. Because “character” and “work ethic” do not adequately describe what has propelled Goldschmidt. Instead, it’s about his remarkable ability to learn (see this story for more). Specifically, his willingness to take ownership of an intentional daily process in which he attacks his weaknesses and builds his strengths.

To the hitting coach, he would ask: How do I become a consistent major league hitter? To the infield coach: How do I become a Gold Glove first baseman? To the strength coach: How do I change my body to get in the best shape possible? Zinter said he trusted the coaches implicitly.

“A lot of kids have so much pride that they want to show the coaches and the front office that they know what they’re doing, and they don’t need the help,” Zinter said. “They don’t absorb the information because they want us to think they know it already. Goldy didn’t have an ego. He didn’t have that illusion of knowledge. He’s O.K. with wanting to learn.”

“He’s done such a great job of listening to everything and channeling how it works for him,” said Aaron Hill, a veteran second baseman. “He asks guys everything — about ground balls, footwork, counts, swings, setups, where to sit in the box, what I’m doing. You name it, he’s asking the questions.”

The picture that emerges is not of vague qualities, but rather of a highly specific set of traits — a combination of inquisitiveness, growth mindset, humility, adaptiveness, and relentlessness.

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest an idea called Learning Quotient. The idea is that our ability to learn is a measurable skill, just like IQ.

Here’s how it might work: rate yourself from 0 to 5 on the following questions according to the usual scale: 0 for strongly disagree; 5 for strongly agree.

1. You work on your skills for an hour or more every day
2. You are focused on process, not the immediate outcomes
3. You have strong relationships with mentors/coaches, and use them as models and guidance
4. You are keenly aware of how much you do not know, and the gap between your present abilities and your longterm goals
5. You can accurately and precisely describe the skills you want to build
6. You think about improving your skills all the time
7. You approach your daily work with enthusiasm
8. You are balanced between building with repetition and seeking innovations
9. You are comfortable going outside of your comfort zone
10. You are constantly adapting and refining your learning process

By this yardstick, a perfect LQ would be 50: the heavenly realm of John Wooden and Goldschmidt. Below 15 and you’re either comatose or Allen Iverson (an immense talent who famously didn’t believe in practice). I suspect most of us would fall in the 25-30 range or so, which, among other things, speaks to the inherent challenges of creating a daily routine and sticking to it.

What I like about the idea of LQ, however, is that it is not a fixed quality. It can be increased and grown, and profoundly affected by environment and group culture.

The real question is, what do you think? Could LQ be used to scout or develop talent? And, if so, what other questions should be added to the list?

The Soft-Skills Revolution

Remember back ten years ago when big data and Moneyball analytics changed the sports world?

Consider this your official heads-up, because that kind of disruption is about to happen in business, sales, teaching, and other domains built on soft skills. And it might be because of this little device.

Meet the sociometer. It might look boring, but it provides a window into the most mysterious world of all: the hidden landscape of social interactions that drives creativity, productivity, and success.

The sociometer, worn around the neck like an ID badge, captures tone of voice, activity level, and location. It can tell who you talk to, how often, and for how long. It can tell whether two speakers are face to face, or turned away from each other. It can measure the energy level of an interaction, and use it to determine levels of engagement. Most important, it can combine its data with email and social media to form detailed maps that reveal the inner workings of a team, company, or classroom.

The sociometer was originally developed by Alex “Sandy” Pentland and the folks at MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, and further perfected by Ben Waber and other MIT alums who founded Sociometric Solutions. The technology is still evolving, and there are some hurdles to overcome (preserving individual privacy being the most obvious), but it’s easy to imagine how this device might fundamentally change the landscape of work life. Because it’s already starting to happen.

For example: sales firms use the sociometer as a skill-development tool. They show trainees how often top salespeople interrupt clients (hardly ever, it turns out) and then show them precisely where they fall on that scale.

Businesses are using it to maximize team cohesion by altering physical space. For instance, Waber’s studies reveal that 12-person lunch tables lead to significantly more interaction and productivity than four-person lunch tables.

Through an application called Meeting Mediator, the sociometers provide real-time data that shows levels of participation, dominance, and interaction to help people distinguish a healthy, productive meeting from an unhealthy one.

Yes, there’s something Orwellian about the notion that our movements and communications can be tracked and placed into some management algorithm. But if individual privacy concerns can be addressed, I think the potential outweighs the dangers.

We normally think of great social skills as being mysterious and vaguely magical. But when we see like a sociometer — when we see our social world in terms of quantifiable, repeatable patterns — we get a glimpse of the mechanics beneath the magic.  We begin to notice examples of brilliant social thinking all around us.

For example:

• How Steve Jobs designed the Pixar studio building so that all the bathrooms were centrally located — maximizing serendipitous interaction.

• How successful comedy-improv troupes prohibit using the words “no” and “but” and replace them with “yes” and “and.”

• How Amazon’s Jeff Bezos uses a “two-pizza rule” — which states that any team that cannot be fed with two pizzas is too big, and has to be made smaller.

The sociometer may be a new tool, but the most useful truth it will reveal will be an ancient one: we work best in small, cohesive, purposeful tribes.

So here’s a question: would you be willing to wear a sociometer at work?

How Great Teachers See

Talent identification is the holy grail of sports, business, parenting, and education. We dream of having the magical ability to quickly and accurately assess who is destined to succeed; to sort the contenders from the pretenders.

Funny thing is, there was once a clever scientist who figured out how to do just that.

His name was Dov Eden; he was an Israeli psychologist who worked with businesses and the military. In the early 1980s Eden published a remarkable study that showed he could predict with uncanny precision which young recruits in the Israeli military would become top performers.

It worked like this: Eden studied the mental and physical aptitudes of one thousand recruits, then selected a handful of soldiers he labeled as “high potential.” Eden informed platoon commanders that they could “expect unusual achievements” from these individuals.

Sure enough, Eden was right. Over the next 11 weeks, Eden’s group performed significantly better than their peers — 9 percent higher on expertise tests and 10 percent higher on weapons evaluation.

It looked for all the world like an impressive display of talent identification — except that it wasn’t.

Because here’s the twist: the “high-potential” soldiers weren’t really high-potential. Eden had selected them completely at random. The real power was in the act of labeling them as high-potential. In sending a simple signal — these people are special.

That signal had created a massive effect in both the mind of the instructor and the learner — a virtuous spiral between teacher and learner that led to the full expression of potential. (The phenomenon, dubbed the Pygmalion Effect, has been repeated many times, and is particularly powerful in educational settings.)

The story, told in Adam Grant’s marvelous new book Give and Take, gives us a glimpse into the power of labels, and how they affect our subconscious. The underlying picture: the unconscious minds of most teachers are naturally thrifty with energy and attention — after all, they don’t have all the time in the world.  They thus look at each new student with a questioning eye: do they have what it takes? Is this a good investment?

The high-potential label is like a flashing Las Vegas sign reading THIS PERSON IS A GREAT INVESTMENT — that triggers a cascade of positive effects. First impressions are uniformly positive. Early mistakes aren’t treated as verdicts; but as learning opportunities. Progress isn’t treated as luck, but as a happy inevitability.

I remember watching Hans Jensen, a remarkable cello teacher at Meadowmount Music School, teach two students. To my eye, one student was clearly better than the other. After the lesson, I asked Hans which student had more potential.

“Who knows?” he said.

I think this is precisely the kind of thinking that distinguishes master teachers. They share a hesitancy to judge; a stubborn, seemingly illogical optimism. They see failures as stepping stones to progress. They begin each new encounter with a single thrilling thought: this person is special.

And then, more often than not, that thought turns out to be true.

Forget 10,000 Hours — Instead, Aim for 10 Minutes

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been nearly five years since the 10,000-Hour Rule went mainstream. Last week, as if to officially mark the anniversary, more than three hundred coaches, players, general managers, and talent-development experts from around the world gathered at the Leaders in Performance conference in New York. Among this crowd, you might expect to find people singing the praises of the 10,000-Hour Rule.

You’d be wrong.

A significant number disliked it, because they saw the rule creating a mindless culture of hour-counting. They saw sports federations building programs around the metric, using it as the sole measure of progress.

“It’s absolutely nuts,” the head of one nation’s soccer federation told me. “Coaches are tracking practice hours and the athletes are clocking in and out with time cards like they’re working on an assembly line. There’s no ownership, no creativity.”

The science behind the 10,000-Hour rule has been subject to debate, and rightly so, because talent is more complex than any one measure. For example, how do you calibrate the impact of Warren Buffett’s childhood paper route on his temperament and business skills? How do you count the hours the young Keith Richards spent listening to blues records and falling in love with them?

The real issue here, however, is that the the 10,000-Hour rule is not really about quantity. It’s about the power of sharp, focused, high-quality practice. It’s about the massive learning differences created by intense efforts within highly engaging practice environments. We see this in the habits of high-performing groups, many of whom build their skills through a combination of short, sharp sessions and lots of restorative rest.

For example, at La Masia, the training academy that has produced the majority of Barcelona’s world-beating soccer team, the schedule calls for organized training a mere 70 minutes per day — a figure that most U.S. travel soccer coaches would scoff at as being insufficient.  But here’s the thing: it’s a world-class 70 minutes: a razor-sharp, full-tilt, meticulously planned session with far more content and engagement than any mundane, exhausting three-hour practice.

The other benefit of this approach is that it frees the learners to spend time on their own. Real learning doesn’t happen just through organized drills; most of it happens in the off hours, when you’re fooling around, inventing games, competing, experimenting, mimicking, grappling with problems and inventing solutions. When you’re wholly engaged in the art of simple, intense play.

So perhaps a solution is to ignore the 10,000-Hour Rule and instead embrace the 10-Minute Rule. Which has three elements:

1) Focus: pick out a target skill — a single chunk you want to work on.
2) Super-high intensity
3) Rest: only do it when you’re fresh. If you’re exhausted, quit.

In other words: don’t approach practice like a factory worker logging hours. Instead, think like an opportunist. Be an entrepreneur.

The Big Bet

About a week from now, I will make a phone call to London and place a large bet. In fact this bet will be, by far, the biggest bet I’ve ever placed — around $1,500.

There are only three rules: 1) I have to bet it all; 2) I can bet on any sport; 3) I’m not allowed to lose. (This third rule was established by my wife Jen, and also by the existence of our son’s college tuition bills.)

So the question is, what should I bet on?

Quick backstory: a few months ago a book I co-wrote was fortunate enough to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, which is sponsored by the British bookmaker of the same name. As part of the prize, I got a free voucher allowing me to place this bet.

At first, I was tempted to aim for a longshot. Like picking the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series (approximate odds: 1 bazillion to 1). Or picking the Cleveland Browns to win the Super Bowl. Or, come to think of it, any team from Cleveland to win anything.

Then, urged by my ever-wise wife, I started to think more conservatively. I started to look for a team or person whose talents I could trust with this bet. It wasn’t easy.

Because if I’ve learned anything over the past years it’s that success at the highest level — in sports, business, music — has a significant component of randomness to it. You can do everything exactly right — train, coach, prepare — but chance and chaos will have their say. Favorites collapse all the time. Underdogs win all the time. Refs make terrible calls. Freaky injuries happen. The ball bounces in strange directions. How do you beat that? It seemed hopeless.

Then I read this article. And saw this video.

They tell the story of how LeBron James, basketball’s best player, set out to improve his game. How, in a move straight out of Moneyball, James ruthlessly analyzed his weaknesses and set out to build a new skill set that would make him a more efficient teammate. How he hired a master coach and made himself a humble apprentice, showing up early for each training session, videotaping and studying, in order to learn a new set of scoring moves. How James, in short, turned himself into a master student.

Here’s James talking about the process:

“The biggest thing isn’t how much you work on things, it’s ‘Can you work on something, then implement it into a game situation?’” James says. “Can you bring what you’ve worked on so much and put it out on the floor with the finished product? I was happy that I was able to do that and make that transformation.”

James emerged from that summer transformed. “When he returned after the lockout, he was a totally different player,” [Coach Eric] Spoelstra says. “It was as if he downloaded a program with all of Olajuwon’s and Ewing’s post-up moves. I don’t know if I’ve seen a player improve that much in a specific area in one off season

So now I’m leaning toward betting on James and the Heat to win the NBA championship next month. In the larger sense, I wouldn’t really be betting on James — I’d be betting on the power of his process, his approach, his craftsmanship. I’d be betting that, in sports as in everything else, the smartest learner wins.

But before I make that phone call and place that bet, I want to ask: do you think this is the right move? Is there anything I’m missing here?

What would you bet on?

The Vastly Underrated Importance of Goofy Little Games

I love this video because it’s a time machine to a lost age of childhood. Here, we see hockey superstars Sidney Crosby and Max Talbot travel to the tiny Crosby family basement in Nova Scotia to do what Sidney spent much of his young life doing: shoot pucks into the Crosby family dryer. (Spoiler alert: Crosby is still pretty good.)

Watching this, readers of a certain age might be transported back to their own basements, and the little games played there. At my house, the favorite game involved roller skates, badminton racquets, and high-speed collisions with the radiator covers (which strongly resembled the Crosby dryer).

It turns out this sort of thing is a pattern. Golfer Rory McIlroy learned to play golf by chipping balls into the family washing machine. Hall of Fame ballplayer Willie Mays practiced hitting by swinging at bottle caps with a broomstick. Cricketer Donald Bradman practiced his batting by bouncing a golf ball off a water tank and hitting the rebound. They aren’t alone. Look deeply into the biography of any top athlete, musician, or writer, and you’ll eventually find a kid in a basement, enraptured by some goofy little game they invented.

So here’s my question: In a world where so much of youth life is highly organized and regimented, do these goofy little games still happen? Do they matter?

I think they do matter. Not just because they’re fun, but also because they’re the crucial learning space where skills are built and refined. Four reasons why goofy little games are important:

More engagement: the kid owns the space and sets the rules. Instead of being passive reactors, they are coach, player, and crowd all in one.
More focused repetition: kids are not limited by official practice hours or the strategies of a coach. Want to play? Play. Want to obsessively focus on a single move? Do it.
Improved creativity: conventional practice is great for fundamentals, but creativity is not built like that. It’s built by messing around: experimenting, trying stuff that might seem crazy in normal settings (for a nice example of this, check out Crosby’s eyes-closed shot to win the game at the 2:20 mark).

The deeper question is, in today’s hyper-organized world, how do you encourage goofy little games? How do you create the sort of environments where a kid can build skills on their own, even if it means absolutely destroying the family dryer?

I’d love to hear any ideas you might have.

(Big thanks to Trevor Parent of the University of Maine at Presque Isle for sharing the video.)

The Most Important Moment of Practice

Question: What’s the most important part of a practice session?

A) Start
B) Finish
C) Middle

Before you answer, consider the following story:

A few years ago, students at New Dorp School of Staten Island, NY, were struggling. Test scores were down, dropouts were up. School leaders tried a variety of methods — new technology, new teachers, new programs, you name it. Nothing worked.

Then, in 2008, New Dorp’s leaders came to a realization: students were not failing because they lacked intelligence. They were failing because they lacked the ability to construct arguments, build ideas, and distinguish essential information from nonessential information.

So New Dorp embarked on a bold experiment — they targeted these skills by building the school curriculum around analytic writing, using a proven technique called the Hochman Program. As Peg Tyre reports in The Atlantic:

The Hochman Program would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children…are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own.  

When speaking, [students] were required to use specific prompts outlined on a poster at the front of each class.

“I agree/disagree with ___ because …”
“I have a different opinion …”
“I have something to add …”
“Can you explain your answer?”

It worked incredibly well. The kids at New Dorp not only got better at writing, they got better at every subject, to the point that New Dorp is now a model for what some are calling the Writing Revolution. (Read Peg’s story here.)

Here’s why: analytic writing is a keystone skill. It is the foundation on which other skills can be built — literally, inside the brain. Improving at analytic writing allowed the New Dorp students to improve at math, science, and social studies because it supports those skills in the same way that a keystone supports a foundation.

Every talent has its keystone skills. Think of a baseball hitter’s ability to identify the speed and location of a pitch. Or a violinist’s ability to precisely match pitch. Or a salesperson’s ability to connect quickly on an emotional level. Or a soccer player’s ability to swiftly “read” a game.

All of these are keystone skills on which larger skills are built. They are exponentially more important to performance than any other skill. After all, it doesn’t matter how beautiful a baseball swing you have, if you can’t tell where the ball is located. It doesn’t matter how great a salesperson you are, if you can’t connect to people.

The strange thing is, keystone skills are easily overlooked and under-practiced. Most of us approach performance the same way New Dorp did in the early days — we try lots of things, in random order, and hope we get better

Instead of merely hoping, you should be highly strategic about planning practice sessions around keystone skills. Spend time analyzing the skill you want to build. What’s the single most important element? What is the move on which all your other moves depend? Then structure your practice around the keystone.

To return to our original question: What’s the most important part of a practice session?

The answer is D) None of the above.

Because the most important time of a practice session is before it begins, when you take time to figure out the answer to a simple question: what’s your keystone skill?