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by
Geoff Colvin
deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
Across realms, the required concentration is so intense that it’s exhausting.
hard—if in most cases it’s “not inherently enjoyable,” as some of the top researchers say—then why do some people put themselves through it day after day for decades, while most do not? Where does the necessary passion come from? That turns out to be quite a deep question. But answers are turning up.
In every industry worldwide, businesses have to perform at the highest standard, and then get continually better, just to be competitive. Great performance is becoming more valuable.
We all know that sports records keep getting broken, but we generally don’t appreciate just how dramatic the progress has been, or the reasons for it.
ago—representing the best performance of any human being on the planet—today in many cases equal ho-hum performance by high schoolers.
Today’s best high school time in the marathon beats the 1908 Olympic gold medalist by more than twenty minutes.
train themselves more effectively. That’s an important concept for us to remember.
Today the math he was talking about—calculus hadn’t been invented—is taught routinely to millions of high school students.
Instead, just as in sports, the standard of what we do with what we’ve got has simply risen tremendously.
When Tchaikovsky finished writing his Violin Concerto in 1878, he asked the famous violinist Leopold Auer to give the premier performance. Auer studied the score and said no—he thought the work was unplayable.
But people have learned how to perform much, much better.
For example, a cleverly designed study of world championship games in chess found recently that the game is being played at a far higher level today than it was in the nineteenth century, when the world championship was first contested.
The researchers concluded, “these results imply dramatic improvements at the highest level of intellectual achievement in the game of chess over the last two centuries.”
That world is now gone. Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.
It has become possible in recent years to create staggering amounts of shareholder wealth with business models that use very little financial capital but tons of human capital. For example, Microsoft has used about $30 billion of financial capital from all sources over its corporate lifetime, and it has created about $221 billion of shareholder wealth.
Even more dramatically, Google has used only about $5 billion of capital but has created about $124 billion of shareholder wealth.
Microsoft and Google understand perfectly well that their success is built on human capital. Both companies are famous for the scorching intelligence of the people they hire and for the brutally rigorous tests they impose on job applicants.
They say it’s hiring. They know what the scarce resource is.
The constraint, he says, isn’t money, it’s people: “You don’t just walk out on the street and hire an Exxon Mobil engineer or geoscientist or researcher.”
For virtually every company, the scarce resource today is human ability. That’s why companies are under unprecedented pressure to make sure that every employee is as highly developed as possible—and as we shall see, no one knows what the limits of development are.
At the same time, a separate historic trend is putting individuals under unprecedented pressure to develop their own abilities more highly than was ever necessary before, quite apart from anything their employers may or may not do to develop them.
That trend is the advent of the first large-scale glo...
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For most of human history, most work has been place-based. Often it was tied to the location of customers; farriers had to be where the horses were, bakers where the buyers were, bankers where the depositors and borrowers were. Other
Thus the great majority of workers competed for jobs mostly with other workers in their area, and when they competed more broadly, it was mostly with workers in other parts of the country.
But today, many millions of workers in developed economies compete for jobs with other workers around the world. The reason is that a large and growing proportion of all work is information-based and doesn’t involve moving or processing anything physical at all.
A major accounting firm audited a client company in London by flying in a team of accountants from India, putting them up in a hotel for three weeks, and flying them back; it was much cheaper than using British accountants.
It’s all happening because the costs of computing power and telecommunications are in free fall. Processing information and moving it around costs practically nothing.
good—and just as good a value—as the very best workers in their field anywhere on earth. It’s
For most of history, few people had to worry about what world class was. But now that’s changing. In a global, information-based, interconnected economy, businesses and individuals are increasingly going up against the world’s best.
Most of what we want to do is hard. That’s life. Encountering problems, discouragement, and disappointment is inevitable. So any knowledge about what makes us better at the things we want to do—real knowledge, not myth or conjecture—can be used not just to make us richer but also to make us happier.
Confronting the unexpected facts about innate abilities
They were classified into five ability groups, ranging from students at a music school who were admitted by competitive audition (the top group) to students who had tried an instrument for at least six months but had given it up. Researchers matched the groups by age, gender, instruments, and socioeconomic class.
Then the researchers interviewed the students and their parents at length. How much did the kids practice? At what age could they first sing a recognizable tune? And so on. Fortunately for the researchers, the British educational system gave them an independent means of assessing these students beyond the five ability groups used.
The results were clear. The telltale signs of precocious musical ability in the top-performing groups—the evidence of talent that we all know exists—simply weren’t there. On the contrary, judged by early signs of special talent, all the groups were highly similar.
only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.
The researchers calculated the average hours of practice needed by the most elite group of students to reach each grade level, and they calculated the average hours needed by each of the other groups. There were no statistically significant differences.
it took an average of twelve hundred hours of practice to reach grade 5, for example. The music school students reached grade levels at earlier ages than the other students for the simple reason that they practiced more each day.
By age twelve, the researchers found, the students in the most elite group were practicing an average of two hours a day versus about fifteen minutes a day for the students in the lowest group, an 800 percent difference.
number of years of study needed by a pianist under modern training programs before publicly performing various works, and then compared that with the number of years actually needed by several prodigies throughout history. If the average music student needs six years of preparation before publicly playing a piece, and a given prodigy did it after three years, that student would have an index of 200 percent. Mozart’s index is around 130 percent, clearly ahead of average students. But twentieth-century prodigies score 300 percent to 500 percent. This is another example of rising standards. The
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It supports what most of us would suppose: Smarter people do better. Research says they do more demanding work and achieve higher socioeconomic status. When we think of intelligence in the general, oldfashioned, academic sense, then particle physicists are smarter than dentists, who are smarter than assembly-line workers, on average.
In fact, the researchers found that the expert handicappers used models that were far more complex than what the nonexperts used, so-called multiplicative models in which the values of some factors (such as track condition) altered the importance of others (such as last-race speed).
“Low-IQ experts always used more complex models than high-IQ nonexperts,” the researchers found. Not only did handicapping expertise fail to correlate with IQ, it didn’t even correlate with performance on the arithmetic subtest of the IQ test.
The researchers’ conclusion: Their results suggest “that whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning.”
For example, a study of children who took up chess found that the strength of IQ as a predictor dropped drastically as the children worked and got better, and IQ was of no value in predicting how quickly they would improve.
The evidence is similar when it comes to that other general ability we often associate with hypersuccessful people, an amazing memory.
Yet a large mass of more recent evidence shows that memory ability is acquired, and it can be acquired by pretty much anyone.
He did it by working out his own mnemonic system based on his experience as a competitive runner.
Similarly, 4 1 3 1 became 4:13.1, a mile time.
