Deliberate Practice

Mission

Mission: Write a 3k-word summary of the book “Talent is Overrated” showing how to apply its techniques to at least three important, real-world problems. Mission duration: 1 week.

Summary

Book name: “Talent is overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else”

This book primarily deals with answering the question, “Are geniuses born or made?”. A completely science-backed approach has been delivered by the author, Geoffrey Collin. Following is the summary.

The Mystery

When people think about Mozart, Tiger Woods, Federer they never really imagine themselves ever getting to such a level of proficiency. They often marvel at how the legends do their activity so well, and then move on with their lives. But what separates hard workers from the truly exceptional aka world-class? Is it hard-work? Experience? Talent? Intelligence? Memory? Luck?

Most of us think we work hard. Look at everyone you know right from your parents to your siblings and even yourself. Just “working hard” seems to not cut it become the greatest of the greats aka legend.

If you look at experience, it certainly does not look like the deciding factor regarding this. Many studies by leading researchers (TIO Chapter 1) seem to show a 0 correlation between experience and skills irrespective of the field (be it with auditors, clinical psychologists and even surgeons).

Auditors with years of experience were no better at detecting corporate fraud—a fairly important skill for an auditor—than were freshly trained rookies.

Talent is overrated

Talent we imagine is something that people are born with. Talent certainly seems to be overrated especially when it refuses to show itself even after many many years into the lives of exceptional musicians.

In a study of outstanding American pianists, for example, you could not have predicted their eventual high level of achievement even after they’d been training intensively for six years;

A standard argument that comes at any such number of studies presented is, “But what about Mozart, and what about Tiger Woods?”

There seems to be an explanation for these so called anomalies. In both the case of Mozart and Tiger woods their fathers seem to be starting them off quite early in their lives and have spent quite some time building the skill into their children. In the case of Mozart his father was a highly accomplished pedagogue and in the case of Tiger Woods, his father played golf quite well and was extremely passionate about it and was also a teacher.

The question about talent is answered in the fact that Mozart’s first piece regarded today as a masterpiece was composed when he was 21. Although it is an early age, it must be taken into account that the boy has been in preparation since very very young. In an attempt to compare how Mozart fares with his current contemporaries, Scientists created a ‘precocity index’. This roughly measures how much better someone is compared to the average. Mozart scored a thirteen percent on the precocity index whereas his current contemporaries scored thirty to five-hundred percent. This is probably due to the improved methods in teaching and learning.

In Tiger’s case his father never really claimed any inborn talent, but he thought that the boy seemed to grasp things rather quickly. And both of them state Hard Work for the Success of Tiger.

If you look at Jack Welsh, CEO General Electric, one of the twentieth century’s manager of the century apparently showed no inclination towards business until his mid-twenties. He started working in chemical development operation at GE around that time. And until that point there seems to be nothing indicating the business tycoon that he was going to become. Talent Waar ben jij?

If talent existed and refused to show itself even after so many years of life, it beckons if inate ability (talent) even exists.

Smartness: Intelligence and Memory

Maybe talent seems like it doesn’t exist, but surely intelligence and memory power should have a high influence. Spoiler Alert! Nope.

Intelligence

A study was conducted in the business realm. Salesmen were an attractive subject for this study as it is rather clear to measure output/success. More number of sales implies more success. The study was the largest of its kind containing data of several dozen studies amounting to 45k individuals. Because of such a large number the endless sources of noise are expected to be drowned. The bosses gave good indication of the IQ of the person with their ratings, and with the help of sales they actually made, the results were compiled.

Intelligence was virtually useless in predicting how well a salesperson would perform. Whatever it is that makes a sales ace, it seems to be something other than brainpower.

Another investigation on real world performance was with betting of horses. The goal was to forecast post-time odds. Based on this the classification of experts and non-experts was done. Both groups seem to have not much differences in terms of experience at the track, years of formal education, and even the IQ averages and variation. Further investigation suggested that IQ’s didn’t help predict if someone was going to be good or bad at this. A person with IQ of 85 (“dull normal”) was able to pick out the top horse in 10/10 races. And a non-expert with IQ 118 picked up the top horse for 3/10 cases. There are a dozen factors that go into deciding the outcome of the game, like how the horse fared in the last game, track condition etc… Apparently the low-IQ-experts used far complex models that took a wide consideration of multiple variables unlike the high-IQ-non-experts.

And this doesn’t stop here. The same traits are observed with Chess, GO and even scrabble. “Scrabble users show below average results on tests of verbal ability.”, And some Chess grand masters have IQ that are below Normal. All in all,

IQ seems to be a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at it for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.

And what about memory?

The Czech master Richard Reti once played twenty-nine blindfolded games simultaneously.
Miguel Najdorf, a Polish-Argentinean grand master, played forty-five blindfolded games simultaneously in Sao Paulo in 1947;

Surely this is a sign of the Divine, right? Surprise, surprise! A study with highly skilled chess players and non-experts in chess was done where all were shown real chess game positions of 25 pieces for 5-10 seconds. The chess masters were able to recall the position of every single piece, whereas the non-experts were able to recall 4 or 5 pieces. As expected. This was followed up with random placement of chess pieces and the same 5-10 seconds to remember each piece. The chess masters and the non-experts pretty much ended up with the same results.

The chess masters did not have incredible memories. What they had was an incredible ability to remember real chess positions.

Experts remembered about 5-9 chunks of information at a time on the chess board that allowed them to recall the positions of the pieces. The same was observed with GO and Gomuku even.

Many decades of research have shown that average short-term memory holds only about seven items. The capacity of short-term memory doesn’t seem to vary much from person to person; virtually everyone’s short-term memory falls in the range of five to nine items.

As reflected later in the book (TIO, Chap 6), remembering 49 games at once is still a ginormous feat not possible with this short term memory. More on this later.

Up until now it might seem that we are just unstoppable forces who can all become legends. But certainly there are limitations. There are physical limitations to achievement such as Death and diseases, limitations related to age, personal dimensions etc… It appears that other the physical limitations, there is not really clearly understood or proven non-physical inate abilities inhibiting our potential to success.

A better Idea

Who is Jerry rice?

As every football fan knows, Jerry Rice was the greatest receiver in NFL history, and some football authorities believe he may have been the greatest player at any position.

He was a great athlete while already in his senior year but was not NFL level good, that all teams fought to sign him.

In the 1985 draft, fifteen teams passed him over before the San Francisco 49ers finally signed him.

Despite all this the legacy he has left behind him is truly remarkable.

For some future player to perform at such an extremely high standard for so many years in a physically brutal game is obviously not impossible, but history suggests that it is unlikely.

What makes him different?

He always did more. During workouts after catching a pass rice he would sprint to the end zone unlike his other team mates who would only trot. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team left. His off-season trainings were even more serious. These workouts were not shared with other teams not because it was confidential, but because it would possibly cause harm to them, as they were extremely grueling. He spent way more time than his colleagues with his workouts which he completely conducted on his own. The workouts involved a lot strenuous cardio and weight training for long hours. People who joined him for these workouts would stop midway because they got sick. These workouts were considered the most demanding in the league.

He trained for specific things that was most important for his success. He knew he could not sprint fast, but then he trained on other aspects which resulted in speed not making much of a difference. And he certainly defied age limits.

Wide receivers, who run like hell on most plays and frequently get crushed by tacklers, aren’t supposed to last twenty seasons or play until age forty-two. None but Rice has ever done so.

Is this the recipe for greatness? Is it about working harder than the hardest? What matters?

The crucial finding on what seems to matter

A study of 3 violin groups from a school, rated by their teachers into three categories based on their skill level, shows some interesting insights. Group A and B were the exceptional and the good performers. Group C were students from a department in the same school which admitted far less talented students who would become researchers or teachers. All groups were alike, with same age, spending similar amount of time in total for activities such as lessons, practice, exams etc…

After a thorough study it was discovered that groups A and B spent equal number of hours in practice by themselves per/week by themselves, whereas group C spent much lesser time in doing this. This seems to explain why Group A and B were much better than group C. But this quite did not answer why Group A and B were so different. Upon a deeper look it was found that the total accumulated hours of lifetime practice for Group A was >7k hours, for group B was 5k hours and for group C it was 3k hours. Such trends are not akin to violinists alone further re-enforcing that talent is a lost concept. “No matter who they are or what explanation of their performance was being advanced, it always took them many years to become excellent.” For example, many scientists and authors produce their greatest work only after twenty or more years of devoted effort. We see that practice seems key. But researchers think it is much more than that. But,

The vast majority of people we work with, or play golf with, or play Doom with, got better for a while and then leveled off, having apparently reached the limit of their abilities; years of further work have not made them any better. On the other hand, we see repeatedly that the people who have achieved the most are the ones who have worked the hardest. How can both sets of observations be true?

Simple ‘practice makes perfect’ seems to be not enough. These top performers seem to be doing something more.

What is deliberate practice and what isn’t

Sometimes I go to basketball practice and try a few shots from one spot. Then I try some drills in ball handling to improve play during the game. I try multiple variations 2-3 times and get bored and then play some one-on-ones with someone and feel happy that I have clocked 2 more hours of practice that gets me to amazing levels someday. You know, ‘Practice makes perfect’ and the like. The author hosts a similar example from his life when he went golfing and “practicing” with golf balls. He says with conviction that this will do jack shit to your performance.

The idea of deliberate practice (DP) is quite different from the above form of practice. Jerry Rice according to the author a near perfect example of someone who did massive amounts of DP and in the end became legend.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

It’s designed specifically to improve performance.

During DP, one must identify certain sharply defined elements that need improvement and work on them intently. These practices should be designed in such a way that they stretch your current abilities. The great performers, see a couple of issues and isolate each one of them and work on them until they have seen sufficient improvement before moving on to the next aspect.

It is recommended by the author that they are done with the guidance of a teacher. In case we think that we have outgrown the benefits of a teachers help, the author suggests to atleast give it another thought.

While learning it is ideal to be in the zone where we are just beyond our comfort zone which makes us stretch our abilities. And it probably is quite motivating instead of being a daunting task to approach.

It can be repeated a lot

In golf the ball rarely gets buried into the sand. Such shots are quite rare. But when they happen you cannot expect to perform well as you have rarely performed that shot. Top performers repeat a lot. Isolation of the specific space where you need to improve is key, followed by a lot of repetitions.

Ted Williams, baseball’s greatest hitter, would practice hit- ting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than thirty years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night.

Feedback

Following all this, one can work on his technique but it very important to see progress and get feedback. Otherwise one will stop getting any better and stop caring about the end goal. Feedback is extremely crucial to feel motivated. Sometimes results might need interpretation, trusting your own judgment might not really be the best way to go about it. Is the blog post clear to a new reader? Will people get the main idea? Is it organized well? Paul Graham for example, appears to take this very seriously. Before he publishes a post, he runs atleast a few loops of getting feedback from his friends followed by correction before publishing it.

It is painful

I can imagine working on things like my sentence construction. I know I don’t make the best sentences. First I would need to identify good sentences and maybe try to emulate them in other works consciously. This could be qualified as DP. But the shear repulsion to that activity is huge, and pushing through all of it for maybe atleast 10k sentences, makes it painful I think. The violinists from the Ericsson experiment stated practice as the least fun activity in their daily life.

Everyone would achieve greatness if it were easy and fun. But everyone doesn’t and it is not easy and fun. Your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more. Think about Jerry Rice again!

These tasks whether physical or not, seem to drain out much of our mental energy as they are all about improving an unsatisfactory performance and trying your hardest to improve these. It is estimated that 4-5 hours of DP seems to be the upper limit, across disciplines, with sessions frequently lasting no more than 90 minutes. The study of violinists (TIO chap 4) for example shows that the kids that do DP slept more not only during the night but also during the afternoons.

A dramatic example

“Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian educational psychologist, formed the view in the 1960s that great performers are made, not born.” Laszlo married with the intention of using his own kids as the experiment and raised 3 women to become top level chess players. All kids were home schooled and made to do DP. There was sufficient material for study on chess by that time and that is one of the reasons why chess was chosen.

All three were great players, but only one is the current world number 1 woman player. It is known within the family that Judith is the one that worked the hardest and it seems to show. The other two started having other interests or drifted off from the game.

In summary DP is when you work on specific things to stretch yourself beyond your current capabilities. It will be hard, it will be painful. Your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more. Think about Jerry Rice again!

How DP works

DPer’s perceive more

DPer’s know where to look and where to get more information. If you consider typewriters, in order to improve speed they look further into the text and move their fingers in such a way that writing the next words, is convenient. Expert doctors who look at X-rays, see far more from it than amateurs. They understand the significance of the indicators that average performers don’t even notice. Top Tennis players look at the hips and shoulders of servers to know where the ball is going to go. It would be quite a feat to rely only on reaction speed over the quarter of a second that the ball takes to cross the field.

Knowing more

You didn’t really have to know much about a field if you knew the best ways to analyze a problem and think it through, and you needed to know even less if your analysis and reasoning power could be juiced by a computer

And yet the time of computers beating humans hadn’t arrived. Be it in chess or GO. What was missing was the vast knowledge of the particular positions in different cases and what sort of choices had what sort of consequences. In chess apparently, master-level players posses chess knowledge by a factor of 10-100 compared to good club-level players.

Remembering more

Earlier we saw that people in general are capable of holding 5-9 chunks in their head. This is the short-term memory that is being talked about. In the study of remembering the maximum number of pieces and their positions, the chess-masters were able to recollect every single piece when it was real chess positions. But, when it came to random arrangements they were as good as the control group.

This can be imagined like letters and words. Given a word it is easier to remember if it is familiar and with little effort we can spell it backwards even, but if the letters are in a random order, it is going to be pretty hard. What chess players could be seeing is words.

And with a rich vocabulary of such words, they seem to be doing much more. Apparently researchers have estimated that good club players have a vocabulary of 100-1000 “words”, but a master-level player has a vocabulary of 1k-10k “words”.

Holding 49 chess games in memory seems to be doing much more than what the short-term memory can handle.

A study involving a description of a football game and 2 sets of people demonstrates this. The description was shown to fans of the game and random people. After some time recalling the details of the game, was the task. The fans were able to recall the important parts of the game about who passed to who and what the sequence of events were, whereas the control group remembered trivial things like when the crowd roared etc… and missed the crucial details.

The fans’ high-level knowledge of the game provided a frame- work on which to hang the information they had read.

Long-term-memory seems to be one that allows you to retrieve more information in a fast and reliable way by providing hooks for you to add your information to, more like connections.

In the letters-versus-words analogy, it isn’t just that novices see letters while experts see words; the experts also know the meanings of the words.

Not everyone can hold 49 chess games in memory simultaneously.

It’s clear that the superior memory of great performers doesn’t just happen. Since it is built on deep understanding of the field, it can be achieved only through years of intensive study. It further requires consistently relating new information to higher-level concepts, which is hard work.

Changes to physical structure

The influence of DP on DPer’s is even more impressive that the body actually gets modified in the process. Changes to the body, the brain, muscles, and even the heart can happen, to aid you in your field.

Endurance runners, for instance, have larger hearts than average until they stop training.

Athletes can change not just the size of their muscles but even the composition of them (the proportion of fast-twitch fibers to slow-twitch) through years of practice

The brain’s ability to change is greatest in youth, but it doesn’t end there

The bottom line being that there is path that exists, that runs between your current abilities to that of the greats. It is hard, extremely long and demanding. Not many will follow it all the way till the end. But if you do…

But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely… Which is … Legend Mr Wayne!

-Batman Begins

Applying to our lives

Know what you want to be

To begin with you need to know where you want to go. Do you want to be the greatest basketball player you can be? Do you want to be able to reason and solve problems like an STM? Do you want to be the best at your work? Do you want huge-ass muscles? Do you want to be amazing in Data Science? Do you want very good at analyzing problems and performing research (as would be needed by GiveWell)? Do you want to be able to communicate ideas better?

The skills and abilities one can choose to develop are infinite, but the opportunities to practice them fall into two general categories: opportunities to practice directly, apart from the actual use of the skill or ability, the way a musician practices a piece before performing it; and opportunities to practice as part of the work itself.

So for example, if you look at chess, you can study positions and make a move and compare it to what and why the grand masters did it. This is Practicing directly. Another way of DP could be to actually just play games online and get practice as a result of that.

It doesn’t seem to matter how one practices as long as it meets the DP criteria of high volume repetition and work that stretches your skills.

The music model

When you want to get better at playing the piano, you can think of all the ways it could be done much better. You could improve on say the trill, or the speed or your knowledge of arpeggios or coordination of both the hands etc… You look at each aspect. It is probably easy to isolate and practice them. You can get feedback about your progress looking at the tempo of improvement or from your coach or even watch a video of yourself.

Thus, in the music model, you see what aspects need improvement, isolate them and practice them. The practice and the real performance have almost the same aspects to it.

The same thing can be applied to career-interviews even. In essence it is similar as the key messages are going to be conveyed regardless of the questions. Here you could look at aspects such as your humor, your passion, logical flow of thoughts (for example using STAR method), and the actual messages being delivered well. Feedback from a mock interview with a friend or recording your self conveying the important points could help.

For written work, it is probably best to emulate the method of one of the best writers (as viewed by many) Benjamin Franklin. Here key aspects to work on could be, grammar, elegance of expression, perspicuity, organization, vocabulary etc… Benjamin Franklin (BF) worked on his writing as a result of the feedback from his dad. For some reason that motivated him to take on DP despite having little time in addition to the work he was doing.

BF took the best work he could find and wrote down the meaning of each sentence. A few days later, he would use these notes to form sentences. And then he compared the original and his work, discovered some faults and corrected them. His method was thus, look at what needs to be improved (identify key aspect), try to forcibly write (DP) and compare with the original (feedback). This he seems to have done multiple times working on every single isolated aspect of his writing. BF used the Spectator.

instead of emulating the Spectator, you would choose a superior letter to the shareholders, advertisement, blog entry, or other appropriate model.

The chess model

In chess isolation of an aspect seems a little out of hand, as key aspects are probably hard to find. But, with chess, thousands of books on different positions, different games have been published. The DP routine would be to look at a particular position and choose a move and compare it to the move chosen by the master. Followed by analysis.

Business is like chess. You are presented with a position of a problem and need to figure out the best move. Real world as it is makes it hard to evaluate which of the proposed solutions is better. In any case the process of focusing on the problem and evaluating solutions is in itself instructive. This is called the case method and apparently Harvard Business graduates would have done >500 cases by the time they graduate.

You might work in marketing for years and get only a couple of chances to market U.S. products in China, for example, so that’s a skill you probably wouldn’t be very good at. But in a short time you could study a dozen cases about marketing U.S. products in Our Lives in China. That’s one step removed from actually marketing the products, but it puts you many steps ahead of anyone who has not studied that specific skill intensely and repeatedly

The sports model

The practice of athletes falls into two aspects in the sports model. One is conditioning, things that allow you to perform certain activities better. If you played NFL, you need speed, and muscles (for explosiveness). Tennis players work on stamina so that they can still play at the 3rd hour of the game. The other aspect is working on critical skills like batting the baseball, or serving the tennis ball in certain locations or hitting the golf ball out of the sand. The difference between other models and this is that no 2 situations will be exactly the same. The variability plays a huge role. Every time you pass, the ball in NFL, the positioning of each player will be different. But for a pianist the Beethoven stays the same no matter what.

For conditioning in information and service based work, its probably about getting stronger with the underlying cognitive skills; basic math and accounting for financing, basic science for people in engineering etc…

For people who write and edit, the same applies to Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

There are classic guides available for every field and revisiting them is one way of improving conditioning. Conditioning can also be done on new material. Pencil editing a new article, analyzing the basic ratios of an unfamiliar financial statement etc…

If we would like to become an expert in our field we would read tons about our field, the history, read everything that the experts are doing, get insights from colleagues etc… The goal is to gain a lot of knowledge about the domain, but not just to amass information. The point is that we would like to build a mental model of how the domain functions. That is the crucial picture.

The second aspect of practice is based on focused simulation. Sometimes it is difficult to engage in a lot of this practice due to unpredictable opponents, fast responses and dynamic situations. But it should still be possible to bat the baseball and swing the golf club or shoot the ball into the basketball ring in ways that would happen in the game, while focusing on high repetition and immediate feedback.

Deliberate Practice for innovation

It appears that even being creative is not not-possible with DP. Two myths associated with creativity are a) that it happens suddenly (to anyone) and b) too much knowledge inhibits creativity.

Sudden Creativity

Although all fields require creativity, some fields in which people are expected to be really creative are poets, composers and painters. When Studying 76 composers or 131 painters or even 66 poets, for their first glorious moment, the answer comes out to be similar. Within the first five years no one had their first glorious moment. With composers it took even more; 10 years for most of them. It seems that you cannot escape the initial years before achieving greatness akin to the ‘10 years of silence’ or the ‘10-year rule’.

Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard wrote a book-length study (Creating Minds) of seven of the greatest innovators of the early twentieth century: Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Mahatma Gandhi, Martha Graham, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky.

The ten-year-rule seems to be prevalent irrespective of the field.

Too much knowledge?

Watt was responsible for the industrial revolution with his giant innovation. The Newcomen engine wasn’t very efficient, but it was already there, before Watt improved it. The impact of Watt is not at question here but the point is that there was no sudden spark. Watt’s training as a maker of scientific instruments gave him the skills and knowledge with which to do it. A similar story occurs with the innovation of the cotton gin as well.

From the telegraph to the airplane to the Internet, they’re all adaptations and extensions of what existed, made possible by great insights but entirely impossible without a deep knowledge of, and reliance on, past achievements.

Domain specific knowledge seems key in becoming one of the greats, whichever way you see it.

Great performance in Youth and Age

Knowledge is the foundation of great performance

The average age that people get Nobel Prizes has increased by six years over a 100 year period. This Nobel Prize effect is happening across all domains such as economics, finance, Marketing, organizational behavior, operations research. All these fields have developed so much in the last couple of decades that it takes more time to gain the foundation onto which great contributions can happen.

Knowledge is the foundation of great performance, and in fields where important advances are being made continually, mastering the accumulated knowledge takes longer all the time.

No one has become exceptional on his own, a striking feature in the lives of the great souls are the support they receive at the critical times in their development.

Supporting environment

The greatest value of a supporting home environment is that it enables a person to start developing early.

Starting early certainly has its advantages. The body can adopt itself in critical ways in the early stages. You have more time in your hands, less responsibilities allowing you to work on DP. It is quite possible to acquire 10k hours before reaching 20 years. This might not be possible for everyone though owing to their circumstances.

Simonton’s research found that “exceptional creators are less likely to develop during times of anarchy

Apparently the role of environment is much higher than we think. Research conducted informs that adolescents are able to sustain concentrated effortful study (very important for DP), in certain environments characterized as both stimulating and supporting environments.

A stimulating environment was one with lots of opportunities to learn and high academic expectations. A supportive environment was one with well-defined rules and jobs, without much arguing over who had to do what, and in which family members could rely on one another.

But what this means to adults like me who want to take control of their life now is unclear.

Defying age

Research has established quite well that as we age we slow down. Things such as remembering, solving unfamiliar problems take twice as much time as young people. Even coordinating the arms and legs becomes difficult.

But, Yo-Yo Ma was a world-famous cellist at age twenty who became even better at 40. Huh? Studies in broad range of fields show consistently that excellent performers (be it in piloting, music, bridge, management), seem to suffer from the same age-related issues as everyone else, except in their domain.

This is probably one of the most important outcomes in research. This fills me with immense joy to know that I don’t have to be lame when I am old and that I can still be thriving atleast in things where I perform excellently. I immediately recollect the image of Scooby, who is 60 years of age and still has the physique of a killer body builder and endurance of a marathoner. Expert much!

Psychologists measured the response speeds of some old pianists by checking how fast they could tap their fingers to a choice in the screen. This was slow as expected. But when the same pianists were given piano related tasks like finger taping or finger coordination, they didn’t seem to have slowed down at all. Corollary: More DP will result in you not sucking with old age.

Arthur Rubinstein continued to perform publicly to great acclaim, until he was eighty nine. Julio Franco (baseball) played in the 2007 season at age 49, owing to his regimen of intense exercise and diet. A seventy-four-year-old man in 2004 ran 4 minutes faster than the gold medal performance of 1896 Olympics. WHAT!!!

Our brains are perfectly able to add new neurons well into old age when conditions demand it, and brain plasticity doesn’t stop with age. Give your brain the right kind of training—for example, by making it try to do two things at once—and plasticity will increase in the regions that normally show the greatest atrophy in later years.

Warren Buffett continues to run Berkshire Hathaway brilliantly in his late seventies. Rupert Murdoch, at about the same age, is aggressively expanding his huge media conglomerate, News Corporation.

Eventually of course the age catches on. Warren Buffett has decided to retire. Arthur Rubinstein gave up performing publicly at eighty-nine because he was becoming deaf and blind.

But what pushes them so far, with the continual practice, painful pushing beyond what’s comfortable, for many hours a day and years on end? Why do chess grand masters continue to work for 4-5 hours a day studying chess position when it does not necessarily bring wealth?

Why do some young business people push themselves beyond their jobs’ considerable daily demands to acquire more knowledge and skills when the payoff is uncertain and may be years away?

Why?

Where does passion come from?

Intrinsic motivation

In essence Shizuka Arakawa, a figure skater, during her practice had fallen on her ass 20000 times atleast before she finally won the gold medal for Olympics in 2006. But why?

There are two kinds of motivation. One is the intrinsic kind and the other is the extrinsic kind. Motivated by factors from within such as the need to achieve, the need to power over others, even the need to do good in the world, are intrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivators motivate us extrinsically such as doing things for purely money. What Shizuka Arakawa had seems to be intrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation and high creative achievement go hand in hand according to research. A wide range of creative achievers seem to be devoted to great questions or problems in their field and feel driven to pursue them for decades.

But how can something that is not fun at all (as we have seen until now) be intrinsically motivating?

Mihaly Csikszentmihali suggests a mechanism that connects the intrinsic motivation and demands of DP. His work on “flow” suggests a state where time slows down, enjoyment is heightened and the painfulness of the task becomes not observable.

In simple terms, when the tasks are easy then it gets boring. When tasks involved are challenging enough that they just stretch us beyond our skills, then we are in flow. If it gets too challenging then we get frustrated. Top-level performers in sports seem to rate practice high on the scale of enjoyableness. But the violinists seen in Ericsson’s study seem to rank it as not enjoyable. The sharp contrast continues.

The author seems to suggest as an explanation the following:

But at a deeper level one has to suspect that practice is somehow meeting an inner need for anyone who can maintain it at an intense level for years.

I think what the author is suggesting is that even though Ericcson’s violinists rate practicing as least fun, practicing somehow satisfies an inner need for people who maintained it at an intense level for years. And by the looks of it could it be that the violinists were stretching their abilities way more than “just outside their comfort zone”? Maybe it is a part of DP?

I will leave this with one final comment. Amir khan can be seen here training to look his muscular best in a short time. He trains to exhausting amounts because of his trainer, both in cardio and weights. He sees the results and it’s quite frankly nothing short of amazing. Sometimes during the workouts he is seen to be saying “I fucking give up”, but the trainer fakes him into doing more weights anyway. In the end the results are insane. So Amir, how did you like doing your workout? *Insert Ericcson’s violinists response here*.

The question of whether we need to do it at this level, at the level of Jerry Rice or the Ericcson’s violinists seems to be a discussion for another post. But to be Jerry Rice, you need to be the best of the best of the best. You need to train like the best of the best of the best. Maybe it will be painful in the end. But we shall be able to run on purely intrinsic motivation, just like the Ericcson’s violinists?

Moving on.

Extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation however is expected to not get people to the greatest heights. But,

When Watson and Crick were struggling to find the structure of DNA, they worked almost nonstop because they knew they were in a race with other research teams. Alexander Graham Bell worked similarly on the telephone, knowing he was in competition with Elisha Gray, whom he beat to the patent office by just hours.

Not all extrinsic motivators are bad. Extrinsic motivators that re-enforces intrinsic motivation could still work effectively.

Recognition that confirms competence turned out to be effective. While the mere expectation of being judged tended to reduce creativity, personal feedback could actually enhance creativity if it was the right kind—”constructive, nonthreatening, and work-focused rather than person-focused,” in Amabile’s words. That is, feedback that helped a person do what he or she felt compelled to do was effective.

These extrinsic motivators that re-enforce the intrinsic motivation benefit kids especially in the early stages. Parents instead of saying,”if you don’t practice we’ll cancel your allowance,” seemed to say “if you don’t practice we’ll take the piano away”. Of course this worked only the child cared about the piano. With time the students become responsible for their own motivation.

Child prodigies

Sometimes apparently there are cases where kids show amazing drive (intrinsic motivation) to do something, like a 10 month old baby crying for paper and pen to draw all the time. Although, the people who do become top-level achievers are rarely those ‘child prodigies’. This is certainly true in business, if you look at the early lives of Welches, Ogilvies, and Rockefellas, there was no hint at the giant success that was about to come.

Time and again the story is the same: Even by age eleven or twelve it would have been difficult to predict who the future exceptional performers would be.

Multiplier effect

In virtually every field, beginners can’t manage more than an hour of practice per day, and sometimes much less. But by the time they become top performers, they’ve built themselves up to handling four to five hours a day. It isn’t quite right to say only that the practice caused the performance or that the performance helped support the practice. Over time, each contributed to the other.

Some spark seems to have started, just like in the kid who started taking piano seriously, once he saw at close range an actual pianist performing.

Final words

Becoming the greatest of greats involves a large investment of time and resources. The price people often pay to rise to the top of any field are quite high.

Howard Gardner, after studying his seven exceptional achievers, noted that “usually, as a means of being able to continue work, the creator sacrificed normal relationships in the personal sphere.” Such people are “committed obsessively to their work. Social life or hobbies are almost immaterial.” That may sound like admirable self-sacrifice and direction of purpose, but it often goes much further, and it can be ugly.

Above all, what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

There is path that exists, that runs between your current abilities to that of the greats. It is hard, extremely long and demanding. Not many will follow it all the way till the end. But if you do…

But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they (1st world) can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely… Which is … Legend Mr Wayne!

-Batman Begins

Application

Synopsis of ‘Talent is Overrated’

We need to do a lot of DP to improve aspects of each of the above skills. It needs to be remembered that domain knowledge is quite important. The goal is to focus on key aspects that need training and perform DP over them. Some of the salient ideas of DP are to:

• focus on key aspects and train in a focused and repeated manner. (chess model)

• when key aspects are not isolatable, then we try to work on scenarios, where we compare our performance to the case performance (chess model)

• Sometimes we might need to work on both conditioning and focused practice at high volume (sports model)

• Domain knowledge is key. We always need to understand that techniques to solve problems might be good, but domain knowledge just like in chess is required to create the long-term-memory hooks, which seem to be required in every career especially to be the greatest of greats.

• Top DPer’s seem to be able to perform 5 hours of DP/day at max, followed by a lot of rest.

• After 30 we will start seeing that our skills that are not kept up with DP, are fading away.

Knowing what you want to be

• I recently in this post realized that working at an Effective Altruism Organization (EAO) is probably as highly impact as I can get. I have also seen other careers but I decided to start work on Data Science (DS) for the next few years (to gain some flexible career capital) with a focus on getting into EAOs in the future. DS allows me to gain skills relevant to many EAOs. EAOs typically require critical thinking, good communication and ability to do research, i.e., identify what is important to solve a problem, know what data you need, know how to use statistics to your advantage, propose the best solution to the problem based on the resources available, and finally communicate the results to a general audience. So that means skills to be learn’t are,

  1. Solving problems with critical thinking: hypothesis forming, collecting relevant data, analysis using statistical methods

  2. Statistics

  3. Communication: Writing and presentation

• In addition, I want to be in exceptional health when I am 60 like Scooby.

  1. Weight training

  2. Cardio

  3. diet

• Furthermore, I want to be exceptionally good at one sport so that I can play it at a high level and enjoy even when I am old.

  1. Basketball or Badminton (just one)

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

-Google

When thinking is subconscious, you are in no position to see any problems in it. And, if you don’t see any problems in it, you won’t be motivated to change it.

-Criticalthinking.org

You are what you think and you need your thinking to be free of mistakes. You need to consciously train it. This seems to be similar to the music model, similar to what Benjamin Franklin did to improve his writing. In order to do DP, I seek high volume repetition of the principles of critical thinking as given in criticalthinking.org.

I will start at “Becoming an art of your thinking”. Examine the strategies and go for high volume repetition. And for feedback, it looks like I might not get any during my high volume repetition by myself. Just like in real world business, it looks I am going to have to count on the process of the exercise to be in itself instructive. Writing down might help for a future me to evaluate it once I have forgotten (just like Benjamin Franklin did it). I could always request an STM to review my work if he has time.

The type of scenarios to practice in seem aplenty, I could practice them on scenarios in my life, scenarios at work, scenarios from the news and scenarios from my learning online.

In addition to the above I should also look into Rationalists Taboo and thinking narrowly to help me get better at thinking, indeed with high repetition.

It seems to meet all the values of DP, including the pain of DPing. ;)

Statistics

For statistics, I first have got to take a course to get to town with the basics. After that is seems to be about knowing when to apply and what. I am only interested in statistics that helps me solve problems. Learning statistics seems to follow the chess method. DS in general is about problem solving with statistics. Focusing on solving high volume of problems and comparing to what the solution actually is and what techniques they have used might be one of the ways to go. This could be a rare case where in I am probably going to be practicing during the work.

I guess I also need to ask around to understand better my needs and sources on these subjects to make high repetition of problem solving possible.

Communication writing/presentation

For me writing would follow the sports model. Sports model because of the need to work on conditioning and the need to isolate aspects.

Conditioning

• Improve speed of writing

  A website by the name of typeracer allows you to race other people based on typing speeds. With a certain premium membership you get statistics as well. If this skill is quite important then I need to practice more of it. An STM initially suggested 5-15 mins a day. I could see where I am today and where I am in 1 week and plan for some changes based on the results. I mostly race with myself, trying to get better as the opponents are usually random and not matching your skill level.

• Write with less spelling mistakes

  The same typeracer has this mode called DEATH MODE. When in DEATH mode you are not allowed to make any mistakes at all. I could use this, or pay more attention in the normal mode to make less typing mistakes. I shall try this for a week for 15 mins a day and take it from there.

High repetition focused practice

Lets first look at writing. Just like Benjamin Franklin emulated the Spectator, I guess I need to emulate something. But what are the aspects I want to focus on? Maybe an STM can tell me just like Benji’s dad told him? It’s quite vague or maybe I need to think more about it i.e., compare it to the works I respect. I really loved the way 80k-hours wrote their articles that had so much of research and an amazing delivery. Writing such a big article at such a level is something I would like to aim for. I also love how an STM structures his passages. There is humor, at the right places, and the logical structure of the arguments is pretty darn awesome. There are still to this date that I go back to some of his essays. If I am looking at logical structure I hope my exercises in Critical thinking should do me some help. But, first I wait for some feedback.

Following the Franklins method is a bit vague now, as in I don’t see what aspect I would like to improve.

Others

I am not really sure what skill is required for weight training other than knowing what to eat and maxing out at the gym. There is probably some need to think critically to analyze issues and find workarounds or solutions for them, but that seems about it.

In order to improve my basketball, I allocate 6 hrs per week in the weekends. 3 hrs of DP on Saturday and 1 hr on Sunday.

Conditioning

More stamina, more speed (quick bursts) is required to beat my current opponents. Instead of doing strenuous biking 4 days a week, maybe I can focus on High intensity Training (HIT), during the same time, focusing on sudden bursts and stamina as a result of that. For feedback I do have a heart rate monitor and a watch which I can use to measure my progress regularly.

Isolating aspects

Aspects such as in-game shooting, ball-handling in certain situations, going to the basket for a layup in different cases needs to be practiced. High volume repetition followed by testing in the weekend games or one-on-one should give the feedback I think. For things like shooting I can manage feedback looking at the percentage of shots converted while shooting from a distance, and track it over time.

Stats

Total words: 7218, excluding quotations

total time: ~33 hrs within 1 week (PR)

max time: 9.5 hrs/ day on reading and 8 hrs/per day on writing. (PR)

reading and making initial notes: 11.5 hrs (PR)

rough summary: 5 hrs

real summary: ~8 hrs

final edition: 4-5 hrs

final final edition: 45 min

Application: 3.25 hrs.