Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

This is a perfect example of expert decision-making in practice: circumventing combinatorial explosion via advanced pattern recognition. It is precisely the same skill wielded by Kasparov, but on an ice hockey pitch rather than a chessboard. How was Gretzky able to do this? Let’s hear from the man himself: ‘I wasn’t naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for.’ And later: ‘The highest compliment that you can pay me is to say that I worked hard every day…That’s how I came to know where the puck was going before it even got there.’

All of which helps to explain a qualification that was made earlier in the chapter: you will remember that the ten-thousand-hour rule was said to apply to any complex task. What is meant by complexity? In effect, it describes those tasks characterized by combinatorial explosion; tasks where success is determined, first and foremost, by superiority in software (pattern recognition and sophisticated motor programmes) rather than hardware (simple speed or strength).

Most sports are characterized by combinatorial explosion: tennis, table tennis, football, ice hockey, and so on. Just try to imagine, for a moment, designing a robot capable of solving the real-time spatial, motor, and perceptual challenges necessary to defeat Roger Federer on a tennis court. The complexities are almost impossible to define, let alone solve. It is only in sports like running and lifting – simple activities testing a single dimension such as speed or strength – that the design possibilities become manageable.

Of course, not all expert decision-making is rapid and intuitive. In some situations, chess players are required to conduct deep searches of possible moves, and firefighters are required to think logically about the consequences of actions. So are top sportsmen and military commanders.

But even in the most abstract decisions, experience and knowledge play a central role. In an experiment carried out by David Rumelhart, a psychologist at Stanford University, five times as many participants were able to figure out the implications of a logical expression when it was stated in a real setting (‘Every purchase over thirty dollars must be approved by the manager’) than when stated in a less meaningful way (‘Every card with a vowel on the front must have an integer on the back’).

Earlier in this chapter we saw that the talent myth is disempowering because it causes individuals to give up if they fail to make rapid early progress. But we can now see that it is also damaging to institutions that insist on placing inexperienced individuals – albeit with strong reasoning skills – in positions of power.

Think, for example, of the damage done to the governance of Britain by the tradition of moving ministers – the most powerful men and women in the country – from department to department without giving them the opportunity to develop an adequate knowledge base in any of them. It is estimated that the average tenure of a ministerial post in recent years in Britain has been 1.7 years. John Reid, the long-serving member of Tony Blair’s government, was moved from department to department no less than seven times in seven years. This is no less absurd than rotating Tiger Woods from golf to football to ice hockey to baseball and expecting him to perform expertly in every arena.

What we decide about the relative importance of practice and knowledge on the one hand and talent on the other has major implications not just for ourselves and our families, but for corporations, sports, governments, and, indeed, the future of artificial intelligence.

(#litres_trial_promo)

On 3 May 1997, Kasparov and Deep Blue went head-to-head for a second time. The hype was no less intense and the stakes no less high. IBM put up over a million dollars in prize money, and the world’s media descended upon the venue – this time the thirty-fifth floor of the Equitable Center on Seventh Avenue in New York – in even greater numbers (IBM would later estimate that the company gained more than $500 million in free publicity).

But this time, Deep Blue was triumphant, defeating the world champion by two games to one, with three draws. It was a crushing blow for Kasparov, who stormed out of the venue. He would later allege that IBM had created playing conditions advantageous to Deep Blue and that they had refused to provide computer printouts which would have helped his preparation. He also made entirely unsubstantiated claims that IBM had cheated. He was not a good loser.

What had happened over the course of the preceding fifteen months? How had Deep Blue managed to convert defeat into a famous victory? Firstly, the machine had been provided with double the processing power (it was now able to compute more than 200 million moves per second). But its victory would have been impossible without another key innovation.

As the American Physical Society put it, ‘Deep Blue’s general knowledge of chess was significantly enhanced through the efforts of IBM consultant and international grandmaster Joel Benjamin, so that it could draw on vast resources of stored information, such as a database of opening games played by grandmasters over the last 100 years.’

Deep Blue’s programmers – like Gary Klein, Jim Immelt, and Wayne Gretzky – had realized that knowledge is power.

2 Miraculous Children? (#ulink_e8b854fb-b56c-5a53-a1ee-b821b94f735e)

The Myth of the Child Prodigy

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a sensation in the courts of eighteenth-century Europe. At the age of just six, he was enchanting members of the aristocracy with his skills on the piano, often with his sister Maria Anna playing alongside him. He began composing pieces for the violin and piano at the age of five, going on to produce many works before his tenth birthday. Pretty impressive stuff for a boy in short trousers.

How do you solve a conundrum like Mozart? Even those sympathetic to the idea that excellence emerges over the course of ten thousand hours of practice are stumped when attempting to explain the timeless genius of one of history’s greatest composers, a man who has changed lives with his artistic insight and intricate creativity.

Surely this is an example of a man who was born with his sublime abilities intact, a man who came into the world stamped with the mark of genius? After all, Mozart had scarcely even lived ten thousand hours by the time he was getting to grips with the piano and his early compositions.

But is that the whole story? Here is Mozart’s early life, told in a little more detail by the journalist and author Geoff Colvin:

Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a programme of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Wolfgang’s teacher by more than just his own eminence; he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children.

While Leopold was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year Wolfgang was born, remained influential for decades. So, from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him…

Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.

Seen in this context, Mozart’s achievements suddenly seem rather different. He no longer looks like a musician zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice; rather, he looks like somebody who embodies the rigours of practice. He set out on the road to excellence very early in life, but now we can see why.

It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practising with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.

Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practised for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted – and their knowledge deepened – by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.

What about Mozart the child composer rather than Mozart the child performer? The facts follow the same logic. Sure, he wrote compositions as a young boy, but they had nothing in common with the sublime creations of his later years. His first four piano concertos, written at the age of eleven, and his next three, written at sixteen, contain no original music: they are simply rearrangements of the music of other composers.

‘There is nothing distinctively “Mozartian” about them,’ writes Robert Weisberg, a psychologist specializing in creativity and problem-solving. In this context, it is not surprising that music insiders rarely describe Mozart as a prodigy. Indeed, the critic Harold Schonberg argues that Mozart ‘developed late’, as his greatest works did not emerge until he had been composing for two decades.

Of course, none of this explains why Mozart eventually managed to produce compositions that are considered among the greatest artistic creations in human history, but it ought to dispel the myth that they emerged from on high, like gifts from the gods. Mozart was one of the hardest-working composers in history, and without that deep and sustained application he would have got nowhere.

The same essential truth is revealed when looking at child prodigies in sport.

When Tiger Woods became the youngest-ever winner of the US Masters golf championship in 1997, he was hailed by many experts as the most naturally gifted golfer to play the game. This was understandable given his audacious stroke-making around the hallowed Augusta course. But dig down into his past, and an entirely different explanation reveals itself – and, once again, it starts with a highly motivated father. Here is a flavour of Tiger’s early years:

Earl Woods was a former baseball player and Green Beret who was obsessed with the idea that practice creates greatness. He started his son at what he himself describes as an ‘unthinkably early age’, before he could even walk or talk. ‘Early practice is vital so that performances became totally ingrained and flow from the subconscious,’ Woods Senior would later say.

Placed in his highchair in the garage at home, so he could watch as Earl hit balls into the net, little Tiger was given a golf club at Christmas – five days before his first birthday – and at eighteen months had his first golf outing. He couldn’t yet count to five, but little Tiger already knew a par 5 from a par 4.

By the age of two years and eight months Woods was familiar with bunker play, and by his third year he had developed his preshot routine. Soon his practice sessions were taking place on the driving range and putting green, where he would hone his skills for hours at a time.

At the age of two Woods entered his first pitch-and-putt tournament at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California. He could already hit the ball eighty yards with his 2.5 wood and pitch accurately from forty yards. When Tiger was four, Earl hired the services of a professional to accelerate his development. Tiger won his first national major tournament at thirteen.

Practice sessions would typically end with a competitive drill, like placing the ball three feet from the hole to see how many consecutive putts Tiger could make. After seventy in a row, Earl would still be standing there.

By his mid-teens, Woods had clocked ten thousand hours of dedicated practice, just like Mozart.

The Williams sisters, both multiple grand slam winners in tennis, are also held up as testaments to the talent theory of excellence (they are also, rightly, regarded as having achieved amazing things in the teeth of formidably tough circumstances). But the really striking thing about the sisters’ story is neither their talent nor their humble beginnings but their almost fanatical devotion – here’s a summary of their early days on the courts.

Two years before Venus Williams was born, her father Richard was flipping television channels when he saw the winner of a tennis match receive a cheque for $40,000. Impressed with the money top players could earn, he and his new wife, Oracene, decided to create a tennis champion. Venus was born on 17 June 1980, and Serena a year later, on 26 September 1981.

To learn how to coach, Richard watched videotapes of famous tennis stars, read tennis magazines at the library, and spoke to psychiatrists and tennis coaches. He also taught himself and his wife to play tennis so they could hit with their daughters.

After Serena was born, the family moved from the Watts area of Los Angeles to nearby Compton. An economically depressed area, Compton was rough and violent, and the family occasionally witnessed gunfire. Richard became the owner of a small company that hired out security guards, and Oracene a nurse.

Tennis training began in earnest when Venus was four years, six months, and one day old and Serena three years old, and while the only courts available for practice were riddled with potholes and surrounded by gangs, Richard carved out remarkable opportunities for his daughters.

Training would often involve Richard standing on one side of the net, feeding five hundred and fifty balls he kept in a shopping cart. When they were finished, they would pick up the balls and start again.

As part of their training, the girls trained with baseball bats and were encouraged to serve at traffic cones until their arms ached. The two once had a practice session during the school holidays that began at 8.00 a.m. and lasted until 3.00 p.m. As Venus put it: ‘When you’re little, you just keep hitting and hitting.’ Oracene said, ‘They were always in the courts early, even before their father or I would get there.’ Serena entered her first competition at the age of four and a half.

‘My dad worked hard to build our technique,’ Venus has said. ‘He’s really a great coach. He’s very innovative. He always has a new technique, new ideas, new strategies to put in place. I don’t really think of those things, but he does.’

When the sisters were twelve and eleven, Richard invited teaching pro Rick Macci – who had earlier coached such tennis stars as Mary Pierce and Jennifer Capriati – to come to Compton and watch his daughters play. He was impressed by the sisters’ skill and athleticism and invited them to study with him at his Florida academy, and soon after, the family relocated to the Sunshine State.

By then, both sisters had already clocked up thousands of hours of practice.

Examine any sporting life where success has arrived early and the same story just keeps repeating itself. David Beckham, for example, would take a football to the local park in east London as a young child and kick it from precisely the same spot for hour upon hour. ‘His dedication was breathtaking,’ his father has said. ‘It sometimes seemed that he lived on the local field.’

Beckham concurs. ‘My secret is practice,’ he said. ‘I have always believed that if you want to achieve anything special in life you have to work, work, and then work some more.’ By the age of fourteen, Beckham’s dedication paid off: he was spotted and signed by the youth team of Manchester United, one of the most prestigious football clubs in the world.