Practice doesn't necessarily make perfect

Parent Cafe
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http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/practice-doesnt-make-perfect

This article kind of dovetailed with discussions we recently had on here about the top 1% and special ed for them, etc. What the article is saying is that unlike what has been the mantra, the relationship between becoming proficient in something or achieving is not simple, that you can get in your 10,000 hours or whatever, and still not be able to do something all that well (it is a New Yorker piece, so of course it isn’t necessarily written with a real conclusion, despite the title). What it does seem to be saying is that neither talent alone nor grit and determination alone are going to do it, that talent does play a role in success as well as grit and determination. In terms of the 1% article, what this is saying is pretty much the same thing that one did, that the talent may be there without the support it won’t happen, and it also says that more ‘ordinary’ people achieve because they had the kind of support, skills, grit and determination to make it, their talents, while more modest then ‘the best’ were complimented by the other factors.

What amazes me, as it has with the whole nature versus nurture argument, is that to me it should be obvious that every person is different and the combination of things that lead to failure or success are unique with people, that there is a continuum of inate talent versus hard work, and the magic formula changes with each person. Denying inate talent or saying “well, someone who is really out there doesn’t need help” is as losing a proposition as saying “there is no such thing as inate talent, all it takes is grit, determination and hard work”, it leaves out the complexity of human beings.

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I agree, it seems obvious that some people simply have natural talent in certain areas. Athletic ability is an obvious one, where you can become quite good with hard work but never equal the person with natural talent who works equally hard. Even talented individuals need practice though; as the saying goes: “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”

On the academic side, I think it’s equally obvious that some people can simply be gifted in certain areas (e.g. Math) beyond the ability of others. Every once in a while I’ll do brain teasers and the math ones that stump me for 30 minutes I’ll present to W who pops out the answer with a glance.

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There is also a luck factor to success. When ability and preparation intersect with luck (whatever that lucky opportunity is) then really amazing things can happen.

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Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

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@gouf78 my kids could recite that in their sleep. The groans when I reminded them? Frequent and loud!

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In other words, it’s complicated. Like 99% of things in life.

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And what it means is that it’s futile to break it down to talent vs hard work imo.

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I could practice piano perfectly for hours a day, for years, and never be a Heifetz. I could golf for hours a day for years and never be a Woods or Palmer. Why are we then considered “elitist” when we suggest that some kids are smarter than others, or more talented in math or in languages or in other intellectual pursuits? That if all cannot participate in a particular activity or class, no one should? Does any school apply that to, say, their football team - anyone who tries out makes varsity and plays in every game?

Makes no sense at all.

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Perfect practice isn’t the answer if talent isn’t there.

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@chedva:
Even if you were a great pianist, you wouldn’t be Heifetz, maybe Rubinstein or Horowitz (heifetz was a violinist)…

As far as the rest of your post, dead spot on. The reason it is considered elitist is because people worship sports and they are what ‘regular’ people do, whereas the other things are achievements in the intellectual or arts, which this country has always had suspicion of. A guy who can run a 4.4 40 or catch an 80 yard pass or hit a ball out of Yankee stadium is for the most part physically gifted (and yes, there is a thinking side to sports, too, but people don’t think of that)…we often hear the lines “intellectual elite” and it is often a perjorative, yet “elite athlete” is something to be admired. Isaac Asimov in an essay he wrote pointed that out, and used Mark Twain as an example, the heroes of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are bright kids, but they hate school, and the villains in the story are often the kids like Sid Sawyer who does well in school, or other such kids. I think too people are scared of those intellectually gifted, or artistically, because it is hard to codify what makes them that way, whereas with sports you can attribute it to a ‘batting eye’, a ‘strong arm’, or whatnot.

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Even in sports, look at the “numbers” kids come out of the athletic combines with and then match them up years later to see which athletes became the superstars. It’s often not the kid that can throw the farthest, jump the highest or run the fastest.

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Sometimes, the best punters are on the worst football teams.

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Years ago, one of my kid’s Kindergarten teachers said “practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes progress.” I liked that.

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I always thought that the original 10,000 hours essay by Gladwell was so patently ridiculous, as soon as I got to the part about the Beatles. The Beatles were not the Beatles because they played a lot of hours in Hamburg. The Beatles were the Beatles because Lennon and McCarthy were/are musical geniuses.

Glossing over that, and attributing their music to lots of time playing, was so obviously misguided that it pretty much ended my taking anything Gladwell says seriously.

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@garland:
I think that you may be misinterpreting Gladwell, while I don’t think you can take what he writes as absolute gospel, he isn’t saying that talent is unnecessary, what he is saying is that talent alone is not enough, and to get really good at something requires a lot of work. We hear all the time about ‘natural athletes’ or ‘natural musicians’, but unless they put the time into their craft, they won’t make it, pure and simple (whether it is 10,000 hours or not is debatable). With the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney had talent, were inately musical, but they also paid their dues, they spent a lot of time playing and practicing as musicians, but they also spent it honing their craft as songwriters as well, too…and he talks about that in the book. He also makes clear that the beatles, like other outliers, also happened because of many other factors, they came of age when American rock and roll and the blues became popular in England, they came into being at a time when young people already had been exposed to rock and were receptive. Another piece of luck for them likely was being signed by EMI and being able to get George Martin as a producer (they likely would have been a great group even without him, but I suspect they would have a very different sound).

On the other hand, I have seen non musical kids, kids without much inate musical talent, who because they were drilled and drilled and forced to practice many hours a day, became very proficient on the instrument, but as musicians left a lot to be desired, so sheer time alone working at a craft doesn’t work, either.

I think what Gladwell was trying to dispel was the notion that people who make it, outliers, are that way because they were inately talented and that was enough, the whole point of the book (which should be read as a whole) is that unlike the Ayn Rand idea of the brilliant man who achieves because of special characteristics, outliers happen because of a lot of factors, inate talent is/can be one part of the picture, but other things play a hand, including luck that some of the more self involved say had nothing to do with their success, along with claiming they did it all by themselves when most ‘self made’ people had a ton of help in achieving…

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I can go back and re-read, but I recall he made an awful big deal about them and their musician-ship. Which I’m sorry, is ridiculous. They didn’t make it big because they played better than anyone else. The songwriting didn’t come from the hours. My recollection is that he absolutely was saying that they were who they were because of long hours of gigs. You don’t have to raise the Ayn Rand boogie-woman to dismiss the idea that their innate genius was paramount. Sure, had they not worked at their craft, it might not have gotten honed. But the hours were not the reason they were who they were.

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But Gladwell has made a career out of the Big Statement, that eludes subtlety and elides details. So this is part of a pattern. I’ve read a lot of his stuff, and he has a schtick that plays well. I dunno, maybe he worked at it for a lot of hours.

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We’ve sort of had this discussion before, but I think a lot depends on what outcomes you want to measure. SAT scores to me have a very strong genetic component. If you look at the people who score near perfect SAT scores in 11th grade, most of them could score well above the average high school junior or senior when they were in 7th grade. For most people, no amount of hard work is going to get them the near perfect SAT score. The problem with the Nature study is SAT scores don’t have much predictive power for success outside academia. Confusion results when people go back and forth between different outcome measures.

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@garland:
Being in the music world (albeit classical, which is in some ways different than pop music, others it isn’t), it isn’t that Lennon and McCartney weren’t great songwriters, they were, and they also as a band were musical people in their own right. In music you always here of these musical ‘geniuses’ that critics love and 5 people actually listen to, and no, the beatles as musicians were not one of these unsung greats. That said, though, they wrote songs that started out incredibly hooky and sugar coated, and they evolved, too, they progressed, they didn’t keep writing "I wanna hold your hand’, and that came from time. People talk about Mozart being a musical prodigy who obviously was a ‘natural’ because he wrote his first piece at 6 or 7, but the reality was that Mozart didn’t write anything you could call his own until his late teens, he wrote a lot of music in those 10 years or so, but much of it was in effect practice, it was derivative of other composers and so forth. Neither end, neither the Ayn Rand crap about people being ‘blessed creators’ or the idea that with hard work people can achieve greatness alone, are true, but the reality is that natural talent only gets you so far, that without the work and dedication and passion, you don’t get far. Like I said, being in music on all ends, I have seen plenty of kids who put in the work, who from the time they were 6 or so were practicing 5,6, 7 hours a day, multiple lessons a week, and while they achieved technical mastery, musically were the human equivalent of a record player; on the other hand I have seen a lot of musically gifted kids who didn’t put the time in, and while their playing in many ways was interesting, very musical, it also was impossible to listen to.

Doesn’t mean I think Gladwell is hard science, but I am pretty sure he is correct that without putting the time in, in the case of the beatles the hours of playing they got in as a group and the many hours McCartney and Lennon spent writing music (put it this way, for every sone they produced for the beatles, they likely had a ton of paper that got thrown out, trying to write music in the early days before they hit it). The Beatles in some ways were classic Gladwell, that their success was a combination of things, the talent was there, no doubt, but other elements were there for them as well, the timing of their ascent, where they grew up, changes in society, all led to what happened to them. You could give the entire Lennon McCartney package of songs, give it to some bar band at the time, and it is doubtful they would achieve any kind of real success.

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@roethlisburger:
I doubt there is a genetic component to SAT scores, in the sense that someone of average intelligence can do well on a SAT test (as a matter of fact, the SAT test for the past 20+ years is not correlated to IQ, Mensa used to allow SAT scores for proof to admission because there was a correlation between the old test and IQ, they haven’t since then). Yes, there are gifted kids who can blow out the SAT with little effort, but with test prep kids who aren’t gifted can get near perfect scores, too, a large part of the SAT IMO is learning how to take it, you don’t need to be a genius to do well on it. I have seen the kind of prep more than a few kids go through for the SAT and such, and it kind of proves Gladwells argument in the sense that they have had so much test prep that they go in almost knowing what is on the test, and they are fine tuned to taking it. When I went to high school in the old days test prep for the SAT was not what it is today, my school didn’t offer it, and most kids used the SAT prep books (this is before home computers were common or obviously the internet), few used services like Kaplan because they were so expensive (at least at my high school). I did fairly well on the SAT, but I did no prep work, I had friends who spent a lot of time prepping who had close to 1600 scores (old SAT), I was a couple of hundred points below them, and neither of them was a genius, nor was I.