Summary: As discussed in my previous post, a huge amount of effort and experience is needed to become a top performer. Even if there were something like ‘talent’, by itself ‘talent’ is by far not enough; even Einstein worked hard at maths and physics for more than 15 years before his ‘miracle year’ breakthrough. Of course, this leads to the counter-question: if experience is necessary, and perhaps even sufficient (as the Ericsson investigation seemed to imply), why are then not all professional performers equally good? The difference has to be caused by differences in talent, right? The answer is however ‘not necessarily’, as experience is a tricky teacher, which can make you great, but much more commonly teaches you until you reach an ‘acceptable’ level. This post is about how that works and how you can avoid or escape ‘experienced mediocrity’ and reach excellence (or at least pretty impressive performance) instead.
Practice makes p_____. What is the second word?
“Permanent”
-Joke among educational scientists
A while ago I was discussing with some acquaintances the rule that ten years of practice are necessary to achieve world-class performance. One of them said: then we must be world-class, for we have worked in our field for over ten years!
My acquaintances may have been world-class in their field (I wouldn’t know the ranking order in their profession). Generally observing people around me, however, I must unfortunately conclude that 10 years (or, more clearly, 10000 hours) of practicing anything does not necessarily guarantee top performance, or even performance that is anything close to top performance. This is not just in science, where US Nobel laureates publish two times as many papers as scientists still worthy enough to make it into ‘American Men and Women of Science’ (Dean Keith Simonton, “Origins of Genius“). There are experienced teachers who fall far below the level of equally experienced but ‘expert’ teachers (see, for example, John Hattie’s “Teachers Make a Difference, What is the research evidence?“), and in computer programming the difference between the best and the worst programmers even reaches a factor of about 10x ! (Steve McConnell, “Origins of 10X – How Valid is the Underlying Research?“) And also in the programmer case, experience seems not to play any role (though that may partially be because all programmers studied were quite experienced).
So while experience is necessary to reach top performance (as seen by the near-universal validity of a 10-or-something-year rule in many fields), there are huge differences in performance between equally experienced individuals. One could of course invoke ‘IQ’ or ‘talent’ as an explanation, but research suggests a different cause.
Take for example an investigation undertaken by the US army into the performance of its personnel, ranging from cooks to attilerymen (quoted by Earl Hunt, ‘Expertise, Talent and Social Encouragement’ in ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance‘). This research showed that people starting a new job indeed became better in it with time- but that they only improved the first 1 to 3 years. Then their skill plateaud. Hattie found something similar for teachers; teachers got better with experience, but most of the gain occurred in the first few years. After that, gains were minimal.
Since we know that people need ten years or more to become top performers, but most people stop improving in an activity after two or three years, the hard-to-avoid conclusion is that top-performers are not necessarily better than ‘normal’ people because they have more experience, but because for whatever reason they continue improving and learning.
Now, you may wonder: why do (future) top performers improve? Do they have special capabilities that allow them to keep improving beyond the 3-year mark?
In fact, no special capability is needed to learn longer than three years; children take over a decade to master the vocabulary and grammar of their mother tongue to a decent level. And it is also telling that in the army investigation, smarter people plateaud earlier (sometimes even within one year), even if their plateau was slightly higher that that which employees with lower IQs reached in their three years. This strongly suggests that there is no such thing as a ‘three year block’, but that there is an entirely different reason why people stop improving: they (or at least their brains) consider themselves ‘good enough’.
Consider the hypothetical case of someone living in Berlin who wants to visit Amsterdam. Not seeing road signs leading to Amsterdam, but remembering the saying that all roads lead to Rome, he decides to travel to Rome first, and from Rome get to Amsterdam. And he gets there. So it worked! His brain is satisfied.
While he is traveling again and again from Berlin to Amsterdam via Rome and back, he slowly forms a habit, meaning that neuronal connections in his brain are strengthened (go south at Bern, for example), and in the end he does not have to think about the road anymore (in psychological terms, this is called automaticity). This is nice, because he can think about other things instead, like his job, or his girlfriend.
Basically, you can say that the brain is lazy: if some course of action gets the desired result, the brain will do exactly the same thing the next time. With time and repetition, it becomes an automatism, becoming faster and faster and taking less and less effort, which is good. However, while this automation means that there will be some improvement in speed given sufficient practice, it only makes inefficient methods slightly less inefficient, it will not make one’s habits or skills great. For that, you have be taught the better method, or invent it yourself.
The true ‘bottleneck’ is that in many cases we don’t think it worth the time to investigate or experiment with alternative methods (“if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”), and bosses or colleagues may not have the time, courage, expertise or drive to teach us better ways.
The neat results of Ericsson of hours practiced versus skill achieved are likely neat exactly because music lessons and practice are very different from a regular job: teachers are always telling students to do things better, and giving more and more challenging assignments. This is definitely not what happens in most jobs, where feedback is sparse, late or absent, and the difficulty level of tasks is not neatly ramped-up.
Why then do top-performers seem to flout the ‘3-year rule’, even if they may not have formal teachers? The answer seems to be two-fold:
a) they try to interact with top performers in their field and/or their works, whether that means having a postdoc at the group of an eminent scientist or reading/studying the works of the great people in their field, like Einstein, as a student, tried to read everything of Maxwell and Helmholz and other 19th century top physicists.
b) they spend time thinking how they can become better, or how they can overcome obstacles. And they experiment! For example, Linus Pauling (Nobel laureate in chemistry and peace), would spend 15 minutes before going to bed thinking about an important problem, hoping the answer would come to him in his sleep. Definitely this is not ‘natural’ behavior or behavior he learned at school; he very likely invented it himself to push his performance even further.
The great challenge therefore does not seem to be that the average person is physically or mentally unable to learn for longer than a few years, it is more that people are generally not motivated enough to spend the time and mental effort and take the social risks to improve beyond an ‘adequate’ level. Of course, it also does not help that for most jobs and activities there is not a clear course or program on how to continue improving, and often even motivated people can fail (witness the high failure rate of people wanting to lose weight or stop smoking). Still, lack of motivation/aspiration seems to be the root cause of premature plateauing of skill. So that may be the most suitable subject for my next post.