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Translator: Sanntint Tint Reviewer: sun moon
Many of you have probably heard of the 10,000-hour rule. The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice to become excellent at something. And that it's better to start as early as possible. The exemplar for this story is Tiger Woods. His father gave him a putter when he was 7 months old. Fast forward to age 21, he's the greatest golfer in the world. A classic 10,000-hour story. Another one is the three Polgar sisters, whose father decided to teach them chess systematically from a young age. When his two daughters became grandmaster chess players, the question arose: if the 10,000-hour rule is true, shouldn't we see top players starting their so-called deliberate practice early? When scientists study top performers, they find they spend more time in deliberate practice. Not surprising. When you track athletes along their path to improvement, the pattern seems to be this: a period of sampling a variety of physical activities, which scientists call a sampling period, in future top performers. They acquire general skills and delay specialization, putting them ahead of peers who get stuck at lower levels. This doesn't fit the 10,000-hour rule, does it? So, I started thinking about other fields that involve early specialization, which can't be done, like music. The pattern is often similar. Exceptional musicians, until their third instrument, didn't spend more time in deliberate practice than average musicians. They also had a sampling period. Even prodigies like Yo-Yo Ma. So, I became interested in exploring the development behind long-respected masters. Duke Ellington avoided music lessons as a child to focus on baseball and painting. Maryam Mirzakhani, as a girl, wasn't interested in math and dreamed of being a novelist, yet she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. Vincent van Gogh had five different careers before he completely failed, and in his late 20s, he picked up "The Guide to the ABCs of Drawing." Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer from the University of Michigan who took a philosophy course to fulfill a requirement. There he learned about a nearly century-old system of logic that could solve mathematical problems by encoding true and false propositions as 1s and 0s. This led to the invention of the binary code, which is the basis of all digital computers today. Frank H. Haselby started his first professional job at age 54 and became the CEO of Girl Scouts. The player tracked here. He sampled tennis, skiing, and wrestling. Although his mother was a tennis coach, she refused to coach him because he wouldn't consistently return the ball. He sampled sports like handball, volleyball, soccer, badminton, and skateboarding. So who is this sixty-year-old? He's Roger Federer. Everything about him is as famous as Tiger Woods. However, even tennis enthusiasts don't know anything about his development. Why is that? Because the Tiger Woods story is inspiring, and it seems to be a neat narrative that encompasses anything you want to excel at in life. However, golf is an exemplary model for almost everything humans want to learn. Golf is a paradigm of what psychologist Robin Hogarth calls a "kind learning environment." The next levels and goals are clear. Clear and unchanging rules. You get fast, precise feedback when you do something. Chess is also a good learning environment. On the other side of this spectrum are environments with unclear next levels and goals, and changing rules, which are "wicked learning environments." When you do something, you might get feedback, it might be delayed, and it might be imprecise. One of these seems to resemble the world we live in. So if over-specialization isn't always the trick in a wicked world, what is? Sometimes it's a winding or zigzag path, which can be hard to discuss because it seems to maintain a broader perspective. It might seem late. However, if you look at research on technological innovation, the most impactful patents with increasing influence are written by teams involving individuals who have worked across many different technology classes and can combine things from different fields. One of my admired figures, and a frontrunner in this, is a Japanese man named Gunpei Yokoi. He didn't do well on school electronics exams, so he settled for a low-level job as a maintenance worker at a playing card company in Kyoto. He combined some technologies known in the calculator industry with some known in the credit card industry to create handheld games. This transformed a playing card company founded in the 19th century with wooden storefronts into a toy and game company. You've probably heard of it called Nintendo. His most brilliant work is the Game Boy. What prevents these people from creating more is that we don't encourage patterns like early preparation or specialization. Naturally, there will be as many ways to succeed as there are people, but we tend to encourage and cheer for the Tiger path, and I think we also need those who walk the Roger path in a wicked world. Or as the distinguished physicist, mathematician, and writer Freeman Dyson said, "For a good ecosystem, you need both birds and frogs. The frogs, who see the details, are down in the mud. The birds, who don't see these details, integrate the knowledge of the frogs." You need both. The problem, Dyson says, is that we're telling everyone to be a frog. In a wicked world, I think this is becoming increasingly short-sighted.