This certainly brings up a lot of very good questions about innate talent, intelligence, and ability. My friend Nathan and I were discussing this very issue in Arlington a couple weeks ago. This article seems to contradict or at least mollify what we've been learning about intelligence in our micro class.Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.
Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.
"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.
Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.
This research also makes me wonder about the effects of age on talent acquisition. Do older people tend not to develop deep talent in new areas later in life (becoming a concert pianist after age 40 for example) due to innate limitations of learning or more due to economic concerns? (An older person's time is more valuable than a young person's in terms of alternative uses of it, and they have less financial incentive to develop new talents because they have less time to employ thier skills in the marketplace.) Some of these issues were certainly a consideration for me when thinking about coming back to school for my PhD while in my mid-30s.
I particularly agree with the implications of the article in terms of encouraging students to pursue what they truly enjoy. I spent far too long in a job and industry that I did not enjoy. The salary I made certainly gave me a comfortable lifestyle, but I did not have the motivation or interest to truly excel in that field. It has been great to come back to school and get headed in a new direction.
Now if I could only figure out a way to motivate myself to study macro and econometrics, then I'd be good to go!
Here are some additional links:
- More thoughts on this (including some great links) from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (the author's of this article)
- Dr. Erricson's homepage
- An article on Erricson in The Economist
- The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
P.S. -- Here's a trailer to what looks like a touching movie about the making of a star:
See a larger version here.
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