Part of an interview in Macleans. Matthew Syed, Times reporter and Britain’s number one table-tennis player argues that natural ability has very little to do with high achievement.
A: If you look at the scientific evidence, where you end up in a field bears no relation whatsoever to you initial endowment and is created by the quality and quantity of your practice. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown that the difference between extraordinary performers and everyone else is that they practice more.
Q: Most of us put in a lot of practice at something. Why aren’t we super-achievers?
A: It has to be purposeful practice with the right level of focus, and you have to be extending you limitations and receiving good training with rigorous feedback, you’re not going to improve. I’ve driven for thousands of hours but I’m not a world–class driver, because when I drive, I’m listening to the radio and wondering what to have for dinner. But when I play table tennis, I’m pushing myself, always, just beyond my limits. That’s not particularly comfortable. I’m concentrating as hard as I can; I have a camera trained on me so I can get feedback by watching the video later; I’ve got the best coach in the world watching – all that means that you just keep getting better and better. Ericsson pointed out that the most amazing thing about expertise is the capacity of “ordinary” people to just keep improving with practice.
Q: But doesn’t the athlete who starts out with more natural ability which is at least partially genetically determined, have a distinct advantage?
A: Genes are relevant to initial ability. You can see, for example, that some kids are better than others when they first pick up a ball. But the evidence shows that over many thousands of hours, that initial disparity just doesn’t matter. What really alerted me to a fundamental problem with the idea that success is all about natural ability is that I grew up on Silverdale Road in Reading, about as anonymous a road as you can imaging, and yet in the early 1980s that one tiny street contained more of the top table tennis players than the rest of the nation combined. There was no genetic mutation that occurred only for people living on Silverdale Road. We just had access to better opportunities – most importantly, the opportunity to practice at a facility that was open around the clock and receive very advanced training from the best coach in the country, who taught at our local primary school. Our genetic inheritance didn’t matter, because after a number of years, all of us who lived on that road found ourselves to be very new people with brains and bodies sculpted by the training and practice.
Q: You say that there’s no such thing as a child prodigy, there are just parents who coach their children to start practicing earlier and harder. Why do some parent succeed while others fail?
A: If there’s some level of coercion, if a child is doing the work or the sport because he’ll be disciplined by his parents if he doesn’t, the amount he’ll improve is severely compromised and there is greater risk of burning out. Good coaching is about encouraging enjoyment and getting the young person to internalize the motivation. Tiger Woods said, “My dad never asked me to play golf. I asked him.”
Q: You write about Laszlo Plogar, a Hungarian educational psychologist who set out in the 1970s to prove that any child could become world-class at something. He chose chess because success could be measured objectively, and his three daughters became the best female players in history. How did he get them to internalize motivation?
A: Polgar made chess playful, jovial, and he used little tactics to build a level of excitement and interest. For instance, at the beginning he would say, ‘No, no, you’re not allowed to play yet.” By the time they were teenagers and winning international tournaments, the girls were fascinated by chess and wanted to practice. They didn’t need to be pushed.
Q: How important is positive feedback?
A: The type of positive feedback is crucial. If you praise kids for talent, for how skilled they are, they avoid challenges because they know that if they fail they’re going to lose that label. You want to encourage and praise them for effort, for working hard. The distinction is between what Carol Dweck, A Stanford psychologist who has done groundbreaking work in this area, calls a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that talent is what leads to success, and you are likely to give up if you fail early on because that will be regarded as evidence that you lack the necessary talent. But if you believe that success revolves around hard work and practice, failure is not going to deter you at all. It’s going to tell you that you need to practice harder. With a growth mindset, you’re more likely to reach excellence, because failure is an inevitable part of reaching excellence.
A: If you look at the scientific evidence, where you end up in a field bears no relation whatsoever to you initial endowment and is created by the quality and quantity of your practice. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown that the difference between extraordinary performers and everyone else is that they practice more.
Q: Most of us put in a lot of practice at something. Why aren’t we super-achievers?
A: It has to be purposeful practice with the right level of focus, and you have to be extending you limitations and receiving good training with rigorous feedback, you’re not going to improve. I’ve driven for thousands of hours but I’m not a world–class driver, because when I drive, I’m listening to the radio and wondering what to have for dinner. But when I play table tennis, I’m pushing myself, always, just beyond my limits. That’s not particularly comfortable. I’m concentrating as hard as I can; I have a camera trained on me so I can get feedback by watching the video later; I’ve got the best coach in the world watching – all that means that you just keep getting better and better. Ericsson pointed out that the most amazing thing about expertise is the capacity of “ordinary” people to just keep improving with practice.
Q: But doesn’t the athlete who starts out with more natural ability which is at least partially genetically determined, have a distinct advantage?
A: Genes are relevant to initial ability. You can see, for example, that some kids are better than others when they first pick up a ball. But the evidence shows that over many thousands of hours, that initial disparity just doesn’t matter. What really alerted me to a fundamental problem with the idea that success is all about natural ability is that I grew up on Silverdale Road in Reading, about as anonymous a road as you can imaging, and yet in the early 1980s that one tiny street contained more of the top table tennis players than the rest of the nation combined. There was no genetic mutation that occurred only for people living on Silverdale Road. We just had access to better opportunities – most importantly, the opportunity to practice at a facility that was open around the clock and receive very advanced training from the best coach in the country, who taught at our local primary school. Our genetic inheritance didn’t matter, because after a number of years, all of us who lived on that road found ourselves to be very new people with brains and bodies sculpted by the training and practice.
Q: You say that there’s no such thing as a child prodigy, there are just parents who coach their children to start practicing earlier and harder. Why do some parent succeed while others fail?
A: If there’s some level of coercion, if a child is doing the work or the sport because he’ll be disciplined by his parents if he doesn’t, the amount he’ll improve is severely compromised and there is greater risk of burning out. Good coaching is about encouraging enjoyment and getting the young person to internalize the motivation. Tiger Woods said, “My dad never asked me to play golf. I asked him.”
Q: You write about Laszlo Plogar, a Hungarian educational psychologist who set out in the 1970s to prove that any child could become world-class at something. He chose chess because success could be measured objectively, and his three daughters became the best female players in history. How did he get them to internalize motivation?
A: Polgar made chess playful, jovial, and he used little tactics to build a level of excitement and interest. For instance, at the beginning he would say, ‘No, no, you’re not allowed to play yet.” By the time they were teenagers and winning international tournaments, the girls were fascinated by chess and wanted to practice. They didn’t need to be pushed.
Q: How important is positive feedback?
A: The type of positive feedback is crucial. If you praise kids for talent, for how skilled they are, they avoid challenges because they know that if they fail they’re going to lose that label. You want to encourage and praise them for effort, for working hard. The distinction is between what Carol Dweck, A Stanford psychologist who has done groundbreaking work in this area, calls a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that talent is what leads to success, and you are likely to give up if you fail early on because that will be regarded as evidence that you lack the necessary talent. But if you believe that success revolves around hard work and practice, failure is not going to deter you at all. It’s going to tell you that you need to practice harder. With a growth mindset, you’re more likely to reach excellence, because failure is an inevitable part of reaching excellence.
