Summary: Some people seem so incredibly good at their field, that one can understand why the Romans attributed outstanding performance to a ‘genius’, a spirit sent by the gods to inspire the fortunate individual. However, when studying the lives of prodigies and eminent persons, it becomes clear that eminence in any field takes lots of practice for even the most ‘talented’ – at least 10 years.
‘What nonsense is that?’ Tom Poes exclaimed. ‘You gave Sir Oliver the recipe for making gold, which involved molten lead, that needed to be stirred…’
‘With a stone’, the other added. ‘Stirring and stirring, around and around and around. 123,456,789 times; for it is not the formula that is hard, it is the work! After stirring 123,456,789 times the stone has become the philosopher’s stone, and only then the lead it touches turns into gold.’
Tom Poes and Roerik Omenom, ‘The lead reformer’, Marten Toonder
When watching or listening to prodigies or world class experts, it can sometimes be hard to believe that those people are mere humans. How can those people create the most wonderful music, hit the impossible ball, or develop such simple yet marvelous theories? It is no wonder the Romans explained extremely high ability with the concept ‘genius’, denoting that there must have been a special spirit, the genius, instilled by the gods at birth into the fortunate individual.
The existence of ‘prodigies’, children who are already famous performers in their field, like Mozart, Tiger Woods, or Bobby Fischer in chess seems to lend extra credence to the ‘genius’ idea. However, one should remember that prodigies are called prodigies because they perform much better in a certain field than other children. For example, Tiger Woods won his first golf competition at age 2 (the Under Age 10 section of the Drive, Pitch, and Putt competition at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California). However, he was not able to beat his father, who was merely a good amateur golfer, until he was 11. So while the golfing skill of Woods was extraordinary for a child his age, in absolute terms even an extremely talented toddler like Tiger was by far not yet good enough to take a serious shot at the world championships: he won his first major trophy in the adult competition at age 21, at which time he had been golfing for more than 19 years. Similarly, Mozart was indeed a child prodigy, but his first composition that is still regarded as a masterwork (instead of a pretty good work – for a 10 year old) was the Piano Concerto no. 9, written when Mozart was 21 years old. By that time, he had had composition lessons for at least 10 years. Bobby Fischer, who was not yet quite an adult when he became a chess grandmaster at age 15, had nevertheless been practicing chess for 9 years already.
In conclusion, even prodigies apparently need to put in time to reach an (adult) world-class level in their chosen field.
Researchers who looked at prodigies as well as people who were not considered prodigies but nevertheless reached great eminence in their field (for example Einstein, Darwin, Marie Curie, but also chess grandmasters, poets, writers, and composers such as Bach or Beethoven), discovered that all of them had spent at least 10 years (or about 10,000 hours) mastering their field before they produced their first masterpiece. This finding has been so consistent, that it has been dubbed the ‘10 year rule’: over a decade of practice is needed to excel in a field.
Now, ’10 years’, while memorable, is actually an oversimplification; the exact amount of time seems to depend on the starting age, the skills needed in the field (strength, aerobic capacity, intelligence, creativity, and/or motor skills), and the competitiveness of the field. In cases where there are few or no full-time practitioners, like in memory competitions, one year may already be enough to win a national championship (as described in Joshua Foer’s book ‘Moonwalking with Einstein‘). But in older, better-known fields the minimum seems to vary from about six years (for painters [Handbook of Creativity, Robert J. Sternberg] and very tall basketball players), to about 15 to 20 years for violinists. However, while the ’10 year rule’ is therefore not very accurate in a literal way, it is still very true and potent in its essence: it takes an enormous amount of effort to reach the top in a field, much more than most people are willing or able to expend. If you merely think “wouldn’t it be nice to be a Nobel-prize winning physicist/wealthy rock musician/world famous tennis player” you are very unlikely to have the perseverance or be willing to make the sacrifices needed to attain that level – because the ‘reward’ is a very, very long way off.
Of course, while these data strongly suggest that a large amount of work is necessary to reach a high level in any activity, it does not say that it is sufficient. Perhaps it is necessary to put in all that time to reach world-class levels, even if you are talented or even a genius. But that does not automatically mean that anyone who spends 10 years doing or practicing something will become incredibly good at it. You may need both talent and time: without talent, time spent practicing may not have much effect, or at least probably won’t make you rise above mediocrity.
Fortunately, such a hypothesis can be investigated scientifically; one could in principle (if one can clearly quantify skill) try to compare the time needed by different people to reach a certain level of skill. Such a kind of research has for example been performed by John Sloboda and colleagues for musical achievement (Sloboda, J.A.; Davidson, J.W.; Howe, M.J.A.; and Moore, D.G. “The Role of Practice in the Development of Performing Musicians”, British Journal of Psychology 87 (1996) p287-309.) This investigation (as did investigations before) found no evidence for ‘giftedness’ in music; children, whether considered ‘talented’ or ‘untalented’ took approximately equal amounts of time to reach a certain level in musical skill. The ‘talented’ just practiced more hours and therefore seemed to progress faster. An earlier study by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues at a conservatory (in Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T., and Tesch-Römer, C. “The role of deliberate practice in expert performance“. Psychological Review, 100 (1993) p363-406) found that the best violinists had had about 7,500 hours of solitary practice at age 18, while the ‘merely’ good violinists had on average 5,300 hours, and the future music teachers who studied at the same institution 3,400 hours. There were no clear cases of ‘drudges’ who had studied a lot but with little to show for it, or ‘geniuses’ who had reached the highest rungs with relatively little effort.
So next time you feel a small pang of envy when hearing about a successful artist, musician or scientist, you may at least find some comfort in the thought that that person probably had to work extremely hard to get to that point. However, while Ericsson may not have found drudges in his study of music students, in daily life there do seem to be people who work hard, but never get very good at what they do. How can we explain that?
But that would be an excellent subject for my next post.