Everyone knows I am addicted to this stuff. What a great read. I wish we were all more aware that we are one step away from being stars if we just pick our spot and work hard. I’ll include an excerpt below. Here is the link to the article.
Ericsson has spent the last 30 years probing the implications of the first experiment he ever conducted as a professional. The year was 1976, and he was studying the limits of memory. At the time, it was believed that the brain could only remember about seven random numbers at a particular moment. Ericsson thought he’d try to increase this capacity through rigorous training. “I was really surprised when, after about 20 hours of training, we could expand the short term memory for digits from seven to 20,” Ericsson recalls. “Then [the experimental subject] just kept on improving. After about 200 hours of training, he could remember over 80 numbers. It was very surprising.”
Ericsson wondered what other human talents were malleable. After all, if memory ability wasn’t innate, then it seemed hard to imagine what was. What else could people learn to do better?
Ericsson started studying a range of “expert performers.” He investigated chess grandmasters and the stars of the PGA tour, Scrabble champions and brain surgeons, concert pianists and circus acrobats. After putting these peak performers through a battery of cognitive tests, Ericsson realized that their talent wasn’t genetic. They weren’t born with better brains. In fact, the average IQ of people at the top of their field, no matter what it is, equaled that of the average college student.
But if talent isn’t innate, then where does it come from? Ericsson’s answer was so simple it was shocking: Practice makes perfect. Talent comes from learning by doing. For example, when Ericsson studied classical pianists, he found that the winners of competitions had practiced over 10,000 hours by the age of 20, while less accomplished performers only practiced between 2,000 and 5,000 hours. This same effect was apparent across a range of fields. “From the outside, it seems like talented people don’t have to put in a lot of effort,” Ericsson says. “They make it look so easy. But when you look closely, the opposite is actually true. The best performers are almost always the ones who practice the most. I have yet to find a talented person who didn’t earn their talent through hard work and thousands of hours
of practice.”
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