Practice Makes Perfect, Not Talent

Back when I was serving in Chile, my mission president really emphasized practicing our teaching craft. Having played basketball all his life, he was a sports enthusiast and often shared with us quotes by legendary college coach John Wooden, winner of 10 consecutive NCAA men's basketball championships. One of my favorites was this one:

Sportswriters often asked Coach Wooden how he had the good fortune of recruiting so many "born shooters" and "born ball handlers."

He said:

I recruit good players who love the game! When they come to my team they know that they can become great. And then we go to work and we practice, practice, practice. "Great shooters" are born after 2000 hours of shooting practice. "Great ball handlers" are born after 3000 hours of ball-handling practice. My players become great because they are disciplined, good players, who practice, practice, and practice.

This morning I came across this article by David Brooks wherein he talks about how Genius is tied more to perseverance than talent. He says:

We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

I guess there's something to be said for having a genetic disposition to be able to focus and work at a craft so meticulously, but in the end it really comes down to a person's dedication. Sure, there is a certain amount of natural talent involved with anything, but you'll find a lot more superstars who are successful because they work at it more than just having a natural inclination toward the subject.

A few months ago a guy I blog-stalk wrote about this same topic. He does not have permalinks set up for his individual blog posts so you'll have to go to December 2008 and scroll down about halfway to the post called Best. He mentions:

I have re-reshaped the message even further to hew closer to how one Nobel chemist explained his success. I forget his name. He freely admits that he is not the brightest mind in his field. His colleagues think he is a jerk. So far we seem to have a lot in common, well, besides that Nobel thing. He explains how he competes with more gifted colleagues by noting that while his "best" is not better than their "best," most people don't do their best. Invariably, your "best" will be better than the half-hearted attempt of someone brilliant.

In that post he cites another article from Fortune that talks about how the secret to greatness is practice and hardwork. I might even like that Fortune article more than the first one by Brooks, just because it lists more examples and is a little more thorough. The article says:

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)

In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

I think all this ties nicely into one of the quotes that I had included in a post I wrote last week about James Rogan. People achieve greatness by persevering. My mission president also to used to say (he probably still does) that you can't achieve great things when you are constantly thinking petty thoughts. It takes the steady dedication of a lifetime, which for many, is more rare than finding the actual talent. But like Rogan notes, while people may inherit money or talents, they don't inherit greatness. That's left up to you and me.