Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice Matthew Syed Originally published as BOUNCE: How Champions Are MadeThe ‘Freakonomics of Sport’…What are the real secrets of sporting success, and what lessons do they offer about life in general? Why doesn’t Tiger Woods “choke”? Why are the best figure skaters those that have fallen over the most and why has one small street in Reading produced more top table tennis players than the rest of the country put together.As a three-time Commonwealth table-tennis champion and two-time Olympian, Matthew Syed is perfectly placed to show what it takes to get to the top in any discipline. And as an award-winning writer for the sports and comment pages of the Times – and holder of a prize-winning degree from Oxford University – he knows the facts, the science and the personalities better than anyone.In his book Matt overturns myths and outdated thinking to show “why it is that top sportsmen seem to perceive faster, smarter and deeper than the rest of us.” He draws on the latest in neuroscience and psychology to discover why so many top athletes are superstitious, and meets the Hungarian man who turned his daughters into three of the best chess players in history – and explains how.Along the way, he introduces an extraordinary cast of footballers, cricketers, baseball players, speedskaters, scientists and experts – and interviews the East German athlete who became a man, and her husband. Matthew’s book is crammed full of fascinating stories and telling studies, insights and statistics, all brought together to make a wonderfully thought-provoking read.Matthew’s book is not simply the Freakonomics of sport though – it looks at big questions such as the nature of talent, what kind of practice actually works, how to achieve motivation, drugs in sport (and life) and whether black people really are faster runners. Fresh, ground-breaking and tackling subjects with wide appeal, Matthew’s book is sure to be one of the most talked-about of the year. Bounce How Champions Are Made Matthew Syed Copyright (#ulink_fef17b8c-c053-5581-99ee-a4604739843a) First published in Great Britain in 2010 Fourth Estate A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk) Copyright © Matthew Syed 2010 The right of Matthew Syed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. 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Source ISBN: 9780007350520 Ebook Edition: 9780007350537 Version: 2018-08-02 For Dilys Table of Contents Cover Page (#u77b2d121-aa21-57ba-a2a2-9d6649f1dbdd) Title Page (#ua0fab2c6-5677-55be-a331-1fb0682b337d) Copyright (#u9127d3ae-3821-55e4-8647-ce85259f2672) Dedication (#uaa19827e-6038-5db8-908e-73fa6ec401e1) PART I The Talent Myth (#u4e735952-fb56-584f-aa1e-2717a4671d75) 1 The Hidden Logic of Success (#u893ae71c-a6c2-514b-88e6-39ed86f20c52) 2 Miraculous Children? (#u37e50fdf-6a5d-5a01-8e68-61608fdc41dc) 3 The Path to Excellence (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Mysterious Sparks and Life-Changing Mindsets (#litres_trial_promo) PART II Paradoxes of the Mind (#litres_trial_promo) 5 The Placebo Effect (#litres_trial_promo) 6 The Curse of Choking and How to Avoid It (#litres_trial_promo) 7 Baseball Rituals, Pigeons, and Why Great Sportsmen Feel Miserable after Winning (#litres_trial_promo) PART III Deep Reflections (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Optical Illusions and X-ray Vision (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Drugs in Sport, Schwarzenegger Mice, and the Future of Mankind (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Are Blacks Superior Runners? (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PART I The Talent Myth (#ulink_e0798c7d-921f-52e7-ae6e-7d82cd464aad) 1 The Hidden Logic of Success (#ulink_e7776ec5-ba15-5ba9-b6cc-b0f3aad7a1d1) The Autobiographical Bias In January 1995, I became the British number-one table tennis player for the very first time which, I am sure you will agree, is a heck of an achievement. At twenty-four years of age, I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of regular invitations to speak to school audiences about my rise to international glory, and would often take my gold medals along to dazzle the youngsters. Table tennis is a pretty big sport in the UK, with 2.4 million participants, 30,000 paid-up members of the governing body, thousands of teams, and serious riches for those who excel. But what made me special? What had marked me out for sporting greatness? I came up with a number of attributes: speed, guile, gutsiness, mental strength, adaptability, agility, and reflexes. Sometimes I would marvel at the fact that I had these skills in such abundance that they were capable of elevating me – little me! – beyond hundreds of thousands of others aspiring to that precious top spot. And all this was doubly amazing, considering I had been born into a family in an ordinary suburb of an ordinary town in south-east England. There was no silver spoon. No advantages. No nepotism. Mine was a triumph of individuality; a personal odyssey of success, a triumph against the odds. This, of course, is the way that many who have reached the top in sport, or indeed in any other field, choose to tell their stories. We live in a culture that encourages this kind of soaring individualism. Hollywood is full of such narratives, often sugarcoated in that well-known American Dream sentimentality. But while these stories are inspirational, rousing, and compulsively entertaining, are they true? Here is my story in table tennis, retold with the bits that I chose to ignore the first time around, as they diminished the romance and the individuality of my triumph. 1. Table In 1978 my parents, for reasons they are still unable to explain (neither of them plays table tennis), decided to buy a table tennis table – a super deluxe 1000 with gold lettering, since you ask – and to put it in our large garage. I don’t know the exact percentage, but you can imagine that there were not many youngsters of my age in my home town who possessed a full-size, tournament-specification table. Fewer still had a garage in which it could be housed full-time. This was my first bit of good fortune. 2. My Brother My second piece of good fortune was having an older brother called Andrew who came to love table tennis as much as I. We would play for hours in the garage after school: duelling, battling, testing each other’s reflexes, experimenting with new spins, investigating new paddles, inviting over friends who, although often more accomplished in other sports, were bemused to see just how far we had advanced in table tennis. Without knowing it, we were blissfully accumulating thousands of hours of practice. 3. Peter Charters Mr Charters was a teacher at the local primary school, a tall man with moustache, a twinkle in his eye, a disdain for conventional teaching methods, and a passion for sport that bordered on the fanatical. He was the coach of almost all the after-school sporting clubs, the manager of the school football team, the organizer of school sports day, custodian of the badminton equipment, and inventor of a game called ‘Bucket Ball’, a kind of improvised basketball. But Charters cared about one thing above all: table tennis. He was the nation’s top coach and a senior figure in the English Table Tennis Association. The other sports were just a front, an opportunity to scout sporting talent wherever it emerged so he could focus it – ruthlessly and exclusively – upon table tennis. No child who passed through Aldryngton School in Reading was not given a try-out by Charters. And such was his zeal, energy, and dedication to table tennis that anybody who showed potential was persuaded to take their skills forward at the local club, Omega. Charters invited me and my brother Andy to join Omega in 1980, at the very moment we were beginning to outgrow the garage. 4. Omega Omega was not a luxurious club – it was a one-table hut in a gravel enclosure a couple of miles from where we lived in suburban Reading: cold in winter, ferociously hot in summer, with plants growing through the roof and floor. But it had one advantage that made it almost unique in the county: it was open twenty-four hours a day, for the exclusive use of its tiny group of members, each of whom had a set of keys. My brother and I took full advantage, training after school, before school, at weekends, and during school holidays. We were also joined by other Aldryngton alumni who had been spotted and snapped up by Charters, so that by 1981 Omega was becoming something of a sensation. One street alone (Silverdale Road, on which the school was situated) contained an astonishing number of the nation’s top players. At number 119 were the Syeds. Andrew, my brother, went on to become one of the most successful junior players in the history of British table tennis, winning three national titles before retiring due to injury in 1986. He was later described by Charters as the best young player to emerge from England for a quarter of a century. Matthew (that’s me) also lived at 119 and became a long-serving England senior number one, a three-time Commonwealth champion, and a two-time Olympian. At number 274, just opposite Aldryngton, lived Karen Witt. She was one of the most brilliant female players of her generation. She won countless junior titles, the national senior title, the hugely prestigious Commonwealth championship, and dozens of other competitions during a sparkling career. When she retired with back trouble at the age of twenty-five, she had changed the face of English women’s table tennis. At number 149, equidistant between the Syeds and the Witts, lived Andy Wellman. He was a powerful player who would go on to win a series of titles, mainly in doubles, and was widely feared, particularly after defeating one of the top English players in the prestigious Top 12 event. At the bottom of Silverdale Road was Paul Trott, another leading junior, and Keith Hodder, an outstanding county player. Around the corner were Jimmy Stokes (England junior champion), Paul Savins (junior international), Alison Gordon (four times English senior champion), Paul Andrews (top national player), and Sue Collier (England schools champion). I could go on. For a period in the 1980s, this one street, and the surrounding vicinity, produced more outstanding table tennis players than the rest of the nation combined. One road among tens of thousands of roads; one tiny cohort of schoolkids against millions up and down the country. Silverdale Road was the wellspring of English table tennis: a Ping-Pong mecca that seemed to defy explanation or belief. Had some genetic mutation spread throughout the local vicinity without touching the surrounding roads or villages? Of course not: the success of Silverdale Road was about the coming together of factors of a beguilingly similar kind to those that have, from time to time, elevated other tiny areas on our planet into the sporting ascendancy (Spartak, an impoverished tennis club in Moscow, for example, created more top-twenty women players between 2005 and 2007 than the whole of the United States). In particular, all of the sporting talent was focused ruthlessly on table tennis, and all of the aspiring players were nurtured by an outstanding coach. And as for me, with a table in the garage and a brother as passionate about Ping-Pong as myself, I had a head start before I even got to Aldryngton. The Myth of Meritocracy My parents – bless them – continue to describe my success in table tennis as an inspirational triumph against the odds. That is kind indeed, and I thank them for it. When I showed them a draft of this chapter, they disputed its entire thesis. Yes, but what about Michael O’Driscoll (a rival from Yorkshire)? He had all your advantages, but he didn’t make it. What about Bradley Billington (another rival from Derbyshire)? He had parents who were international table tennis players, but he did not become England’s number one. This is merely a slightly different twist on what I call the autobiographical bias. My point is not that I was a bad table tennis player; rather, it is that I had powerful advantages not available to hundreds of thousands of other youngsters. I was, in effect, the best of a very small bunch. Or, to put it another way, I was the best of a very big bunch, only a tiny fraction of whom had my opportunities. What is certain is that if a big enough group of youngsters had been given a table at eight, had a brilliant older brother to practise with, had been trained by one of the top coaches in the country, had joined the only twenty-four-hour club in the county, and had practised for thousands of hours by their early teens, I would not have been number one in England. I might not have even been number one thousand and one in England. Any other conclusion is a crime against statistics (it is of course possible that I would have been number one, but the possibility is strictly theoretical). We like to think that sport is a meritocracy – where achievement is driven by ability and hard work – but it is nothing of the sort. Think of the thousands of potential table tennis champions not fortunate enough to live in Silverdale Road, with its peculiar set of advantages. Think of the thousands of potential Wimbledon champions who have never been fortunate enough to own a tennis racket or receive specialized coaching. Think of the millions of potential Major-winning golfers who have never had access to a golf club. Practically every man or woman who triumphs against the odds is, on closer inspection, a beneficiary of unusual circumstances. The delusion lies in focusing on the individuality of their triumph without perceiving – or bothering to look for – the powerful opportunities stacked in their favour. This is one of the central points made by Malcolm Gladwell in his marvellous book Outliers. Gladwell shows how the success of Bill Gates, the Beatles, and other outstanding performers is not so much to do with ‘what they are like’ but rather ‘where they come from’. ‘The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves,’ Gladwell writes. ‘But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.’ Whenever I am inclined to think I am unique and special, I remind myself that had I lived one door further down the road, I would have been in a different school catchment area, which would have meant that I would not have attended Aldryngton, would never have met Peter Charters, and would never have joined Omega. It is often said that in elite sport the margins of victory and defeat are measured in milliseconds: the reality is that they are measured in variables that are far more elusive. But it is worth pausing here for a moment to consider an objection. You may agree with the thrust of the argument that opportunity is necessary for success, but is it sufficient? What about the natural gifts that mark out the very best from the rest? Are these skills not necessary to get to a Wimbledon final or the top of an Olympic podium? Are they not vital to becoming a chess grandmaster or the CEO of a multinational? Is it not delusional to suppose that you (or your children) can achieve great success without also possessing rare talent? This has been the abiding presumption of modern society ever since Francis Galton, an English Victorian polymath, published his book Hereditary Genius. In the book, Galton wields the insights of his half-cousin Charles Darwin to come up with a theory of human achievement that remains in the ascendancy to this day. ‘I propose to show’, Galton wrote, ‘that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world... I have no patience with the hypothesis…that babies are born pretty much alike and the sole agencies in creating differences ... are steady application and moral effort.’ The idea that natural talent determines success and failure is, today, so powerful that it is accepted without demur. It seems indisputable. When we watch Roger Federer caressing a cross-court forehand winner or a chess grandmaster playing twenty games simultaneously while blindfolded or Tiger Woods launching a 350-yard fade, we are irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that they possess special gifts not shared by the rest of us. The skills are so qualitatively different, so detached from our own lives and experience, that the very idea that we could achieve similar results with the same opportunities seems nothing less than ridiculous. The metaphors we use to describe outstanding achievers encourage this way of thinking. Roger Federer, for example, has been said to have ‘tennis encoded in his DNA’. Tiger Woods is said to have been ‘born to play golf’. Top performers subscribe to this way of thinking, too. Diego Maradona once claimed he was born with ‘football skill in my feet’. But is talent what we think it is? What Is Talent? In 1991 Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, and two colleagues conducted the most extensive investigation ever undertaken into the causes of outstanding performance. Their subjects – violinists at the renowned Music Academy of West Berlin in Germany – were divided into three groups. The first group comprised the outstanding students: the boys and girls expected to become international soloists, the pinnacle of musical performance. These were the kids who would normally be described as supertalented, the youngsters supposedly lucky enough to have been born with special musical genes. The second group of students were extremely good, but not as accomplished as the top performers. These were expected to end up playing in the world’s top orchestras, but not as star soloists. In the final group were the least able students: teenagers studying to become music teachers, a course with far less stringent admissions standards. The ability levels of the three groups were based on the assessment of the professors and corroborated by objective measures such as success in open competitions. After a painstaking set of interviews, Ericsson found that the biographical histories of the three groups were remarkably similar and showed no systematic differences. The age when the students began practice was around eight years of age, which was the same time they began formal lessons. The average age when they first decided to become musicians was just before they turned fifteen. The average number of music teachers who had taught them was 4.1, and the average number of musical instruments that they had studied beyond the violin was 1.8. But there was one difference between the groups that was both dramatic and unexpected; indeed, it was so stark that it almost jumped out at Ericsson and his colleagues – the number of hours devoted to serious practice. By the age of twenty, the best violinists had practised an average of ten thousand hours – more than two thousand hours more than the good violinists and more than six thousand hours more than the violinists hoping to become music teachers. These differences are not just statistically significant; they are extraordinary. Top performers had devoted thousands of additional hours to the task of becoming master performers. But that’s not all. Ericsson also found that there were no exceptions to this pattern: nobody who had reached the elite group without copious practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off but failed to excel. Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest. Ericsson and his colleagues were astounded by these findings, sensing that they heralded a paradigm shift in the way excellence is understood – that it is practice, not talent, that ultimately matters. ‘We deny that these differences [in skill level] are immutable; that is, due to innate talent,’ they wrote. ‘Instead we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long persistence of deliberate effort to improve performance.’ The aim of the first part of this book is to convince you that Ericsson is right; that talent is not what you think it is; that you can accomplish all manner of things that seem so far beyond your current capabilities as to occupy a different universe. But this will not be a wishy-washy exercise in the power of positive thinking. Rather, the arguments will be grounded in recent findings in cognitive neuroscience that attest to the way the body and mind can be transformed with specialized practice. After all, what is talent? Many people feel sure they know it when they see it; that they can look at a group of kids and discern from the way they move, the way they interact, the way they adapt, which of them contain the hidden genes necessary for success. As the managing director of a prestigious violin school put it: ‘Talent is something a top violin coach can spot in young musicians that marks them out as destined for greatness.’ But how does the teacher know that this accomplished young performer, who looks so gifted, has not had many hours of special training behind the scenes? How does he know that the initial differences in ability between this youngster and the rest will persist over many years of practice? In fact, he doesn’t, as a number of studies have demonstrated. An investigation of British musicians, for example, found that the top performers had learned no faster than those who reached lower levels of attainment: hour for hour, the various groups had improved at almost identical rates. The difference was simply that top performers had practised for more hours. Further research has shown that when top performers seem to possess an early gift for music, it is often because they have been given extra tuition at home by their parents. But what about child prodigies – kids who reach world class while still in adolescence? Have they not learned at a super-fast rate? Well, no. As we shall see in the next chapter, child prodigies may look as if they have reached the top in double-quick time, but the reality is that they have compressed astronomical quantities of practice into the short period between birth and adolescence. As John Sloboda, professor of psychology at Keele University, put it: ‘There is absolutely no evidence of a “fast track” for high achievers.’ Jack Nicklaus, the most successful golfer of all time, has made the same point: ‘Nobody – but nobody – has ever become really proficient at golf without practice, without doing a lot of thinking and then hitting a lot of shots. It isn’t so much a lack of talent; it’s a lack of being able to repeat good shots consistently that frustrates most players. And the only answer to that is practice.’ The same conclusion – about the primacy of practice – is reached by widening the perspective, as Ericsson has shown. Just consider the way in which standards have risen dramatically in just about every area of human endeavour. Take music: when Franz Liszt composed Feux Follets in 1826, it was said to be virtually unplayable; today, it is performed by every top pianist. The same is true in sport. When the winner of the men’s 100 metres in the 1900 Olympics clocked 11.0 seconds, it was considered a miracle; today that time would not be sufficient to qualify for the final of the secondary school national trials. In diving, the double somersault was almost prohibited in the 1924 Olympics because it was considered dangerous; now it is routine. The fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympics was just a few minutes faster than the entry time for today’s Boston Marathon, which is achieved by thousands of amateurs. In academia, too, standards are spiralling ever upwards. The thirteenth-century English scholar Roger Bacon argued that it was impossible to master mathematics in less than thirty to forty years; today calculus is taught to almost every college student. And so it goes on. But the key point is that these improvements have not occurred because people are getting more talented: Darwinian evolution operates over a much longer time span. They must have occurred, therefore, because people are practising longer, harder (due to professionalism), and smarter. It is the quality and quantity of practice, not genes, that is driving progress. And if that is true of society, why not accept that it is also true of individuals? So the question is: How long do you need to practise in order to achieve excellence? Extensive research, it turns out, has come up with a very specific answer to that question: from art to science and from board games to tennis, it has been found that a minimum of ten years is required to reach world-class status in any complex task. In chess, for example, Herbert Simon and William Chase, two American psychologists, found that nobody had attained the level of an international grandmaster ‘with less than a decade’s intense preparation with the game’. In music composition, John Hayes also found that ten years of dedication is required to achieve excellence, a verdict that features centrally in his book The Complete Problem Solver. An analysis of the top nine golfers of the twentieth century showed that they won their first international competition at around twenty-five years of age, which was, on average, more than ten years after they started golfing. The same finding has been discovered in fields as diverse as mathematics, tennis, swimming, and long-distance running. The same is even true in academia. In a study of the 120 most important scientists and 123 most famous poets and authors of the nineteenth century, it was found that ten years elapsed between their first work and their best work. Ten years, then, is the magic number for the attainment of excellence. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that most top performers practise for around one thousand hours per year (it is difficult to sustain the quality of practice if you go beyond this), so he re-describes the ten-year rule as the ten-thousand-hour rule. This is the minimum time necessary for the acquisition of expertise in any complex task. It is also, of course, the number of hours that the top violinists had practised in the Ericsson experiment. (#litres_trial_promo) Now think about how often you have heard people dismiss their own potential with statements like ‘I am not a natural linguist’ or ‘I don’t have the brain for numbers’ or ‘I lack the coordination for sport’. Where is the evidence for such pessimism? Often it is based upon nothing more than a few weeks or a few months of half-hearted effort. What the science is telling us is that many thousands of hours of practice are necessary to break into the realm of excellence. Before going on, it’s worth emphasizing something about the upcoming chapters: the truth of the arguments will have urgent implications for the way we choose to live our lives. If we believe that attaining excellence hinges on talent, we are likely to give up if we show insufficient early promise. And this will be perfectly rational, given the premise. If, on the other hand, we believe that talent is not (or is only marginally) implicated in our future achievements, we are likely to persevere. Moreover, we will be inclined to move heaven and earth to get the right opportunities for ourselves and our families: the right teacher, access to decent facilities; the entire coalition of factors that lead to the top. And, if we are right, we will eventually excel. What we decide about the nature of talent, then, could scarcely be more important. To conclude this section, here’s an example from Outliers that evokes the twin insights of modern research on excellence: namely, the importance of opportunity on the one hand and practice on the other. In the mid-1980s Roger Barnsley, a Canadian psychologist, was with his family at a Lethbridge Broncos ice hockey game when he was alerted by his wife – who was leafing through the programme – to what looked like an extraordinary coincidence: many of the players had birthdays in the early months of the calendar. ‘I thought she was crazy,’ Barnsley told Gladwell. ‘But I looked through it, and what she was saying just jumped out at me. For some reason, there were an incredible number of January, February, and March birth dates.’ What was going on? Had a genetic mutation affected only those Canadian ice hockey players born in the early part of the year? Was it something to do with the alignment of the stars in the early part of the calendar? In fact the explanation was simple: the eligibility cut-off date for all age-based ice hockey in Canada is 1 January. That means that a ten-year-old boy born in January could be playing alongside another boy born almost twelve months later. This difference in age can represent a huge difference in terms of physical development at that time of life. As Gladwell puts it: This being Canada, the most ice hockey-crazed country on earth, coaches start to select players for the travelling rep squad – the all-star teams – at the age of nine or ten, and of course they are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players, who have had the benefit of critical extra months of maturity. And what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a season instead of twenty games a season ... By the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt, he’s the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A League, and from there into the big leagues. The skewed distribution of birth dates is not limited to the Canadian junior ice hockey league. It is also seen in European youth football, and US youth baseball; indeed, most sports in which age-based selection and streaming are part of the process of moulding the stars of the future. This punctures many of the myths that cling to elite performers. It shows that those who make it to the top, at least in certain sports, are not necessarily more talented or dedicated than those left behind: it may just be that they are a little older. An arbitrary difference in birth date sets in train a cascade of consequences that, within a matter of a few years, has created an unbridgeable chasm between those who, in the beginning, were equally well equipped for sporting stardom. Month of birth is, of course, just one of the many hidden forces shaping patterns of success and failure in this world. But what most of these forces have in common – at least when it comes to attaining excellence – is the extent to which they confer (or deny) opportunities for serious practice. Once the opportunity for practice is in place, the prospects of high achievement take off. And if practice is denied or diminished, no amount of talent is going to get you there. This speaks directly to my experiences in table tennis. With a table tennis table in the garage at home and a brother to practise with, I had a head start on my classmates. It was only a slight head start, but it was sufficient to create a trajectory of development with powerful long-term consequences. My superior ability was taken for evidence of talent (rather than lots of hidden practice), and I was selected for the school team, leading to yet more practice sessions. Then I joined Omega, the local club, then the regional team, then the national team. By the time – a few years later – I was given a chance to perform in an exhibition match in front of the whole school, I possessed skills of an entirely different kind from those of my classmates. They stomped their feet and cheered as I whipped the ball back from all parts of the court. They marvelled at my finesse and coordination and the other ‘natural gifts’ that marked me out as an outstanding sportsman. But these skills were not genetic; they were, in large part, circumstantial. In the same vein, it is not difficult to imagine a spectator in the stands of a major league ice hockey match watching in awe as a former classmate scores a winning goal of spellbinding brilliance. You can imagine him standing and applauding and, later, congregating with friends for an after-match drink to eulogize his hero and to reminisce about how he once played ice hockey alongside him at school. But now suppose you suggested to the ice hockey fan that his hero – a player whose talent seems so irrepressible – might now be working in the local hardware store had his birthday been a few days earlier; that the star player could have strained every sinew to reach the top, but his ambition would have been swept away by forces too powerful to resist, and too elusive to alter. And now imagine suggesting to the fan that it is just possible that he may himself have become an all-star ice hockey player had his mother given birth just a few hours later: on 1 January instead of 31 December. He would probably think you were crazy. Talent Is Overrated If I were to utter random consonants one after the other with, say, a one-second pause between each one, how many do you think you could you repeat back to me? Let’s try the experiment with the letters below. Read along the line, pausing for a second or two at each letter; then, when you get to the end, close the book and see how many you can recall. JELCGXORTNKLS I’m guessing you managed six or seven. If so, you are proving the basic tenet of one of the most renowned papers in cognitive psychology: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, by George A. Miller of Princeton University, published in 1956. In that paper, Miller showed that the memory span of most adults extends to around seven items, and that greater recall requires intense concentration and sustained repetition. Now consider the following feat of memory achieved by a person known in the literature as ‘SF’ in a psychology lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on 11 July 1978. The experiment was conducted by William Chase, a leading psychologist, and Anders Ericsson (the man who would later undertake the study of the violinists in Berlin). They were testing SF on the digit span task. In this test, a researcher reads a list of random numbers, one per second, before asking the subject to repeat back as many digits, in order, as he can remember. On this day SF is being asked to recall an amazing twenty-two digits. Here is how SF got on, as described by Geoff Colvin in his wonderful book Talent Is Overrated: ‘All right, all right, all right,’ he muttered as Ericsson read him the list. ‘All right! All right. Oh…geez!’ He clapped his hands loudly three times, then grew quiet and seemed to focus further. ‘Okay. Okay…Four-thirteen-point-one!’ he yelled. He was breathing heavily. ‘Seventy-seven eighty-four!’ He was nearly screaming. ‘Oh six oh three!’ Now he was screaming. ‘Four-ninefour, eight-seven-oh!’ Pause. ‘Nine-forty-six!’ Screeching now. Only one digit left. But it isn’t there. ‘Nine-forty-six-point…Oh, nine-forty-six-point…’ He was screaming and sounding desperate. Finally, hoarse and strangled: ‘TWO!’ He had done it. As Ericsson and Chase checked the results, there came a knock on the door. It was the campus police. They’d had a report of someone screaming in the lab area. Pretty amazing and rather dramatic, is it not? But this memory performance by SF was just the beginning. A little time later SF managed forty numbers, then fifty. Eventually, after 230 hours of training over a period of almost two years, SF managed to recall eighty-two digits, a feat that, if we were to watch it unfold before our eyes, would lead us to the conclusion that it was the product of special ‘memory genes’, ‘superhuman powers’, or some other phrase from the vocabulary of expert performance. This is what Ericsson calls the iceberg illusion. When we witness extraordinary feats of memory (or of sporting or artistic prowess) we are witnessing the end product of a process measured in years. What is invisible to us – the submerged evidence, as it were – is the countless hours of practice that have gone into the making of the virtuoso performance: the relentless drills, the mastery of technique and form, the solitary concentration that have, literally, altered the anatomical and neurological structures of the master performer. What we do not see is what we might call the hidden logic of success. This is the ten-thousand-hour rule revisited, except that now we are going to dig down into its meaning, its scientific provenance, and its application in real lives. SF was selected by the researchers with one criterion in mind: his memory was no better than average. When he embarked on his training, he was only able to remember six or seven digits, just like you and me. So the amazing feats he eventually achieved must have been due not to innate talent, but to practice. Later, a friend of SF’s reached 102 digits, with no indication that he had reached his ceiling. As Ericsson put it, ‘There are apparently no limits to improvements in memory skill with practice.’ Think about that for a moment or two, for it is a revolutionary statement. Its subversive element is not its specific claim about memory but its promise that anybody can achieve the same results with opportunity and dedication. Ericsson has spent the last thirty years uncovering the same ground-breaking logic in fields as diverse as sport, chess, music, education, and business. ‘What we see again and again is the remarkable potential of “ordinary” adults and their amazing capacity for change with practice,’ says Ericsson. This is tantamount to a revolution in our understanding of expert performance. The tragedy is that most of us are still living with flawed assumptions: in particular, we are labouring under the illusion that expertise is reserved for special people with special talents, inaccessible to the rest of us. So, how did SF do it? Let’s look again at the letter-remembering exercise. We saw that, under normal circumstances, remembering more than six or seven letters is pretty difficult without a great deal of concentration and without constantly repeating the letters to oneself. Now try remembering the following thirteen letters. I suspect you will be able to do so without any difficulty whatsoever – indeed, without even bothering to read through the letters one by one. ABNORMALITIES Piece of cake, wasn’t it? Why? For the simple reason that the letters were arranged in a sequence, or pattern, that was instantly familiar. You were able to recall the entire series of letters by, as it were, encoding them in a higher-order construct (i.e., a word). This is what psychologists call ‘chunking’. Now, suppose I were to write down a list of random words. We know from our previous exercise that you would probably be able to remember six or seven of them. That is the number of items that can be comfortably stored in short-term memory. But, at thirteen letters per word, you would, by implication, be remembering around eighty letters. By a process of ‘chunking’, you have been able to remember as many letters as SF remembered numbers. Think back to SF’s battle with the digit span task. He kept saying things like, ‘Three-forty-nine-point-two’. Why? Because when he heard the numbers 3 4 9 2, he thought of it as 3 minutes, 49.2 seconds, nearly a world record time for running the mile. In the same way other four-digit sequences became times for running the marathon, or half-marathon. SF’s ‘words’ were, in effect, mnemonics based on his experience as a club runner. This is what psychologists call a retrieval structure. Now, let’s take a detour into the world of chess. You’ll be aware that chess grandmasters have astonishing powers of recall and are able to play a mind-boggling number of games at the same time, without even looking at the boards. Alexander Alekhine, a Russian grandmaster, once played twenty-eight games simultaneously while blindfolded in Paris in 1925, winning twenty-two, drawing three, and losing three. Surely these feats speak of psychological powers that extend beyond the wit of ‘ordinary’ people like you and me. Or do they? In 1973 William Chase and Herbert Simon, two American psychologists, constructed a devastatingly simple experiment to find out (Chase is the researcher who would later conduct the experiment with SF). They took two groups of people – one consisting of chess masters, the other composed of novices – and showed them chessboards with twenty to twenty-five pieces set up as they would be in normal games. The subjects were shown the boards briefly and then asked to recall the positions of the pieces. Just as expected, the chess masters were able to recall the position of every piece on the board, while the non-players were only able to place four or five pieces. But the genius of the experiment was about to be revealed. In the next set of tests, the procedure was repeated, except this time the pieces were set up not as in real games, but randomly. The novices, once again, were unable to recall more than five or so pieces. But the astonishing thing is that the experts, who had spent years playing chess, were no better: they were also stumped when trying to place more than five or six pieces. Once again, what looked like special powers of memory were, in fact, nothing of the kind. What was going on? In a nutshell, when chess masters look at the positions of the pieces on a board, they see the equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to ‘chunk’ the pattern with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the relevant ‘language’, not talent. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted by the random positioning of pieces, chess masters find themselves looking at a jumble of letters, just like the rest of us. The same findings extend to other games, like bridge, and much else besides. Time and again, the amazing abilities of experts turn out to be not innate gifts but skills drawn from years of dedication that disappear as soon as they are transported beyond their specific realm of expertise. Take SF. Even after he had built up the capacity to remember an astonishing 82 numbers, he was unable to recall more than six or seven random consonants. Now let’s shift up a gear by taking these insights into the realm of sport. The Mind’s Eye In December 2004 I played a game of tennis with Michael Stich, the former Wimbledon tennis champion from Germany, at the Harbour Club, a plush sporting facility in west London. The match was part of a promotional day pitting journalists against top tennis players to publicize an upcoming competition at the Royal Albert Hall. Most of the matches were light-hearted affairs, with Stich hamming it up and giving the journalists the runaround, much to the amusement of onlookers. But when I came up against Stich, I wanted to conduct a little experiment. I asked Stich to serve at maximum pace. He has one of the fastest serves in the history of the sport – his personal best is 134 mph – and I was curious to see whether my reactions, forged over twenty years of international table tennis, would enable me to return it. Stich smiled at the request, graciously assented, and then spent a good ten minutes warming up, loosening his shoulders and torso to gain maximum leverage on the ball. The onlookers – around thirty or so club members – suddenly became very curious, and the atmosphere a little tense. Stich came back on to court sporting a light sweat, bounced the ball, and glanced across the net, as was his routine. I crouched down and focused hard, coiled like a spring. I was confident I would return the serve, although I was not certain it would be much more than a soft mid-court lob. Stich tossed the ball high into the air, arched his back, and then, in what seemed like a whirl of hyperactivity, launched into his service action. Even as I witnessed the ball connecting with his racket, it whirred past my right ear with a speed that produced what seemed like a clap of wind. I had barely rotated my neck by the time it thudded against the soft green curtains behind me. I stood up straight, bemused, much to Stich’s merriment and that of the onlookers, many of whom were squealing with laughter. I couldn’t fathom how the ball had travelled so effortlessly fast from his racket, on to the court, and then pinged past my head. I asked him to send down another, then another. He served four straight aces before approaching the net with a shrug of the shoulder and a slap of my back. He told me that he had slowed down the last two serves to give me a fighting chance. I hadn’t even noticed. Most people would conclude from this rather humbling experience that the ability to connect with, let alone return, a serve delivered at more than 130 mph must belong exclusively to those with innate reaction speeds – what are sometimes called instincts – at the outer limits of human capability. It is an inference that almost jumps up and bites you when the ball has just rocketed so fast past your nose that you’re relieved at having avoided injury. But I was forbidden from reaching any such conclusion. Why? Because in different circumstances, I have those extraordinaryreaction speeds. When I stand behind a table tennis table, I am able to react to, and return, smash-kills in the blink of an eye. The time available to return a serve in tennis is approximately 450 milliseconds; but there are less than 250 milliseconds in which to return a smash-kill in table tennis. So, why could I return the latter and not the former? In 1984 Desmond Douglas, the greatest-ever UK table tennis player, was placed in front of a screen containing a series of touch-sensitive pads at the University of Brighton. He was told that the pads would light up in a random sequence and that his task was to touch the relevant pad with the index finger of his favoured hand as soon as he could, before waiting for the next pad to light up. Douglas was highly motivated, as all the other members of the team had already undergone the test and were ribbing him in the familiar manner of team rivalry. First one pad, then another, lit up. Each time, Douglas jabbed his finger towards the pad, his eyes scanning the screen for the next target. After a minute, the task ended and Douglas’s teammates (I was one of them: at thirteen years of age, I was at my first senior training camp) gave him a round of applause. Douglas grinned as the researcher left the room to collate the results. After five minutes, the researcher returned. He announced that Douglas’s reactions were the slowest in the entire England team: he was slower than the juniors and the cadets – slower even than the team manager. I remember the intake of breath to this day. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Douglas was universally considered to have the fastest reactions in world table tennis, a reputation he continues to command more than ten years after his retirement. His style was based on standing with his stomach a couple of inches from the edge of the table, allowing the ball to ricochet from his bat using lightning reflexes that astounded audiences around the world. He was so sharp that even the leading Chinese players – who had a reputation for extreme speed – were forced to retreat when they came up against him. But here was a scientist telling us that he had the most sluggish reactions in the whole of the England team. It is not surprising that, after the initial shock, the researcher was laughed out of the room. He was told that the machine must be faulty or that he was measuring the wrong data. Later, the England team manager informed the science staff at Brighton that their services would no longer be required. Sports science was a new discipline back then, and the England manager had shown unusual innovation in seeing if his team could benefit from its insights, but this experiment seemed to prove that it had little to teach table tennis. What nobody considered – not even the unfortunate researcher – was that Douglas really did have the slowest reactions in the team, and that his speed on a table tennis court was the consequence of something entirely different. But what? I am standing in a room at Liverpool John Moores University. In front of me is a screen containing a life-size projection of a tennis player standing at the other end of a virtual court. An eyetracking system is trained on my eyes, and my feet are placed on sensors. The whole thing has been put together by Mark Williams, professor of motor behaviour at Liverpool John Moores and arguably the world’s leading expert on perceptual expertise in sport. Mark hits the play button and I watch as my ‘opponent’ tosses the ball to serve and arches his back. I am concentrating hard and watching intently, but I have already demonstrated why I was unable to return the serve of Stich. ‘You were looking in the wrong place,’ says Mark. ‘Top tennis players look at the trunk and hips of their opponents on return in order to pick up the visual clues governing where they are going to serve. If I were to stop the picture in advance of the ball being hit, they would still have a pretty good idea about where it was going to go. You were looking variously at his racket and arm, which give very little information about the future path of the ball. You could have had the fastest reactions in history, and you still would not have made contact with the ball.’ I ask Mark to replay the tape and adjust my focus to look at the places rich in information, but it makes me even more sluggish. Mark laughs. ‘It is not as simple as just knowing about where to look; it is also about grasping the meaning of what you are looking at. It is about looking at the subtle patterns of movement and postural clues and extracting information. Top tennis players make a small number of visual fixations and “chunk” the key information.’ Think back to the master chess players. You’ll remember that when they looked at a board, they saw words: that is to say, they were able to chunk the position of the pieces as a consequence of their long experience of trying to find the best moves in chess games. Now we can see that the very same thing is happening in tennis. When Roger Federer returns a service, he is not demonstrating sharper reactions than you and I; what he is showing is that he can extract more information from the service action of his opponent and other visual clues, enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us, which, in turn, allows him to make the return – in his case, a forehand cross-court winner rather than a queen to checkmate. This revolutionary analysis extends across the sporting domain, from badminton to baseball and from fencing to football. Top performers are not born with sharper instincts (in the same way that chess masters do not possess superior memories); instead, they possess enhanced awareness and anticipation. In cricket, for example, a first-class batsman has already figured out whether to play off the back foot or front foot more than 100 milliseconds before a bowler has even released the ball. As Janet Starkes, professor emeritus of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada has put it, ‘The exploitation of advance information results in the time paradox where skilled performers seem to have all the time in the world. Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes and patterns speeds up processes.’ The key thing to note is that these cannot possibly be innate skills: Federer did not come into this mortal world with knowledge of where to look or how to efficiently extract information on a service return any more than SF was born with special memory skills (he wasn’t: that is precisely why he was selected by Ericsson) or chess players have innate board-game memory skills (remember that their advantage is eliminated when the pieces are randomly placed). No, Federer’s advantage has been gathered from experience: more precisely, it has been gained from a painstaking process of encoding the meaning of subtle patterns of movement drawn from more than ten thousand hours of practice and competition. He is able to see the patterns in his opponent’s movements in the same way that chess players are able to discern the patterns in the arrangement of pieces on a chessboard. It is his regular practice that has given him this expertise, not his genes. You might suppose that Federer’s speed is transferable to all sports and games (rather as one is inclined to assume that SF’s memory skill is transferable), but you would be wrong. I played a match of real tennis – an ancient form of tennis played indoors with sloping roofs called penthouses, a hard ball, and entirely different techniques – with Federer at Hampton Court Palace in the summer of 2005 (part of a promotional day for his watch sponsor). I found that, for all his grace and elegance, Federer could scarcely make contact with the ball when it was played at any serious speed (neither, for that matter, could I). Some of the onlookers were surprised by this, but this is precisely what is predicted by the new science of expertise. Speed in sport is not based on innate reaction speed, but derived from highly specific practice. I have regularly played table tennis with world-renowned footballers, tennis players, golfers, boxers, badminton players, rowers, squash players, and track and field athletes, and discovered that they are all dramatically slower in their table-tennis-specific response times than even elderly players who have had the benefit of regular practice. Recently I went to the Birmingham home of Desmond Douglas, the Speedy Gonzales of English table tennis, to try to figure out how someone with such unimpressive innate reactions could have become the fastest man in the history of one of the world’s fastest sports. Douglas welcomed me through the door with a friendly grin: he is now in his fifties, but remains as lean and fit as when he was terrorizing players around the world with speed that seemed to defy logic. Douglas offered the suggestion that he has a ‘great eye for the ball’, which is the way quick reactions are often ‘explained’ in high-level sport. The problem is that researchers have never been able to find any connection between sporting ability and the special powers of vision supposedly boasted by top performers. In 2000 the visual function of elite and non-elite footballers was tested using standardized measures of visual acuity, stereoscopic depth, and peripheral awareness. The elite players were no better than their less accomplished counterparts, and neither group recorded above-average levels of visual function. It had to be something else. I asked Douglas to tell me about his early education in table tennis, and the mystery was instantly solved. It turns out that Douglas had perhaps the most unusual grounding of any international table tennis player of the last half-century. Brought up in working-class Birmingham, struggling and unmotivated in his academic work, Douglas happened upon a table tennis club at school. The tables were old and decrepit, but functional. The problem is that they were housed in the tiniest of classrooms. ‘Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable,’ Douglas said, shaking his head. ‘There were three tables going along the length of the room to accommodate all the players who wanted to take part, but there was so little space behind the tables that we had to stand right up against the edge of the tables to play, with our backs almost touching the blackboard.’ I managed to track down a few of the others who played in that era. ‘It was an amazing time,’ one said. ‘The claustrophobia of the room forced us to play a form of “speed table tennis” where everyone had to be super-sharp. Spin and strategy hardly came into it; the only thing that mattered was speed.’ Douglas did not spend a few weeks or months honing his skills in that classroom, but the first five years of his development. ‘We all loved playing table tennis, but Des was different,’ another classmate told me. ‘While the rest of us had other hobbies and interests, he spent all his time in that classroom practising his skills and playing matches. I have never seen anyone with such dedication.’ Douglas was sometimes called the ‘lightning man’, because it seemed that he was so fast he could duck a bolt from the blue. His speed baffled opponents and teammates for decades. Even Douglas was perplexed by it. ‘Maybe I have a sixth sense,’ he said. But we can now see that the solution to the riddle is simple. In essence, Douglas spent more hours than any other player in the history of the sport encoding the characteristics of a highly specific type of table tennis: the kind played at maximum pace, close to the table. By the time he arrived in international table tennis, he was able to perceive where the ball was going before his opponents had even hit it. That is how a man with sluggish reactions became the fastest player on the planet. It is worth pausing here to anticipate an objection or two. You might agree with the thrust of the argument that expertise in table tennis, tennis, football, or anything else requires the performer to have built up a powerful knowledge base drawn from experience. But you might still sense that something in this account is missing. In particular you may feel that recognizing the patterns in an opponent’s movement and framing the optimal response (a cross-court forehand, say) is a very different thing from actually executing the stroke. The former is a mental skill drawn from experience, but the latter seems to be more of a physical talent requiring coordination, control, and feel. But is this schism between the mental and the physical quite what it seems? It is often said that Federer and other top sportsmen have ‘amazing hands’, which neatly emphasizes the supposed physical dimension of hitting a winning smash or dabbing a delicate drop shot. But is there really something in Federer’s fingers or palm that sets him apart from other tennis players? Or would it not be more accurate to say that his advantage consists in the sophistication with which he is able to control the motor system (the part of the peripheral nervous system responsible for movement) such that his racket impacts the ball with precisely the right angle, force, speed, direction, and finesse? Or, to use computer parlance, is not the genius of Federer’s shot execution reflected in a supremacy in software rather than hardware? This is not to deny that any tennis player needs an arm and a hand (and a racket!) to make a return, but simply to emphasize that the limiting factor in making a world-class stroke is not strength or brute force, but the executive control of fine motor movement to create perfect timing. The key point, for our purposes, is that this is not something top sportsmen are born with. If you were to go back to the time when Roger Federer was learning technique, you would find that he was ponderous and sluggish. His movements would have been characterized by conscious control of the skill, lacking smoothness or unity. Only later, after countless hours of practice, were his skills integrated into an intricate set of procedures capable of flexible execution. Today, Federer’s motor programmes are so deeply ingrained that if you were to ask him how he is able to play an immaculately timed forehand, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He might be able to talk about what he was thinking at the time or the strategic importance of the shot, but he wouldn’t be able to provide any insight into the mechanics of the movements that made the stroke possible. Why? Because Federer has practised for so long that the movement has been encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory. This is what psychologists call expert-induced amnesia. It is also worth noting that the development of motor expertise (skilled movement) is inseparable from the development of perceptual expertise (chunking patterns). After all, perfect technique is hardly useful if you fail to hit the ball – think of a totally blind person trying to play tennis. Highly refined, instantly chunked perceptual information is necessary to integrate the movement of the body with the movement of the ball (hand-eye coordination). Without this information the motor programme would be nothing more than a stab in the dark. Great shot-making, then, is not about developing ‘muscle memory’; rather, the memory is encoded in the brain and central nervous system. The ascendancy of the mental and the acquired over the physical and the innate has been confirmed again and again. As Anders Ericsson, now widely acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on expert performance, puts it: ‘The most important differences are not at the lowest levels of cells or muscle groups, but at the athletes’ superior control over the integrated and coordinated actions of their bodies. Expert performance is mediated by acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan, and reason alternative courses of action. These mental representations provide experts with increased control of the aspects that are relevant to generating their superior performance.’ In other words, it is practice, not talent, that holds the key to success. Knowledge Is Power At 3.00 p.m. on 10 February 1996, Garry Kasparov strode into a small room in the Pennsylvania Convention Center to contest one of the most anticipated chess matches in history. He was smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and wore a look of intense concentration. As he sat down at the match table, he glanced across the board to the man on the other side: Dr FengHsuing Hsu, a bespectacled Taiwanese-American with a quizzical expression. In the room, besides Kasparov and Hsu, were three cameramen, one match official, three members of Kasparov’s entourage, and a technical adviser. A strict silence was enforced, with the five hundred spectators packed into a nearby lecture hall to witness the event on screens fed from three TV cameras and live commentary from grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The atmosphere was, by common consent, quite unlike that of any other chess match in living memory. Kasparov is almost universally considered to be the greatest player in the history of the sport. His ELO rating – an official score measuring relative skill – remains the highest ever recorded: 71 points higher than that of Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, and 66 higher than that of the great American player Bobby Fischer. Kasparov, at the time of the contest, had been the world number one for ten straight years, and his mere presence before a chessboard was enough to intimidate some of the world’s most revered grandmasters. But his opponent on this day was susceptible neither to intimidation nor the other mind games for which Kasparov was famous. His opponent was oblivious to Kasparov’s status and reputation for guile and audacity. Indeed, his opponent was not even in the room, but many miles away in a large, dimly lit building in Yorktown Heights, New York. His opponent was a computer. Its name was Deep Blue. The media, rather predictably, hyped the match as an historic showdown between man and machine. ‘The future of humanity is on the line,’ declared one newscaster. ‘The match goes further than mere chess, presenting a challenge to mankind’s sovereignty,’ intoned USA Today. Even Kasparov seemed to be seduced by the apocalyptic tenor of the pre-match hype, saying, ‘This is a mission to defend human dignity... It is species-defining.’ Kasparov’s opening move, pawn to C5, was typed into a computer adjacent to the match table by Mr Hsu (the brains behind the development of Deep Blue, on behalf of electronics giant IBM) and then transmitted across to the IBM Center in New York by a relatively new technology called the Internet. At this point Deep Blue sprang into action. Powered by 256 specially developed chess processors operating in parallel, 32 concentrated on each eight-square section of the board, it was able to compute more than 100 million positions per second. A few moments later, Deep Blue’s response came winging its way across the ether, and Mr Hsu dutifully executed the instruction: pawn to C3. For six games over eight days, the thrust and counterthrust between man and machine was beamed to a captivated world. Kasparov, an eccentric and hot-tempered Azerbaijani, was famous for his histrionics, often growling and shaking his head vigorously. Many had criticized Kasparov’s antics, accusing him of deliberately trying to disturb adversaries. But Kasparov was no less animated against his machine opponent, often rising from his chair to pace the room. Just before the fortieth move in the final game on 17 February, Kasparov took his watch from the table and put it on his wrist. This was a familiar sign that the world champion believed the match was nearing its conclusion. The audience in the lecture hall held its breath. Three moves later Dr Hsu rose slowly to his feet and offered his hand to his opponent. The audience burst into wild applause. Kasparov had triumphed. The question is: How? How could a man unable to search more than three moves per second (this represents the current limit of human capacity) defeat a machine whose computing speed was measured in the tens of millions? The answer, as we shall see, will help us to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of expert performance, both within sport and in the wider world. In the 1990s Gary Klein, a New York psychologist, embarked on a major study funded by the US military to examine decision-making in the real world. He was looking to test the theory that expert decision-makers wield logical methods, examining the various alternatives before selecting the optimal choice. Klein’s problem was that the longer the study went on, the less the theory bore any relation to the way decisions are made in practice. The curious thing was not that top decision-makers – medical professionals, firefighters, military commanders, and so on – were making choices based on unexpected factors; it was that they did not seem to be making choices at all. They were contemplating the situation for a few moments and then just deciding, without considering the alternatives. Some were unable even to explain how they happened upon the course of action they actually took. Here is an example of a fire lieutenant making a life-saving decision, as recounted in Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions: There is a simple house fire in a one-storey house in a residential neighbourhood. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back at them. ‘Odd,’ he thinks. The water should have more of an impact. They try dousing it again, and get the same results. They retreat a few steps to re-group. Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building – a perfectly standard building with nothing out of the ordinary. As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses. Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below. Later, when Klein asked the commander how he knew something was about to go terribly wrong, the commander put it down to ‘extrasensory perception’. That was the only thing he could come up with to explain a life-saving decision, and others like it, that seemed to emerge from nowhere. Klein was too much of a rationalist to accept the idea of ESP, but by now he had begun to notice equally perplexing abilities among other expert decision-makers. They seemed to know what to do, often without knowing why. One of Klein’s co-workers, who had spent many weeks studying the neonatal unit of a large hospital, had found that experienced nurses were able to diagnose an infection in babies even when, to outsiders, there seemed to be no visible clues. This was not merely remarkable, but often life-saving: infants at an early stage of life can quickly succumb to infections if they are not detected early. Perhaps the most curious thing of all was that the hospital would perform tests to check the accuracy of the nurse’s diagnosis, and occasionally these would come back negative. But sure enough, by the next day, the tests would come back positive – the nurse had been right all along. To the researcher this seemed almost magical, and even the nurses were baffled by it, attributing it to ‘intuition’ or a ‘special sense’. What was going on? Can the insights gleaned from sport help to unlock the mystery? Think back to Desmond Douglas, the Speedy Gonzales of English table tennis, who could anticipate the movement of a table tennis ball by chunking the pattern of his opponent’s movement before the ball was even hit. Think, also, of how other top performers in sport seem to know what to do in advance of everyone else, creating the so-called time paradox where they are able to play in an unhurried way even under severe time constraints. Klein came to realize that expert firefighters are relying on precisely the same mental processes. They are able to confront a burning building and almost instantly place it within the context of a rich, detailed, and elaborate conceptual scheme derived from years of experience. They can chunk the visual properties of the scene and comprehend its complex dynamics, often without understanding how. The fire commander called it ‘extrasensory perception’; Douglas, you will remember, cited his ‘sixth sense’. We can get an idea of what is going on by digging down into the mind of the fire commander who pulled his men out moments before the floor caved in. He did not suspect that the seat of the fire was in the basement, because he did not even know the house had a basement. But he was already curious, based upon his extensive experience, as to why the fire was not reacting as expected. The living room was hotter than it should have been for such a small fire, and it was altogether too quiet. His expectations were breached, but in ways so subtle he was not consciously aware of why. Only with hindsight – and after hours of conversation with Klein – was it possible to piece together the sequence of events. The reason the fire was not quenched by his crew’s attack was because its base was underneath them, and not in the kitchen; the reason it was hotter than expected was because it was rising from many feet below; the reason it was quiet is because the floor was muffling the noise. All this – and many more interconnecting variables of indescribable complexity – was responsible for the fire commander taking the life-saving decision to pull his men. As Klein explains, ‘The commander’s experience had provided him with a firm set of patterns. He was accustomed to sizing up the situation by having it match one of these patterns. He may not have been able to articulate the patterns or describe their features, but he was relying on the pattern-matching process to let him feel comfortable that he had the situation scoped out.’ A set of painstaking interviews with the nurses in the neonatal unit provided the same insights. In essence, the nurses were relying on their deep knowledge of perceptual cues, each one subtle, but which together signalled an infant in distress. The same mental process is used by pilots, military generals, detectives – you name it. It is also true, as we have seen, of top sportsmen. What they all have in common is long experience and deep knowledge. For years, knowledge was considered relatively unimportant in decision-making. In experiments, researchers would choose participants with no prior experience of the area under examination in order to study the ‘cognitive processes of learning, reasoning, and problem solving in their purest forms’. The idea was that talent – superb general reasoning abilities and logical prowess – rather than knowledge makes for good decision-makers. This was the presumption of top business schools and many leading companies, too. They believed they could churn out excellent managers who could be parachuted into virtually any organization and transform it through superior reasoning. Experience was irrelevant, it was said, so long as you possessed a brilliant mind and the ability to wield the power of logic to solve problems. This approach was seriously misguided. When Jeff Immelt became the chief executive of General Electric in 2001, he commissioned a study of the best-performing companies in the world. What did they have in common? According to Geoff Colvin in Talent Is Overrated, ‘These companies valued “domain expertise” in managers – extensive knowledge of the company’s field. Immelt has now specified “deep domain expertise” as a trait required for getting ahead at GE.’ These insights have not just become central to modern business strategy; they also form the basis of artificial intelligence. In 1957 two computer experts created a programme they called the General Problem Solver, which they billed as a universal problem-solving machine. It did not have any specific knowledge, but possessed a ‘generic solver engine’ (essentially, a set of abstract inference procedures) that could, it was believed, tackle just about any problem. But it was soon realized that knowledge-free computing – however sophisticated – is impotent. As Bruce Buchanan, Randall Davis, and Edward Feigenbaum, three leading researchers in artificial intelligence, put it: ‘The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge. Programmes that are rich in general inference methods – some of which may even have some of the power of mathematical logic – but poor in domain-specific knowledge can behave expertly on almost no tasks.’ Think back to the firefighters. Many young men and women are drawn to the profession because they think they’re good at making decisions under pressure, but they quickly discover they just can’t cut it. When they look at a raging fire, they are drawn to the colour and height of the flames and other perceptually salient features, just like the rest of us. Only after a decade or more of on-the-job training can they place what they are seeing within the context of an interwoven understanding of the patterns of fires. The essential problem regarding the attainment of excellence is that expert knowledge simply cannot be taught in the classroom over the course of a rainy afternoon, or indeed a thousand rainy afternoons (the firefighters studied by Klein had an average of twenty-three years experience). Sure, you can offer pointers of what to look for and what to avoid, and these can be helpful. But relating the entirety of the information is impossible because the cues being processed by experts – in sport or elsewhere – are so subtle and relate to each other in such complex ways that it would take forever to codify them in their mind-boggling totality. This is known as combinatorial explosion, a concept that will help to nail down many of the insights of this chapter. The best way to get a sense of the strange power of combinatorial explosion is to imagine folding a piece of paper in two, making the paper twice as thick. Now repeat the process a hundred times. How thick is the paper now? Most people tend to guess in the range of a few inches to a few yards. In fact the thickness would stretch eight hundred thousand billion times the distance from Earth to the sun. It is the rapid escalation in the number of variables in many real-life situations – including sport – that makes it impossible to sift the evidence before making a decision: it would take too long. Good decision-making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience. This cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned. To put it another way, it emerges through practice. As Paul Feltovich, a researcher at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition at the University of West Florida, has explained: ‘Although it is tempting to believe that upon knowing how the expert does something, one might be able to teach this to novices directly, this has not been the case. Expertise is a long-term developmental process, resulting from rich instrumental experiences in the world and extensive practice. These cannot simply be handed to someone.’ All of which hints at the decisive advantage held by Kasparov over his machine opponent. Deep Blue had all the ‘talent’: the ability to search moves at a rate measured in tens of millions per second. But Kasparov, although limited to a derisory three moves per second, had the knowledge. A deep, fertile, and endlessly elaborate knowledge of chess: the configurations of real games, how they can be translated into successful outcomes, the structure of defensive and offensive positions, and the overall construction of competitive chess. Kasparov could look at the board and see what to do in the same way an experienced firefighter can confront a blazing building and see what to do. Deep Blue can’t. It is worth noting something else here. You’ll remember that SF, the person who performed so well on the digit span task, was able to remember more than eighty numbers by relating them to his experiences as a competitive runner. The numbers 9 4 6 2, for example, became 9 minutes, 46.2 seconds – a very good time for running two miles. SF’s retrieval structure was, in effect, an ad hoc device derived from his life beyond the test. Kasparov’s memory of chess positions, on the other hand, is embedded in the living, breathing reality of playing chess. When he sees a chessboard, he does not chunk the pattern by relating it to an altogether different experience but by perceiving it immediately as the Sicilian Defence or the Latvian Gambit. His retrieval structure is rooted within the fabric of the game. This is the most powerful type of knowledge, and is precisely the kind possessed by firefighters, top sportsmen, and other experts. By now it should be obvious why Deep Blue’s gigantic advantage in processing speed was not sufficient to win – combinatorial explosion. Even in a game as simple as chess, the variables rapidly escalate beyond the capacity of any machine to compute. There are around thirty ways to move towards the beginning of a game, and thirty ways in which to respond. That amounts to around 800,000 possible positions after two moves each. A few moves after that, and the number of positions are measured in trillions. Eventually, there are more possible positions than there are atoms in the known universe. To be successful, a player must cut down on the computational load by ignoring moves unlikely to result in a favourable outcome and concentrating on those with greater promise. Kasparov is able to do this by understanding the meaning of game situations. Deep Blue is not. As Kasparov put it after winning game two of the six-game match: ‘Had I been playing the same game against a very strong human I would have had to settle for a draw. But I simply understood the essence of the end game in a way the computer did not. Its computational power was not enough to overcome my experience and intuitive appreciation of where the pieces should go.’ Gary Klein, the psychologist who studied the firefighters, wanted to double-check whether chess players really do make rapid decisions based on the perceptual chunking of patterns (as opposed to conducting brute-force searches, like computers). He reasoned that if the chunking theory is correct, top chess players would make similar decisions even if the available time was dramatically reduced. So he tested chess masters under ‘blitz’ conditions, where each player has only five minutes on the clock, with around six seconds per move (in standard conditions there are forty moves in a ninety-minute period, allowing around two minutes, fifteen seconds per move). Klein found that, for chess experts, the move quality hardly changed at all in blitz conditions, even though there was barely enough time to take the piece, move it, release it, and hit the timer. Klein then tested the pattern-recognition theory of decision-making directly. He asked chess experts to think aloud as they studied mid-game positions. He asked them to tell him everything they were thinking, every move considered, including the poor ones, and especially the very first move considered. He found that the first move considered was not only playable but also in many cases the best possible move from all the alternatives. This obliterates the presumption that chess is exclusively about computational force and processing speed. Like firefighters and tennis players, chess masters generate usable options as the first ones they think of. This looks magical when you first see it (particularly when chess masters are playing lots of games simultaneously), but that is because we have not seen the ten thousand hours of practice that have made it possible. It is a bit like learning a language. At the beginning, the task of remembering thousands of words and fitting them together using abstract rules of grammar seems impossible. But after many years of experience, we can look at a random sentence and instantly comprehend its meaning. It is estimated that most English language users have a vocabulary of around 20,000 words. American psychologist Herbert Simon has estimated that chess masters command a comparable vocabulary of patterns, or chunks. Now consider the scope of combinatorial explosion in games like rugby, football, tennis, ice hockey, American football, and the like. Even when scientists have invented simplified representations of these sports, they have quickly been overwhelmed by complexity. In robot football, for example, positions on the pitch are represented by 1,680 by 1,088 pixels. When you consider that a chessboard has eight by eight squares and that the pieces move in well-defined ways – unlike a football, which can fly anywhere at any time – you get some idea of the fiendish difficulty of designing a machine to compete without falling victim to information overload. Now, here’s a description of Wayne Gretzky, arguably the greatest player in the history of ice hockey, taken from an article in the New York Times magazine in 1997: Gretzky doesn’t look like a hockey player .. . Gretzky’s gift, his genius even, is for seeing ... To most fans, and sometimes even to the players on the ice, ice hockey frequently looks like chaos: sticks flailing, bodies falling, the puck ricocheting just out of reach. But amid the mayhem, Gretzky can discern the game’s underlying pattern and flow, and anticipate what’s going to happen faster and in more detail than anyone else in the building. Several times during a game you’ll see him making what seem to be aimless circles on the other side of the rink from the traffic, and then, as if answering a signal, he’ll dart ahead to a spot where, an instant later, the puck turns up. This is a perfect example of expert decision-making in practice: circumventing combinatorial explosion via advanced pattern recognition. It is precisely the same skill wielded by Kasparov, but on an ice hockey pitch rather than a chessboard. How was Gretzky able to do this? Let’s hear from the man himself: ‘I wasn’t naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for.’ And later: ‘The highest compliment that you can pay me is to say that I worked hard every day…That’s how I came to know where the puck was going before it even got there.’ All of which helps to explain a qualification that was made earlier in the chapter: you will remember that the ten-thousand-hour rule was said to apply to any complex task. What is meant by complexity? In effect, it describes those tasks characterized by combinatorial explosion; tasks where success is determined, first and foremost, by superiority in software (pattern recognition and sophisticated motor programmes) rather than hardware (simple speed or strength). Most sports are characterized by combinatorial explosion: tennis, table tennis, football, ice hockey, and so on. Just try to imagine, for a moment, designing a robot capable of solving the real-time spatial, motor, and perceptual challenges necessary to defeat Roger Federer on a tennis court. The complexities are almost impossible to define, let alone solve. It is only in sports like running and lifting – simple activities testing a single dimension such as speed or strength – that the design possibilities become manageable. Of course, not all expert decision-making is rapid and intuitive. In some situations, chess players are required to conduct deep searches of possible moves, and firefighters are required to think logically about the consequences of actions. So are top sportsmen and military commanders. But even in the most abstract decisions, experience and knowledge play a central role. In an experiment carried out by David Rumelhart, a psychologist at Stanford University, five times as many participants were able to figure out the implications of a logical expression when it was stated in a real setting (‘Every purchase over thirty dollars must be approved by the manager’) than when stated in a less meaningful way (‘Every card with a vowel on the front must have an integer on the back’). Earlier in this chapter we saw that the talent myth is disempowering because it causes individuals to give up if they fail to make rapid early progress. But we can now see that it is also damaging to institutions that insist on placing inexperienced individuals – albeit with strong reasoning skills – in positions of power. Think, for example, of the damage done to the governance of Britain by the tradition of moving ministers – the most powerful men and women in the country – from department to department without giving them the opportunity to develop an adequate knowledge base in any of them. It is estimated that the average tenure of a ministerial post in recent years in Britain has been 1.7 years. John Reid, the long-serving member of Tony Blair’s government, was moved from department to department no less than seven times in seven years. This is no less absurd than rotating Tiger Woods from golf to football to ice hockey to baseball and expecting him to perform expertly in every arena. What we decide about the relative importance of practice and knowledge on the one hand and talent on the other has major implications not just for ourselves and our families, but for corporations, sports, governments, and, indeed, the future of artificial intelligence. (#litres_trial_promo) On 3 May 1997, Kasparov and Deep Blue went head-to-head for a second time. The hype was no less intense and the stakes no less high. IBM put up over a million dollars in prize money, and the world’s media descended upon the venue – this time the thirty-fifth floor of the Equitable Center on Seventh Avenue in New York – in even greater numbers (IBM would later estimate that the company gained more than $500 million in free publicity). But this time, Deep Blue was triumphant, defeating the world champion by two games to one, with three draws. It was a crushing blow for Kasparov, who stormed out of the venue. He would later allege that IBM had created playing conditions advantageous to Deep Blue and that they had refused to provide computer printouts which would have helped his preparation. He also made entirely unsubstantiated claims that IBM had cheated. He was not a good loser. What had happened over the course of the preceding fifteen months? How had Deep Blue managed to convert defeat into a famous victory? Firstly, the machine had been provided with double the processing power (it was now able to compute more than 200 million moves per second). But its victory would have been impossible without another key innovation. As the American Physical Society put it, ‘Deep Blue’s general knowledge of chess was significantly enhanced through the efforts of IBM consultant and international grandmaster Joel Benjamin, so that it could draw on vast resources of stored information, such as a database of opening games played by grandmasters over the last 100 years.’ Deep Blue’s programmers – like Gary Klein, Jim Immelt, and Wayne Gretzky – had realized that knowledge is power. 2 Miraculous Children? (#ulink_e8b854fb-b56c-5a53-a1ee-b821b94f735e) The Myth of the Child Prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a sensation in the courts of eighteenth-century Europe. At the age of just six, he was enchanting members of the aristocracy with his skills on the piano, often with his sister Maria Anna playing alongside him. He began composing pieces for the violin and piano at the age of five, going on to produce many works before his tenth birthday. Pretty impressive stuff for a boy in short trousers. How do you solve a conundrum like Mozart? Even those sympathetic to the idea that excellence emerges over the course of ten thousand hours of practice are stumped when attempting to explain the timeless genius of one of history’s greatest composers, a man who has changed lives with his artistic insight and intricate creativity. Surely this is an example of a man who was born with his sublime abilities intact, a man who came into the world stamped with the mark of genius? After all, Mozart had scarcely even lived ten thousand hours by the time he was getting to grips with the piano and his early compositions. But is that the whole story? Here is Mozart’s early life, told in a little more detail by the journalist and author Geoff Colvin: Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a programme of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Wolfgang’s teacher by more than just his own eminence; he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children. While Leopold was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year Wolfgang was born, remained influential for decades. So, from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him… Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training. The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday. Seen in this context, Mozart’s achievements suddenly seem rather different. He no longer looks like a musician zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice; rather, he looks like somebody who embodies the rigours of practice. He set out on the road to excellence very early in life, but now we can see why. It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practising with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it. Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practised for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted – and their knowledge deepened – by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all. What about Mozart the child composer rather than Mozart the child performer? The facts follow the same logic. Sure, he wrote compositions as a young boy, but they had nothing in common with the sublime creations of his later years. His first four piano concertos, written at the age of eleven, and his next three, written at sixteen, contain no original music: they are simply rearrangements of the music of other composers. ‘There is nothing distinctively “Mozartian” about them,’ writes Robert Weisberg, a psychologist specializing in creativity and problem-solving. In this context, it is not surprising that music insiders rarely describe Mozart as a prodigy. Indeed, the critic Harold Schonberg argues that Mozart ‘developed late’, as his greatest works did not emerge until he had been composing for two decades. Of course, none of this explains why Mozart eventually managed to produce compositions that are considered among the greatest artistic creations in human history, but it ought to dispel the myth that they emerged from on high, like gifts from the gods. Mozart was one of the hardest-working composers in history, and without that deep and sustained application he would have got nowhere. The same essential truth is revealed when looking at child prodigies in sport. When Tiger Woods became the youngest-ever winner of the US Masters golf championship in 1997, he was hailed by many experts as the most naturally gifted golfer to play the game. This was understandable given his audacious stroke-making around the hallowed Augusta course. But dig down into his past, and an entirely different explanation reveals itself – and, once again, it starts with a highly motivated father. Here is a flavour of Tiger’s early years: Earl Woods was a former baseball player and Green Beret who was obsessed with the idea that practice creates greatness. He started his son at what he himself describes as an ‘unthinkably early age’, before he could even walk or talk. ‘Early practice is vital so that performances became totally ingrained and flow from the subconscious,’ Woods Senior would later say. Placed in his highchair in the garage at home, so he could watch as Earl hit balls into the net, little Tiger was given a golf club at Christmas – five days before his first birthday – and at eighteen months had his first golf outing. He couldn’t yet count to five, but little Tiger already knew a par 5 from a par 4. By the age of two years and eight months Woods was familiar with bunker play, and by his third year he had developed his preshot routine. Soon his practice sessions were taking place on the driving range and putting green, where he would hone his skills for hours at a time. At the age of two Woods entered his first pitch-and-putt tournament at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California. He could already hit the ball eighty yards with his 2.5 wood and pitch accurately from forty yards. When Tiger was four, Earl hired the services of a professional to accelerate his development. Tiger won his first national major tournament at thirteen. Practice sessions would typically end with a competitive drill, like placing the ball three feet from the hole to see how many consecutive putts Tiger could make. After seventy in a row, Earl would still be standing there. By his mid-teens, Woods had clocked ten thousand hours of dedicated practice, just like Mozart. The Williams sisters, both multiple grand slam winners in tennis, are also held up as testaments to the talent theory of excellence (they are also, rightly, regarded as having achieved amazing things in the teeth of formidably tough circumstances). But the really striking thing about the sisters’ story is neither their talent nor their humble beginnings but their almost fanatical devotion – here’s a summary of their early days on the courts. Two years before Venus Williams was born, her father Richard was flipping television channels when he saw the winner of a tennis match receive a cheque for $40,000. Impressed with the money top players could earn, he and his new wife, Oracene, decided to create a tennis champion. Venus was born on 17 June 1980, and Serena a year later, on 26 September 1981. To learn how to coach, Richard watched videotapes of famous tennis stars, read tennis magazines at the library, and spoke to psychiatrists and tennis coaches. He also taught himself and his wife to play tennis so they could hit with their daughters. After Serena was born, the family moved from the Watts area of Los Angeles to nearby Compton. An economically depressed area, Compton was rough and violent, and the family occasionally witnessed gunfire. Richard became the owner of a small company that hired out security guards, and Oracene a nurse. Tennis training began in earnest when Venus was four years, six months, and one day old and Serena three years old, and while the only courts available for practice were riddled with potholes and surrounded by gangs, Richard carved out remarkable opportunities for his daughters. Training would often involve Richard standing on one side of the net, feeding five hundred and fifty balls he kept in a shopping cart. When they were finished, they would pick up the balls and start again. As part of their training, the girls trained with baseball bats and were encouraged to serve at traffic cones until their arms ached. The two once had a practice session during the school holidays that began at 8.00 a.m. and lasted until 3.00 p.m. As Venus put it: ‘When you’re little, you just keep hitting and hitting.’ Oracene said, ‘They were always in the courts early, even before their father or I would get there.’ Serena entered her first competition at the age of four and a half. ‘My dad worked hard to build our technique,’ Venus has said. ‘He’s really a great coach. He’s very innovative. He always has a new technique, new ideas, new strategies to put in place. I don’t really think of those things, but he does.’ When the sisters were twelve and eleven, Richard invited teaching pro Rick Macci – who had earlier coached such tennis stars as Mary Pierce and Jennifer Capriati – to come to Compton and watch his daughters play. He was impressed by the sisters’ skill and athleticism and invited them to study with him at his Florida academy, and soon after, the family relocated to the Sunshine State. By then, both sisters had already clocked up thousands of hours of practice. Examine any sporting life where success has arrived early and the same story just keeps repeating itself. David Beckham, for example, would take a football to the local park in east London as a young child and kick it from precisely the same spot for hour upon hour. ‘His dedication was breathtaking,’ his father has said. ‘It sometimes seemed that he lived on the local field.’ Beckham concurs. ‘My secret is practice,’ he said. ‘I have always believed that if you want to achieve anything special in life you have to work, work, and then work some more.’ By the age of fourteen, Beckham’s dedication paid off: he was spotted and signed by the youth team of Manchester United, one of the most prestigious football clubs in the world. Matt Carr?, director of the sport engineering group at the University of Sheffield has conducted a research project on the mechanics of Beckham’s trademark free kick. ‘It may look completely natural, but it is, in fact, a very deliberate technique,’ Carr? said. ‘He kicks to one side of the ball to create the bend and is also able to effectively wrap his foot around the ball to give it topspin to make it dip. He practised this over and over when he was a young footballer, the same way Tiger Woods practised putting backspin on a golf ball.’ The arduous logic of sporting success has perhaps been most eloquently articulated by Andre Agassi. Reliving his early years in tennis in his autobiography Open, he wrote: ‘My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.’ What does all this tell us? It tells us that if you want to bend it like Beckham or fade it like Tiger, you have to work like crazy, regardless of your genes, background, creed, or colour. There is no short cut, even if child prodigies bewitch us into thinking there is. Extensive research has shown that there is scarcely a single top performer in any complex task who has circumvented the ten years of hard work necessary to reach the top. Well, that’s not quite true. Chess master Bobby Fischer is said to have reached grandmaster status in nine years, although even that is disputed by some of his biographers. A different question concerns the optimal route to the top. Given that thousands of hours must be clocked up on the road to excellence, does it make sense to start children at a very early age, before they have even reached their fifth birthday, like Mozart, Woods, and the Williams sisters? The advantages are obvious: the young performer has a sizable head start on anybody who commences their training, as is more common, a few years later. Yet there are also very real dangers. It is only possible to clock up meaningful practice if an individual has made an independent decision to devote himself to whatever field of expertise. He has to care about what he is doing, not because a parent or a teacher says so, but for its own sake. Psychologists call this ‘internal motivation’, and it is often lacking in children who start too young and are pushed too hard. They are, therefore, on the road not to excellence but to burnout. ‘Starting kids off too young carries high risk,’ Peter Keen, a leading sports scientist and architect of Great Britain’s success at the 2008 Olympic Games, has said. ‘The only circumstances in which very early development seems to work is where the children themselves are motivated to clock up the hours, rather than doing so because of parents or a coach. The key is to be sensitive to the way the child is thinking and feeling, encouraging training without exerting undue pressure.’ But where the motivation is internalized, children tend to regard practice not as gruelling but as fun. Here is Monica Seles, the tennis prodigy: ‘I just love to practise and drill and all that stuff.’ Here is Serena Williams: ‘It felt like a blessing to practise because we had so much fun.’ Here is Tiger Woods: ‘My dad never asked me to go play golf. I asked him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play.’ We will look more closely at the nature of motivation in chapter 4, but it is worth noting that only a minority of top performers start off in early childhood, and even fewer reach exalted levels of performance while still in early adolescence. This would seem to indicate – taking the widest possible perspective and recognizing that individual cases vary greatly – that the dangers of starting out too hard, too young, often outweigh the benefits. One of the skills of a good coach is to tailor a training programme to the mindset of the individual. But, on the wider point, do child prodigies prove the talent theory of excellence? The truth is precisely the reverse. Child prodigies do not have unusual genes; they have unusual upbringings. They have compressed thousands of hours of practice into the small period between birth and adolescence. That is why they have become world-class. A Tale of Three Sisters On 19 April 1967, Laszlo Polgar and his girlfriend Klara married at a registry office in the small Hungarian town of Gy?ngy?s. The guests showered the newlyweds with confetti as they left the building for their three-day honeymoon (Polgar had to get back to the army, where he was midway through his national service) and commented on how happy they looked together. What none of the guests realized was that they were witnessing the start of one of the most audacious human experiments of recent times. Polgar, an educational psychologist, was one of the earliest advocates of the practice theory of expertise. He had written papers outlining his ideas and talked about them to his colleagues at the school where he worked as a maths teacher; he had even lobbied local government officials, arguing that an emphasis on hard work rather than talent could transform the education system if given half a chance. ‘Children have extraordinary potential, and it is up to society to unlock it,’ he says when I meet him and his wife at the family apartment in Budapest, overlooking the Danube. ‘The problem is that people, for some reason, do not want to believe it. They seem to think that excellence is only open to others, not themselves.’ Polgar is an extraordinary person to meet in the flesh. His face is etched with the wary enthusiasm of a man who has spent a lifetime trying to convince a sceptical world of his theories. His eyes sparkle with appeal, his hands work as he elaborates his thoughts, and his face undergoes a triumphant transformation when one so much as nods in agreement. But back in the 1960s, when Polgar was contemplating his experiment, his ideas were considered so outlandish that a local government official told him to see a psychiatrist to ‘heal him of his delusions’. This was Hungary at the height of the Cold War, where radicalism of any kind was considered not merely eccentric but subversive. But Polgar was not deterred. Realizing that the only way to vindicate his theory was to test it on his own future children, he started corresponding with a number of young ladies, in search of a wife. This was a time when having pen pals was not uncommon among Eastern Europeans, as young men and women living under state oppression sought to broaden their horizons. A young Ukrainian named Klara was one of those women. ‘His letters fizzed with passion as he explained his theories of how to produce children with world-class abilities,’ Klara, a warm and gentle lady, a perfect counterpoint to her husband, tells me. ‘Like many at the time, I thought he was crazy. But we agreed to meet.’ Face to face, she found the force of his arguments (not to mention his charm) irresistible and agreed to take part in his bold experiment. On 19 April 1969, she gave birth to their first daughter, Susan. Polgar spent hours trying to decide on the specific area in which Susan would be groomed for excellence. ‘I needed Susan’s achievements to be dramatic, so that nobody could question their authenticity,’ he says. ‘That was the only way to convince people that their ideas about excellence were all wrong. And then it hit me: chess.’ Why chess? ‘Because it is objective,’ Polgar says. ‘If my child had been trained as an artist or novelist, people could have argued about whether she was genuinely world-class or not. But chess has an objective rating based on performance, so there is no possibility of argument.’ Although Polgar was only a hobby player (and Klara not a player at all), he read as much as he could on the pedagogy of chess. He schooled Susan at home, devoting many hours a day to chess even before her fourth birthday. He did so jovially, making great play of the drama of the game, and over time Susan became hooked. By her fifth birthday she had accumulated hundreds of hours of dedicated practice. A few months later, Polgar entered Susan in a local competition. She was so small she could barely see over the table on which the boards were placed, and her competitors and their parents looked on in amusement as she took her place to play her games, her eyes scanning the board and her tiny hands moving the pieces. ‘Almost all the girls qualified for my section were twice my age or older,’ Susan, an attractive and confident forty-year-old now living in New York, recounts. ‘At that point I did not realize the importance of that event in my life. I just looked at it as one chess game at a time. I was having fun. I won game after game, and my final score was 10-0. The fact that such a young girl won the championship was already a sensation in itself, but winning all my games added to people’s amazement.’ On 2 November 1974, Klara gave birth to a second daughter, Sofia, then, on 23 July 1976, to a third daughter, Judit. As soon as they were old enough to crawl, little Judit and Sofia would make their way across to the door of the chess room in the family apartment and peer through the tiny window, watching Susan being put through her paces by their father. They longed to get involved, but Polgar did not want them to start too early. Instead he put the chess pieces in their tiny hands, encouraging them to take pleasure in their texture and shapes. Only when they turned five did he embark on their training. The girls trained devotedly throughout their childhoods, but they also enjoyed it enormously. Why? Because they had internalized the motivation. ‘We spent a lot of hours on the chessboard, but it did not seem like a chore because we loved it,’ says Judit. ‘We were not pushed; chess fascinated us,’ says Sofia. Susan concurs: ‘I loved playing chess. It expanded my horizons and gave me wonderful experiences.’ By the time they had reached adolescence, all three sisters had accumulated well over ten thousand hours of specialized practice, arguably more than any other women in chess history. This is how they fared: Susan In August 1981, at the age of twelve, Susan won the world title for girls under sixteen. Less than two years later, in July 1984, she became the top-rated female player in the world. In January 1991 she became the first woman player in history to reach the status of grandmaster. By the end of her career she had won the world championship for women on four occasions and five chess Olympiads and remains the only person in history, male or female, to win the chess Triple Crown (the rapid, blitz, and classical world championships). Susan was also a pioneer. Despite huge obstacles placed in her way by the chess authorities – she was barred from playing in the 1986 World Championships (for men), even though she had qualified – she eventually paved the way for women to compete in the world’s most prestigious events. She now runs a chess centre in New York. Sofia In 1980, at the age of five, Sofia won the under-eleven Hungarian championship for girls. She would go on to win the gold medal for girls at the world under-fourteen championships in 1986 and numerous gold medals in chess Olympiads and other prestigious championships. But her most extraordinary achievement was the ‘Miracle in Rome’, where she won eight straight games in the Magistrale di Roma against many of the greatest male players, including the grandmasters Alexander Chernin, Semon Palatnik, and Yuri Razuvaev. One chess expert wrote, ‘The odds against such an occurrence must be billions to one.’ Kevin O’Connell, an Irish chess player, rated the performance as the fifth greatest, by man or woman, in history: Sofia married fellow chess player Yona Kosashvili in 1999 and moved to Israel where they live with their two children. She now helps to run a chess website and is an acclaimed painter. Judit After a succession of record-breaking victories in her early teens, Judit won the world under-twelve championships in Romania in 1988. It was the first time in history a girl had won an overall (open to both men and women) world championship. Three years later in 1991, at the age of fifteen years and four months, she became the youngest-ever grandmaster – male or female – in history. In the same year she also won the Hungarian championships, defeating grandmaster Tibor Tolnai in the final. She has now been the number-one female chess player in the world for well over a decade, excluding a brief period when she was taken off the list due to inactivity when she gave birth to her first son in 2004 (to be replaced at the top of the list by her older sister Susan). Over the course of her career, she has had victories over almost every top player in the world, including Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, and Viswanathan Anand. She is universally considered to be the greatest female player of all time. The tale of the Polgar sisters provides scintillating evidence for the practice theory of excellence. Polgar had publicly declared that his yet-to-be-born children would become world-beaters – setting himself up for a fall in the time-honoured tradition of science – and had been proved right. His girls had lived up to the pre-birth hype and then some. Note, also, the public reaction to the girls’ success. When Susan stormed to victory in a local competition at the age of five, everyone present was convinced that this was the consequence of unique talent. She was described by the local newspaper as a prodigy, and Polgar remembers being congratulated by another parent on having a daughter with such amazing talent. ‘That is not something my little Olga could do,’ the parent said. But this is the iceberg illusion: onlookers took the performance to be the consequence of special abilities because they had witnessed only a tiny percentage of the activity that had gone into its making. As Polgar puts it: ‘If they had seen the painfully slow progress, the inch-by-inch improvements, they would not have been so quick to call Susan a prodigy.’ Human Calculators How good are you at mental arithmetic? I’m guessing that you have a pretty clear answer to this question. Maths is one of those things you either can do or can’t. You either have a brain for numbers, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you may as well give up. The idea that calculating ability is predetermined at birth is, perhaps, even more deeply ingrained than the idea that sporting ability is predetermined at birth. It represents the ultimate expression of the talent theory of expertise. For that reason, it is worth taking a closer look to see if things are quite as they seem. As so often, the talent theory of calculating skill finds its most eloquent testimony in the abilities of child prodigies: young boys and girls who perform mental arithmetic at speeds approaching that of computers. Like the six-year-old Mozart, these kids are so remarkable that they often perform to enraptured audiences. Shakuntala Devi, born in Bangalore in 1939, for example, stunned university academics in India by performing three-digit multiplications at the age of eight. She is now in the Guinness Book of Records for being able to multiply two thirteen-digit numbers (for example, 8574930485948 times 9394506947284) in twenty-eight seconds. R?diger Gamm, from Germany, another world-famous ‘human calculator’, is able to calculate ninth powers and fifth roots with incredible accuracy, and to find the quotient of two primes to sixty decimal places. It is remarkable to watch Gamm in action. When asked a question, he closes his eyes and furrows his brow, his eyelids flickering intensely as he grapples with the calculation. A few moments later he opens his eyes, and the numbers spew out at astonishing speed. Surely these feats speak of natural gifts beyond those bestowed on the rest of us. Or do they? In 1896 Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, carried out a simple experiment to find out. He compared the performance of two calculating prodigies with cashiers from the Bon March? department store in Paris. The cashiers had an average of fourteen years experience in the store but had showed no early gift for mathematics. Binet gave the prodigies and the cashiers identical three- and four-digit multiplication problems and compared the time taken to solve them. What happened? You guessed it: the best cashier was faster than either prodigy for both problems. In other words, fourteen years of calculating experience had been sufficient, on its own, to bring perfectly ‘normal’ people up to and beyond the remarkable speed of prodigies. Binet concluded that calculating ability is more about practice than talent – which means that you and I could perform lightning-quick multi-digit calculations if we had the proper training. So, how is it done? As with most ‘miraculous’ feats, there is a trick. Suppose, for example, that you had to multiply 358 and 464. Now, most of us can multiply 300 and 400 to get 120,000. The trick is to commit that number to memory while solving the next component of the problem, say, 400 times 50. This is 20,000, which you add to the running total to get 140,000. Now multiply 400 by 8 to get 320, and add that to the running total, to get 140,320. Eventually, by adding the remaining components of the calculation (there are eighteen separate steps), you get the answer: 166,112. This is still a formidable feat, of course, but it is no longer the calculation that is daunting; it is remembering the running total while performing the various steps. But now consider how much more difficult it is to keep track of a narrative while reading a book. There are tens of thousands of words in the English language, and they are used in new and unforeseen combinations in every sentence of every page. To understand a new sentence, the reader must not only understand its specific meaning, he must also be able to integrate it with all sentences previously read. He must, for example, remember previously mentioned objects and people in order to resolve references to pronouns. This is a memory task of almost unimaginable dimensions. And yet most of us are able to get to the last word of the book – comprising hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of words – without once losing the thread of the narrative. The experience we have clocked up as ‘language-users’ enables us to do this in just the same way that the hours clocked up as ‘number-users’ enables mathematicians to get to the end of a multi-digit multiplication by keeping track of the ‘narrative’ of the calculation. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/matthew-syed/bounce-the-myth-of-talent-and-the-power-of-practice/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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