Range, page 30
Early in the book, I discussed athletes and musicians, because they are practically synonymous with early specialization. But among athletes who go on to become elite, broad early experience and delayed specialization is the norm. Musicians arrive at greatness via an incredible diversity of paths, but early hyperspecialization is often not necessary for skill development and in the more improvisational forms it is rare—although, as in sports, many adults have an enormous financial interest in making it seem essential. Sviatoslav Richter was one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century; he started formal lessons at twenty-two. Steve Nash is a relatively normal-sized Canadian who did not get a basketball until he was thirteen years old; he won the NBA MVP award, twice. As I write this, I am listening to a professional violinist who started when she was eighteen. Of course, she was told to stop before she started because she was too old. She now makes a point of teaching beginner adults. The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even these relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it.
So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind. Two Roman historians recorded that when Julius Caesar was a young man he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain and broke down in tears. “Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable,” he supposedly said. Pretty soon, that concern was a distant memory and Caesar was in charge of the Roman Republic—which he turned into a dictatorship before he was murdered by his own pals. It’s fair to say that like most youth athletes with highlight reels, he peaked early. Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.
Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.
Finally, remember that there is nothing inherently wrong with specialization. We all specialize to one degree or another, at some point or other. My initial spark of interest in this topic came from reading viral articles and watching conference keynotes that offered early hyperspecialization as some sort of life hack, a prescription that will save you the wasted time of diverse experience and experimentation. I hope I have added ideas to that discussion, because research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated. As Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a century ago, of the free exchange of ideas, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
Acknowledgments
I VIEW BOOK WRITING as kind of like running the 800—torture in the middle, but if you PR or give a supreme effort, pretty soon you look back and say, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” It was, but still you should do it again.
All sorts of cool things transpired while I worked on this book. For example: I learned a ton. Also, one day while my brain was overheating, a cardinal, a blue jay, and an oriole appeared near my windowsill—that’s all the eponymous birds of Major League Baseball teams. That never happens.
Thank you, first, to the entire team at Riverhead, especially my editor, Courtney Young. Courtney spooked me a little when we first agreed to go about this book project together by saying something like, “I’d be worried if I weren’t familiar with you.” [Gulp]. She then proceeded to respond like a great coach developing an athlete; she let me engage in broad, self-directed activity, and when I resurfaced two years later with a manuscript that was too long, she switched gears and responded to my desire for fast and frequent feedback as I cut it down to size and shape. When the time came, she gave feedback that made a wicked learning environment a bit more kind (“Yes, I like it; now he sounds like less of a magical gnome.” —Courtney’s feedback on what may have been an overwritten description.). Appropriately, she has range; she almost became an engineer.
Thank you to my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who finished 235th in the New York City Marathon, which is important, but not so important as his animating mission, which, as far as I can tell, is to help writers earn their freedom. To use a sports analogy, my strategy for working with an agent was to draft the best athlete available and get out of the way.
Thank you to everyone who took part in my tortuous fact-checking process, but especially Emily Krieger and Drew Bailey, and the interviewees who gave their time (again . . . and sometimes again) so that I could pester them about things they had already told me. Thanks to Masaharu Kawamata and Tyler Walker for help with Japanese translation.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. The first time we met was for a debate at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, framed as “10,000-hours vs. The Sports Gene.” (It’s on YouTube.) It turned into a great discussion, and I think we both took new thoughts home. He invited me for an interval workout the next day, and then again, and we got to talking (only during warmup) about that whole “Roger vs. Tiger” idea. The discussion was filed away somewhere in my head and surfaced when I interacted with Tillman Scholars. I’m not sure I would have explored the topic without it. As psychologist Howard Gruber wrote, “Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful.”
This book was the greatest organizational challenge I’ve faced; figuring out how to gather information, what to include, and then where to put it overwhelmed me many times. A quote kept coming to mind: “It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla’s tired.” Whatever the reception, I’m proud I kept coming back for more. And I thank the friends and family who supported me and accepted my answer of “hopefully next year” to so many questions. Believe me, it’s not that I didn’t want tickets to that thing I like. It’s just that, as any Westerosi knows, my house words are: “When my book is done.” Those supporters: My brother, Daniel (whose enthusiastic response to my rambling about ideas in chapter 4 convinced me to write about them); sister, Charna (she may have purchased all the copies of my last book); my parents, Mark and Eve, who always waited until after I did something ridiculous to weigh in, rather than prohibiting it beforehand. It makes for a vibrant sampling period. Thanks to “Prince Andrei,” you’ll know who you are when you read this; and to my niece Sigalit Koufax (yes, that Koufax) Epstein-Pawar, and her dad Ameya; and to Andrea and John for moral and caloric support, and the whole Weiss and Green families. Special thanks to Liz O’Herrin and Mike Christman for getting me involved with the Tillman Foundation; to Steve Mesler for getting me involved with Classroom Champions; to my late friend Kevin Richards, without whom I probably would not have become a science writer; and to my friend Harry Mbang, who is never not up for a midnight run to a certain bookstore. Thanks to the entire Chalkbeat family—keep swimming.
Special thanks to Toru Okada, Alice, Natasha Rostova, Katurian K. Katurian, Petter and Mona Kummel, Nate River, Gbessa, Benno von Archimboldi, Tony Webster, Sonny’s brother, Tony Loneman, the trio of Tommy, Doc, and Maurice, Braiden Chaney, Stephen Florida, and many other characters who insist on teaching me about writing. I hope those of you I’m forgetting will forgive me.
I feel a little like Inigo Montoya after he finally got revenge: What now?? But I’m about a million times more excited and less fearful about “What now?” than I would have been before I did the research that went into this book. I closed the acknowledgments of my last book with a note about Elizabeth: “If I ever write another book, I’m sure that one will be dedicated to her too.” (Even though she was waffling between me and John Dewey for her book dedication.) At the close of my second book, I think it’s safe to say that if I ever write another book, I’m sure that one will be dedicated to her too.
Notes
For space considerations, here I present copious but not comprehensive citations. I intend these notes as both a trail of reporting that went into this book as well as a detailed entry point into primary sources for anyone interested in some Friday night (or Saturday morning) exploration. The vast majority of spoken quotes in the book are from interviews I conducted. When that is not the case, the source is identified in the text or here. In the interest of packing as many citations in the available space as I could, I removed subtitles of books and papers in some of the references below.
INTRODUCTION: ROGER VS. TIGER
the boy could balance on his father’s palm: G. Smith, “The Chosen One,” Sports Illustrated, December 23, 1996. (Additionally, Earl Woods included a photograph of this in the source cited below.)
“It is very difficult to communicate how to putt”: The primary source on Tiger’s childhood in this section is: E. Woods (with P. McDaniel, foreword by Tiger Woods), Training a Tiger: Raising a Winner in Golf and Life (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1997).
taught psychological warfare: J. Benedict and A. Keteyian, Tiger Woods (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).
“He has a larger forum than any of them”: Smith, “The Chosen One.”
“I was always very much more interested”; “We had no plan A”: R. Jacob, “Ace of Grace,” Financial Times, January 13, 2006, online ed.
“became unbearable”; “he would have just upset me anyway”: R. Stauffer, The Roger Federer Story: Quest for Perfection (Chicago: New Chapter Press, 2007 [Kindle ebook]).
“pully”; “if they nudged him”; “just don’t cheat”; “Mehr CDs”: J. L. Wertheim, Strokes of Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 [Kindle ebook]).
“being invincible”; “His story is completely different”: Stauffer, The Roger Federer Story.
study of thirty violinists: K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.
“we have to check”: A. Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
“slow bakers”: For an excellent look at how Great Britain altered its talent pipelines, see: O. Slot, The Talent Lab (London: Ebury Press, 2017).
ramp up technical practice in one area: Examples of studies—including those cited in the introduction—from a range of sports and countries documenting the trend of sampling and delayed specialization include (the first paper here is the source for data in the charts showing practice hours): K. Moesch et al., “Late Specialization: The Key to Success in Centimeters, Grams, or Seconds (CGS) Sports,” Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports 21, no. 6 (2011): e282–90; K. Moesch et al., “Making It to the Top in Team Sports: Start Later, Intensify, and Be Determined!,” Talent Development and Excellence 5, no. 2 (2013): 85–100; M. Hornig et al., “Practice and Play in the Development of German Top-Level Professional Football Players,” European Journal of Sport Science 16, no. 1 (2016): 96–105 (epub ahead of print, 2014); A. Güllich et al., “Sport Activities Differentiating Match-Play Improvement in Elite Youth Footballers—A 2-Year Longitudinal Study,” Journal of Sports Sciences 35, no. 3 (2017): 207–15 (epub ahead of print, 2016); A. Güllich, “International Medallists’ and Non-medallists’ Developmental Sport Activities—A Matched-Pairs Analysis,” Journal of Sports Sciences 35, no. 23 (2017): 2281–88; J. Gulbin et al., “Patterns of Performance Development in Elite Athletes,” European Journal of Sport Science 13, no. 6 (2013): 605–14; J. Gulbin et al., “A Look Through the Rear View Mirror: Developmental Experiences and Insights of High Performance Athletes,” Talent Development and Excellence 2, no. 2 (2010): 149–64; M. W. Bridge and M. R. Toms, “The Specialising or Sampling Debate,” Journal of Sports Sciences 31, no. 1 (2013): 87–96; P. S. Buckley et al., “Early Single-Sport Specialization,” Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine 5, no. 7 (2017): 2325967117703944; J. P. Difiori et al., “Debunking Early Single Sports Specialization and Reshaping the Youth Sport Experience: An NBA Perspective,” British Journal of Sports Medicine 51, no. 3(2017): 142–43; J. Baker et al., “Sport-Specific Practice and the Development of Expert Decision-Making in Team Ball Sports,” Journal of Applied Sport Psychology 15, no. 1 (2003): 12–25; R. Carlson, “The Socialization of Elite Tennis Players in Sweden: An Analysis of the Players’ Backgrounds and Development,” Sociology of Sport Journal 5 (1988): 241–56; G. M. Hill, “Youth Sport Participation of Professional Baseball Players,” Sociology of Sport Journal 10 (1993): 107–14.; F. G. Mendes et al., “Retrospective Analysis of Accumulated Structured Practice: A Bayesian Multilevel Analysis of Elite Brazilian Volleyball Players,” High Ability Studies (advance online publication, 2018); S. Black et al., “Pediatric Sports Specialization in Elite Ice Hockey Players,” Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach (advance online publication, 2018). (France, which won the 2018 World Cup, overhauled its youth development decades ago to emphasize unstructured play at the expense of formal competitions, and to make room for late bloomers. A top youth footballer in France might play half as many formal games as an American peer. When French kids in the national development system do have formal games, coaches are barred from talking for most of the competition so that they cannot micromanage young players. “There is no remote [control] for the players. . . . Let them play,” as Ludovic Debru, who helped design the youth system, put it at the 2018 edition of the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Summit.)
“In an era of sports specialization”: J. Brewer, “Ester Ledecka Is the Greatest Olympian at the Games, Even If She Doesn’t Know It,” Washington Post, February 24, 2018, online ed.
“I was doing so many different sports”: J. Drenna, “Vasyl Lomachenko: ‘All Fighters Think About Their Legacy. I’m No Different,’” Guardian, April 16, 2018, online ed.
“young people are just smarter”: M. Coker, “Startup Advice for Entrepreneurs from Y Combinator,” VentureBeat, March 26, 2007.
a tech founder who is fifty: P. Azoulay et al., “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” NBER Working Paper No. 24489 (2018).
“No one imagined silos like that”: G. Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015 [Kindle ebook]).
if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting: A. B. Jena et al., “Mortality and Treatment Patterns Among Patients Hospitalized with Acute Cardiovascular Conditions During Dates of National Cardiology Meetings,” JAMA Internal Medicine 175, no. 2 (2015): 237–44. See also: R.F. Redberg, “Cardiac Patient Outcomes during National Cardiology Meetings,” JAMA Internal Medicine 175, no.2 (2015): 245.
CHAPTER 1: THE CULT OF THE HEAD START
go along with the plan: The lives of the Polgar sisters have been chronicled in a number of books and articles. For the details in this chapter, in addition to an interview with Susan Polgar, the most useful sources were: Y. Aviram (director), The Polgar Variant (Israel: Lama Films, 2014); S. Polgar with P. Truong, Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters Changed the Game of Chess (London: Everyman Chess, 2005); C. Flora, “The Grandmaster Experiment,” Psychology Today, July 2005, online ed.; P. Voosen, “Bringing Up Genius: Is Every Healthy Child a Potential Prodigy?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8, 2015, online ed.; C. Forbes, The Polgar Sisters (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).
“met a very interesting person”: Polgar with Truong, Breaking Through.
“gray average mass”: People staff, “Nurtured to Be Geniuses, Hungary’s Polgar Sisters Put Winning Moves on Chess Masters,” People, May 4, 1987.
“Chess is very objective”: L. Myers, “Trained to Be a Genius, Girl, 16, Wallops Chess Champ Spassky for $110,000,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1993.
“absolute category”: Aviram, The Polgar Variant.
problems like cancer and AIDS: W. Hartston, “A Man with a Talent for Creating Genius,” Independent, January 12, 1993.
“complete lack of connection”: “Daniel Kahneman—Biographical,” Nobelprize.org, Nobel Media AB 2014. I had the pleasure of discussing Kahneman’s life and work with him over lunch in December 2015. Additional detail can be found in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).
impressed him “enormously”: The still-relevant book that impressed Kahneman is: Paul E. Meehl, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954). Meehl sparked an enormous amount of research showing that experts often gain confidence but not skill with experience. An excellent review of some of that work is: C. F. Camerer and E. J. Johnson, “The Process-Performance Paradox in Expert Judgment: How Can Experts Know So Much and Predict So Badly?,” in Toward a General Theory of Expertise, ed. K. A. Ericsson and Jacqui Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
In 2009, Kahneman and Klein: D. Kahneman and G. Klein, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree,” American Psychologist 64, no. 6 (2009): 515–26.
“kind” learning environments: Robin Hogarth’s fantastic book on learning environments is Educating Intuition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
“a more productive carrier”: L. Thomas, The Youngest Science (New York: Penguin, 1995), 22.
In a 1997 showdown: Kasparov was on the cover of the May 5, 1997, Newsweek, with the headline, “The Brain’s Last Stand.”
