Full Transcript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLOuMXnM5wk
[00:07] Many of you here have probably heard of the 10,000 hours rule.
[00:11] It’s the idea that to become great in anything takes 10,000 hours of focused practice.
[00:16] So you’d better get started as early as possible.
[00:18] The poster child for this story is Tiger Woods.
[00:22] His father famously gave him a putter when he was seven months old.
[00:25] Fast forward to the age of 21— he’s the greatest golfer in the world.
[00:29] Quintessential 10,000 hours story.
[00:31] Another is that of the three Polgar sisters, whose father decided to teach them chess in a very technical manner from a very early age.
[00:38] Two of his daughters went on to become grandmaster chess players.
[00:41] I got curious: if this 10,000 hours rule is correct, then we should see that elite athletes get a head start in so-called deliberate practice.
[00:48] And in fact, when scientists study elite athletes, they see that they spend more time in deliberate practice.
[00:53] Not a big surprise.
[00:55] When they actually track athletes over the course of their development, the pattern looks like this:
[00:59] the future elites tend to have what scientists call a sampling period, where they try a variety of physical activities.
[01:05] They gain broad general skills and delay specializing.
[01:09] until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.
[01:11] That doesn’t really comport with the 10,000 hours rule, does it?
[01:15] So I started to wonder about other domains that we associate with obligatory early specialization, like music.
[01:21] Turns out the pattern is often similar.
[01:23] The exceptional musicians didn’t start spending more time in deliberate practice than the average musicians until their third instrument.
[01:29] They too tended to have a sampling period.
[01:31] Even musicians we think of as famously precocious, like Yo-Yo Ma.
[01:35] So this got me interested in exploring the developmental backgrounds of people whose work I had long admired.
[01:40] Duke Ellington shunned music lessons as a kid to focus on baseball and painting and drawing.
[01:45] Mariam Mirzakhani wasn’t interested in math as a girl, dreamed of becoming a novelist, and went on to become the first and so far only woman to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in the world in math.
[01:55] Vincent van Gogh had five different careers before flaming out spectacularly, and, in his late 20s, picked up a book called “The Guide to the ABCs of Drawing.”
[02:04] Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan who took a philosophy course just to fulfill a requirement.
[02:10] And in it he learned about a near century-old system of logic
[02:13] by which true and false statements could be coded as ones and zeros
[02:16] and solved like math problems.
[02:18] This led to the development of binary code,
[02:20] which underlies all of our digital computers today.
[02:23] Frances Hesselbein took her first professional job at the age of 54,
[02:27] and went on to become the CEO of the Girl Scouts.
[02:30] Here’s an athlete I’ve followed.
[02:32] He tried some tennis, some skiing, wrestling.
[02:34] His mother was actually a tennis coach,
[02:36] but she declined to coach him because he wouldn’t return balls normally.
[02:39] And he kept trying more sports:
[02:41] handball, volleyball, soccer, badminton, skateboarding.
[02:44] So who is this dabbler?
[02:46] This is Roger Federer.
[02:47] Every bit as famous as an adult as Tiger Woods.
[02:50] And yet even tennis enthusiasts don't usually know anything
[02:54] about his developmental story.
[02:55] Why is that?
[02:56] I think it’s partly because the Tiger story is very dramatic,
[02:59] but also because it seems like this tidy narrative
[03:02] that we can extrapolate to anything that we want to be good at in our own lives.
[03:06] But it turns out that in many ways, golf is a uniquely horrible model
[03:09] of almost everything that humans want to learn.
[03:11] Golf is the epitome of what the psychologist Robin Hogarth called a kind learning environment.
[03:15] Next steps and goals are clear; rules that are clear and never change.
[03:20] When you do something, you get feedback that is quick and accurate.
[03:24] Chess, also a kind learning environment.
[03:26] On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments where next steps and goals may not be clear— rules may change.
[03:33] You may or may not get feedback when you do something, it may be delayed, it may be inaccurate.
[03:38] Which one of these sounds like the world we're increasingly living in?
[03:41] So if hyper-specialization isn’t always the trick in a wicked world, what is?
[03:45] That can be difficult to talk about, because sometimes it looks like meandering or zigzagging or keeping a broader view.
[03:51] It can look like getting behind.
[03:53] But if we look at research on technological innovation, it shows that increasingly the most impactful patents are authored by teams that include individuals who have worked across a large number of different technology classes and often merge things from different domains.
[04:06] Someone whose work I've admired, who was sort of on the forefront of this, is a Japanese man named Junpei Yokoi.
[04:11] Yokoi didn't score well in his electronics exams at school, so he had to settle for a low-tier job as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company in Kyoto.
[04:19] He combined some well-known technology from the calculator industry, with some well-known technology from the credit card industry, and made handheld games.
[04:26] And it turned this playing card company, which was founded in a wooden storefront in the 19th century, into a toy and game operation.
[04:33] You may have heard of it, it’s called Nintendo.
[04:36] His magnum opus was the Game Boy.
[04:38] We probably don't make as many of those people as we could, because we don't tend to incentivize anything that doesn't look like a head start or specialization.
[04:46] And naturally, I think there are as many ways to succeed as there are people, but I think we tend only to incentivize and encourage the Tiger path, when increasingly, in a wicked world, we need people who travel the Roger path as well.
[04:58] Or as the eminent physicist and mathematician and writer Freeman Dyson put it:
[05:03] “For a healthy ecosystem, we need both birds and frogs.
[05:06] Frogs are down in the mud seeing all the granular details.
[05:09] The birds are soaring up above, not seeing those details,
[05:12] But integrating the knowledge of the frogs.
[05:14] And we need both.
[05:15] The problem, Dyson said, is that we’re telling everyone to become frogs.
[05:20] And I think in a wicked world, that's increasingly shortsighted.