<story><title>Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview</title><url>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00227.x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgeada</author><text>Yes but no.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that many very important things in life are winner takes all. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job. If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don&amp;#x27;t get the deal. If you&amp;#x27;re 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don&amp;#x27;t get the medal, the fame or the recognition.&lt;p&gt;Little differences can have hugely significant consequences. And sometimes the difference is just luck, but still the same huge consequences.</text></item><item><author>FuckButtons</author><text>In basically any other field of endeavor, this is fine though, most things people do aren’t judged as though there can only be one best person in the world at it.</text></item><item><author>Xcelerate</author><text>&amp;gt; The next biggest factor is genetics&lt;p&gt;I think it depends where you’re at in the progression curve. I’ve always thought that most people can reach the top 1% of just about anything with hard work. Beyond that, it comes down to other factors: genetics, environment, luck, etc.&lt;p&gt;I ran track in college and reached roughly the top percentile of my age and gender (i.e., the level of a typical D1 athlete), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have come remotely close to a 12:37 5k. You could have started the training from birth under a team of experts, and it simply just would not have happened.</text></item><item><author>yamrzou</author><text>There was a HN discussion some time ago about choosing a textbook that is optimal for oneself (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=41016650&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=41016650&lt;/a&gt;), and this passage from the answer about deliberate practice stuck out to me:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;In the field of talent development, there is absolutely no debate about the most superior form of training. It&amp;#x27;s deliberate practice: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one&amp;#x27;s capabilities.&lt;p&gt;Deliberate practice is about making performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition. Any individual adjustment is small and yields a small improvement in performance – but when you compound these small changes over a massive number of action-feedback-adjustment cycles, you end up with massive changes and massive gains in performance.&lt;p&gt;Deliberate practice is superior to all other forms of training. That is a &amp;quot;solved problem&amp;quot; in the academic field of talent development. It might as well be a law of physics. There is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains. (The next biggest factor is genetics, and the relative contributions of deliberate practice vs genetics can vary significantly across talent domains.)&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kspacewalk2</author><text>&amp;gt;If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job.&lt;p&gt;For the vast, vast majority of jobs, this is simply false. You will get an equivalent job elsewhere. But yes, if you&amp;#x27;re applying to be Prime Minister, this is definitely the case.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don&amp;#x27;t get the deal.&lt;p&gt;This is very often false as well, when you look at the metric of whether you&amp;#x27;ll get work&amp;#x2F;income, rather than this specific unit of work. There are some industries where you&amp;#x27;re competing for a few massive winner-takes-all bids, but there are many where this isn&amp;#x27;t the case. And oftentimes in the former industries, bids are made by consortia and there will be plenty of sub-contracting.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;If you&amp;#x27;re 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don&amp;#x27;t get the medal, the fame or the recognition.&lt;p&gt;This is definitely true in sports, music and some other fields.&lt;p&gt;I would say, unless you&amp;#x27;re a founder and are seeking to have massive disruptive impact in some field, this does not apply to anyone who visits HN. Good and great programmers, engineers, researchers and managers will always be well off and have a reasonable amount of recognition&amp;#x2F;impact, and the exceptional ones will not take such a disproportionately large chunk of the pie to leave the rest in the dust.</text></comment>
<story><title>Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview</title><url>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00227.x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgeada</author><text>Yes but no.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that many very important things in life are winner takes all. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate, you get no job. If your bid is 99.99% as good as the other one, you likely don&amp;#x27;t get the deal. If you&amp;#x27;re 99.99% as good as the other guy, you don&amp;#x27;t get the medal, the fame or the recognition.&lt;p&gt;Little differences can have hugely significant consequences. And sometimes the difference is just luck, but still the same huge consequences.</text></item><item><author>FuckButtons</author><text>In basically any other field of endeavor, this is fine though, most things people do aren’t judged as though there can only be one best person in the world at it.</text></item><item><author>Xcelerate</author><text>&amp;gt; The next biggest factor is genetics&lt;p&gt;I think it depends where you’re at in the progression curve. I’ve always thought that most people can reach the top 1% of just about anything with hard work. Beyond that, it comes down to other factors: genetics, environment, luck, etc.&lt;p&gt;I ran track in college and reached roughly the top percentile of my age and gender (i.e., the level of a typical D1 athlete), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have come remotely close to a 12:37 5k. You could have started the training from birth under a team of experts, and it simply just would not have happened.</text></item><item><author>yamrzou</author><text>There was a HN discussion some time ago about choosing a textbook that is optimal for oneself (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=41016650&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=41016650&lt;/a&gt;), and this passage from the answer about deliberate practice stuck out to me:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;In the field of talent development, there is absolutely no debate about the most superior form of training. It&amp;#x27;s deliberate practice: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one&amp;#x27;s capabilities.&lt;p&gt;Deliberate practice is about making performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition. Any individual adjustment is small and yields a small improvement in performance – but when you compound these small changes over a massive number of action-feedback-adjustment cycles, you end up with massive changes and massive gains in performance.&lt;p&gt;Deliberate practice is superior to all other forms of training. That is a &amp;quot;solved problem&amp;quot; in the academic field of talent development. It might as well be a law of physics. There is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains. (The next biggest factor is genetics, and the relative contributions of deliberate practice vs genetics can vary significantly across talent domains.)&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>InitialBP</author><text>Your example isn&amp;#x27;t a very good one. If you are 99.99% as good as the next candidate you get no job? How about you get a different job because you&amp;#x27;re still a top performer. Most (all?) jobs don&amp;#x27;t have only a single role to be filled across the entire world.&lt;p&gt;Sure you might not get THE singular highest paid&amp;#x2F;best position to do what you do really well, but you can certainly still get the 2nd or 3rd or be among the top 100&amp;#x2F;1000 well paid people who do X.&lt;p&gt;I stand by the previous commenter, in the vast majority of cases you&amp;#x27;re still going to have some significant benefit from being near the top even if you aren&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;the best&amp;quot;.</text></comment>