<story><title>It takes more than practice to excel</title><url>http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140728094258.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcone</author><text>I think this confirms what a lot of us intrinsically felt: Some people are just better at certain things than others. Jeff Bezos came to this realization while he was in college:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Intent on becoming a theoretical physicist and following the likes of Einstein and Hawking, he discovered that although he was one of the top 25 students in his honors physics program, he wasn&amp;#x27;t smart enough to compete with the handful of real geniuses around him. &amp;#x27;I looked around the room,&amp;#x27; Bezos recalls, &amp;#x27;and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at it than I was, and it was much, much easier for them. It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently.&amp;#x27; The pragmatic Bezos switched his major to computer science and committed himself to starting and running his own business.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/bezos_pr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.wired.com&amp;#x2F;wired&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;7.03&amp;#x2F;bezos_pr.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gaelian</author><text>I would have thought it pretty obvious that some people have in intrinsic &amp;quot;gift&amp;quot; in certain areas. This is completely obvious in physical sports and I don&amp;#x27;t see why - considering that our minds are underpinned by the physical structure of our brains - that this wouldn&amp;#x27;t also be the case when it comes to mental activites as well.&lt;p&gt;Just because I may not have the intrinsic gift that allows me to become the best physicist or investor in the world doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that I couldn&amp;#x27;t get pretty damn good at it if I put the time in, though. It doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily mean that I would enjoy what I was doing any less.&lt;p&gt;I remember hearing about a study that I think was by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck[1] that basically found that praising kids for being smart (i.e. having an intrinsic gift) was far less effective than praising them for putting in a good effort (i.e. putting in the time and practice). While it is incontrovertable that some people do indeed have an intrinsic gift for certain activities, I think we should not lose sight of the apparent fact that just about anyone will do better when this view is at least not assigned greater importance than the need to put in a good effort. Lest we unintentionally start sending messages something like &amp;quot;Oh, well you&amp;#x27;re obviously not as gifted as Michael Jordan at Basketball, so you should probably not even bother learning the game at all.&amp;quot; That&amp;#x27;s an intentionally exaggerated example to get my point across, but particularly when it comes to early childhood development I believe we should not underestimate the effect of even a stray word of encouragement&amp;#x2F;discouragement. I know that such words had a definite effect on me at an early age if they were from the right person - e.g. an authority figure - and often more of an effect than the authority figure assumed their words had at the time.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nymag.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;features&amp;#x2F;27840&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>It takes more than practice to excel</title><url>http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140728094258.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcone</author><text>I think this confirms what a lot of us intrinsically felt: Some people are just better at certain things than others. Jeff Bezos came to this realization while he was in college:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Intent on becoming a theoretical physicist and following the likes of Einstein and Hawking, he discovered that although he was one of the top 25 students in his honors physics program, he wasn&amp;#x27;t smart enough to compete with the handful of real geniuses around him. &amp;#x27;I looked around the room,&amp;#x27; Bezos recalls, &amp;#x27;and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at it than I was, and it was much, much easier for them. It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently.&amp;#x27; The pragmatic Bezos switched his major to computer science and committed himself to starting and running his own business.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/bezos_pr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.wired.com&amp;#x2F;wired&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;7.03&amp;#x2F;bezos_pr.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t confirm that at all.  The original study was that practice counted for much more in fields where the rules and values were stable (like musical instruments or games) and much less where the basic ground rules couldn&amp;#x27;t even be described (like business or war).&lt;p&gt;That part makes a lot of sense: practice and correcting errors only matters when you will be doing something basically the same next time and you have a fixed target of what &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; looks like to shoot for.  It also explains a big question I had with the original study: what constitutes a &amp;quot;field&amp;quot;?  Does 10,000 hours get me mastery of &amp;quot;software software&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;frontend software engineering&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;web-based frontend software engineering&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;web-based frontend software engineering using Angular.js&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;I think a better explanation is that practice is indeed the key to mastery - of fixed, seldom-changing skills where the goalposts are known and widely agreed upon.  But most &amp;quot;fields&amp;quot; rely on combinations of many individual skills, along with a good number of exogenous factors.  I may be a master at Chrome Javascript &amp;amp; rendering performance because I&amp;#x27;ve spent a lot of team with the Chrome team understanding exactly how the rendering engine works.  This makes me great at building a weekend-long demo or acing an interview, but is only a small component of being an effective frontend engineer.  And then when I scale that up from &amp;quot;being an effective frontend engineer&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;founding a successful business&amp;quot;, there&amp;#x27;s also all sorts of luck involved, like who I meet, what industry I target, how popular my initial customers are, what the rest of the technology industry does, etc.</text></comment>