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
