2024-08-12_Genius
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00:00:30.160 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:33.120 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building
00:00:37.440 | a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. And today,
00:00:42.160 | I want to talk about genius, mastery, high-level performance, how you can develop these skills in
00:00:50.240 | yourself for success in any area to which you are attracted and to which you put your mind,
00:00:56.080 | as well as how we can cultivate this in our children. I was reminded that I had intended
00:01:01.120 | to do this podcast months and months ago, but I had forgotten. In answering a question on Friday's
00:01:07.920 | Q&A show, I was asked about this, and I realized I had never did this podcast I intended to do.
00:01:13.920 | And then I got a couple of emails over the weekend of people saying, "Joshua,
00:01:16.640 | please do the podcast." So here it is. This will be related to money in the sense that earning
00:01:21.520 | money and generating high skills is related to your ability to produce money, but it's not going
00:01:29.120 | to be related to personal finance beyond that. But I do think it'll be applicable in all of the
00:01:34.720 | social aspects of your life, your career, your children, their lives, and their careers.
00:01:40.480 | I want to begin by telling you just my pathway, and I will cite for you the three books that
00:01:48.080 | interested me in this topic the most. The first book that I ran into was a book called Peek,
00:01:55.520 | P-E-A-K, Peek, written by an author named Anders Erikson, last name spelled E-R-I-C-S-S-O-N. The
00:02:06.480 | subtitle is called Peek, Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. And I learned about this
00:02:13.040 | book because I stumbled into some online essays talking about deliberate practice. Specifically,
00:02:20.480 | I think the essay that I found that originally inspired me was an essay called How to Use
00:02:26.800 | Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field by Nate Eliasson. I will link to that in
00:02:33.120 | the show notes today. And in this essay, he talks a little bit about Anders Erikson. I'll read the
00:02:39.520 | introduction to the essay. "In the late 1970s, Anders Erikson devised a very boring experiment.
00:02:46.160 | His subject, Steve Falloon, was instructed to memorize random strings of numbers.
00:02:52.800 | Erikson's interest was in how many numbers Steve could keep in his head with consistent practice.
00:02:58.800 | The research and common wisdom at the time said you could only hold around seven to eight random
00:03:03.600 | bits of information in your head at a time. And so far, Steve was proving the research.
00:03:08.640 | In each session, Erikson and Steve would sit down, and Erikson would read him a random string
00:03:14.720 | of numbers at a rate of one per second. By the end of their fourth one-hour session together,
00:03:20.000 | Steve could reliably recite back strings of seven or eight digits, but he'd struggle with nine and
00:03:26.960 | never successfully remembered ten, until he made a breakthrough. During their fifth session, Steve
00:03:33.200 | succeeded at remembering his first ten-digit string and followed it up with his first eleven-digit
00:03:38.080 | string. It may seem trivial, but when the average person, including Steve at first,
00:03:44.240 | can only remember seven, this is a fifty-seven percent improvement over average.
00:03:48.960 | Steve was only getting started, though. He and Erikson continued their work together,
00:03:54.880 | and by the end of the 200th session, he could reliably memorize strings of 82 random digits.
00:04:01.040 | He didn't have any gift. He didn't have any special training. He simply practiced week
00:04:06.880 | after week in a special way, the same way that's created chess prodigies, world record holders,
00:04:12.960 | Olympic gold medalists, prolific writers, and any master of their craft that you're familiar with
00:04:18.320 | today. Anders Erikson devoted his life's work to studying this technique for effective skill
00:04:24.240 | development and coined the term "deliberate practice" to describe it. So just remember
00:04:29.840 | those numbers, that at the time in the 70s, scientists thought you could only hold seven
00:04:34.880 | or eight random bits of information in your head at the time. Steve wound up consistently and
00:04:40.160 | reliably being able to memorize strings of 82 random digits. Interestingly, since that time,
00:04:45.920 | memory experts have gone far beyond Steve's records. I don't know what the current records
00:04:51.200 | are, but they went far beyond his accomplishments, which were extremely fascinating. And Anders
00:04:57.280 | Erikson in his book "Peak" talks about that and talks about the process that Steve went through
00:05:03.200 | to do it. And basically, if I were to boil it down to its essence, he systematically worked
00:05:09.760 | at figuring out new ways to categorize and store the information. In Steve's case, as a research
00:05:16.000 | subject, he used baseball trivia as kind of the pegboard for his information. Other memory
00:05:23.280 | scientists have gone on and created other elaborate encoding schemes that allow them to encode the
00:05:29.360 | random digits in a very effective way. But Steve didn't have any training. There was no one to
00:05:34.720 | train him on it. He just sat down and kept on working at this thing and got enormously better
00:05:40.160 | because he had this personality trait to stick with it for a very long period of time.
00:05:47.680 | Now, it was that essay that led me to go and try to find Erikson's book, which I found,
00:05:52.480 | called "Peak, Secrets from the New Science of Expertise," published in 2017. I would strongly
00:05:59.200 | encourage you, if you're interested in this topic, to read that book and to start with it.
00:06:03.840 | I thought it was really, really well-created and fascinating, some of the insights that I learned
00:06:10.000 | from it, some of which I'll share with you right now. Here is the introductory blurb from Amazon.
00:06:16.480 | "Anders Erikson has made a career studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes,
00:06:21.600 | and memory mavens. 'Peak' distills three decades of myth-shattering research into a powerful
00:06:26.800 | learning strategy that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about
00:06:31.280 | acquiring new abilities. Whether you want to stand out at work, improve your athletic or
00:06:35.680 | musical performance, or help your child achieve academic goals, Erikson's revolutionary methods
00:06:40.560 | will show you how to improve at almost any skill that matters to you." It's a great book. And I
00:06:47.120 | think if you could only read one of the three books that I'm going to talk about, I think it
00:06:51.440 | should be this one. And here was what I took away from the book. The first thing is simply that as
00:06:58.800 | we learn, we get better, and our ability to learn increases. Erikson spent his entire lifetime,
00:07:08.080 | his entire academic career, I think at Florida State University, studying high performers.
00:07:13.760 | And he came away from that career's research making statements similar to the idea that
00:07:20.800 | never in my life have I found a genius performer, a high-level performer to which I can't explain
00:07:29.680 | his long-term success and performance based upon the function of the application of what he calls
00:07:37.200 | deliberate practice, which we'll talk about in a moment, and doing deliberate practice for a
00:07:42.480 | sufficient amount of time. He goes through every proclaimed genius and virtuoso in history and
00:07:49.040 | shows how we can understand this dramatically amazing overperformance based upon the use of
00:07:59.040 | the principles of deliberate practice and applying those principles for a sufficient amount of time.
00:08:04.240 | I can't remember all of the specific examples, but they would include Mozart, they include Tiger
00:08:09.600 | Woods, they include all these different people that are just renowned as high performers. And
00:08:14.720 | he shows how they got that way most likely due to environmental factors and high amounts of the
00:08:26.240 | right kind of practice. One of the anecdotes that he told in the story that was so fascinating to me
00:08:32.880 | involved a discussion of something like perfect pitch. Here's a little bit of the story.
00:08:39.440 | The year is 1763 and a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is about to embark on a tour around Europe
00:08:46.720 | that will jumpstart the Mozart legend. Just seven years old and barely tall enough to see over the
00:08:52.800 | top of a harpsichord, he captivates audiences in his hometown of Salzburg with his skill on the
00:08:58.320 | violin and various keyboard instruments. He plays with a facility that seems impossible to believe
00:09:04.560 | in someone so young. But Mozart has another trick up his sleeve that is, if anything, even more
00:09:11.040 | surprising to the people of his era. We know about this talent because it was described in a rather
00:09:16.080 | breathless letter to the editor about the young Mozart that was published in the newspaper in
00:09:20.160 | Augsburg, Mozart's father's hometown, shortly before Mozart and his family left Salzburg for
00:09:26.240 | their tour. The letter writer reported that when the young Mozart heard a note played on a musical
00:09:32.160 | instrument, any note, he could immediately identify exactly which note it was. The A-sharp in the
00:09:38.000 | second octave above middle C, perhaps, or the E-flat below middle C. Mozart could do this even
00:09:43.680 | if he was in another room and could not see the instrument being played, and he could do it not
00:09:48.080 | just for the violin and fortepiano, but for every instrument he heard. And Mozart's father, as a
00:09:53.760 | composer and music teacher, had nearly every imaginable musical instrument in his house.
00:10:00.000 | Nor was it just musical instruments. The boy could identify the notes produced by anything
00:10:04.160 | that was sufficiently musical. The chime of a clock, the toll of a bell, the achoo of a sneeze.
00:10:10.560 | It was an ability that most adult musicians of the time, even the most experienced, could not match.
00:10:16.400 | And it seemed, even more than Mozart's skill on keyboard and violin, to be an example of the
00:10:21.440 | mysterious gifts that this young prodigy had been born with. That ability is not quite so mysterious
00:10:28.080 | to us today, of course. We know a good deal more about it now than 250 years ago, and most people
00:10:33.760 | today have at least heard of it. The technical term is "absolute pitch," although it is better
00:10:39.920 | known as "perfect pitch," and it is exceptionally rare. Only about one in every 10,000 people has
00:10:47.360 | it. It is much less rare among world-class musicians than among the rest of us, but even
00:10:52.560 | among virtuosos it is far from normal. Beethoven is thought to have had it. Brahms did not. Vladimir
00:10:59.520 | Horowitz had it. Igor Stravinsky did not. Frank Sinatra had it. Miles Davis did not. It would
00:11:06.480 | seem, in short, to be a perfect example of an innate talent that a few lucky people are born
00:11:12.480 | with and most are not. Indeed, that is what was widely believed for at least 200 years.
00:11:18.560 | But over the past few decades, a very different understanding of perfect pitch has emerged,
00:11:23.440 | one that points to an equally different vision of the sorts of gifts that life has to offer.
00:11:29.120 | The first hint emerged with the observation that the only people who had received this
00:11:34.160 | "gift" had also received some sort of musical training early in their childhood. In particular,
00:11:40.800 | a good deal of research has shown that nearly everyone with perfect pitch began musical
00:11:45.440 | training at a very young age, generally around 3-5 years old. But if perfect pitch is an innate
00:11:52.720 | ability, something that you are either born with or not, then it shouldn't make any difference
00:11:56.800 | whether you received music training as a child. All that should matter is that you get enough
00:12:02.400 | musical training, at any time in your life, to learn the names of the notes.
00:12:05.600 | The next clue appeared when researchers noticed that perfect pitch is much more common among
00:12:11.040 | people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and several
00:12:16.000 | other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.
00:12:20.480 | If perfect pitch is indeed a genetic gift, then the only way that the tonal language connection
00:12:26.160 | would make sense would be if people of Asian ancestry are more likely to have genes for
00:12:31.280 | perfect pitch than people whose ancestors come from elsewhere, such as Europe or Africa.
00:12:36.320 | But that is something that is easy to test for. You just recruit a number of people of
00:12:40.640 | Asian ancestry who grew up speaking English or some other non-tonal language and see if
00:12:45.440 | they are more likely to have perfect pitch. That research has been done, and it turns out that
00:12:50.160 | people of Asian heritage who don't grow up speaking a tonal language are no more likely
00:12:54.480 | than people of other ethnicities to have perfect pitch. So, it's not the Asian genetic heritage,
00:13:00.160 | but rather learning a tonal language that makes having perfect pitch more likely.
00:13:04.960 | Up until a few years ago, this was pretty much what we knew. Studying music as a child was
00:13:09.520 | thought to be essential to having perfect pitch, and growing up speaking a tonal language increased
00:13:14.320 | your odds of having perfect pitch. Scientists could not say with certainty whether perfect
00:13:19.920 | pitch was an innate talent, but they knew that if it was a gift, it was a gift that
00:13:24.960 | only appeared among those people who had received some training in pitch in childhood. In other
00:13:30.880 | words, it would have to be some sort of use-it-or-lose-it gift. Even the lucky few people
00:13:36.080 | who are born with a gift for perfect pitch would have to do something, in particular some sort of
00:13:42.160 | musical training while young to develop it. We now know that this isn't the case either.
00:13:47.680 | The true character of perfect pitch was revealed in 2014, thanks to a beautiful experiment carried
00:13:54.240 | out at Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo and reported in the scientific journal Psychology of Music.
00:14:00.720 | The Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara recruited 24 children between the ages of 2 and 6
00:14:08.240 | and put them through a months-long training course designed to teach them to identify,
00:14:13.040 | simply by their sound, various chords played on the piano. The chords were all major chords with
00:14:19.360 | three notes, such as C major chord with middle C and the E and G notes immediately above middle C.
00:14:25.600 | The children were given four or five short training sessions per day, each lasting just a
00:14:30.240 | few minutes, and each child continued training until he or she could identify all 14 of the
00:14:35.600 | target chords that Sakakibara had selected. Some of the children completed the training in less
00:14:41.360 | than a year, while others took as long as a year and a half. Then, once a child had learned to
00:14:46.240 | identify the 14 chords, Sakakibara tested that child to see if he or she could correctly name
00:14:52.160 | individual notes. After completing training, every one of the children in the study had
00:14:56.400 | developed perfect pitch and could identify individual notes played on the piano.
00:15:00.320 | This is an astonishing result. While in normal circumstances only one in every 10,000 people
00:15:07.840 | develops perfect pitch, every single one of Sakakibara's students did. The clear implication
00:15:13.600 | is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon a lucky few, is an ability that
00:15:18.880 | pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training. The study has completely
00:15:24.240 | rewritten our understanding of perfect pitch. So, what about Mozart's perfect pitch? A little
00:15:30.480 | investigation into his background gives us a pretty good idea of what happened. Wolfgang's
00:15:35.280 | father, Leopold Mozart, was a moderately talented violinist and composer, who had never had the
00:15:40.560 | degree of success he desired, so he set out to turn his children into the sort of musicians he
00:15:45.520 | himself had always wanted to be. He began with Mozart's older sister, Maria Anna, who by the
00:15:51.680 | time she was 11 was described by contemporaries as playing the piano and harpsichord as well as
00:15:57.440 | professional adult musicians. The elder Mozart, who wrote the first training book for children's
00:16:03.040 | musical development, began working with Wolfgang at an even younger age than he had started with
00:16:08.080 | Maria Anna. By the time Wolfgang was four, his father was working with him full-time,
00:16:12.960 | on the violin, the keyboard, and more. While we don't know exactly what exercises Mozart's father
00:16:18.640 | used to train his son, we do know that by the time Mozart was six or seven, he had trained far
00:16:23.440 | more intensely and for far longer than the two dozen children who developed perfect pitch through
00:16:28.240 | Sakakibara's practice sessions. In retrospect, then, there should be nothing at all surprising
00:16:33.840 | about Mozart's development of perfect pitch. So, did the seven-year-old Wolfgang have a gift for
00:16:39.520 | perfect pitch? Yes and no. Was he born with some rare genetic endowment that allowed him to identify
00:16:45.920 | the precise pitch of a piano note or a whistling tea kettle? Everything that scientists have
00:16:51.280 | learned about perfect pitch says no. Indeed, if Mozart had been raised in some other family without
00:16:56.800 | exposure to music, or without enough of the right sort of exposure, he would certainly have never
00:17:01.520 | developed that ability at all. Nonetheless, Mozart was indeed born with a gift, and it was the same
00:17:06.720 | gift that the children in Sakakibara's study were born with. They were all endowed with a brain so
00:17:12.000 | flexible and adaptable that it could, with the right sort of training, develop a capability that
00:17:16.960 | seems quite magical to those of us who do not possess it. In short, perfect pitch is not the
00:17:24.000 | gift, but rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift, and as nearly as we can tell,
00:17:32.480 | pretty much everyone is born with that gift. Now, the author goes on and, as I said, gives many
00:17:40.880 | interesting examples, but one of the most important ones to me was his demonstration of the fact
00:17:49.120 | that when you start learning, one of the most magical things is that when you start learning
00:17:54.480 | and developing in a certain area, you actually develop new physical traits, new physical
00:18:01.280 | abilities that make it easier for you to learn more. So, I would call this an example of what
00:18:08.880 | they call the Matthew Principle. Those who have will be given more, and those who have not, even
00:18:13.760 | what they do not have will be taken from them. Because when you do something, your brain actually
00:18:20.480 | physically adapts to that thing that you're doing. My favorite example of this was in the book Peak.
00:18:28.000 | Erickson gives the example of London cab drivers, and he shows how, evidently, in London, there's a
00:18:35.120 | very—to be a London cabbie is not an easy thing. There's a significant training and apprenticeship
00:18:40.720 | program. There's a very significant set of tests that the cab drivers have to pass before they're
00:18:46.640 | allowed to be an official London cabbie, and the tests involve them learning, basically, the city
00:18:53.120 | like the back of their hands. And so, neuroscientists and researchers started to study
00:18:58.160 | London cab drivers, and they worked through all of the questions relating to the London cab driver's
00:19:04.480 | ability. They discovered that the physical makeup of London cab drivers, in terms of their basic
00:19:11.760 | structure of their brain, how the gray matter of their brain is put together, is markedly different
00:19:17.840 | from a non-cab driver, and that the cab drivers all have this difference in their brain. So then
00:19:25.280 | they set out to say, "Well, are people with this difference in their brain actually just selecting
00:19:31.600 | themselves to be cab drivers, or is it the cab driving itself and the navigational skills that
00:19:37.600 | are building this ability?" And so, they went on in the book, and they talked about all the studies,
00:19:42.880 | and they did all of the studies to answer all of the questions about what people's brains are like
00:19:50.640 | before they start being a London cab driver, and then what people's brains are like after they
00:19:54.960 | become a London cab driver. And it shows that their brains change for it. They did all the tests to
00:20:01.040 | make sure that the science was good. And what the science demonstrated was that becoming a cab
00:20:07.040 | driver causes your brain to change and to adapt in terms of its skills of navigation. And he also
00:20:15.920 | cited other research that has been done showing the same thing that happens in other areas.
00:20:20.880 | Mathematicians' brains are different from non-mathematicians' brains. Musicians' brains
00:20:26.960 | are different than non-musicians' brains, even to the point of if you're a violinist,
00:20:31.680 | your brain is different because you will use generally your left hand to control the actual
00:20:36.800 | note placement. So, your brain is going to be different from someone else who is an instrument,
00:20:40.800 | who's a musician, but doesn't use his left hand in playing his instrument.
00:20:45.040 | And this is really powerful because it demonstrates that when we do something,
00:20:49.600 | not only do we get better at it in the natural process of practice makes perfect, but rather,
00:20:57.520 | we become more physically capable of getting better at it. Our brains and our bodies adapt
00:21:06.320 | to the task that we are putting upon them so that we have more physical resources to
00:21:13.200 | apply to the specific task. And there doesn't seem to be a limit to it.
00:21:17.920 | That concept is amazing to me. And to see him lay it out in a very systematic way,
00:21:26.400 | really, I found extraordinarily persuasive, just enormously persuasive. And when he laid out
00:21:33.040 | the ideas of how to do it, then we see its impact in society.
00:21:41.760 | Now, he spends a lot of time in the book talking about deliberate practice.
00:21:45.920 | Later, after reading the book, I realized that I had been seeing the term "deliberate practice"
00:21:50.480 | in many other places, and I'd been seeing his research cited. I just wasn't cluing into it
00:21:56.000 | as I am now. And in essence, this is just my layman version of it. Deliberate practice is a
00:22:02.640 | little bit hard to define, but what I think of it is simply as a purposefully improving the things
00:22:11.200 | that you're not—purposely improving the things that were at the edge under expert coaching and
00:22:19.440 | expert supervision. So, let me give an example. We can divide practice into different kinds of
00:22:24.800 | practice. Anderson talks about, I think, naive practice and purposeful practice and deliberate
00:22:30.320 | practice. So, naive practice is what most of us do. We just kind of go through the motions when
00:22:36.560 | we're doing something, and we just do it the same way that we've always done it. We hit the golf
00:22:40.880 | ball the same way we've always hit the golf ball. And what is unique about naive practice is that
00:22:46.800 | you don't actually get better, or at least you don't get better in a measurable, predictable way.
00:22:52.960 | The example I like to use of this is driving. By the time you reach, say, 30 years old, you've been
00:22:59.520 | driving a car for many, many years, and you've probably driven for many, many hours. You're
00:23:05.920 | going to continue in your life driving for many, many more hours and many, many years. But on the
00:23:11.600 | whole, just because you're driving your car more, your actual driving skills are not getting better.
00:23:19.760 | The average 50-year-old is not a more competent driver than the average 20-year-old. They're kind
00:23:25.360 | of about the same. Why? Well, because when we drive, we're basically always on automatic mode.
00:23:31.920 | We just get in and we go, and we don't change anything, and we're not actually getting better.
00:23:36.800 | And so, this is what most of us do in most parts of our life. We just do the same thing. We play
00:23:42.320 | the game the same way we've always done it. We practice music that we already know how to play.
00:23:46.240 | We cook and make the same recipes we've already had. We're not getting better because we're not
00:23:52.960 | improving or challenging ourselves. Once we reach that, what we perceive to be an acceptable level
00:23:59.840 | of performance, then additional hours of practice don't lead to any improvement.
00:24:06.320 | So, then we could go to purposeful practice. And purposeful practice is
00:24:16.080 | closer to deliberate practice, where we are specifically trying to improve in a certain way.
00:24:23.760 | So, if we're playing music, we're trying to play a certain piece of music through
00:24:27.920 | without any mistakes multiple times in a row. Or we're trying to specifically work on a certain
00:24:34.240 | technique that is necessary for our ping pong game. And so, here we are actually getting better.
00:24:41.360 | We're focusing, we're getting feedback, and we're genuinely getting better. And purposeful practice
00:24:48.960 | is effective at making us better, but it's not enough. What we need for true deliberate practice,
00:24:57.120 | the most important aspect, is we need to be improving in a field that is well-defined,
00:25:06.800 | where the skills and the outcomes are known by the experts. The structure of the field is
00:25:12.720 | well-defined. And we need to have a teacher who can give us specific practice activities
00:25:19.760 | that will help us to cross over the roadblocks that are in our face. And the idea is that with
00:25:27.600 | these, we can focus on that specific core set of skills that is hindering our further practice.
00:25:34.880 | And so, that's the core of deliberate practice. It really is something that can only be done
00:25:40.240 | in a field where the skills of success are well-known, and where we can hire and find
00:25:46.720 | an excellent coach. Otherwise, we're going to be just doing purposeful practice and
00:25:51.600 | making it up ourselves, just like the guy who was memorizing numbers made it up himself.
00:25:56.640 | What I found so encouraging about this was that it was a broad-scale science-based affirmation
00:26:03.760 | of basically what most any motivational speaker has been teaching for many, many years,
00:26:09.520 | that if someone else has done something, you can do it too, right? Anything you can do,
00:26:14.080 | I can do better. I can do anything better than you. Well, it's true if I follow the
00:26:18.800 | same practice. So, when we identify experts in a field, we figure out how they became
00:26:23.120 | that expert and what was it that made them so good, then we can design practice
00:26:28.240 | methodologies that will help us to improve. And those practice methodologies are always going
00:26:34.640 | to keep us at kind of the cutting edge. The example that I remember, I think it came from
00:26:38.640 | the book, but that I think about, was a golfer. If you're a pro golfer, then one of the things
00:26:45.600 | that you're working on is your skill is the kinds of skills that very rarely will anyone else need.
00:26:52.640 | So, I guess we go to Tiger Woods as an example, right? This guy that we all understand is an
00:26:59.680 | amazing golfer. When Tiger Woods is practicing, he's not sitting around and practicing his drive
00:27:06.800 | off of the tee. That's not where he needs practice. He has a perfect drive, he's practiced
00:27:12.880 | it a bazillion times, and there's no need for any further practice of that. But what a guy like him
00:27:18.320 | needs to do is practice the very extreme skills. So, in one of the books, it was talked about how
00:27:25.360 | a golfer will go out to a sandpit and will systematically sink balls into the sandpit and
00:27:31.040 | try to shoot very hard shots out of the sandpit. That's something and create just crazy stuff,
00:27:38.160 | put the ball in, step on it, put it down under and do this. And those are skills that are really
00:27:44.240 | important, but they're really only important, say, once a year or once every couple of years.
00:27:49.840 | But yet in that moment when you're playing the game and you've hit the ball into the sandpit,
00:27:56.080 | the fact that you've practiced this tiny skill hundreds or thousands of times means that there's
00:28:02.320 | a much greater likelihood that that one shot that you make once a year will lead to your having the
00:28:09.520 | winning score. And in the expert level, that's what it is. It's always these tiny little things
00:28:14.400 | that are at the very margin, but that's where your practice has to focus on. So, the concept
00:28:19.760 | of deliberate practice is enormously freeing and motivating because it means that I can put together
00:28:26.240 | a way to improve that's appropriate for me. I can do anything that I want to do. I can build
00:28:34.240 | a practice strategy that allows me to accomplish anything that I'm looking to accomplish.
00:28:40.320 | The ultimate vindication of this would have to do, as a kind of a scientific theory,
00:28:49.040 | it would really be vindicated if we could predict in advance who's going to be an expert and know
00:28:56.320 | that it's not kind of an accident that it happens. And the most powerful story that you'll hear
00:29:01.440 | repeatedly when you start getting into this area of research has to do with a man named
00:29:05.840 | Laszlo Polgar and his wife and three daughters. Let me read you a little bit of the story.
00:29:10.400 | In the late 1960s, the Hungarian psychologist Laszlo Polgar and his wife Clara embarked on a
00:29:17.600 | grand experiment that would consume their lives for the next quarter century. Laszlo had studied
00:29:23.120 | hundreds of people who were considered geniuses in one field or another, and he'd concluded that
00:29:28.720 | with the proper rearing, any child could be turned into a genius. When he was wooing Clara,
00:29:34.320 | he outlined his theories and explained that he was looking for a wife who would collaborate with him
00:29:39.680 | to test his theories on their own children. Clara, a teacher from Ukraine, must have been a very
00:29:46.000 | special woman, for she responded positively to this unorthodox courtship and agreed to Laszlo's
00:29:51.360 | proposals for marriage and for turning their future children into geniuses. Laszlo was so
00:29:56.720 | sure his training program would work for any area that he wasn't picky about which particular one
00:30:01.760 | he and Clara would target, and the two of them discussed various options. Languages were one
00:30:07.120 | option. Just how many languages might it be possible to teach a child? Mathematics was
00:30:11.840 | another possibility. Top-flight mathematicians were highly regarded in Eastern Europe at the
00:30:16.400 | time, as the communist regime sought ways to prove their superiority over the decadent West.
00:30:21.360 | Mathematics would have the added advantage that there were no top-level female mathematicians
00:30:26.480 | at the time, so assuming that he and Clara had a daughter, Laszlo would prove his claims even
00:30:31.040 | more convincingly. But he and Clara settled on the third option. "We could do the same thing
00:30:37.040 | with any subject. If you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject,"
00:30:42.320 | Clara would later tell a newspaper reporter. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective
00:30:48.080 | and easy to measure." Chess had always been thought of as a game for the male mind, with
00:30:54.000 | female chess players treated as second-class citizens. The women had their own tournaments
00:30:58.560 | and championships because it was thought it wouldn't be fair to put them up against the men,
00:31:02.960 | and there had never been a female grandmaster. Indeed, at the time, the common attitude toward
00:31:07.680 | women playing chess was much like Samuel Johnson's famous quote, "A woman's preaching is like a dog's
00:31:13.520 | walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
00:31:18.560 | The Polgars were blessed with three children, all of them girls. All the better to prove Laszlo's
00:31:25.200 | point. Their first daughter, born in April 1969, was named Susan (in Hungarian, Susana). Sophia
00:31:33.120 | followed in November 1974, and then Judith in July 1976. Laszlo and Clara homeschooled their
00:31:40.400 | daughters in order to spend as much time as possible focusing on chess. It didn't take long
00:31:45.120 | for the Polgars' experiment to become a tremendous success. Susan was just four years old when she
00:31:51.280 | won her first tournament, dominating the Budapest Girls Under Eleven Championship with ten wins,
00:31:56.480 | no losses, and no ties. At 15, she became the top-ranked woman chess player in the world,
00:32:02.160 | and she went on to become the first woman to be awarded grandmaster status via the same path that
00:32:06.720 | the males must take. Two other women had been named grandmasters after winning female-only
00:32:11.680 | world championships. And Susan wouldn't even be the most accomplished of the girls.
00:32:18.400 | Sophia, the second daughter, also had an amazing chess career. Perhaps its highlight came when
00:32:23.120 | she was only 14, when she dominated a tournament in Rome that included several highly-regarded
00:32:28.640 | male grandmasters. By winning eight of her nine games and drawing the ninth, she earned a single
00:32:34.640 | tournament chess rating (that is, a rating based only on the games of that tournament) of 2,735,
00:32:41.520 | which was one of the highest tournament ratings ever for either a male or female player.
00:32:47.120 | That was in 1989, and people in the chess world still talk about "the sack of Rome."
00:32:52.320 | Although Sophia's highest overall chess rating was 2,540, well over the 2,500 threshold for
00:32:59.840 | grandmaster, and although she had performed more than well enough in sanctioned tournaments,
00:33:04.400 | she was never awarded grandmaster status, a result that was apparently more a political
00:33:09.360 | decision than a judgment about her chess prowess. Like her sisters, she never tried to make nice
00:33:14.320 | with the male chess establishment. Sophia was at one time the sixth-ranked female chess player in
00:33:20.160 | the world. Among the Polgar sisters, though, she could be considered the "slacker."
00:33:24.960 | Judith was the crown jewel of Laszlo Polgar's experiment. She became a grandmaster at 15
00:33:31.360 | years, 5 months, making her, at that time, the youngest person, male or female, to ever reach
00:33:38.080 | that level. She was the number one-ranked women's chess player in the world for 25 years until she
00:33:43.360 | retired from chess in 2014. At one time, she was ranked number eight in the world among all chess
00:33:49.680 | players, male or female, and in 2005, she became the first, and so far only, woman to play in the
00:33:56.800 | overall world chess championship. The Polgar sisters were all clearly experts. Each of them
00:34:03.520 | became among the very best in the world in an area in which the measured performance is extremely
00:34:09.120 | objective. There are no style points in chess. Your school background doesn't matter. Your resume
00:34:15.040 | doesn't count. So we know, without any doubts, just how good they were. And they were very,
00:34:20.720 | very good. And while some details of their background are unusual – very few parents
00:34:26.320 | are so focused on turning their children into the best in the world at something – they provide a
00:34:30.720 | clear, if somewhat extreme, example of what it takes to become an expert performer. The paths
00:34:36.000 | that Susan, Sophia, and Judith took to chess mastery are in line with the path that essentially
00:34:41.440 | all experts have taken to become extraordinary. In particular, psychologists have found that an
00:34:47.440 | expert's development passes through four distinct stages, from the first glimmers of interest to
00:34:53.360 | full-fledged expertise. Everything we know about the Polgar sisters suggests they went through
00:34:59.280 | those same stages, if perhaps in a slightly different fashion because of how their father
00:35:04.240 | directed their development. And he goes on and talks about the four stages, which are starting
00:35:09.120 | out. In the starting out stage, children are introduced in a playful way to what will eventually
00:35:13.760 | become their field of interest. And at this stage, the parents of children who are to become experts
00:35:19.520 | play a crucial role in the child's development. For one thing, the parents give their children a
00:35:23.760 | great deal of time, attention, and encouragement. For another, the parents tend to be very
00:35:28.800 | achievement-oriented and teach their children such values as self-discipline, hard work,
00:35:34.000 | responsibility, and spending one's time constructively. And once a child becomes
00:35:39.760 | interested in a particular field, he or she is expected to approach it with those same attributes,
00:35:45.600 | discipline, hard work, achievement. This is a crucial period in a child's development.
00:35:51.360 | Many children will find some initial motivation to explore or to try something because of their
00:35:56.080 | natural curiosity or playfulness. And parents have an opportunity to use this initial interest as a
00:36:01.280 | springboard to an activity. But that initial curiosity-driven motivation needs to be
00:36:06.960 | supplemented. One excellent supplement, particularly with smaller children, is praise.
00:36:12.080 | Another motivation is the satisfaction of having developed a certain skill,
00:36:15.600 | particularly if that achievement is acknowledged by a parent. Once a child can consistently hit
00:36:20.560 | a ball with a bat, say, or play a simple tune on the piano or count the number of eggs in a carton,
00:36:25.360 | that achievement becomes a point of pride and serves as motivation for further achievements
00:36:29.520 | in that area. It goes on, talks about how practice is not such a big part of the initial stage,
00:36:35.280 | but then in stage two, becoming serious. Once a future expert performer becomes interested
00:36:40.400 | and shows some promise in an area, the typical next step is to take lessons from a coach or
00:36:45.200 | teacher. At this point, most of these students encounter deliberate practice for the first time.
00:36:50.320 | Unlike their experiences up to this point, which have been mainly playful activities,
00:36:55.840 | their practice is about to become work. One of the things that's most interesting about
00:37:02.400 | the concept of deliberate practice is how hard it is. It's exhausting. The world's greatest
00:37:09.360 | performers can only engage in deliberate practice, true deliberate practice, for very small quantities
00:37:15.760 | of time because that deliberate practice is so exhausting. So it really is hard work.
00:37:23.680 | So what can parents do? Well, parents can help with motivation.
00:37:27.120 | Judith has said that her father was the best motivator she had ever met,
00:37:31.200 | and this is perhaps the most important factor in the early days of an expert's development,
00:37:35.680 | maintaining that interest and motivation while the skills and habits are being built.
00:37:40.160 | Parents have an important role to play as well. Parents help their children establish routines,
00:37:46.240 | say, practicing the piano for an hour each day, and they give them support and encouragement and
00:37:52.160 | praise them for improvements. Some parents of Bloom's future experts had to resort to tactics
00:37:59.200 | like threatening to cut off piano lessons and sell the piano or to no longer take the child
00:38:04.240 | to swim practice. Obviously, all of the future expert performers decided at this juncture that
00:38:10.160 | they wanted to keep going. Others might choose otherwise. While there are various ways that
00:38:14.800 | parents and teachers can motivate children, the motivation must ultimately be something
00:38:20.080 | that comes from within the child or else it won't endure. And the author talks about other ways to
00:38:25.120 | accomplish that. The third phase is commitment. Generally, when they're in their early or mid
00:38:30.560 | teens, the future experts make a major commitment to becoming the best that they can be. This
00:38:35.840 | commitment is the third stage. Now, students will often seek out the best teachers or schools for
00:38:41.120 | their training, even if it requires moving across country. In most cases, that teacher will be
00:38:46.000 | someone who has reached the highest levels in the field him or herself, a concert pianist-turned
00:38:50.320 | teacher, a swimming coach who has trained Olympic athletes, a top research mathematician, and so on.
00:38:55.680 | It is generally not easy to be accepted into these programs, and acceptance means that the teacher
00:39:00.080 | shares the student's belief that he or she can reach the highest levels. Here, the author talks
00:39:06.560 | about the benefits of starting young. In Bloom's study, all 120 experts had become their climb
00:39:12.080 | toward that pinnacle as children, which is typical among expert performers. But people
00:39:17.760 | frequently ask me what the possibilities are for someone who doesn't begin training until later in
00:39:22.000 | life. While the specific details vary by field, there are relatively few absolute limitations on
00:39:28.080 | what is possible for people who begin training as adults. Indeed, the practical limitations,
00:39:32.880 | such as the fact that few adults have four to five hours a day to devote to deliberate practice,
00:39:37.440 | are often more of an issue than any physical or mental limitations. However, expertise in some
00:39:44.080 | fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn't start training as a child. Understanding
00:39:51.120 | such limitations can help you decide which areas you might wish to pursue.
00:39:54.720 | The most obvious performance issues are those that involve physical abilities.
00:39:59.680 | In the general population, physical performance peaks around age 20. With increasing age,
00:40:04.640 | we lose flexibility. We become more prone to injury and we take longer to heal. We slow down.
00:40:10.000 | Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their 20s. Professional athletes
00:40:15.440 | can remain competitive in their 30s or even early 40s with recent advances in training.
00:40:19.920 | In fact, people can train effectively well into their 80s. Much of the age-related deterioration
00:40:25.280 | in various skills happens because people decrease or stop their training. Older people who continue
00:40:30.640 | to train regularly see their performance decrease much less. There are master's divisions in track
00:40:35.680 | and field competition with age brackets up to 80 and beyond. And the people who train for these
00:40:40.320 | events do so in precisely the same way that people who are decades younger do. They just train for
00:40:45.920 | shorter periods with less intensity because of the increased risk of injury and the increased
00:40:50.400 | amount of time the body takes to recover from training. Now, in addition to the gradual
00:40:55.520 | deterioration in physical abilities that accompanies aging, some physical skills
00:40:59.440 | simply cannot be developed to expert levels if one doesn't start working on them in childhood.
00:41:05.600 | The human body is growing and developing through adolescence up to the late teens or early 20s.
00:41:11.200 | But once we hit 20 or so, our skeletal structure is mostly set, which has implications for certain
00:41:16.720 | abilities. For example, if ballet dancers are to develop the classic turnout, the ability to
00:41:21.840 | rotate the entire leg, beginning at the hip, so that it points directly to the side, they must
00:41:26.800 | start early. If they wait until after their hip and knee joints calcify, which typically happens
00:41:31.760 | between the ages of 8 and 12 years, they'll probably never be able to get a full turnout.
00:41:37.280 | The same sort of thing is true for the shoulders of athletes, like baseball pitchers,
00:41:41.440 | whose sport requires them to throw a ball with an overhead motion. Only those who start training at
00:41:46.320 | an early age will have the requisite range of motion as adults, with the throwing arm able
00:41:50.800 | to be stretched well back behind the shoulder to produce the classic windup. And something similar
00:41:56.000 | holds true with the motion tennis players use when serving. Only those who start young have the full
00:42:01.600 | range of the serving motion. Professional tennis players who start young also overdevelop the
00:42:07.040 | forearm they use to handle the racket. Not just the muscles, but the bones as well. The bones in
00:42:12.320 | a tennis player's dominant arm can be 20% thicker than the bones in his or her other arm, a huge
00:42:18.240 | difference that allows the bones in the dominant arm to endure the steady jolting that comes with
00:42:23.280 | hitting a tennis ball that may be traveling as fast as 50 miles per hour. However, even tennis
00:42:28.640 | players who start later in life, in their 20s, still can adapt to some degree, but just not as
00:42:34.240 | much as those who start younger. In other words, our bones retain their ability to change in
00:42:38.720 | response to stress well beyond puberty. We witness this pattern again and again when we examine the
00:42:44.000 | relationship between age and the body's ability to adapt to stresses or other stimuli. The body
00:42:49.200 | and the brain both are more adaptable during childhood and adolescence than they are in
00:42:53.120 | adulthood, but in most ways they remain adaptable to some degree throughout life.
00:42:57.600 | The relationship between age and adaptability varies considerably according to exactly which
00:43:03.360 | characteristic you have in mind, and the patterns are very different for mental adaptations than for
00:43:09.440 | physical ones. Consider the various ways that musical training can affect the brain. Studies
00:43:14.800 | have shown that some parts of the brain are larger in musicians than in non-musicians,
00:43:19.440 | but there are certain parts of the brain for which this is true only if the musician began
00:43:23.600 | studying music as a young child. Researchers have found proof of this, for example, in the
00:43:28.240 | corpus callosum, the collection of tissue that connects the brain's hemispheres and serves as
00:43:32.960 | the communications path between them. The corpus callosum is significantly larger in adult musicians
00:43:38.400 | than in adult non-musicians, but a closer look finds that it is really only larger in musicians
00:43:44.240 | who started practicing before they were seven. A different example a couple pages later. Consider
00:43:50.080 | what happens to the brain when it learns multiple languages. It is well known that people who speak
00:43:54.560 | two or more languages have more gray matter in certain parts of the brain, in particular the
00:44:00.000 | inferior parietal cortex, which is known to play a role in language, and that the earlier a person
00:44:06.160 | learned a second language, the more extra gray matter there is. To everyone else this is a desk,
00:44:11.680 | but to you it's an entrepeneur, your starting block. You're saying a desk? This is opportunity.
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00:44:24.560 | The Boost mobile network includes roaming coverage from partner networks which cover
00:44:27.680 | 99% of the U.S. population. Moto G 5G on us. When you switch with ID verification,
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00:44:39.760 | Thus, learning languages early in life takes place, it seems, at least in part,
00:44:44.240 | through adding gray matter. But a study of multilingual people who as adults studied to
00:44:49.120 | become simultaneous interpreters found a very different effect on the brain. These simultaneous
00:44:54.640 | interpreters actually had less gray matter than people who could speak the same number of languages
00:44:59.280 | but who didn't work as simultaneous interpreters. The researchers who carried out the study
00:45:03.840 | speculated that this disparity was because of the different contexts in which the learning took
00:45:08.080 | place. When children and adolescents learn new languages, it is against the backdrop of increasing
00:45:13.440 | gray matter, and so their learning the additional languages may occur through the addition of gray
00:45:18.000 | matter. But when adults continue their focus on multiple languages, this time with an emphasis
00:45:22.480 | on simultaneous translation, it is against a backdrop of pruning synapses. Fascinating to
00:45:29.680 | dig into. I hope I'm whetting your appetite on the book. I need to go back and reread it
00:45:34.160 | because it's just so good. And this leads to kind of the final question that the book addresses,
00:45:41.840 | which is, what about natural talent? Whenever I write or speak about deliberate practice and
00:45:49.280 | expertise, I am invariably asked, but what about natural talent? In my articles and my talks,
00:45:55.360 | I always offer the same basic message that I have here. Expert performers develop their
00:46:01.280 | extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step-by-step
00:46:07.360 | in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts. Various sorts of practice can be
00:46:13.680 | effective, but the most effective of all is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice takes
00:46:19.120 | advantage of the natural adaptability of the human brain and body to create new abilities.
00:46:23.920 | Most of these abilities are created with the help of detailed mental representations,
00:46:28.880 | which allow us to analyze and respond to situations much more effectively than we could
00:46:34.080 | otherwise. "Fine," some people will reply, "we understand all that. But even so, aren't there
00:46:39.200 | some people who don't have to work as hard and can still be better than everyone else? And aren't
00:46:43.680 | there some people who are born without any talent for something, say music or math or sports,
00:46:48.560 | so that no matter how hard they try, they'll never be any good at it?"
00:46:51.760 | It is one of the most enduring and deep-seated of all beliefs about human nature
00:46:56.880 | that natural talent plays a major role in determining ability. This belief holds that
00:47:02.320 | some people are born with natural endowments that make it easier for them to become
00:47:06.480 | outstanding athletes or musicians or chess players or writers or mathematicians or whatever.
00:47:11.120 | While they may still need a certain amount of practice to develop their skills, they need far
00:47:17.280 | less than others who are not as talented, and they can ultimately reach much greater heights.
00:47:22.560 | My studies of experts point to quite a different explanation of why some people ultimately develop
00:47:27.600 | greater abilities in an area than others, with deliberate practice playing the starring role.
00:47:33.120 | So let's separate myth from reality by exploring the intertwined roles of talent and training in
00:47:38.400 | the development of extraordinary abilities. As we'll see, innate characteristics play a much
00:47:43.120 | smaller and much different role than many people generally assume. Now, you can go on and read
00:47:49.440 | about the magic of Paganini as his example, and Mozart and others, including he gives a story of
00:47:57.280 | the magical high jumper of Donald Thomas, cited in the book The Sports Gene, talks about various
00:48:03.600 | savants. But at the end of the day, the basic lesson that Erickson tries to teach is that
00:48:11.360 | genetic ability or talent, innate talent, is not the key factor that leads to the long-term outcome.
00:48:21.680 | Now, this is not without controversy. In fact, I'm quite interested myself in these areas of
00:48:28.880 | controversy. I would say the two areas of the greatest controversy would have to do with innate
00:48:36.800 | genetics, especially related to areas like athletic performance, and as well as innate
00:48:43.680 | characteristics as measured by IQ. Now, there is an enormous and robust and very vitriolic debate
00:48:51.360 | around the topic of IQ. Is someone's natural IQ a determinative factor in life outcomes?
00:49:02.320 | This is one of the most hotly debated areas that I know of in the social sciences, where it's
00:49:06.960 | actually basically forbidden to debate it, because people say, "Well, if you categorize people based
00:49:12.480 | upon their natural IQ, then that's unfair, and it's not leading to the long-term outcome." So,
00:49:20.640 | if you basically want to destroy your potential for a noted, illustrious career, start becoming
00:49:25.920 | an IQ researcher. I don't have the competence to actually assess this. I don't know enough about
00:49:32.640 | the literature. I don't understand it. I don't have the competence to hold a position on this,
00:49:36.080 | so I don't have a position on it. What's fascinating is if you start looking into IQ,
00:49:40.640 | there are a number of studies that demonstrate how the enormous predictive value of somebody's IQ in
00:49:50.160 | terms of their long-term life outcomes, and we can see all kinds of evidence that IQ seems to be
00:49:57.120 | persuasive. At least constrained to this subject of genius, Erickson touches on this,
00:50:04.160 | and he talks about the fact that the impact of IQ is measurable,
00:50:09.920 | but not determinative of ultimate performance. Let me read you just a
00:50:20.000 | short example when he's talking about chess players. "Perhaps the best example we have of
00:50:26.320 | this comes from chess. In the popular imagination, great skill in chess is intimately tied to
00:50:31.920 | tremendous logic and intellect. If an author or screenwriter wishes to signal that a character is
00:50:37.760 | particularly brilliant, that character will be seated at a chessboard and will checkmate his or
00:50:42.080 | her opponent with the proper savoir-faire. Even better, this genius will come across a game
00:50:47.040 | already in progress and, after glancing at the board for a second or two, point out the winning
00:50:51.680 | line of play. Quite often the chess player is a quirky but brilliant detective or perhaps the
00:50:56.800 | equally quirky and almost equally brilliant criminal mastermind, or preferably both,
00:51:01.440 | so that the opponents can face each other across the board, matching wits and trading witticisms.
00:51:05.760 | Sometimes, as in the climactic scene in the 2011 movie A Game of Shadows with Sherlock Holmes and
00:51:12.400 | Professor Moriarty, the two of them end up ignoring the chessboard altogether and just spit
00:51:17.360 | out their moves at each other like two boxers fainting and jabbing until one lands the knockout
00:51:21.840 | punch. But no matter the circumstances, the message is always the same. A mastery of chess signals the
00:51:28.480 | sort of deep intelligence that only a few are fortunate enough to be born with. And conversely,
00:51:34.400 | playing chess brilliantly demands a brilliant mind. And if you examine chess-playing ability
00:51:40.400 | in children who are just learning to play, those with higher IQs do indeed become better players
00:51:46.400 | faster. But that is just the beginning of the story. And it is the end of the story that truly
00:51:52.960 | tells the tale. Over the years, many researchers have examined the connection between intelligence
00:51:58.240 | and chess-playing ability. Some of the earliest work was done in the 1890s by Alfred Bennett,
00:52:03.600 | the father of intelligence testing, who studied chess players mainly in an attempt to understand
00:52:08.320 | what sort of memory was required to play blindfold chess. Bennett developed his IQ test as a method
00:52:14.720 | of identifying students who had problems doing well in school. And indeed, he succeeded,
00:52:19.520 | as IQ tests are very much correlated with academic success. But since Bennett's time,
00:52:25.440 | many researchers have argued that the IQ test measures general abilities that are correlated
00:52:29.920 | with success in virtually any domain, such as music and chess. These researchers thus
00:52:35.280 | believe that IQ tests measure some sort of general innate intelligence. Others disagree, however,
00:52:41.760 | and argue that IQ is best thought of not as innate intelligence, but rather simply as what IQ tests
00:52:48.560 | measure, which can include such things as knowledge about relatively rare words and
00:52:52.640 | acquired skills in mathematics. Without delving deeply into that debate, I will just say that I
00:52:57.520 | think it is best to not equate IQ with innate intelligence, but simply to stick with the facts
00:53:03.600 | and think of IQ as some cognitive factor measured by IQ tests that has been shown to predict certain
00:53:09.600 | things, such as success in school. It goes on and talks about chess then, and here is the relevant
00:53:17.200 | section. But these studies were done in young chess players, and while they found that these
00:53:22.400 | young players did have higher than average IQ scores, there was no clear relationship between IQ
00:53:28.000 | and how good a particular player was. By contrast, studies done in adults have generally found adult
00:53:33.200 | chess players to have no better visuospatial abilities than normal non-chess playing adults.
00:53:38.880 | Research has also shown that skilled adult chess players, even grandmasters, do not have
00:53:44.640 | systematically higher IQs than other adults with similar levels of education, nor is there any
00:53:50.640 | correlation between the IQs of highly skilled chess players and their chess ratings. As strange
00:53:56.880 | as it seems to those of us who have grown up with the tortured but brilliant fictional characters
00:54:00.800 | who excel at chess, all of the evidence says that higher intelligence is not correlated
00:54:06.560 | with better chess playing among adults. Even stranger is the case of Go, which has been often
00:54:12.000 | referred to as the Asian version of chess. It talks about what the game is. While there's only
00:54:17.360 | one type of piece and only one type of move, putting a stone at an intersection point, the
00:54:21.440 | game is actually more complex than chess in the sense that there are far more different possible
00:54:25.840 | games that can be played, and indeed it has proved far more challenging than chess to develop
00:54:30.880 | software to play the game well. Unlike the best chess playing computer programs, which can
00:54:36.880 | consistently beat chess grandmasters, the best Go programs, at least as this is written in 2015,
00:54:42.880 | cannot stand up to top-ranked Go players. Thus, as with chess, you might assume that Go masters
00:54:49.360 | must have high IQs or perhaps exceptional visuospatial skills. But again, you would be
00:54:55.920 | wrong. Recent studies of Go masters have found that their average IQ is, if anything, below
00:55:03.680 | average. Two separate studies of Korean Go experts found an average IQ of about 93,
00:55:09.040 | compared with control groups of non-Go playing Koreans matched for age and sex, which had an
00:55:13.520 | average IQ around 100. While the number of Go masters in the two studies were small enough
00:55:19.600 | that the below average IQs could have just been statistical flukes, it is clear that Go masters,
00:55:24.560 | on average, score no higher on IQ tests than people in the general population.
00:55:29.680 | Against this background, the three British researchers set out to resolve the conflicting
00:55:34.480 | results on chess players. Does a higher intelligence, that is, a higher IQ score,
00:55:40.240 | help one develop a better chess game or not? The researchers' plan was to do a study that
00:55:44.880 | took into account both intelligence and practice time. Earlier studies had looked at one or the
00:55:50.800 | other but not both. It goes around and explains how the research was identified. When the
00:55:56.880 | researchers analyzed all their data, they found results similar to those seen by other researchers.
00:56:02.080 | The amount of chess practice that the children had done was the biggest factor in explaining
00:56:07.040 | how well they played chess, with more practice being correlated with better scores on the various
00:56:12.160 | measures of chess skill. A smaller but still significant factor was intelligence, with higher
00:56:17.680 | IQ being related to better chess skills. Surprisingly, visuospatial intelligence wasn't
00:56:23.280 | the most important factor, but rather memory and processing speed were. Looking at all their
00:56:27.840 | evidence, the researchers concluded that in children of this age, practice is the key factor
00:56:32.560 | in success, although innate intelligence, or IQ, still plays a role. The picture changed
00:56:39.040 | dramatically, however, when the researchers looked at only the elite players in the group.
00:56:44.160 | These were 23 children, all boys. The show talks about their elite skills. Among these 23 elite
00:56:50.080 | players, the amount of practice was still the major factor determining their chess skills,
00:56:54.720 | but intelligence played no noticeable role. While the elite group did have a somewhat higher average
00:57:01.760 | IQ than the average IQ for the entire group of 57, the players in the elite group with lower IQs were,
00:57:08.160 | on average, slightly better players than those in the elite group with high IQ.
00:57:12.080 | Stop and digest that for a moment. Among these young, elite chess players,
00:57:17.680 | not only was a higher IQ no advantage, but it seemed to put them at a slight disadvantage.
00:57:22.640 | The reason, the researchers found, was that the elite players with lower IQs tended to practice
00:57:29.680 | more, which improved their chess game to the point that they played better than the high IQ
00:57:35.680 | elite players. Now, the author goes on and expands the actual research on this
00:57:40.560 | more, and it's so fascinating. But consider this. If you see yourself as, if you see or are,
00:57:47.760 | if you're genuinely not as skilled in an area as someone else is naturally in that area,
00:57:54.000 | and if you practice more, there's a good chance that your additional amounts of practice
00:57:59.920 | can make up for the other person's innate advantage and superiority over you such
00:58:06.400 | that you can beat the other person. That's one of the most powerful, empowering ideas that I
00:58:11.760 | can imagine. Now, let's go on to a different section as we wrap up our discussion on this
00:58:15.520 | particular book, "The Real Role of Innate Characteristics." The results from the chess
00:58:20.720 | study provide a crucial insight into the interplay between talent and practice in the development of
00:58:26.480 | various skills. While people with certain innate characteristics, IQ in the case of the chess study,
00:58:32.480 | may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time
00:58:37.520 | and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining
00:58:42.240 | how skilled a person becomes. Researchers have seen evidence of this pattern in many different
00:58:47.760 | fields. In music, as in chess, there is an early correlation between IQ and performance. For
00:58:54.960 | example, a study of 91 5th grade students who were given piano instruction for six months found that
00:58:59.760 | on average, the students with higher IQs performed better at the end of those six months than those
00:59:04.480 | with lower IQs. However, the measured correlation between IQ and music performance gets smaller as
00:59:11.360 | the years of music study increase, and tests have found no relationship between IQ and music
00:59:17.120 | performance among music majors in college or among professional musicians. In a study on expertise
00:59:23.440 | in oral surgery, the performance of dental students was found to be related to their performance on
00:59:27.840 | tests of visual spatial ability, and the students who scored higher on those tests also performed
00:59:33.200 | better on surgical simulations done on the model of a jaw. However, when the same test was done on
00:59:38.720 | dental residents and dental surgeons, no such correlation was found. Thus, the initial influence
00:59:44.720 | of visual spatial ability on surgical performance disappears over time as the dental students
00:59:50.000 | practice their skills, and by the time they become residents, the differences in talent,
00:59:55.200 | in this case visual spatial ability, no longer have a noticeable effect. Among the people studying
01:00:01.280 | to be London taxi drivers that we discussed in Chapter 2, there was no difference in IQ between
01:00:05.440 | the ones who finished the course and became certified drivers and those who dropped out.
01:00:09.920 | IQ made no difference in how well the drivers could learn to find their way around London.
01:00:14.800 | The average IQ of scientists is certainly higher than the average IQ of the general population,
01:00:20.480 | but among scientists, there is no correlation between IQ and scientific productivity.
01:00:26.080 | Indeed, a number of Nobel Prize-winning scientists have had IQs that would not even
01:00:30.400 | qualify them for MENSA, an organization whose members must have a measured IQ of at least 132,
01:00:36.160 | a number that puts you in the upper two percentile of the population.
01:00:42.800 | Skipping down the discussion of scientists, a number of researchers have suggested that
01:00:46.640 | there are, in general, minimum requirements for performing capably in various areas.
01:00:50.960 | For instance, it has been suggested that scientists in at least some fields need an
01:00:54.960 | IQ score of around 110 to 120 to be successful, but that a higher score doesn't confer any
01:01:00.800 | additional benefit. However, it is not clear whether that IQ score of 110 is necessary
01:01:06.720 | to actually perform the duties of a scientist or simply to get to the point where you can be hired
01:01:12.400 | as a scientist. In many scientific fields, you need to hold a Ph.D. to be able to get
01:01:16.720 | research grants and conduct research, and getting a Ph.D. requires four to six years
01:01:21.120 | of successful postgraduate academic performance, with a high level of writing skills and a large
01:01:25.760 | vocabulary, which are essentially attributes measured by verbal intelligence tests.
01:01:30.720 | Furthermore, most science Ph.D. programs demand mathematical and logical thinking,
01:01:35.360 | which are measured by other components of intelligence tests. When college graduates
01:01:39.440 | apply to graduate school, they have to take such tests as the Graduate Record Examination, GRE,
01:01:44.240 | which measure these abilities, and only the high-scoring students are accepted into science
01:01:48.160 | graduate programs. Thus, from this perspective, it is not surprising that scientists generally
01:01:52.880 | have IQ scores of 110 to 120 or above. Without the ability to achieve such scores, it is unlikely
01:01:58.640 | they would have ever had the chance to become scientists in the first place.
01:02:02.400 | One could also speculate that there are certain "minimum talent" requirements for such things as
01:02:06.800 | playing sports or painting, so that people who fall below those requirements would find it
01:02:10.960 | difficult or impossible to become highly skilled in those areas. But outside of some very basic
01:02:16.640 | physical traits, such as height and body size in sports, we have no solid evidence that such
01:02:23.760 | minimum requirements exist. We do know, and this is important, that among those people who have
01:02:30.080 | practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no
01:02:35.680 | evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best.
01:02:42.880 | Once you get to the top, it isn't natural talent that makes the difference,
01:02:47.600 | at least not talent in the way it is usually understood as an innate ability to excel at a
01:02:53.520 | particular activity. I better stop. He talks about the dark side of believing in talent,
01:03:03.440 | which to me, I think, is the most important thing, and talks about where do we go from here.
01:03:09.520 | The big takeaways that I took from the book is that we can really dramatically improve
01:03:14.560 | our training methodologies by applying deliberate practice. When I finished reading this book,
01:03:20.880 | I took several dozen pages of screenshots and sent them to a friend of mine who's a physician,
01:03:26.320 | and basically just pointing out how we can dramatically improve training programs for
01:03:31.680 | skills. When I take the modern science that is presented by this skilled researcher and I look
01:03:40.640 | around, what I see is enormous opportunities for improvement in how we teach and in how we train.
01:03:46.240 | And I've tried to, this has been kind of one of my interests, is to say, how can I apply
01:03:53.600 | this modern knowledge that we have to how we teach and how we train? Because all of our
01:04:00.160 | training methodologies should involve the basic principles of deliberate practice,
01:04:05.680 | and this should be the case in how we teach reading, it should be the case in how we teach
01:04:08.960 | mathematics, it should be the case in how we teach sports, it should be the case in how
01:04:12.400 | we teach anything. And indeed, I think that we can measure the impact of these ideas across many,
01:04:20.400 | many fields. If you just look at the Olympics, which are just concluded here in 2024, and you
01:04:25.600 | take whatever discipline you're interested in and go back 30 years or 50 years, what you will see
01:04:31.920 | is that the Olympic performance of a previous competitor who got an Olympic medal in 1970
01:04:39.680 | today is basically the average performance of a high-scoring high school athlete, not in any way
01:04:46.080 | Olympic-level. And so we've pushed the envelope in so many things, especially physical endeavors,
01:04:52.720 | because of our ability to train more effectively. I think in mental endeavors,
01:04:58.000 | we could argue both sides. One thing I've said in the past is that I said it's just embarrassing
01:05:08.880 | how we've failed so enormously in making advances in educational abilities. If you go back and you
01:05:17.520 | look at a Harvard College entrance exam from the early 20th century, and you compare the
01:05:22.400 | amount of knowledge needed by that, and you compare that to today, it's astonishing how
01:05:28.160 | ignorant our modern generation is. And so I have made the statement that we should dramatically
01:05:33.840 | improve how we actually teach, because if we're not producing more knowledgeable, more informed
01:05:39.920 | graduates today than we were back then, we're failing. I don't agree with that anymore, though.
01:05:46.320 | I think I was wrong in saying that. I don't know how to quantify this. But as I thought about that,
01:05:51.440 | I realized that's not the case. Today, we're teaching a much bigger body of knowledge.
01:05:56.640 | If you were to go back to 1900 or 1800 and look at the amount of knowledge that a Harvard entrance,
01:06:04.960 | an entering college freshman was expected to know, there was a much deeper level of knowledge,
01:06:11.920 | especially in the humanities, especially in the classical languages and things like that.
01:06:16.720 | But I think today there's a much bigger body of knowledge that that entering student would know,
01:06:22.640 | because today there'll be much more advanced mathematics, much more advanced history,
01:06:26.720 | much more advanced science. And so I don't think it was right when I previously made those
01:06:32.080 | statements. But I would love to see somebody quantify that and try to figure it out. Regardless,
01:06:38.560 | the point remains that we should be incorporating the very best teaching methodologies in teaching
01:06:43.360 | these things. And if you're coaching someone, a young person or yourself, you always need to go
01:06:49.440 | out and find the best current teaching methodology, because we can and should find ourselves
01:06:54.400 | dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to learn the subjects that we're teaching. And I
01:06:59.840 | think we can do this and we should do this. This is basically all of my interest in homeschooling.
01:07:04.400 | I have enormously above average interest in these topics, enormously above average resources,
01:07:10.320 | enormously above average research abilities. And so this is what I do. This is my hobby,
01:07:15.840 | is I go out and try to find this stuff. And I see good results with the areas that I have
01:07:19.840 | adapted this to, and I'm still working to create good results.
01:07:23.520 | So let's leave the IQ question aside and let the researchers keep working on it. I think the most
01:07:28.800 | empowering thing that we can take from this book, Peak, and from other expert research is the idea
01:07:36.480 | that almost anybody with enough time and with the right practice methodology can become a top
01:07:44.080 | performer. I think this is true. I believe we have good scientific reason to believe that it's true.
01:07:50.400 | Whether it's actually true, though, in the fullness of time, I think it's metaphorically
01:07:55.120 | true. I think this is a truth that is so useful to the common human experience that it's something
01:08:01.840 | that we should believe is true and let the scientists keep on working to prove its truth
01:08:07.200 | or prove its lack of truth. Nowhere in the book, Peak, does Erickson say that talent does not exist.
01:08:14.720 | The researchers, as he described it, are open to the idea that innate talent does exist.
01:08:21.600 | What they say is that innate talent does not predict the outcomes for expert performance.
01:08:29.600 | Rather, what does predict the outcomes for long-term expert performance is the amount of time,
01:08:35.840 | the amount of high-quality practice that a person has engaged in in the relevant field,
01:08:40.480 | and the actual kind of practice, having the best coaches with the best techniques.
01:08:47.360 | So I think it's useful for us to set aside the concept of innate talent and focus instead on
01:08:53.840 | believing that we, in the fullness of time, we have the right practice and the right experience
01:09:01.680 | over time. Now, the next book in the trio that I read was a book called Talent is Overrated,
01:09:08.320 | What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by an author named Jeff Colvin.
01:09:12.960 | Colvin is not a scientist or a researcher. He's a journalist. And yet, his book is really well
01:09:19.280 | written, and it goes through and tries to demonstrate exactly what the title says.
01:09:24.400 | I'll read the blurb. "Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do?
01:09:29.440 | Most of us think we know the answer, but we're almost always wrong. That's important because
01:09:34.160 | if we're wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better
01:09:38.960 | at anything we care about. Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery.
01:09:44.880 | Bringing together extensive scientific research, best-selling author Jeff Colvin shows where we
01:09:50.080 | go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable. It isn't specific,
01:09:55.600 | innate talent, nor is it plain old hard work. It's a very specific type of work that anyone can do,
01:10:02.400 | but most people don't. What's more, the principles of great performance apply to virtually any
01:10:07.360 | activity that matters to you. Readers worldwide have been inspired by this book's liberating
01:10:12.640 | message. You don't need a one-in-a-million natural gift. Better performance, and maybe
01:10:17.760 | even world-class performance, is closer than you think." I think this book is extremely useful. I
01:10:23.200 | didn't like it as much as Peak because I was more interested in the actual scientific research of
01:10:28.400 | Erikson, but I think it was very useful. And this book was published many years ago and has been
01:10:33.840 | updated, at least with one 10th anniversary edition. It's a good book. What I took away
01:10:39.760 | from the book was a broader application of concepts. He touched on a lot of things that
01:10:44.960 | Erikson himself didn't talk about. Erikson is cited many times in the book, as are many other
01:10:49.840 | researchers. And he gave a lot more application of the book. Now, this is where I started to say,
01:10:55.840 | "Wait a second. I'm not sure we could go to this application. I'm not sure we should go to this
01:11:00.720 | application." The most inspiring application that I found from Talent is Overrated was where the
01:11:06.720 | author talked about societal advances and inventions. And what he really took an axe to
01:11:13.760 | was the idea that inventors just sit around and come up with brilliant ideas. And he showed how,
01:11:18.800 | on the contrary, if you start looking at the history of inventions, most of the breakthrough
01:11:24.160 | inventions are simply a product of systematic plotting by people taking problems, working at
01:11:31.120 | those problems, thinking about previous solutions. And there is a basic evolutionary arc that makes
01:11:38.720 | sense with regard to most breakthrough inventions. That was what I really took from it that I thought
01:11:42.720 | was powerful. So I think that you can take a field that you're working in and you can make
01:11:46.960 | dramatic differences in it in a steady, plotting way. You don't have to wait for some kind of
01:11:51.200 | brilliant epiphany and flash of inspiration to cause your breakthrough idea to happen.
01:11:56.640 | Where I wasn't on board with the ideas from Talent is Overrated is the author's absolute
01:12:04.560 | enthusiasm for the idea of causing people to specialize at an early age. So he gave examples
01:12:13.520 | of, well, if we need a tennis player to start at an early age, like the Williams sisters did,
01:12:19.360 | then that's going to be amazing. We've created these great athletes, these tennis prodigies
01:12:23.680 | and these golf prodigies from all these people who started at an early age. We should do exactly the
01:12:28.800 | same thing in business. And we should be training and growing little marketing experts from three
01:12:35.200 | years old so that by the time they're teens, they're going to be prodigies. And Colvin expanded
01:12:41.600 | his discussion and his examples that he cited throughout his whole book into the world of
01:12:47.920 | business and into the world of broader achievement in society, maybe even in politicians.
01:12:54.880 | Now, what struck me so wrong was this idea that we should have children specialize from such an
01:13:00.960 | early age. And I've thought about why did that strike me so wrong? On the one hand, I'm open to
01:13:06.400 | it. And I think that this is in many ways what has happened in previous civilizations. I've become a
01:13:13.520 | great respecter of the concept of aristocracy. Being raised in the democratic ideals of the
01:13:19.680 | U.S. American milieu, I grew up with a natural disdain for the concepts of aristocracy, monarchy,
01:13:27.280 | things like that. Today, I appreciate those systems much more. If I could move to a monarchy
01:13:34.800 | or an aristocracy where the monarchs basically aligned with my values in life, I wouldn't even
01:13:41.120 | think twice about that. I don't see any huge particular value of democracy. Those are fighting
01:13:47.040 | words. Don't fight me on it. I'm testing that out, kind of still thinking. But I really question
01:13:53.680 | if broad-scale democracy is the right solution. I think if we — just let me defend this real
01:14:00.080 | quickly because I know such fighting words. If we went back to a system like existed in the early
01:14:08.080 | United States without universal suffrage, with some kind of — I don't want to call it a landed
01:14:14.080 | aristocracy, but let's call it a landed democracy — some kind of a democratic rule of the elites,
01:14:19.920 | democratic rule of the wealthy, democratic rule of something like that, perhaps that would create
01:14:28.640 | something better. Maybe we could go to broad-scale republicanism with a republic gathered together
01:14:36.320 | with some form of democratic system in the states. But I really wish we could get rid of popular
01:14:44.480 | elections for senators. I wish senators were simply appointed. I wish we could get rid of
01:14:49.680 | all of the popular primary system elections of elections in the United States. I don't see any
01:14:55.440 | value whatsoever of presidents being elected with a popular vote in a primary system. I would like
01:15:02.560 | to go back to a system of 150 years ago because the current one just seems utterly stupid in terms
01:15:08.480 | of the results that it is creating. And the dangers of populism are so enormous that it's just
01:15:14.960 | creating massive problems. So I'm not entirely opposed to democracy, but universal suffrage to
01:15:20.720 | me seems an absolute catastrophe. And when you put universal suffrage together with popular elections
01:15:26.560 | for the people's house, which has always been popular elections, and then also the Senate and
01:15:31.520 | also the presidency, including the primary system, this just seems like a total catastrophe to me in
01:15:37.280 | watching the American system. And so if you went back to a monarchy or aristocracy of some kind,
01:15:43.680 | and you look at it, the benefit of that was basically specialization from an early age.
01:15:49.120 | And so if a monarchy is seeing itself as upholding a responsibility, I look at
01:15:56.560 | Queen Elizabeth, recently deceased Queen Elizabeth, and look at the sense of responsibility
01:16:04.560 | that she had, she served as a responsible monarch, a monarch with a vision. And if you went back and
01:16:10.240 | studied a little bit of aristocracies where we have access to them, they were expected to live
01:16:16.800 | by a code to kind of raise the human spirit. Now, obviously, those weren't perfect systems.
01:16:21.600 | Obviously, they failed continually. But the point was, that may be an expression of basically early
01:16:26.080 | specialization. You don't expect the son of a king to go and pursue a scientific career.
01:16:32.560 | On the contrary, you expect the son of a king to go and pursue a career in the humanities and a
01:16:37.200 | career in understanding political science and a career in statesmanship. And I would dearly love
01:16:42.640 | to see some actual statesmen emerge within my own home country of the United States as compared to
01:16:47.920 | a bunch of crude populist politicians. But leave that aside for a moment. My point was just to
01:16:53.280 | illustrate that perhaps this concept of being a prince or an aristocrat and being raised in this
01:16:59.200 | idea where your life course was charted out for you is actually an example of where we engaged in
01:17:04.720 | early specialization. And maybe it's not all a bad thing, but it really struck me as crass and wrong
01:17:11.600 | to somehow say to an eight-year-old that we're going to train you to be the president of a
01:17:15.600 | corporation. And I don't know, I can't fully defend that belief. Is that a bad thing? No,
01:17:24.320 | probably not a bad thing, but it just still strikes me as wrong. And maybe that's just a
01:17:28.320 | cultural artifact. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it. But it's a convenient segue
01:17:32.800 | to then the next book, which was the third book in this kind of this trilogy that I read,
01:17:37.440 | which was a book called Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by an author
01:17:43.440 | named David Epstein. Now, I really enjoyed Range, and I'm not sure how to fit all these together.
01:17:49.680 | Range, in many ways, was basically an argument against talent is overrated, as well as an
01:17:57.680 | argument against other things. It's an argument against grit. When you go through his chapters,
01:18:02.320 | if you know a little bit about the space, you can basically understand each chapter being an
01:18:07.680 | argument against a certain book. And I felt his book was very well written. He gave great examples,
01:18:14.000 | and he rebutted many of the ideas of talent is overrated, and by extension, honors Erickson by
01:18:19.920 | giving counter examples. On the whole, I didn't think he disproved anything, but rather provided
01:18:27.360 | more of a cautionary, hey, maybe hyperspecialization from an early age is not the only thing that
01:18:33.840 | matters. What I took away from Range was that there are other factors that are not included
01:18:39.040 | in exclusively this idea of hyperspecialization from an early age. Some world-class athletes do
01:18:47.600 | indeed specialize and become world-class from another early age. Some world-class athletes,
01:18:52.400 | on the other hand, don't specialize from an early age. And I think that most of us would nod our
01:18:57.520 | heads and say, sure, we can understand that. Somebody who has broad athletic ability could
01:19:02.640 | probably succeed in many sports. You don't have to just choose one sport and play it from the age
01:19:06.720 | of three onward. You could probably have a lot of overlap between these abilities, just like
01:19:12.480 | there's overlap in other things. If somebody has learned one foreign language, and they've learned
01:19:16.720 | it well, there's a pretty decent chance that they could learn another foreign language and learn it
01:19:20.160 | well. It's not like there's something magically different about French versus Spanish. They're
01:19:23.840 | just different expressions of it. So those cautions were good. What I thought was the
01:19:28.640 | most interesting in Range was where he talked about how maybe success in a certain area isn't
01:19:35.920 | always the key factor. So he talked a good bit about the problem of too much grit, for example,
01:19:42.240 | too much stick-to-itiveness. And he demonstrated how someone sticking to something for a long
01:19:49.840 | period of time could indeed be a predictive outcome for that person succeeding in the long
01:19:56.560 | run. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right outcome for the person's life success,
01:20:01.920 | that in general, trying different things is important to ultimately identify the area where
01:20:08.400 | you really want to focus. And I felt like this overview gave me some of the answers I was looking
01:20:13.120 | for with my frustration with talent is overrated and this idea of hyper-specialization, that,
01:20:17.840 | sure, we can see that hyper-specialization can produce a world-class genius, a leader in his
01:20:24.160 | field, but does that mean that that's actually a good thing? And we don't know, but we shouldn't
01:20:30.000 | artificially force people into a certain area without exposing them to the broad range,
01:20:36.080 | pun intended, of options that are available. The other useful point that I drew from Range
01:20:42.000 | was the distinction of what the author calls kind learning environments versus wicked learning
01:20:48.000 | environments. I think on my Friday show, I said friendly instead of kind. He uses the word kind.
01:20:53.200 | The basic idea is chess is a great example of a skill that has to be studied and learned.
01:20:58.640 | And so hyper-specialization, like Laszlo Polgar did with his children,
01:21:03.360 | hyper-specialization can lead to an amazing outcome. But that's not because hyper-specialization
01:21:09.440 | leads to an amazing outcome in every endeavor, but rather because chess is a kind learning
01:21:15.120 | environment. That means that the rules are clear and you get immediate feedback on your decisions.
01:21:20.240 | The environment is very highly structured. And so people who become an expert at chess basically are
01:21:26.720 | learning patterns that can be recognized and understood intuitively and responded to quickly
01:21:32.560 | again and again and again. And all of those patterns are constrained to an orderly world.
01:21:37.360 | All of the pieces have specific rules, specific things they can do, specific things they can't
01:21:42.640 | do. And so you can absorb the body of knowledge and develop broad recognition of all of the
01:21:47.840 | patterns of the chess game. Other games like golf, where we talk about Tiger Woods and what his
01:21:52.960 | father did to train him to be expert. Well, it's a kind environment. The rules are consistent and
01:21:57.760 | clear. You get immediate feedback from your results. And so your success in that environment
01:22:02.000 | comes from consistently repeating and refining your techniques. But that doesn't describe all
01:22:08.240 | learning environments. On the contrary, there are wicked learning environments. So doing something
01:22:13.760 | like being a stock market trader. Well, here we have an enormously wicked environment that's filled
01:22:19.920 | with complex and unpredictable variables. And the feedback that you get from your decisions,
01:22:26.320 | it doesn't necessarily occur immediately. Sometimes it can be just delayed or misleading.
01:22:31.680 | And what works in one particular situation may not work in another, which makes it very difficult
01:22:37.360 | to develop consistent expertise. Once your rules start working and you think you've got it cracked,
01:22:42.560 | well, all of a sudden now the market changes. Something changes dramatically. And the rules
01:22:46.640 | that worked for a certain amount of time don't seem to work so reliably in other examples,
01:22:52.560 | in other scenarios. Or he gives examples like emergency medicine or parenting.
01:22:57.200 | If you're in emergency medicine, you have all kinds of situations that are very unpredictable
01:23:03.360 | and yet have enormously high stakes. And so what works in one outcome may not necessarily be the
01:23:09.760 | thing that works in another. And so due to the highly variable environments, what you do changes.
01:23:17.840 | And parenting, there's no clear rules. And sometimes the feedback that you get is
01:23:22.640 | ambiguous. You're actually making a difference in the child's life, but the child won't say
01:23:26.320 | anything about it. Or it's decades down the road. And so it's hard to look at your three-year-old
01:23:32.400 | and say, I'm going to teach you the master list of rules that you need to know to be a great parent
01:23:35.840 | so you're going to be a world-class parent by the age of 20. No, that doesn't work. It works in
01:23:39.760 | chess. It doesn't work in parenting. So that's a really useful model to have in your mind to say,
01:23:46.880 | what's the difference among these things? And it's a good book because it challenges some of
01:23:54.560 | those things. Let me hear for your overall view on the book Range. Let me read this really great
01:24:00.560 | review from Amazon written by Todd Stark. And he gives the book a five-star review, and this will
01:24:06.000 | just be the best, most succinct way to get an idea of the content of the book. "This is a beautifully
01:24:11.600 | written and well-justified discussion of the various specific things that are not taken into
01:24:15.680 | account by the widespread cultural emphasis on early specialization for success and our popular
01:24:22.160 | model of performers in terms of domain-specific expertise. This takes the form of a single
01:24:27.440 | conclusion, which I would paraphrase as, we need to be able to play and explore widely and to color
01:24:33.360 | outside the lines for a while in order to become very good at solving the difficult problems we
01:24:37.680 | later encounter. But our cultural obsession with specialization pushes counter to that.
01:24:43.200 | There's a constant tension of the author's confidence in his conclusion that generalists
01:24:48.000 | are uniquely valuable and desperately needed, and his recognition that he is fighting an almost
01:24:53.120 | quixotic uphill battle against powerful cultural trends and incentives for specialization.
01:24:58.480 | What he means by specialization and the factors closely tied to it. One, head start, encouraging
01:25:05.120 | children from an early age to narrowly pursue things they seem talented at or have an interest
01:25:10.560 | in. Two, domain specificity, training with heavy emphasis on the specific narrow range skills we
01:25:17.520 | know we will need in the target environment and assuming far transfer of skills from other
01:25:22.640 | activities will be limited or non-existent. Three, disciplinary focus, viewing learning as
01:25:28.480 | consisting of accumulating facts and theories specific to a particular field or subfield of
01:25:33.360 | study in order to become highly skilled at working in that narrow field. Four, persistence, the idea
01:25:39.760 | that we should identify a passion early and stick with it no matter what because it's what we're
01:25:44.400 | good at and enjoy and so can become successful at it if we manage to persist. Five, fast and
01:25:50.480 | efficient short-term learning, the assumption that we are learning better when we feel familiar with
01:25:55.120 | the material quickly and that we are then learning more efficiently. Against those powerful and
01:26:00.720 | popular specialization factors, Epstein presents several compelling lines of evidence. One,
01:26:06.320 | domain specificity varies with kind versus wicked learning. The argument for early specialization
01:26:12.080 | and domain specificity is based on the observation that we need a long period of deliberate practice
01:26:17.440 | to accumulate the patterns and skills specific to performing in that specific area and that
01:26:22.400 | practicing or exploring other activities is unlikely to do anything helpful for our performance
01:26:27.040 | in our specialty. Epstein counters that on closer inspection, we find a crucial distinction between
01:26:33.280 | different kinds of domains and learning environments wherein some of them deliberate
01:26:37.280 | practice reliably makes us better but in others deliberate practice either helps much less or can
01:26:42.320 | even make us perform more poorly under some conditions. So not all domains or learning
01:26:47.040 | environments are equally specific and the head start is not equally helpful in all activities.
01:26:52.240 | Two, creative performance comes from early exploration and interdisciplinary learning.
01:26:59.040 | Given the domain specific view of expertise, we tend to assume that in order for someone to
01:27:03.200 | perform at a high level in any activity, since they need expertise, they need to specialize
01:27:08.480 | in that activity. Epstein counters that when we focus specifically on creative performance,
01:27:14.320 | we find that deep expertise can be invaluable but is not enough. In order to come up with truly
01:27:20.880 | novel solutions to problems, we need to make use of analogies that cross different domains
01:27:26.000 | while sharing deep structural similarities. That means being familiar with a wider range of ideas
01:27:32.160 | and ways of thinking than just those in our specialty. And so Epstein says creative
01:27:37.040 | performance is found more in people with broader backgrounds. Epstein argues that outstanding
01:27:41.840 | creative performance also tends to be associated with early exploration of different activities
01:27:46.800 | more than with early specialization. Three, the efficiency we perceive from narrow
01:27:53.440 | immersion is very often illusory. We tend to assume that when we feel more familiar with the
01:27:58.960 | activity or material that we are learning it. That's part of the strong intuitive appeal for
01:28:04.160 | immersion in an activity comes from. It feels like we're learning more when we're more immersed.
01:28:09.280 | Epstein argues that the evidence from learning research shows quite often exactly the opposite,
01:28:14.960 | that the learning we think we're doing under conditions of immersion is either much less
01:28:18.640 | or much shorter lived than we assume. Robert Bjork's concept of desirable difficulty in
01:28:24.400 | learning and the evidence base behind it plays a central role in this argument.
01:28:27.840 | This, Epstein argues, tell us that slow learning, which helps us make new connections between a
01:28:33.440 | wider range of experiences, is much more conducive to learning in the long run than
01:28:38.000 | fast efficient learning from immersion in a narrow subject matter.
01:28:41.200 | Four, match quality is not necessarily the same as early passion. Part of the argument for early
01:28:48.560 | specialization is based on the assumption that people have certain interests and talents from
01:28:53.040 | early on. And if they can find something that matches them well and start early,
01:28:57.440 | they can align their passion with a successful career in that activity.
01:29:00.800 | Epstein argues that what we know about lifespan development tells us that people's passions are
01:29:05.680 | not so fixed or narrow and finds a number of cases of exceptionally successful people who
01:29:10.640 | spent their lives exploring and trying different things before finding a match that was truly
01:29:15.440 | satisfying and successful for them. Range is an appeal to encourage exploration in our lives from
01:29:21.600 | early on, and for experimenting and experiencing broadly in our learning, even though it may seem
01:29:27.680 | to be inefficient or slow. Epstein does not deny the immense value of long, deliberate,
01:29:33.520 | specialized practice in "kind" domains, or the value of having deep specialized experience in
01:29:39.600 | some areas, but he has also made a passionate and well-argued case for making better use
01:29:44.320 | of a completely different dimension of performance, a dimension rooted in longer-term
01:29:48.720 | developmental outcomes, more exploratory or playful learning, and an ongoing search for
01:29:53.760 | ever-better matches between our interests and abilities and our activities. I think that's a
01:29:58.320 | great summary of the book. And in general, these books, to me, seem to merge beautifully, and not
01:30:06.000 | actually to be at odds, but more to be a measure of, "Here's the science in this application,
01:30:11.440 | and then here's how this gets put together." I worry that the book Range is enormously more
01:30:18.320 | popular than either of these other books. Range on Amazon has 11,420 ratings, Peak has 3,340 ratings,
01:30:28.000 | and Talent is overrated at 1,980 ratings. I think people are less served, generally,
01:30:35.680 | by the message in Range than by the message in the other books, because it seems to me
01:30:40.480 | that many people underestimate the value of being able to actually become a world-class genius.
01:30:46.160 | Maybe it's just the circles I'm exposed to, but I hear a lot more people that believe in the
01:30:50.560 | existence of innate talent and ability as being the determinative factor in someone's long-term
01:30:57.200 | outcomes than anything else. You hear this in the IQ perspectives, you hear this in discussions of
01:31:02.320 | genetics. People believe this to be the determinative factor, and I don't see the
01:31:06.800 | evidence for that position being raised. In addition, people underestimate the value of
01:31:14.800 | deliberate practice. The concept of deliberate practice and the ability to apply it is life
01:31:19.200 | changing, because it means that you can genuinely develop yourself to be the leader in your career.
01:31:24.560 | I took away from these books a huge emphasis on my incorporating a deliberate practice routine.
01:31:32.320 | I've basically rested on a lot of my laurels from younger in my life and younger in my career,
01:31:37.280 | and I haven't seen some of my skills actually increase in the last
01:31:40.400 | five years because I'm just engaging in continual naive practice, and I realized I need to be
01:31:47.440 | continually focused on deliberate practice. I really do. That's an empowering message.
01:31:54.320 | I would like that message to get out into our culture much more than the message from Range,
01:31:59.040 | because what it seems like I perceive from Range is that many people who are not familiar with
01:32:04.240 | these other aspects of research may simply go out in the world and say, "Well, you don't need to
01:32:09.120 | focus at all. You don't need to focus on getting better. You just need to go out and have a variety
01:32:12.960 | of experiences." And I'm in favor of the outcome, but only when it's balanced against the benefit
01:32:19.680 | of specialization and benefit of focus. I haven't touched yet on the discussion
01:32:25.680 | of physical talent and physical abilities. David Epstein wrote another book that I have not read
01:32:31.840 | called The Sports Gene, Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.
01:32:36.400 | I have been wanting to read this book very much because it seems to me that if genetic ability
01:32:43.280 | is the key determining factor, then we should be able to see that generally in sports,
01:32:51.040 | more so than in other areas like cognitive ability, where we have the ability to measure
01:32:55.520 | and we know that the brain adapts, and we should see it in sports. Do we see it? I don't know. I
01:33:03.280 | hear a lot of people very loudly advocating that we absolutely see it and that your genetic base
01:33:09.120 | is the key. And it seems obvious to me that genetic base is going to have a significant factor
01:33:16.320 | in many areas, but I also am not sure about the other. So, I'd like to get around to that,
01:33:21.840 | but I haven't done it yet. Let me tell you what I think we should do as a result of
01:33:27.040 | what I've described in these books. Number one, I think we should believe ourselves
01:33:33.120 | and instill the belief in our children and all around us that I can and you can become
01:33:40.880 | world-class in any area that you care about enough to really focus on and engage in deliberate
01:33:47.920 | practice for enough time. The amount of time varies. One thing that's interesting is I used
01:33:53.520 | to read Malcolm Gladwell's books, and he has in his book, this book, "Outliers," where he talks
01:33:57.680 | about the so-called 10,000-hour rule. And that 10,000-hour rule has become basically commonly
01:34:03.040 | accepted wisdom in our culture, as best I can tell from "Outliers." But Erickson, whose research was
01:34:10.640 | the basic foundation of that 10,000-hour rule, very politely tries to demonstrate how nobody
01:34:15.760 | understands the 10,000-hour rule because the research of the 10,000-hour rule came from
01:34:22.240 | Erickson's application of his research with violin players. But Gladwell, as best I can tell,
01:34:29.120 | arbitrarily selected 10,000 hours because that was a number that was discussed in the research
01:34:36.000 | showing that the elite performers had accumulated 10,000 hours by a certain age, but it's a totally
01:34:40.960 | arbitrary number. To be a world-class performer in some fields may require many more than 10,000
01:34:46.960 | hours, and in other fields, it may require much less, just depends on the field. So there's
01:34:50.880 | nothing magical about 10,000 hours being the key that separates an expert from a non-expert.
01:34:56.880 | But what is right and useful about 10,000 hours is that you're going to need hours of practice.
01:35:01.120 | And this is the same thing that I say in the few areas that I am an expert in,
01:35:04.880 | is it's just a matter of the time you put into it. So when I teach someone about language learning,
01:35:09.680 | I focus on the time. If you spend the time with the language, you're going to do it.
01:35:14.320 | And that's the key factor. Now, there's good technique and bad technique. There's things
01:35:17.920 | that can get you better, faster results and less fast results. And so that's an expression
01:35:22.480 | of deliberate practice in the world of language. But at its core, the key thing is you're going
01:35:27.840 | to get better at it when you are engaging in it for a significant amount of time.
01:35:32.080 | So we should trumpet this from the rooftops that you can be a leader in a field if you have enough
01:35:37.520 | time and you put in enough practice. The cool thing also, I've adapted this to a couple of
01:35:42.320 | other applications. Just this weekend, I was talking with a friend and I was talking about,
01:35:45.600 | we've got the 10,000 hour rule, which is what you might need to be a world-class performer. Sure,
01:35:50.400 | maybe so. That's a lot of hours that you need to put into an area. But you can create other
01:35:56.240 | versions of this rule. I heard of somebody talked about, and I found out not many people were
01:36:01.040 | writing on it, but I found it enormously motivating, the concept of a 100-hour rule
01:36:05.360 | that you could probably be in, say, the top 5% of a field if you just did 100 hours a year.
01:36:10.800 | 100 hours a year comes out to two hours a week, so call it 20 minutes a day. If you do something
01:36:17.040 | for 15 or 20 minutes a day at 100 hours a year, you're never going to be the top person in a
01:36:22.400 | field, but you'll probably be in the top 5%. You can at least develop a skill that's going to
01:36:26.720 | dramatically change your life. And so even if you're not going to become an expert at everything,
01:36:30.960 | learning some things and becoming expert at more things just through applications a small amount
01:36:36.000 | of time is a big deal. And then you could even craft other rules from this. I was describing
01:36:41.760 | the benefits of when I learned to salsa dance. And I had less than 20 hours of instruction in
01:36:47.920 | salsa dancing, and it transformed everything in my life. I took one class in college that was
01:36:52.400 | Latin dance, and just 20 hours of instruction that I then went on to practice more was totally
01:36:58.720 | transformative in my life. I'll save those stories for another time. But the experience of that 20
01:37:06.000 | hours impacted me enormously. And I think there's lots of things like that, that you don't actually
01:37:12.000 | need hundreds of hours. You don't need 100 hours a year. You just need a couple dozen hours of
01:37:17.040 | exposure to various things, and you'll gain something from it. So I'm firmly in the camp of
01:37:22.800 | the generalist being valuable, but the message we need to teach people is just to say that you
01:37:27.440 | can do it. So try, get started. I think where we can see this the most obviously has to do
01:37:33.120 | with academic subjects, and that was the context of Friday. I can't find any evidence that there's
01:37:38.960 | any innate difference in innate ability for people who are good at math and people who are not good
01:37:44.240 | at math, or innate ability for people who are good at writing and who are not good at writing.
01:37:48.400 | I can't find it. If it exists, tell me. I've looked for it. I haven't done an exhaustive
01:37:52.960 | search, but if you know of it, find it. I can't find any evidence that any innate ability for
01:37:58.560 | academic subjects in school counts. On the contrary, I can find lots of evidence that
01:38:04.080 | fit all of the model of Erickson's book, Peak. It had to do with motivation, has to do with
01:38:10.880 | the time spent, has to do with interest and how that interest is cultivated that indicate it.
01:38:16.720 | I don't see why every person, every student is not capable of being very good at mathematics,
01:38:24.240 | is not capable of being very good at writing, is not capable of being very good at history,
01:38:28.800 | and not being capable of being very good at science. I don't see any reason why every student
01:38:34.000 | can't perform very well in all of these areas. I don't see any reason why you have to specialize
01:38:39.840 | in the early years. It seems self-evident to me that poor performance in any one of these areas
01:38:47.040 | has much more to do with teaching methodology, bad pedagogy, uninspiring teachers,
01:38:53.280 | inconsistent practice, the wrong kind of practice than it does with anything else.
01:38:58.960 | So, what's the foundation of a good educational plan? I think reading is the foundation of a
01:39:05.840 | good educational plan. If you go back and listen to my series on how to invest in your children at
01:39:10.720 | an early age, I go through a lot of the arguments. Number one is exposure to verbal language.
01:39:15.680 | Children should be surrounded by lots and lots of language. In so doing, they will gain lots of
01:39:20.560 | words that they will know, and they will gain lots of general knowledge about the world.
01:39:25.600 | Then, when they are readers, we want to help them to read very extensively. That comes from
01:39:32.160 | inspiring interest. So, when a child is highly motivated to read, he or she is going to read
01:39:36.880 | very widely. That reading widely is going to allow the child to have broad general exposure
01:39:44.800 | to the world, huge vocabulary, and to absorb the structures of written language, which are
01:39:51.680 | different than the structures of colloquial verbal language. That is likely to cause the child to
01:39:57.920 | naturally be skilled with writing. So, if we pull writing apart into its component parts,
01:40:02.560 | writing consists of two basic elements. The ability to use words to take abstract thought
01:40:11.760 | and convert it into concrete words, and secondarily, the skill of actually putting
01:40:16.640 | down sentences on paper with the physical act of writing, proper orthography, proper grammar,
01:40:22.080 | things like that. Well, that's very trainable if we pull it apart and train it. If a child has a
01:40:27.200 | broad bank of literary knowledge, then the child is likely to be a skilled writer. And creativity
01:40:35.200 | grows over time, and writing skill grows with practice. And so, every child should be a great
01:40:41.120 | writer through lots and lots of practice. What about other subjects? Well, math is the obvious
01:40:45.520 | example. To me, mathematics is obviously something that everyone is capable of with the right kind of
01:40:51.440 | practice. So, what is often missing in people who are bad at math? Well, first, they've often
01:40:56.080 | probably missed out on motivation. Nobody's come along and inspired them about mathematics. They
01:41:02.560 | may not have understood the subject in a way that is applicable, which is why I think we should do
01:41:07.200 | more narrative math and less worksheets and just kill and drill worksheets. But even if we're doing
01:41:13.760 | worksheets, we should do them consistently in modest doses, not to overwhelm the attention
01:41:18.800 | span of the child, and do them much more consistently. Math, the way that it's taught
01:41:22.960 | in the context of the school year with enormous breaks for summer, is just a catastrophe,
01:41:27.680 | because these are skills that need to be practiced every day. And so, if we take this skill and we
01:41:31.920 | do math six days a week, 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, an hour a day, and growing over
01:41:37.680 | time, how can a child not be good at mathematics? And especially if we get individualized instruction
01:41:43.920 | where we're always teaching to exactly the thing that the child is needing to learn,
01:41:51.040 | and we're not going too fast. And so, the child is not getting lost with a class that can grasp
01:41:55.120 | a concept faster than he can, but rather is just going at his own individual pace.
01:41:59.920 | So, I don't see why any child shouldn't be very skilled with mathematics. It all builds
01:42:04.320 | systematically, and if you do the work day by day, year by year, then you're going to wind
01:42:09.040 | up with the necessary skills and the fullness of time. What about history? Well, same thing,
01:42:15.520 | interest. Interest, narrative, spending time with the subject. Why are so many students bad
01:42:20.240 | at history? Well, because you sit down in ninth grade and you're handed a stupid, boring,
01:42:25.200 | sawdust textbook to read, and you have no context for everything. But if you've spent 10 years
01:42:30.160 | before that reading stories of the past, then you have all these different pegs to hang things on,
01:42:36.080 | so you can hang the facts and the dates onto people that you've lived with for years. You've
01:42:40.480 | read their stories, you've read the historical fiction, you've read their biographies,
01:42:43.920 | you've read the narratives that involve them. And so, these are living creatures,
01:42:48.400 | living people with whom you have a relationship. So, now, facts and figures and meaning and all
01:42:52.960 | of that can easily be absorbed in that context. Same thing with science.
01:42:56.320 | Why are people bad at science? Well, again, it's just because you're handed a textbook out of the
01:43:01.600 | blue in 10th grade that's about biology and said, "Learn this." But it's all new vocabulary,
01:43:07.200 | and you have 100 and, call it 150 or 160 days to absorb all this vocabulary. You don't have any
01:43:13.680 | framework to hold it on. But in my model, if you've read great scientists, their biographies,
01:43:20.000 | and their stories of how they invented things, and you've spent all your time with all these
01:43:23.280 | wonderful living narratives that have engaged you with the context, and you've spent your time
01:43:28.080 | studying through and you're doing it over the course of years rather than trying to do it all
01:43:31.520 | in one year, then it should be pretty doable for you to do really well on your A-levels or get a
01:43:37.440 | five on your AP biology exam because you've sat with the information for so long. And it's not
01:43:42.720 | just try to stuff down your head. So, there's a whole world of learning science that I'm not even
01:43:48.240 | talking about here. But at its core, I think we can expect any child to learn effectively and to
01:43:55.440 | be skilled in all of these areas. This should transform how we teach children. This should
01:44:00.640 | transform every aspect of what we do. To apply generalization, I think children should have a
01:44:08.480 | general education. The model should be general and then allow them to self-select into the areas that
01:44:14.160 | are the most interest. If we know that certain skills are actually going to have a physical
01:44:19.440 | impact on the body and the brain, we should stress those skills. And from an academic perspective,
01:44:25.680 | children should do math, not because they're going to use it, but because it makes them smarter.
01:44:30.160 | It grows gray matter in their brain. When I read Peek, I found all the math bits. I read it to my
01:44:34.800 | children. This is why we do math, guys, because it grows your brain. It literally adds gray matter
01:44:38.800 | to your brain. So, you do math so that you're smarter. And when you're smarter, because you've
01:44:43.200 | grown the gray matter in your brain, you're more capable of doing better math. So, 10 years from
01:44:48.160 | now, everyone's going to say, "Well, math just comes easily to you." Yeah, it comes easily to
01:44:52.000 | me because it didn't come easily to me in the beginning, but I built gray matter in my brain
01:44:55.360 | that made it come more easily to me. So, we know that math ability impacts IQ. We know that doing
01:45:01.120 | math makes you smarter. It grows your brain. So, therefore, we should do math consistently
01:45:05.280 | and over time. I call math, basically, mathematics, the barbell for the brain.
01:45:11.120 | And by a little speech to my children, I read a book one time on how to teach math to young
01:45:16.640 | people, and the author made a big point. Don't tell people that they're going to use math. So,
01:45:20.800 | don't tell your ninth grader, "Yeah, you definitely need this geometry because you're
01:45:24.000 | going to use it." That's a lie. You know he's not going to use it. Why do you do math? Because
01:45:28.320 | it makes you smarter, and in the same way that a barbell is infinitely adjustable for any body.
01:45:34.480 | You can put a barbell on a 99-year-old old woman's life on her back and teach her how to squat it,
01:45:40.400 | and you can find a barbell exercise that's appropriate for her, and it will help her to
01:45:44.240 | grow muscle and get stronger. You can put a barbell and load it up for a 30-year-old powerlifter at
01:45:49.440 | the peak of his career with 800 pounds on it, and the barbell is the tool that allows you to add the
01:45:56.720 | necessary appropriate stress with the desirable difficulty to the human body. That's what's so
01:46:01.760 | powerful about a barbell. Well, mathematics, I see, is the same thing. It is an appropriate tool
01:46:07.200 | that you can work through with a five-year-old that is going to allow the five-year-old to
01:46:11.360 | learn at an appropriate level, and to the 55-year-old double PhD in theoretical mathematics,
01:46:19.600 | he's still sitting there doing math, thinking, and getting his brain smarter. Math is infinitely
01:46:24.800 | scalable. So it should probably be the core academic skill that is applied to everyone
01:46:31.360 | because it's infinitely scalable up and down. And in the same way that with a barbell,
01:46:35.680 | we can add an ounce to the bar and get you just a little bit stronger, or we can add 10 pounds
01:46:41.120 | to the bar, the student can go through math very slowly or very quickly, depending on current
01:46:46.720 | ability and what the math is that we're doing right now. So the reason we do math is to make
01:46:51.200 | you smarter. Why do we do music? Well, music makes you smarter. It grows your brain. It allows you to
01:46:57.920 | access the aesthetics of the world in a different way. So we should all study music, learn music.
01:47:03.600 | Music is one of those other things that we know it increases IQ. So we should practice and learn
01:47:08.000 | music. Incidentally, when I talked about this a long time ago, I mentioned that I was going to
01:47:12.960 | be testing a bunch of apps. I am profoundly persuaded now of the value of modern apps
01:47:19.280 | for teaching music as a great thing. SimplyPiano is the one that I've tested the most. It's
01:47:24.560 | fantastic. I think it's best used with a teacher, but it's fantastic. I could go on and on. It's a
01:47:30.880 | good example of deliberate practice. So consider these. I'll skip that for now. But music is
01:47:35.440 | something that all students should learn because it is helping their ability. It's making them
01:47:40.640 | smarter. Other artistic expressions, same thing. Drawing, painting, these are things that are
01:47:45.440 | important. They're aesthetic disciplines that help you to see the world differently, and they
01:47:50.080 | will change how your brain works in a positive way, give you a more diverse array of abilities.
01:47:56.640 | Language, same thing. Language makes you smarter. I'm not aware of any evidence that reading
01:48:02.480 | increases IQ, but I think reading absolutely makes you smarter in the common sense of it.
01:48:07.040 | It's got to increase IQ, but I just don't know. I haven't read anything of that being the case.
01:48:11.120 | But reading is how you learn about the world. It makes you smart. It makes you understand how the
01:48:15.120 | world works, which is the definition of smartness, not just being able to do well on an IQ test.
01:48:20.720 | And so being widely read is an important component, and that should be in your native language.
01:48:25.680 | But then in addition to being widely read, you should be working your way
01:48:29.520 | up systematically. All students should be working their way up the scale of complexity
01:48:34.240 | and difficulty. If you are actually a reader who reads a lot and doesn't just read fluff for the
01:48:40.080 | brain, then when you get to things like an SAT exam, it's a joke. You never have to study for
01:48:44.400 | that stuff. It's just a joke because you're reading complex novels, complex material,
01:48:49.600 | philosophy that has difficult ideas, historical analysis that has difficult vocabulary,
01:48:54.480 | very complex writing styles. That's what you should be reading, growing up to it little by
01:49:00.800 | little. We also know that foreign languages make your brain bigger, grow your gray matter in your
01:49:05.520 | brain. So you should be doing this in multiple languages and systematically just working your
01:49:11.040 | way up the structure because it's making you smarter. Now, take this student who's just being
01:49:17.200 | gently led up this structure through a dozen or 15 years of education and now bring it to a specialty.
01:49:26.960 | And I think this is the right model where you're going to have all of that generalist background
01:49:31.600 | that then gets applied to an area of special interest where you really go deep, but yet you
01:49:37.280 | didn't go too deep too early. That's the takeaway. That's what we should be doing.
01:49:41.040 | The other thing I didn't talk about, though, was physical ability and athletic ability.
01:49:44.720 | I believe the same basic concept applies. When I was younger, I had this stupid idea that somehow
01:49:51.120 | some people are just born athletic and other people aren't. It seems fairly obvious to me
01:49:56.160 | that some people are naturally more athletic than others are. I see this in family members. I see
01:50:02.000 | this in myself with comparison. I have a brother who is just always naturally athletic. I was always
01:50:06.400 | naturally clumsy and uncoordinated. But then what happens is we tend to funnel people
01:50:12.000 | into different pathways based upon this basic natural ability.
01:50:17.600 | And a friend of mine who is a physical trainer, he was explaining, he was like, "Children,
01:50:22.160 | why don't some children move?" Well, they don't move because it doesn't feel good to move.
01:50:26.640 | Why doesn't it feel good to move? Because they don't know how to move oftentimes. And so moving
01:50:30.720 | to them doesn't feel good, so they don't want to do it. Well, they don't do it,
01:50:35.120 | and then it feels worse and worse for them. Whereas for the children who know how to move,
01:50:39.840 | then they know how to move, so it feels good for them to move, so they move more.
01:50:44.400 | And as they move more, they get better at moving, their skills of knowing how to move increase with
01:50:49.600 | practice, and they just naturally move more and they become athletic. And so this particular
01:50:54.560 | trainer friend of mine, when we talked about how to train children with athletics, a big focus of
01:50:59.440 | his was teaching movement skills, teaching people how to move. Because if you can teach a child that
01:51:04.880 | doesn't move a lot how to move in a way that doesn't generate pain, but instead generates
01:51:09.760 | pleasure, then he's more likely to move more. In hindsight, I look at them and say, "Duh,
01:51:14.800 | obviously, that should be the key." But what that means is that we need good physical training for
01:51:20.240 | young people, consistent environments where they're training constantly. And a lot of that
01:51:25.680 | should be done in the context of play, but there should be focused training for children so that
01:51:30.160 | their play can be better. So this is the area I know the least about from my own personal ignorance,
01:51:35.360 | but I'm trying to engage in it and try to build it. And a lot of this, I think, should be generalized
01:51:41.920 | movement patterns, not sport-specific movement, but generalized movement patterns and strength
01:51:47.760 | building. As best I can tell, the dominant theory of physical education in the United States today
01:51:53.040 | seems to be that if you play sports or play, then you'll learn how to move. And that's not the only
01:51:59.520 | way to approach it. There's a fascinating pathway you can go down. If you look at the infamous
01:52:04.160 | example of La Sierra High in California in the 1960s, where you had this high school implemented
01:52:09.040 | this school-wide athletic training program, PE program, for all of its students, where they
01:52:15.760 | focused on teaching strength rather than teaching sport. They created some of the most high-performing
01:52:24.320 | sports teams, and they created a student body of young men and young women that was beautiful,
01:52:32.560 | flat-out beautiful. I'm using that word very intentionally. If you go back and you look at
01:52:38.240 | the videos and you see just an entire student population of beautifully muscled, strong young
01:52:45.440 | men, beautifully coordinated, strong young women, you see the men more than the women in the old
01:52:50.000 | videos. That's what we want. And unfortunately, with the death of President Kennedy, all of that
01:52:57.520 | basically disappeared in the American system, and it's all disappeared in the wake of sport.
01:53:02.400 | And we've got a bunch of fat slobs that are ugly high school students instead of beautiful in what
01:53:08.400 | should be the most beautiful part of their life. There's people working at it, and we should be
01:53:13.040 | supporting them. But at the very least, we owe it to ourselves and to our children to teach them
01:53:16.880 | movement patterns, teach them strength, so that their later specialization with sport will come
01:53:22.080 | into play. And we've got great science in that world. It's just not spreading across to the
01:53:26.640 | general population. So I believe that we can and should be advancing ourselves and as a culture
01:53:33.760 | and as a civilization. We could fix all of these problems. We just lack the will to do it.
01:53:42.000 | We don't care to do it. We haven't persuaded our neighbors that they should care. And we have
01:53:47.600 | enormously dysfunctional systems. So what I've done is I've just withdrawn from all of that,
01:53:53.920 | from the system, and I've said, "I can do it better, and let me prove it." And that's what I'm
01:53:59.840 | myself working on. I don't mean to sound arrogant or kind of bragging, but it's important sometimes
01:54:07.280 | to say things in advance before you do them. In the way that what Laszlo Polgar, if he had just
01:54:12.080 | had three daughters who were really skilled with chess, and he didn't set out in advance and say,
01:54:23.280 | "This is what I'm going to do," his story would not be nearly as impactful. So I'm telling you
01:54:30.560 | the same in advance while I'm in it. But I don't believe there's any limit on human performance.
01:54:34.880 | I believe that every person is capable of getting better, and that most people are capable of
01:54:42.560 | extreme high performance if they have the right environment, the right inputs, and the right
01:54:47.120 | coaches teaching them. And so I'm doing my best to do that in my homeschool, to do it on an
01:54:52.320 | academic level, to do it on a physical level, to do it on an ideally social grace level. I think
01:54:57.600 | that's the hardest, but I'm working at it. That's where I've had the most failures. But I believe
01:55:02.400 | we should create, we should be able to create superhumans in terms of having the qualities and
01:55:10.080 | characteristics that we desire. If elite schools for years have been able to do this, I have a
01:55:16.640 | great interest in this. I've gone and studied as best I could find the curricula of the world's
01:55:21.280 | elite boarding schools and things like that. There's no question that these schools have
01:55:25.280 | succeeded in producing very high performing students. So we need to understand that.
01:55:30.880 | And I wish I could go and snap my fingers and change the whole government school system in
01:55:35.680 | the US, but I can't do it. But what I can do is I can experiment in my own house,
01:55:39.920 | and I want to encourage you to experiment with your children and find the best science that you
01:55:45.200 | can, use your intuition to filter that science to the specifics of your children, teach them,
01:55:51.520 | and then let's compare notes on what's working, what's not working. Let's figure out how we can
01:55:56.000 | do that so that our great-grandchildren can do so much better. I see myself as the patriarch
01:56:01.920 | of a dynasty. I see you as the patriarch of a dynasty, the matriarch of a dynasty. I see you
01:56:08.560 | as having a very important role to play in that. And what you're doing today in your household,
01:56:13.920 | based upon your philosophy of learning and of genius performance and knowledge and all of that,
01:56:19.120 | the family culture that you're building will impact your great-great-grandchildren
01:56:24.320 | as it should. So, you should be thinking about that. You should be eating healthy today,
01:56:29.600 | not just for yourself, but you should be eating healthy today so that you can set the example in
01:56:35.280 | front of your children, so that they'll be healthy, so that the epigenetic long-term outcome
01:56:41.120 | of your great-great-grandchildren is superior. We need that kind of superiority in the human race.
01:56:47.600 | And don't ever let the fact that other people may not be able to do what you do
01:56:53.600 | to cause you to pull back. The world is served in no way by your playing small,
01:57:00.960 | by your shrinking back. The world is served by your playing hard and well so that you become
01:57:08.240 | strong and so that your family becomes strong so that you can reach out a hand to those nearby who
01:57:13.360 | are weak and lift them up. I shouldn't go down this path. What angers me so much about
01:57:21.760 | our current philosophical argumentation is that it seems like a substantial number of our
01:57:33.440 | neighbors want to basically destroy high performance due to jealousy. They want to
01:57:40.160 | tear down the wealthy due to jealousy. They want to tear down the smart and the beautiful because
01:57:44.960 | not everybody can be smart and beautiful, and we need equity across population. This is the most
01:57:50.800 | destructive thing possible. Jealousy of another person is sin. It is absolute sin, and it is
01:58:01.360 | one of the most damaging long-term things. Being covetous of what someone else has is totally
01:58:10.480 | destructive, and it's totally sinful, and it destroys your society. I've looked for this
01:58:14.560 | anecdote years ago. I read an anecdote. I thought it came from The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman,
01:58:20.240 | but I went and searched the book one time and I couldn't find it. But the author of the book was
01:58:25.680 | giving an example, and he was giving the example of the difference between the United States,
01:58:31.840 | the culture of the United States of America, and the culture of the Middle East. And he was
01:58:37.440 | showing how children in the Middle East, well, children in the United States look up to the man
01:58:42.560 | who has a house on the hill, and they're taught, "Hey, Johnny, someday you, if you work hard enough,
01:58:50.880 | you yourself can have a house on the hill like that man has." Whereas the children in the Middle
01:58:56.960 | East are taught, "Muhammad, someday, if you work hard enough, you can blow up that house on the
01:59:02.880 | hill." And there's just such an obvious example of that metaphor, as obviously offensive as it
01:59:09.040 | is to so many people. It's such an obvious truth that if you teach your children that the goal is
01:59:13.440 | to go out and blow up and destroy the houses on the hill, you're going to be left with a totally
01:59:18.800 | raised neighborhood that's nothing but destruction and poverty and misery. But if you teach your
01:59:24.080 | children to build houses on a hill, and that they too, if they work hard enough, can build a house
01:59:29.040 | on the hill, you're going to have a neighborhood that is full of beautiful houses on a hill.
01:59:33.680 | What do you want? Pick it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:59:39.680 | So, with your children, don't teach them to hold back. Teach them to be as absolutely
01:59:45.840 | high-performing as they're capable of being. And whenever they run up against a genetic potential
01:59:51.520 | or an intelligence potential, just kind of ignore it and say, "That's all right. I can keep studying."
01:59:56.080 | I myself feel this all the time. I feel stupid. I know that I'm smarter than a lot of other people.
02:00:02.160 | I'm not saying this in a self-deprecating way. Sometimes I listen to stuff, I listen to people,
02:00:06.640 | and I just feel dumb. And I say, "How am I ever…? What do I know? I feel utterly stupid."
02:00:15.760 | But I remind myself with the philosophy that that's okay. I'm not responsible for the intelligence
02:00:21.920 | that God gave that man over there, I'm just responsible for my own. And if I'll just keep
02:00:26.240 | on working at it, I can probably learn in 10 years from now what that guy's saying today that I don't
02:00:31.200 | get, I'll probably get it if I keep working at it. And that's the power of philosophy.
02:00:36.320 | You should cultivate this philosophy in yourself and in your children, because regardless of what
02:00:41.520 | the science says or what the science doesn't say, it's a useful, functional philosophy that will
02:00:47.200 | put you in a position of having better outcomes. And then remember, "To whom much is given,
02:00:53.440 | much is required." If you are given intelligence, you're not given that so you can go out in the
02:01:00.640 | world and puff up your chest and say, "Well, I'm just so much smarter than you, and here's
02:01:05.200 | my MENSA membership." You're given that so that you can serve your fellow man. You have to use
02:01:10.640 | your gifts and your talents and your abilities and your intelligence and your athleticism and
02:01:15.280 | your strength to help others who are weak. If you were given much, if you are privileged,
02:01:22.080 | you are going to be held accountable to that. I am enormously privileged in my life,
02:01:27.920 | and I'm going to be held accountable for that based upon how I use my skills and my gifts to
02:01:34.720 | serve others. The same for you. If you grew up wealthy, you have an obligation to steward that
02:01:43.200 | wealth for the benefit of the poor. If you grew up in a loving household with two parents who
02:01:50.480 | loved you and made an amazing life for you, you have an obligation to use that and spread it in
02:01:58.400 | the world. You have an obligation to open your mouth and talk about it to help others to have
02:02:03.760 | the same results. If you're intelligent, you have an obligation to use your intelligence for the
02:02:10.240 | good of mankind. Your ambition should be to be a Nobel Prize winner so that the whole world can
02:02:17.840 | benefit from the work of your hands and the work of your mind. I hope that's a good place to leave
02:02:22.400 | this subject. I would encourage everyone to read these books. I've just touched on the foundation.
02:02:29.920 | I really like the order that I read them in. I like reading "Peak Secrets from the New Science
02:02:34.800 | of Expertise" by Anders Ericsson first, followed by "Talent is Overrated" by Jeff Colvin. I think
02:02:41.840 | those two could be swapped out either way. They're compatible. And if you wanted to skip them,
02:02:46.800 | skip one of them. They're very good. They're just different. But my favorite of the three was "Peak,"
02:02:50.880 | then "Talent is Overrated," and then "Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by
02:02:55.760 | David Epstein. All of them available in audio. All of them are available pretty cheap on Kindle and
02:03:01.920 | paperback. They're super cheap, and they're well worth your time. And it's important that you have
02:03:06.960 | a good scientific foundation for these beliefs. And I hope that I've inspired you to check it out.
02:03:10.880 | Hope I've inspired you to take these things and do them. I just want to close by saying,
02:03:17.040 | the world needs you and your genius. The world needs your children and their genius.
02:03:24.800 | We're all in this together. Your work is important. So get at it.
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