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My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. And today, I want to talk about genius, mastery, high-level performance, how you can develop these skills in yourself for success in any area to which you are attracted and to which you put your mind, as well as how we can cultivate this in our children.

I was reminded that I had intended to do this podcast months and months ago, but I had forgotten. In answering a question on Friday's Q&A show, I was asked about this, and I realized I had never did this podcast I intended to do. And then I got a couple of emails over the weekend of people saying, "Joshua, please do the podcast." So here it is.

This will be related to money in the sense that earning money and generating high skills is related to your ability to produce money, but it's not going to be related to personal finance beyond that. But I do think it'll be applicable in all of the social aspects of your life, your career, your children, their lives, and their careers.

I want to begin by telling you just my pathway, and I will cite for you the three books that interested me in this topic the most. The first book that I ran into was a book called Peek, P-E-A-K, Peek, written by an author named Anders Erikson, last name spelled E-R-I-C-S-S-O-N.

The subtitle is called Peek, Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. And I learned about this book because I stumbled into some online essays talking about deliberate practice. Specifically, I think the essay that I found that originally inspired me was an essay called How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field by Nate Eliasson.

I will link to that in the show notes today. And in this essay, he talks a little bit about Anders Erikson. I'll read the introduction to the essay. "In the late 1970s, Anders Erikson devised a very boring experiment. His subject, Steve Falloon, was instructed to memorize random strings of numbers.

Erikson's interest was in how many numbers Steve could keep in his head with consistent practice. The research and common wisdom at the time said you could only hold around seven to eight random bits of information in your head at a time. And so far, Steve was proving the research.

In each session, Erikson and Steve would sit down, and Erikson would read him a random string of numbers at a rate of one per second. By the end of their fourth one-hour session together, Steve could reliably recite back strings of seven or eight digits, but he'd struggle with nine and never successfully remembered ten, until he made a breakthrough.

During their fifth session, Steve succeeded at remembering his first ten-digit string and followed it up with his first eleven-digit string. It may seem trivial, but when the average person, including Steve at first, can only remember seven, this is a fifty-seven percent improvement over average. Steve was only getting started, though.

He and Erikson continued their work together, and by the end of the 200th session, he could reliably memorize strings of 82 random digits. He didn't have any gift. He didn't have any special training. He simply practiced week after week in a special way, the same way that's created chess prodigies, world record holders, Olympic gold medalists, prolific writers, and any master of their craft that you're familiar with today.

Anders Erikson devoted his life's work to studying this technique for effective skill development and coined the term "deliberate practice" to describe it. So just remember those numbers, that at the time in the 70s, scientists thought you could only hold seven or eight random bits of information in your head at the time.

Steve wound up consistently and reliably being able to memorize strings of 82 random digits. Interestingly, since that time, memory experts have gone far beyond Steve's records. I don't know what the current records are, but they went far beyond his accomplishments, which were extremely fascinating. And Anders Erikson in his book "Peak" talks about that and talks about the process that Steve went through to do it.

And basically, if I were to boil it down to its essence, he systematically worked at figuring out new ways to categorize and store the information. In Steve's case, as a research subject, he used baseball trivia as kind of the pegboard for his information. Other memory scientists have gone on and created other elaborate encoding schemes that allow them to encode the random digits in a very effective way.

But Steve didn't have any training. There was no one to train him on it. He just sat down and kept on working at this thing and got enormously better because he had this personality trait to stick with it for a very long period of time. Now, it was that essay that led me to go and try to find Erikson's book, which I found, called "Peak, Secrets from the New Science of Expertise," published in 2017.

I would strongly encourage you, if you're interested in this topic, to read that book and to start with it. I thought it was really, really well-created and fascinating, some of the insights that I learned from it, some of which I'll share with you right now. Here is the introductory blurb from Amazon.

"Anders Erikson has made a career studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. 'Peak' distills three decades of myth-shattering research into a powerful learning strategy that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring new abilities. Whether you want to stand out at work, improve your athletic or musical performance, or help your child achieve academic goals, Erikson's revolutionary methods will show you how to improve at almost any skill that matters to you." It's a great book.

And I think if you could only read one of the three books that I'm going to talk about, I think it should be this one. And here was what I took away from the book. The first thing is simply that as we learn, we get better, and our ability to learn increases.

Erikson spent his entire lifetime, his entire academic career, I think at Florida State University, studying high performers. And he came away from that career's research making statements similar to the idea that never in my life have I found a genius performer, a high-level performer to which I can't explain his long-term success and performance based upon the function of the application of what he calls deliberate practice, which we'll talk about in a moment, and doing deliberate practice for a sufficient amount of time.

He goes through every proclaimed genius and virtuoso in history and shows how we can understand this dramatically amazing overperformance based upon the use of the principles of deliberate practice and applying those principles for a sufficient amount of time. I can't remember all of the specific examples, but they would include Mozart, they include Tiger Woods, they include all these different people that are just renowned as high performers.

And he shows how they got that way most likely due to environmental factors and high amounts of the right kind of practice. One of the anecdotes that he told in the story that was so fascinating to me involved a discussion of something like perfect pitch. Here's a little bit of the story.

The year is 1763 and a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is about to embark on a tour around Europe that will jumpstart the Mozart legend. Just seven years old and barely tall enough to see over the top of a harpsichord, he captivates audiences in his hometown of Salzburg with his skill on the violin and various keyboard instruments.

He plays with a facility that seems impossible to believe in someone so young. But Mozart has another trick up his sleeve that is, if anything, even more surprising to the people of his era. We know about this talent because it was described in a rather breathless letter to the editor about the young Mozart that was published in the newspaper in Augsburg, Mozart's father's hometown, shortly before Mozart and his family left Salzburg for their tour.

The letter writer reported that when the young Mozart heard a note played on a musical instrument, any note, he could immediately identify exactly which note it was. The A-sharp in the second octave above middle C, perhaps, or the E-flat below middle C. Mozart could do this even if he was in another room and could not see the instrument being played, and he could do it not just for the violin and fortepiano, but for every instrument he heard.

And Mozart's father, as a composer and music teacher, had nearly every imaginable musical instrument in his house. Nor was it just musical instruments. The boy could identify the notes produced by anything that was sufficiently musical. The chime of a clock, the toll of a bell, the achoo of a sneeze.

It was an ability that most adult musicians of the time, even the most experienced, could not match. And it seemed, even more than Mozart's skill on keyboard and violin, to be an example of the mysterious gifts that this young prodigy had been born with. That ability is not quite so mysterious to us today, of course.

We know a good deal more about it now than 250 years ago, and most people today have at least heard of it. The technical term is "absolute pitch," although it is better known as "perfect pitch," and it is exceptionally rare. Only about one in every 10,000 people has it.

It is much less rare among world-class musicians than among the rest of us, but even among virtuosos it is far from normal. Beethoven is thought to have had it. Brahms did not. Vladimir Horowitz had it. Igor Stravinsky did not. Frank Sinatra had it. Miles Davis did not. It would seem, in short, to be a perfect example of an innate talent that a few lucky people are born with and most are not.

Indeed, that is what was widely believed for at least 200 years. But over the past few decades, a very different understanding of perfect pitch has emerged, one that points to an equally different vision of the sorts of gifts that life has to offer. The first hint emerged with the observation that the only people who had received this "gift" had also received some sort of musical training early in their childhood.

In particular, a good deal of research has shown that nearly everyone with perfect pitch began musical training at a very young age, generally around 3-5 years old. But if perfect pitch is an innate ability, something that you are either born with or not, then it shouldn't make any difference whether you received music training as a child.

All that should matter is that you get enough musical training, at any time in your life, to learn the names of the notes. The next clue appeared when researchers noticed that perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.

If perfect pitch is indeed a genetic gift, then the only way that the tonal language connection would make sense would be if people of Asian ancestry are more likely to have genes for perfect pitch than people whose ancestors come from elsewhere, such as Europe or Africa. But that is something that is easy to test for.

You just recruit a number of people of Asian ancestry who grew up speaking English or some other non-tonal language and see if they are more likely to have perfect pitch. That research has been done, and it turns out that people of Asian heritage who don't grow up speaking a tonal language are no more likely than people of other ethnicities to have perfect pitch.

So, it's not the Asian genetic heritage, but rather learning a tonal language that makes having perfect pitch more likely. Up until a few years ago, this was pretty much what we knew. Studying music as a child was thought to be essential to having perfect pitch, and growing up speaking a tonal language increased your odds of having perfect pitch.

Scientists could not say with certainty whether perfect pitch was an innate talent, but they knew that if it was a gift, it was a gift that only appeared among those people who had received some training in pitch in childhood. In other words, it would have to be some sort of use-it-or-lose-it gift.

Even the lucky few people who are born with a gift for perfect pitch would have to do something, in particular some sort of musical training while young to develop it. We now know that this isn't the case either. The true character of perfect pitch was revealed in 2014, thanks to a beautiful experiment carried out at Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo and reported in the scientific journal Psychology of Music.

The Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara recruited 24 children between the ages of 2 and 6 and put them through a months-long training course designed to teach them to identify, simply by their sound, various chords played on the piano. The chords were all major chords with three notes, such as C major chord with middle C and the E and G notes immediately above middle C.

The children were given four or five short training sessions per day, each lasting just a few minutes, and each child continued training until he or she could identify all 14 of the target chords that Sakakibara had selected. Some of the children completed the training in less than a year, while others took as long as a year and a half.

Then, once a child had learned to identify the 14 chords, Sakakibara tested that child to see if he or she could correctly name individual notes. After completing training, every one of the children in the study had developed perfect pitch and could identify individual notes played on the piano. This is an astonishing result.

While in normal circumstances only one in every 10,000 people develops perfect pitch, every single one of Sakakibara's students did. The clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training.

The study has completely rewritten our understanding of perfect pitch. So, what about Mozart's perfect pitch? A little investigation into his background gives us a pretty good idea of what happened. Wolfgang's father, Leopold Mozart, was a moderately talented violinist and composer, who had never had the degree of success he desired, so he set out to turn his children into the sort of musicians he himself had always wanted to be.

He began with Mozart's older sister, Maria Anna, who by the time she was 11 was described by contemporaries as playing the piano and harpsichord as well as professional adult musicians. The elder Mozart, who wrote the first training book for children's musical development, began working with Wolfgang at an even younger age than he had started with Maria Anna.

By the time Wolfgang was four, his father was working with him full-time, on the violin, the keyboard, and more. While we don't know exactly what exercises Mozart's father used to train his son, we do know that by the time Mozart was six or seven, he had trained far more intensely and for far longer than the two dozen children who developed perfect pitch through Sakakibara's practice sessions.

In retrospect, then, there should be nothing at all surprising about Mozart's development of perfect pitch. So, did the seven-year-old Wolfgang have a gift for perfect pitch? Yes and no. Was he born with some rare genetic endowment that allowed him to identify the precise pitch of a piano note or a whistling tea kettle?

Everything that scientists have learned about perfect pitch says no. Indeed, if Mozart had been raised in some other family without exposure to music, or without enough of the right sort of exposure, he would certainly have never developed that ability at all. Nonetheless, Mozart was indeed born with a gift, and it was the same gift that the children in Sakakibara's study were born with.

They were all endowed with a brain so flexible and adaptable that it could, with the right sort of training, develop a capability that seems quite magical to those of us who do not possess it. In short, perfect pitch is not the gift, but rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift, and as nearly as we can tell, pretty much everyone is born with that gift.

Now, the author goes on and, as I said, gives many interesting examples, but one of the most important ones to me was his demonstration of the fact that when you start learning, one of the most magical things is that when you start learning and developing in a certain area, you actually develop new physical traits, new physical abilities that make it easier for you to learn more.

So, I would call this an example of what they call the Matthew Principle. Those who have will be given more, and those who have not, even what they do not have will be taken from them. Because when you do something, your brain actually physically adapts to that thing that you're doing.

My favorite example of this was in the book Peak. Erickson gives the example of London cab drivers, and he shows how, evidently, in London, there's a very—to be a London cabbie is not an easy thing. There's a significant training and apprenticeship program. There's a very significant set of tests that the cab drivers have to pass before they're allowed to be an official London cabbie, and the tests involve them learning, basically, the city like the back of their hands.

And so, neuroscientists and researchers started to study London cab drivers, and they worked through all of the questions relating to the London cab driver's ability. They discovered that the physical makeup of London cab drivers, in terms of their basic structure of their brain, how the gray matter of their brain is put together, is markedly different from a non-cab driver, and that the cab drivers all have this difference in their brain.

So then they set out to say, "Well, are people with this difference in their brain actually just selecting themselves to be cab drivers, or is it the cab driving itself and the navigational skills that are building this ability?" And so, they went on in the book, and they talked about all the studies, and they did all of the studies to answer all of the questions about what people's brains are like before they start being a London cab driver, and then what people's brains are like after they become a London cab driver.

And it shows that their brains change for it. They did all the tests to make sure that the science was good. And what the science demonstrated was that becoming a cab driver causes your brain to change and to adapt in terms of its skills of navigation. And he also cited other research that has been done showing the same thing that happens in other areas.

Mathematicians' brains are different from non-mathematicians' brains. Musicians' brains are different than non-musicians' brains, even to the point of if you're a violinist, your brain is different because you will use generally your left hand to control the actual note placement. So, your brain is going to be different from someone else who is an instrument, who's a musician, but doesn't use his left hand in playing his instrument.

And this is really powerful because it demonstrates that when we do something, not only do we get better at it in the natural process of practice makes perfect, but rather, we become more physically capable of getting better at it. Our brains and our bodies adapt to the task that we are putting upon them so that we have more physical resources to apply to the specific task.

And there doesn't seem to be a limit to it. That concept is amazing to me. And to see him lay it out in a very systematic way, really, I found extraordinarily persuasive, just enormously persuasive. And when he laid out the ideas of how to do it, then we see its impact in society.

Now, he spends a lot of time in the book talking about deliberate practice. Later, after reading the book, I realized that I had been seeing the term "deliberate practice" in many other places, and I'd been seeing his research cited. I just wasn't cluing into it as I am now.

And in essence, this is just my layman version of it. Deliberate practice is a little bit hard to define, but what I think of it is simply as a purposefully improving the things that you're not—purposely improving the things that were at the edge under expert coaching and expert supervision.

So, let me give an example. We can divide practice into different kinds of practice. Anderson talks about, I think, naive practice and purposeful practice and deliberate practice. So, naive practice is what most of us do. We just kind of go through the motions when we're doing something, and we just do it the same way that we've always done it.

We hit the golf ball the same way we've always hit the golf ball. And what is unique about naive practice is that you don't actually get better, or at least you don't get better in a measurable, predictable way. The example I like to use of this is driving. By the time you reach, say, 30 years old, you've been driving a car for many, many years, and you've probably driven for many, many hours.

You're going to continue in your life driving for many, many more hours and many, many years. But on the whole, just because you're driving your car more, your actual driving skills are not getting better. The average 50-year-old is not a more competent driver than the average 20-year-old. They're kind of about the same.

Why? Well, because when we drive, we're basically always on automatic mode. We just get in and we go, and we don't change anything, and we're not actually getting better. And so, this is what most of us do in most parts of our life. We just do the same thing.

We play the game the same way we've always done it. We practice music that we already know how to play. We cook and make the same recipes we've already had. We're not getting better because we're not improving or challenging ourselves. Once we reach that, what we perceive to be an acceptable level of performance, then additional hours of practice don't lead to any improvement.

So, then we could go to purposeful practice. And purposeful practice is closer to deliberate practice, where we are specifically trying to improve in a certain way. So, if we're playing music, we're trying to play a certain piece of music through without any mistakes multiple times in a row. Or we're trying to specifically work on a certain technique that is necessary for our ping pong game.

And so, here we are actually getting better. We're focusing, we're getting feedback, and we're genuinely getting better. And purposeful practice is effective at making us better, but it's not enough. What we need for true deliberate practice, the most important aspect, is we need to be improving in a field that is well-defined, where the skills and the outcomes are known by the experts.

The structure of the field is well-defined. And we need to have a teacher who can give us specific practice activities that will help us to cross over the roadblocks that are in our face. And the idea is that with these, we can focus on that specific core set of skills that is hindering our further practice.

And so, that's the core of deliberate practice. It really is something that can only be done in a field where the skills of success are well-known, and where we can hire and find an excellent coach. Otherwise, we're going to be just doing purposeful practice and making it up ourselves, just like the guy who was memorizing numbers made it up himself.

What I found so encouraging about this was that it was a broad-scale science-based affirmation of basically what most any motivational speaker has been teaching for many, many years, that if someone else has done something, you can do it too, right? Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.

Well, it's true if I follow the same practice. So, when we identify experts in a field, we figure out how they became that expert and what was it that made them so good, then we can design practice methodologies that will help us to improve. And those practice methodologies are always going to keep us at kind of the cutting edge.

The example that I remember, I think it came from the book, but that I think about, was a golfer. If you're a pro golfer, then one of the things that you're working on is your skill is the kinds of skills that very rarely will anyone else need. So, I guess we go to Tiger Woods as an example, right?

This guy that we all understand is an amazing golfer. When Tiger Woods is practicing, he's not sitting around and practicing his drive off of the tee. That's not where he needs practice. He has a perfect drive, he's practiced it a bazillion times, and there's no need for any further practice of that.

But what a guy like him needs to do is practice the very extreme skills. So, in one of the books, it was talked about how a golfer will go out to a sandpit and will systematically sink balls into the sandpit and try to shoot very hard shots out of the sandpit.

That's something and create just crazy stuff, put the ball in, step on it, put it down under and do this. And those are skills that are really important, but they're really only important, say, once a year or once every couple of years. But yet in that moment when you're playing the game and you've hit the ball into the sandpit, the fact that you've practiced this tiny skill hundreds or thousands of times means that there's a much greater likelihood that that one shot that you make once a year will lead to your having the winning score.

And in the expert level, that's what it is. It's always these tiny little things that are at the very margin, but that's where your practice has to focus on. So, the concept of deliberate practice is enormously freeing and motivating because it means that I can put together a way to improve that's appropriate for me.

I can do anything that I want to do. I can build a practice strategy that allows me to accomplish anything that I'm looking to accomplish. The ultimate vindication of this would have to do, as a kind of a scientific theory, it would really be vindicated if we could predict in advance who's going to be an expert and know that it's not kind of an accident that it happens.

And the most powerful story that you'll hear repeatedly when you start getting into this area of research has to do with a man named Laszlo Polgar and his wife and three daughters. Let me read you a little bit of the story. In the late 1960s, the Hungarian psychologist Laszlo Polgar and his wife Clara embarked on a grand experiment that would consume their lives for the next quarter century.

Laszlo had studied hundreds of people who were considered geniuses in one field or another, and he'd concluded that with the proper rearing, any child could be turned into a genius. When he was wooing Clara, he outlined his theories and explained that he was looking for a wife who would collaborate with him to test his theories on their own children.

Clara, a teacher from Ukraine, must have been a very special woman, for she responded positively to this unorthodox courtship and agreed to Laszlo's proposals for marriage and for turning their future children into geniuses. Laszlo was so sure his training program would work for any area that he wasn't picky about which particular one he and Clara would target, and the two of them discussed various options.

Languages were one option. Just how many languages might it be possible to teach a child? Mathematics was another possibility. Top-flight mathematicians were highly regarded in Eastern Europe at the time, as the communist regime sought ways to prove their superiority over the decadent West. Mathematics would have the added advantage that there were no top-level female mathematicians at the time, so assuming that he and Clara had a daughter, Laszlo would prove his claims even more convincingly.

But he and Clara settled on the third option. "We could do the same thing with any subject. If you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject," Clara would later tell a newspaper reporter. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure." Chess had always been thought of as a game for the male mind, with female chess players treated as second-class citizens.

The women had their own tournaments and championships because it was thought it wouldn't be fair to put them up against the men, and there had never been a female grandmaster. Indeed, at the time, the common attitude toward women playing chess was much like Samuel Johnson's famous quote, "A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs.

It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all." The Polgars were blessed with three children, all of them girls. All the better to prove Laszlo's point. Their first daughter, born in April 1969, was named Susan (in Hungarian, Susana). Sophia followed in November 1974, and then Judith in July 1976.

Laszlo and Clara homeschooled their daughters in order to spend as much time as possible focusing on chess. It didn't take long for the Polgars' experiment to become a tremendous success. Susan was just four years old when she won her first tournament, dominating the Budapest Girls Under Eleven Championship with ten wins, no losses, and no ties.

At 15, she became the top-ranked woman chess player in the world, and she went on to become the first woman to be awarded grandmaster status via the same path that the males must take. Two other women had been named grandmasters after winning female-only world championships. And Susan wouldn't even be the most accomplished of the girls.

Sophia, the second daughter, also had an amazing chess career. Perhaps its highlight came when she was only 14, when she dominated a tournament in Rome that included several highly-regarded male grandmasters. By winning eight of her nine games and drawing the ninth, she earned a single tournament chess rating (that is, a rating based only on the games of that tournament) of 2,735, which was one of the highest tournament ratings ever for either a male or female player.

That was in 1989, and people in the chess world still talk about "the sack of Rome." Although Sophia's highest overall chess rating was 2,540, well over the 2,500 threshold for grandmaster, and although she had performed more than well enough in sanctioned tournaments, she was never awarded grandmaster status, a result that was apparently more a political decision than a judgment about her chess prowess.

Like her sisters, she never tried to make nice with the male chess establishment. Sophia was at one time the sixth-ranked female chess player in the world. Among the Polgar sisters, though, she could be considered the "slacker." Judith was the crown jewel of Laszlo Polgar's experiment. She became a grandmaster at 15 years, 5 months, making her, at that time, the youngest person, male or female, to ever reach that level.

She was the number one-ranked women's chess player in the world for 25 years until she retired from chess in 2014. At one time, she was ranked number eight in the world among all chess players, male or female, and in 2005, she became the first, and so far only, woman to play in the overall world chess championship.

The Polgar sisters were all clearly experts. Each of them became among the very best in the world in an area in which the measured performance is extremely objective. There are no style points in chess. Your school background doesn't matter. Your resume doesn't count. So we know, without any doubts, just how good they were.

And they were very, very good. And while some details of their background are unusual – very few parents are so focused on turning their children into the best in the world at something – they provide a clear, if somewhat extreme, example of what it takes to become an expert performer.

The paths that Susan, Sophia, and Judith took to chess mastery are in line with the path that essentially all experts have taken to become extraordinary. In particular, psychologists have found that an expert's development passes through four distinct stages, from the first glimmers of interest to full-fledged expertise. Everything we know about the Polgar sisters suggests they went through those same stages, if perhaps in a slightly different fashion because of how their father directed their development.

And he goes on and talks about the four stages, which are starting out. In the starting out stage, children are introduced in a playful way to what will eventually become their field of interest. And at this stage, the parents of children who are to become experts play a crucial role in the child's development.

For one thing, the parents give their children a great deal of time, attention, and encouragement. For another, the parents tend to be very achievement-oriented and teach their children such values as self-discipline, hard work, responsibility, and spending one's time constructively. And once a child becomes interested in a particular field, he or she is expected to approach it with those same attributes, discipline, hard work, achievement.

This is a crucial period in a child's development. Many children will find some initial motivation to explore or to try something because of their natural curiosity or playfulness. And parents have an opportunity to use this initial interest as a springboard to an activity. But that initial curiosity-driven motivation needs to be supplemented.

One excellent supplement, particularly with smaller children, is praise. Another motivation is the satisfaction of having developed a certain skill, particularly if that achievement is acknowledged by a parent. Once a child can consistently hit a ball with a bat, say, or play a simple tune on the piano or count the number of eggs in a carton, that achievement becomes a point of pride and serves as motivation for further achievements in that area.

It goes on, talks about how practice is not such a big part of the initial stage, but then in stage two, becoming serious. Once a future expert performer becomes interested and shows some promise in an area, the typical next step is to take lessons from a coach or teacher.

At this point, most of these students encounter deliberate practice for the first time. Unlike their experiences up to this point, which have been mainly playful activities, their practice is about to become work. One of the things that's most interesting about the concept of deliberate practice is how hard it is.

It's exhausting. The world's greatest performers can only engage in deliberate practice, true deliberate practice, for very small quantities of time because that deliberate practice is so exhausting. So it really is hard work. So what can parents do? Well, parents can help with motivation. Judith has said that her father was the best motivator she had ever met, and this is perhaps the most important factor in the early days of an expert's development, maintaining that interest and motivation while the skills and habits are being built.

Parents have an important role to play as well. Parents help their children establish routines, say, practicing the piano for an hour each day, and they give them support and encouragement and praise them for improvements. Some parents of Bloom's future experts had to resort to tactics like threatening to cut off piano lessons and sell the piano or to no longer take the child to swim practice.

Obviously, all of the future expert performers decided at this juncture that they wanted to keep going. Others might choose otherwise. While there are various ways that parents and teachers can motivate children, the motivation must ultimately be something that comes from within the child or else it won't endure. And the author talks about other ways to accomplish that.

The third phase is commitment. Generally, when they're in their early or mid teens, the future experts make a major commitment to becoming the best that they can be. This commitment is the third stage. Now, students will often seek out the best teachers or schools for their training, even if it requires moving across country.

In most cases, that teacher will be someone who has reached the highest levels in the field him or herself, a concert pianist-turned teacher, a swimming coach who has trained Olympic athletes, a top research mathematician, and so on. It is generally not easy to be accepted into these programs, and acceptance means that the teacher shares the student's belief that he or she can reach the highest levels.

Here, the author talks about the benefits of starting young. In Bloom's study, all 120 experts had become their climb toward that pinnacle as children, which is typical among expert performers. But people frequently ask me what the possibilities are for someone who doesn't begin training until later in life. While the specific details vary by field, there are relatively few absolute limitations on what is possible for people who begin training as adults.

Indeed, the practical limitations, such as the fact that few adults have four to five hours a day to devote to deliberate practice, are often more of an issue than any physical or mental limitations. However, expertise in some fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn't start training as a child.

Understanding such limitations can help you decide which areas you might wish to pursue. The most obvious performance issues are those that involve physical abilities. In the general population, physical performance peaks around age 20. With increasing age, we lose flexibility. We become more prone to injury and we take longer to heal.

We slow down. Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their 20s. Professional athletes can remain competitive in their 30s or even early 40s with recent advances in training. In fact, people can train effectively well into their 80s. Much of the age-related deterioration in various skills happens because people decrease or stop their training.

Older people who continue to train regularly see their performance decrease much less. There are master's divisions in track and field competition with age brackets up to 80 and beyond. And the people who train for these events do so in precisely the same way that people who are decades younger do.

They just train for shorter periods with less intensity because of the increased risk of injury and the increased amount of time the body takes to recover from training. Now, in addition to the gradual deterioration in physical abilities that accompanies aging, some physical skills simply cannot be developed to expert levels if one doesn't start working on them in childhood.

The human body is growing and developing through adolescence up to the late teens or early 20s. But once we hit 20 or so, our skeletal structure is mostly set, which has implications for certain abilities. For example, if ballet dancers are to develop the classic turnout, the ability to rotate the entire leg, beginning at the hip, so that it points directly to the side, they must start early.

If they wait until after their hip and knee joints calcify, which typically happens between the ages of 8 and 12 years, they'll probably never be able to get a full turnout. The same sort of thing is true for the shoulders of athletes, like baseball pitchers, whose sport requires them to throw a ball with an overhead motion.

Only those who start training at an early age will have the requisite range of motion as adults, with the throwing arm able to be stretched well back behind the shoulder to produce the classic windup. And something similar holds true with the motion tennis players use when serving. Only those who start young have the full range of the serving motion.

Professional tennis players who start young also overdevelop the forearm they use to handle the racket. Not just the muscles, but the bones as well. The bones in a tennis player's dominant arm can be 20% thicker than the bones in his or her other arm, a huge difference that allows the bones in the dominant arm to endure the steady jolting that comes with hitting a tennis ball that may be traveling as fast as 50 miles per hour.

However, even tennis players who start later in life, in their 20s, still can adapt to some degree, but just not as much as those who start younger. In other words, our bones retain their ability to change in response to stress well beyond puberty. We witness this pattern again and again when we examine the relationship between age and the body's ability to adapt to stresses or other stimuli.

The body and the brain both are more adaptable during childhood and adolescence than they are in adulthood, but in most ways they remain adaptable to some degree throughout life. The relationship between age and adaptability varies considerably according to exactly which characteristic you have in mind, and the patterns are very different for mental adaptations than for physical ones.

Consider the various ways that musical training can affect the brain. Studies have shown that some parts of the brain are larger in musicians than in non-musicians, but there are certain parts of the brain for which this is true only if the musician began studying music as a young child.

Researchers have found proof of this, for example, in the corpus callosum, the collection of tissue that connects the brain's hemispheres and serves as the communications path between them. The corpus callosum is significantly larger in adult musicians than in adult non-musicians, but a closer look finds that it is really only larger in musicians who started practicing before they were seven.

A different example a couple pages later. Consider what happens to the brain when it learns multiple languages. It is well known that people who speak two or more languages have more gray matter in certain parts of the brain, in particular the inferior parietal cortex, which is known to play a role in language, and that the earlier a person learned a second language, the more extra gray matter there is.

To everyone else this is a desk, but to you it's an entrepeneur, your starting block. You're saying a desk? This is opportunity. Students who switch and save can get the Moto G 5G on us at your local Boost retailer. The Boost mobile network includes roaming coverage from partner networks which cover 99% of the U.S.

population. Moto G 5G on us. When you switch with ID verification, a new $60 plan activation. Taxes extra. All prices, fees, features, functionality, and other offers are subject to change without notice. See participating dealers for details. Thus, learning languages early in life takes place, it seems, at least in part, through adding gray matter.

But a study of multilingual people who as adults studied to become simultaneous interpreters found a very different effect on the brain. These simultaneous interpreters actually had less gray matter than people who could speak the same number of languages but who didn't work as simultaneous interpreters. The researchers who carried out the study speculated that this disparity was because of the different contexts in which the learning took place.

When children and adolescents learn new languages, it is against the backdrop of increasing gray matter, and so their learning the additional languages may occur through the addition of gray matter. But when adults continue their focus on multiple languages, this time with an emphasis on simultaneous translation, it is against a backdrop of pruning synapses.

Fascinating to dig into. I hope I'm whetting your appetite on the book. I need to go back and reread it because it's just so good. And this leads to kind of the final question that the book addresses, which is, what about natural talent? Whenever I write or speak about deliberate practice and expertise, I am invariably asked, but what about natural talent?

In my articles and my talks, I always offer the same basic message that I have here. Expert performers develop their extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step-by-step in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts. Various sorts of practice can be effective, but the most effective of all is deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice takes advantage of the natural adaptability of the human brain and body to create new abilities. Most of these abilities are created with the help of detailed mental representations, which allow us to analyze and respond to situations much more effectively than we could otherwise. "Fine," some people will reply, "we understand all that.

But even so, aren't there some people who don't have to work as hard and can still be better than everyone else? And aren't there some people who are born without any talent for something, say music or math or sports, so that no matter how hard they try, they'll never be any good at it?" It is one of the most enduring and deep-seated of all beliefs about human nature that natural talent plays a major role in determining ability.

This belief holds that some people are born with natural endowments that make it easier for them to become outstanding athletes or musicians or chess players or writers or mathematicians or whatever. While they may still need a certain amount of practice to develop their skills, they need far less than others who are not as talented, and they can ultimately reach much greater heights.

My studies of experts point to quite a different explanation of why some people ultimately develop greater abilities in an area than others, with deliberate practice playing the starring role. So let's separate myth from reality by exploring the intertwined roles of talent and training in the development of extraordinary abilities.

As we'll see, innate characteristics play a much smaller and much different role than many people generally assume. Now, you can go on and read about the magic of Paganini as his example, and Mozart and others, including he gives a story of the magical high jumper of Donald Thomas, cited in the book The Sports Gene, talks about various savants.

But at the end of the day, the basic lesson that Erickson tries to teach is that genetic ability or talent, innate talent, is not the key factor that leads to the long-term outcome. Now, this is not without controversy. In fact, I'm quite interested myself in these areas of controversy.

I would say the two areas of the greatest controversy would have to do with innate genetics, especially related to areas like athletic performance, and as well as innate characteristics as measured by IQ. Now, there is an enormous and robust and very vitriolic debate around the topic of IQ. Is someone's natural IQ a determinative factor in life outcomes?

This is one of the most hotly debated areas that I know of in the social sciences, where it's actually basically forbidden to debate it, because people say, "Well, if you categorize people based upon their natural IQ, then that's unfair, and it's not leading to the long-term outcome." So, if you basically want to destroy your potential for a noted, illustrious career, start becoming an IQ researcher.

I don't have the competence to actually assess this. I don't know enough about the literature. I don't understand it. I don't have the competence to hold a position on this, so I don't have a position on it. What's fascinating is if you start looking into IQ, there are a number of studies that demonstrate how the enormous predictive value of somebody's IQ in terms of their long-term life outcomes, and we can see all kinds of evidence that IQ seems to be persuasive.

At least constrained to this subject of genius, Erickson touches on this, and he talks about the fact that the impact of IQ is measurable, but not determinative of ultimate performance. Let me read you just a short example when he's talking about chess players. "Perhaps the best example we have of this comes from chess.

In the popular imagination, great skill in chess is intimately tied to tremendous logic and intellect. If an author or screenwriter wishes to signal that a character is particularly brilliant, that character will be seated at a chessboard and will checkmate his or her opponent with the proper savoir-faire. Even better, this genius will come across a game already in progress and, after glancing at the board for a second or two, point out the winning line of play.

Quite often the chess player is a quirky but brilliant detective or perhaps the equally quirky and almost equally brilliant criminal mastermind, or preferably both, so that the opponents can face each other across the board, matching wits and trading witticisms. Sometimes, as in the climactic scene in the 2011 movie A Game of Shadows with Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, the two of them end up ignoring the chessboard altogether and just spit out their moves at each other like two boxers fainting and jabbing until one lands the knockout punch.

But no matter the circumstances, the message is always the same. A mastery of chess signals the sort of deep intelligence that only a few are fortunate enough to be born with. And conversely, playing chess brilliantly demands a brilliant mind. And if you examine chess-playing ability in children who are just learning to play, those with higher IQs do indeed become better players faster.

But that is just the beginning of the story. And it is the end of the story that truly tells the tale. Over the years, many researchers have examined the connection between intelligence and chess-playing ability. Some of the earliest work was done in the 1890s by Alfred Bennett, the father of intelligence testing, who studied chess players mainly in an attempt to understand what sort of memory was required to play blindfold chess.

Bennett developed his IQ test as a method of identifying students who had problems doing well in school. And indeed, he succeeded, as IQ tests are very much correlated with academic success. But since Bennett's time, many researchers have argued that the IQ test measures general abilities that are correlated with success in virtually any domain, such as music and chess.

These researchers thus believe that IQ tests measure some sort of general innate intelligence. Others disagree, however, and argue that IQ is best thought of not as innate intelligence, but rather simply as what IQ tests measure, which can include such things as knowledge about relatively rare words and acquired skills in mathematics.

Without delving deeply into that debate, I will just say that I think it is best to not equate IQ with innate intelligence, but simply to stick with the facts and think of IQ as some cognitive factor measured by IQ tests that has been shown to predict certain things, such as success in school.

It goes on and talks about chess then, and here is the relevant section. But these studies were done in young chess players, and while they found that these young players did have higher than average IQ scores, there was no clear relationship between IQ and how good a particular player was.

By contrast, studies done in adults have generally found adult chess players to have no better visuospatial abilities than normal non-chess playing adults. Research has also shown that skilled adult chess players, even grandmasters, do not have systematically higher IQs than other adults with similar levels of education, nor is there any correlation between the IQs of highly skilled chess players and their chess ratings.

As strange as it seems to those of us who have grown up with the tortured but brilliant fictional characters who excel at chess, all of the evidence says that higher intelligence is not correlated with better chess playing among adults. Even stranger is the case of Go, which has been often referred to as the Asian version of chess.

It talks about what the game is. While there's only one type of piece and only one type of move, putting a stone at an intersection point, the game is actually more complex than chess in the sense that there are far more different possible games that can be played, and indeed it has proved far more challenging than chess to develop software to play the game well.

Unlike the best chess playing computer programs, which can consistently beat chess grandmasters, the best Go programs, at least as this is written in 2015, cannot stand up to top-ranked Go players. Thus, as with chess, you might assume that Go masters must have high IQs or perhaps exceptional visuospatial skills.

But again, you would be wrong. Recent studies of Go masters have found that their average IQ is, if anything, below average. Two separate studies of Korean Go experts found an average IQ of about 93, compared with control groups of non-Go playing Koreans matched for age and sex, which had an average IQ around 100.

While the number of Go masters in the two studies were small enough that the below average IQs could have just been statistical flukes, it is clear that Go masters, on average, score no higher on IQ tests than people in the general population. Against this background, the three British researchers set out to resolve the conflicting results on chess players.

Does a higher intelligence, that is, a higher IQ score, help one develop a better chess game or not? The researchers' plan was to do a study that took into account both intelligence and practice time. Earlier studies had looked at one or the other but not both. It goes around and explains how the research was identified.

When the researchers analyzed all their data, they found results similar to those seen by other researchers. The amount of chess practice that the children had done was the biggest factor in explaining how well they played chess, with more practice being correlated with better scores on the various measures of chess skill.

A smaller but still significant factor was intelligence, with higher IQ being related to better chess skills. Surprisingly, visuospatial intelligence wasn't the most important factor, but rather memory and processing speed were. Looking at all their evidence, the researchers concluded that in children of this age, practice is the key factor in success, although innate intelligence, or IQ, still plays a role.

The picture changed dramatically, however, when the researchers looked at only the elite players in the group. These were 23 children, all boys. The show talks about their elite skills. Among these 23 elite players, the amount of practice was still the major factor determining their chess skills, but intelligence played no noticeable role.

While the elite group did have a somewhat higher average IQ than the average IQ for the entire group of 57, the players in the elite group with lower IQs were, on average, slightly better players than those in the elite group with high IQ. Stop and digest that for a moment.

Among these young, elite chess players, not only was a higher IQ no advantage, but it seemed to put them at a slight disadvantage. The reason, the researchers found, was that the elite players with lower IQs tended to practice more, which improved their chess game to the point that they played better than the high IQ elite players.

Now, the author goes on and expands the actual research on this more, and it's so fascinating. But consider this. If you see yourself as, if you see or are, if you're genuinely not as skilled in an area as someone else is naturally in that area, and if you practice more, there's a good chance that your additional amounts of practice can make up for the other person's innate advantage and superiority over you such that you can beat the other person.

That's one of the most powerful, empowering ideas that I can imagine. Now, let's go on to a different section as we wrap up our discussion on this particular book, "The Real Role of Innate Characteristics." The results from the chess study provide a crucial insight into the interplay between talent and practice in the development of various skills.

While people with certain innate characteristics, IQ in the case of the chess study, may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining how skilled a person becomes.

Researchers have seen evidence of this pattern in many different fields. In music, as in chess, there is an early correlation between IQ and performance. For example, a study of 91 5th grade students who were given piano instruction for six months found that on average, the students with higher IQs performed better at the end of those six months than those with lower IQs.

However, the measured correlation between IQ and music performance gets smaller as the years of music study increase, and tests have found no relationship between IQ and music performance among music majors in college or among professional musicians. In a study on expertise in oral surgery, the performance of dental students was found to be related to their performance on tests of visual spatial ability, and the students who scored higher on those tests also performed better on surgical simulations done on the model of a jaw.

However, when the same test was done on dental residents and dental surgeons, no such correlation was found. Thus, the initial influence of visual spatial ability on surgical performance disappears over time as the dental students practice their skills, and by the time they become residents, the differences in talent, in this case visual spatial ability, no longer have a noticeable effect.

Among the people studying to be London taxi drivers that we discussed in Chapter 2, there was no difference in IQ between the ones who finished the course and became certified drivers and those who dropped out. IQ made no difference in how well the drivers could learn to find their way around London.

The average IQ of scientists is certainly higher than the average IQ of the general population, but among scientists, there is no correlation between IQ and scientific productivity. Indeed, a number of Nobel Prize-winning scientists have had IQs that would not even qualify them for MENSA, an organization whose members must have a measured IQ of at least 132, a number that puts you in the upper two percentile of the population.

Skipping down the discussion of scientists, a number of researchers have suggested that there are, in general, minimum requirements for performing capably in various areas. For instance, it has been suggested that scientists in at least some fields need an IQ score of around 110 to 120 to be successful, but that a higher score doesn't confer any additional benefit.

However, it is not clear whether that IQ score of 110 is necessary to actually perform the duties of a scientist or simply to get to the point where you can be hired as a scientist. In many scientific fields, you need to hold a Ph.D. to be able to get research grants and conduct research, and getting a Ph.D.

requires four to six years of successful postgraduate academic performance, with a high level of writing skills and a large vocabulary, which are essentially attributes measured by verbal intelligence tests. Furthermore, most science Ph.D. programs demand mathematical and logical thinking, which are measured by other components of intelligence tests. When college graduates apply to graduate school, they have to take such tests as the Graduate Record Examination, GRE, which measure these abilities, and only the high-scoring students are accepted into science graduate programs.

Thus, from this perspective, it is not surprising that scientists generally have IQ scores of 110 to 120 or above. Without the ability to achieve such scores, it is unlikely they would have ever had the chance to become scientists in the first place. One could also speculate that there are certain "minimum talent" requirements for such things as playing sports or painting, so that people who fall below those requirements would find it difficult or impossible to become highly skilled in those areas.

But outside of some very basic physical traits, such as height and body size in sports, we have no solid evidence that such minimum requirements exist. We do know, and this is important, that among those people who have practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill in their chosen field, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best.

Once you get to the top, it isn't natural talent that makes the difference, at least not talent in the way it is usually understood as an innate ability to excel at a particular activity. I better stop. He talks about the dark side of believing in talent, which to me, I think, is the most important thing, and talks about where do we go from here.

The big takeaways that I took from the book is that we can really dramatically improve our training methodologies by applying deliberate practice. When I finished reading this book, I took several dozen pages of screenshots and sent them to a friend of mine who's a physician, and basically just pointing out how we can dramatically improve training programs for skills.

When I take the modern science that is presented by this skilled researcher and I look around, what I see is enormous opportunities for improvement in how we teach and in how we train. And I've tried to, this has been kind of one of my interests, is to say, how can I apply this modern knowledge that we have to how we teach and how we train?

Because all of our training methodologies should involve the basic principles of deliberate practice, and this should be the case in how we teach reading, it should be the case in how we teach mathematics, it should be the case in how we teach sports, it should be the case in how we teach anything.

And indeed, I think that we can measure the impact of these ideas across many, many fields. If you just look at the Olympics, which are just concluded here in 2024, and you take whatever discipline you're interested in and go back 30 years or 50 years, what you will see is that the Olympic performance of a previous competitor who got an Olympic medal in 1970 today is basically the average performance of a high-scoring high school athlete, not in any way Olympic-level.

And so we've pushed the envelope in so many things, especially physical endeavors, because of our ability to train more effectively. I think in mental endeavors, we could argue both sides. One thing I've said in the past is that I said it's just embarrassing how we've failed so enormously in making advances in educational abilities.

If you go back and you look at a Harvard College entrance exam from the early 20th century, and you compare the amount of knowledge needed by that, and you compare that to today, it's astonishing how ignorant our modern generation is. And so I have made the statement that we should dramatically improve how we actually teach, because if we're not producing more knowledgeable, more informed graduates today than we were back then, we're failing.

I don't agree with that anymore, though. I think I was wrong in saying that. I don't know how to quantify this. But as I thought about that, I realized that's not the case. Today, we're teaching a much bigger body of knowledge. If you were to go back to 1900 or 1800 and look at the amount of knowledge that a Harvard entrance, an entering college freshman was expected to know, there was a much deeper level of knowledge, especially in the humanities, especially in the classical languages and things like that.

But I think today there's a much bigger body of knowledge that that entering student would know, because today there'll be much more advanced mathematics, much more advanced history, much more advanced science. And so I don't think it was right when I previously made those statements. But I would love to see somebody quantify that and try to figure it out.

Regardless, the point remains that we should be incorporating the very best teaching methodologies in teaching these things. And if you're coaching someone, a young person or yourself, you always need to go out and find the best current teaching methodology, because we can and should find ourselves dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to learn the subjects that we're teaching.

And I think we can do this and we should do this. This is basically all of my interest in homeschooling. I have enormously above average interest in these topics, enormously above average resources, enormously above average research abilities. And so this is what I do. This is my hobby, is I go out and try to find this stuff.

And I see good results with the areas that I have adapted this to, and I'm still working to create good results. So let's leave the IQ question aside and let the researchers keep working on it. I think the most empowering thing that we can take from this book, Peak, and from other expert research is the idea that almost anybody with enough time and with the right practice methodology can become a top performer.

I think this is true. I believe we have good scientific reason to believe that it's true. Whether it's actually true, though, in the fullness of time, I think it's metaphorically true. I think this is a truth that is so useful to the common human experience that it's something that we should believe is true and let the scientists keep on working to prove its truth or prove its lack of truth.

Nowhere in the book, Peak, does Erickson say that talent does not exist. The researchers, as he described it, are open to the idea that innate talent does exist. What they say is that innate talent does not predict the outcomes for expert performance. Rather, what does predict the outcomes for long-term expert performance is the amount of time, the amount of high-quality practice that a person has engaged in in the relevant field, and the actual kind of practice, having the best coaches with the best techniques.

So I think it's useful for us to set aside the concept of innate talent and focus instead on believing that we, in the fullness of time, we have the right practice and the right experience over time. Now, the next book in the trio that I read was a book called Talent is Overrated, What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by an author named Jeff Colvin.

Colvin is not a scientist or a researcher. He's a journalist. And yet, his book is really well written, and it goes through and tries to demonstrate exactly what the title says. I'll read the blurb. "Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer, but we're almost always wrong.

That's important because if we're wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about. Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery. Bringing together extensive scientific research, best-selling author Jeff Colvin shows where we go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable.

It isn't specific, innate talent, nor is it plain old hard work. It's a very specific type of work that anyone can do, but most people don't. What's more, the principles of great performance apply to virtually any activity that matters to you. Readers worldwide have been inspired by this book's liberating message.

You don't need a one-in-a-million natural gift. Better performance, and maybe even world-class performance, is closer than you think." I think this book is extremely useful. I didn't like it as much as Peak because I was more interested in the actual scientific research of Erikson, but I think it was very useful.

And this book was published many years ago and has been updated, at least with one 10th anniversary edition. It's a good book. What I took away from the book was a broader application of concepts. He touched on a lot of things that Erikson himself didn't talk about. Erikson is cited many times in the book, as are many other researchers.

And he gave a lot more application of the book. Now, this is where I started to say, "Wait a second. I'm not sure we could go to this application. I'm not sure we should go to this application." The most inspiring application that I found from Talent is Overrated was where the author talked about societal advances and inventions.

And what he really took an axe to was the idea that inventors just sit around and come up with brilliant ideas. And he showed how, on the contrary, if you start looking at the history of inventions, most of the breakthrough inventions are simply a product of systematic plotting by people taking problems, working at those problems, thinking about previous solutions.

And there is a basic evolutionary arc that makes sense with regard to most breakthrough inventions. That was what I really took from it that I thought was powerful. So I think that you can take a field that you're working in and you can make dramatic differences in it in a steady, plotting way.

You don't have to wait for some kind of brilliant epiphany and flash of inspiration to cause your breakthrough idea to happen. Where I wasn't on board with the ideas from Talent is Overrated is the author's absolute enthusiasm for the idea of causing people to specialize at an early age.

So he gave examples of, well, if we need a tennis player to start at an early age, like the Williams sisters did, then that's going to be amazing. We've created these great athletes, these tennis prodigies and these golf prodigies from all these people who started at an early age.

We should do exactly the same thing in business. And we should be training and growing little marketing experts from three years old so that by the time they're teens, they're going to be prodigies. And Colvin expanded his discussion and his examples that he cited throughout his whole book into the world of business and into the world of broader achievement in society, maybe even in politicians.

Now, what struck me so wrong was this idea that we should have children specialize from such an early age. And I've thought about why did that strike me so wrong? On the one hand, I'm open to it. And I think that this is in many ways what has happened in previous civilizations.

I've become a great respecter of the concept of aristocracy. Being raised in the democratic ideals of the U.S. American milieu, I grew up with a natural disdain for the concepts of aristocracy, monarchy, things like that. Today, I appreciate those systems much more. If I could move to a monarchy or an aristocracy where the monarchs basically aligned with my values in life, I wouldn't even think twice about that.

I don't see any huge particular value of democracy. Those are fighting words. Don't fight me on it. I'm testing that out, kind of still thinking. But I really question if broad-scale democracy is the right solution. I think if we — just let me defend this real quickly because I know such fighting words.

If we went back to a system like existed in the early United States without universal suffrage, with some kind of — I don't want to call it a landed aristocracy, but let's call it a landed democracy — some kind of a democratic rule of the elites, democratic rule of the wealthy, democratic rule of something like that, perhaps that would create something better.

Maybe we could go to broad-scale republicanism with a republic gathered together with some form of democratic system in the states. But I really wish we could get rid of popular elections for senators. I wish senators were simply appointed. I wish we could get rid of all of the popular primary system elections of elections in the United States.

I don't see any value whatsoever of presidents being elected with a popular vote in a primary system. I would like to go back to a system of 150 years ago because the current one just seems utterly stupid in terms of the results that it is creating. And the dangers of populism are so enormous that it's just creating massive problems.

So I'm not entirely opposed to democracy, but universal suffrage to me seems an absolute catastrophe. And when you put universal suffrage together with popular elections for the people's house, which has always been popular elections, and then also the Senate and also the presidency, including the primary system, this just seems like a total catastrophe to me in watching the American system.

And so if you went back to a monarchy or aristocracy of some kind, and you look at it, the benefit of that was basically specialization from an early age. And so if a monarchy is seeing itself as upholding a responsibility, I look at Queen Elizabeth, recently deceased Queen Elizabeth, and look at the sense of responsibility that she had, she served as a responsible monarch, a monarch with a vision.

And if you went back and studied a little bit of aristocracies where we have access to them, they were expected to live by a code to kind of raise the human spirit. Now, obviously, those weren't perfect systems. Obviously, they failed continually. But the point was, that may be an expression of basically early specialization.

You don't expect the son of a king to go and pursue a scientific career. On the contrary, you expect the son of a king to go and pursue a career in the humanities and a career in understanding political science and a career in statesmanship. And I would dearly love to see some actual statesmen emerge within my own home country of the United States as compared to a bunch of crude populist politicians.

But leave that aside for a moment. My point was just to illustrate that perhaps this concept of being a prince or an aristocrat and being raised in this idea where your life course was charted out for you is actually an example of where we engaged in early specialization. And maybe it's not all a bad thing, but it really struck me as crass and wrong to somehow say to an eight-year-old that we're going to train you to be the president of a corporation.

And I don't know, I can't fully defend that belief. Is that a bad thing? No, probably not a bad thing, but it just still strikes me as wrong. And maybe that's just a cultural artifact. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it. But it's a convenient segue to then the next book, which was the third book in this kind of this trilogy that I read, which was a book called Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by an author named David Epstein.

Now, I really enjoyed Range, and I'm not sure how to fit all these together. Range, in many ways, was basically an argument against talent is overrated, as well as an argument against other things. It's an argument against grit. When you go through his chapters, if you know a little bit about the space, you can basically understand each chapter being an argument against a certain book.

And I felt his book was very well written. He gave great examples, and he rebutted many of the ideas of talent is overrated, and by extension, honors Erickson by giving counter examples. On the whole, I didn't think he disproved anything, but rather provided more of a cautionary, hey, maybe hyperspecialization from an early age is not the only thing that matters.

What I took away from Range was that there are other factors that are not included in exclusively this idea of hyperspecialization from an early age. Some world-class athletes do indeed specialize and become world-class from another early age. Some world-class athletes, on the other hand, don't specialize from an early age.

And I think that most of us would nod our heads and say, sure, we can understand that. Somebody who has broad athletic ability could probably succeed in many sports. You don't have to just choose one sport and play it from the age of three onward. You could probably have a lot of overlap between these abilities, just like there's overlap in other things.

If somebody has learned one foreign language, and they've learned it well, there's a pretty decent chance that they could learn another foreign language and learn it well. It's not like there's something magically different about French versus Spanish. They're just different expressions of it. So those cautions were good. What I thought was the most interesting in Range was where he talked about how maybe success in a certain area isn't always the key factor.

So he talked a good bit about the problem of too much grit, for example, too much stick-to-itiveness. And he demonstrated how someone sticking to something for a long period of time could indeed be a predictive outcome for that person succeeding in the long run. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right outcome for the person's life success, that in general, trying different things is important to ultimately identify the area where you really want to focus.

And I felt like this overview gave me some of the answers I was looking for with my frustration with talent is overrated and this idea of hyper-specialization, that, sure, we can see that hyper-specialization can produce a world-class genius, a leader in his field, but does that mean that that's actually a good thing?

And we don't know, but we shouldn't artificially force people into a certain area without exposing them to the broad range, pun intended, of options that are available. The other useful point that I drew from Range was the distinction of what the author calls kind learning environments versus wicked learning environments.

I think on my Friday show, I said friendly instead of kind. He uses the word kind. The basic idea is chess is a great example of a skill that has to be studied and learned. And so hyper-specialization, like Laszlo Polgar did with his children, hyper-specialization can lead to an amazing outcome.

But that's not because hyper-specialization leads to an amazing outcome in every endeavor, but rather because chess is a kind learning environment. That means that the rules are clear and you get immediate feedback on your decisions. The environment is very highly structured. And so people who become an expert at chess basically are learning patterns that can be recognized and understood intuitively and responded to quickly again and again and again.

And all of those patterns are constrained to an orderly world. All of the pieces have specific rules, specific things they can do, specific things they can't do. And so you can absorb the body of knowledge and develop broad recognition of all of the patterns of the chess game. Other games like golf, where we talk about Tiger Woods and what his father did to train him to be expert.

Well, it's a kind environment. The rules are consistent and clear. You get immediate feedback from your results. And so your success in that environment comes from consistently repeating and refining your techniques. But that doesn't describe all learning environments. On the contrary, there are wicked learning environments. So doing something like being a stock market trader.

Well, here we have an enormously wicked environment that's filled with complex and unpredictable variables. And the feedback that you get from your decisions, it doesn't necessarily occur immediately. Sometimes it can be just delayed or misleading. And what works in one particular situation may not work in another, which makes it very difficult to develop consistent expertise.

Once your rules start working and you think you've got it cracked, well, all of a sudden now the market changes. Something changes dramatically. And the rules that worked for a certain amount of time don't seem to work so reliably in other examples, in other scenarios. Or he gives examples like emergency medicine or parenting.

If you're in emergency medicine, you have all kinds of situations that are very unpredictable and yet have enormously high stakes. And so what works in one outcome may not necessarily be the thing that works in another. And so due to the highly variable environments, what you do changes. And parenting, there's no clear rules.

And sometimes the feedback that you get is ambiguous. You're actually making a difference in the child's life, but the child won't say anything about it. Or it's decades down the road. And so it's hard to look at your three-year-old and say, I'm going to teach you the master list of rules that you need to know to be a great parent so you're going to be a world-class parent by the age of 20.

No, that doesn't work. It works in chess. It doesn't work in parenting. So that's a really useful model to have in your mind to say, what's the difference among these things? And it's a good book because it challenges some of those things. Let me hear for your overall view on the book Range.

Let me read this really great review from Amazon written by Todd Stark. And he gives the book a five-star review, and this will just be the best, most succinct way to get an idea of the content of the book. "This is a beautifully written and well-justified discussion of the various specific things that are not taken into account by the widespread cultural emphasis on early specialization for success and our popular model of performers in terms of domain-specific expertise.

This takes the form of a single conclusion, which I would paraphrase as, we need to be able to play and explore widely and to color outside the lines for a while in order to become very good at solving the difficult problems we later encounter. But our cultural obsession with specialization pushes counter to that.

There's a constant tension of the author's confidence in his conclusion that generalists are uniquely valuable and desperately needed, and his recognition that he is fighting an almost quixotic uphill battle against powerful cultural trends and incentives for specialization. What he means by specialization and the factors closely tied to it.

One, head start, encouraging children from an early age to narrowly pursue things they seem talented at or have an interest in. Two, domain specificity, training with heavy emphasis on the specific narrow range skills we know we will need in the target environment and assuming far transfer of skills from other activities will be limited or non-existent.

Three, disciplinary focus, viewing learning as consisting of accumulating facts and theories specific to a particular field or subfield of study in order to become highly skilled at working in that narrow field. Four, persistence, the idea that we should identify a passion early and stick with it no matter what because it's what we're good at and enjoy and so can become successful at it if we manage to persist.

Five, fast and efficient short-term learning, the assumption that we are learning better when we feel familiar with the material quickly and that we are then learning more efficiently. Against those powerful and popular specialization factors, Epstein presents several compelling lines of evidence. One, domain specificity varies with kind versus wicked learning.

The argument for early specialization and domain specificity is based on the observation that we need a long period of deliberate practice to accumulate the patterns and skills specific to performing in that specific area and that practicing or exploring other activities is unlikely to do anything helpful for our performance in our specialty.

Epstein counters that on closer inspection, we find a crucial distinction between different kinds of domains and learning environments wherein some of them deliberate practice reliably makes us better but in others deliberate practice either helps much less or can even make us perform more poorly under some conditions. So not all domains or learning environments are equally specific and the head start is not equally helpful in all activities.

Two, creative performance comes from early exploration and interdisciplinary learning. Given the domain specific view of expertise, we tend to assume that in order for someone to perform at a high level in any activity, since they need expertise, they need to specialize in that activity. Epstein counters that when we focus specifically on creative performance, we find that deep expertise can be invaluable but is not enough.

In order to come up with truly novel solutions to problems, we need to make use of analogies that cross different domains while sharing deep structural similarities. That means being familiar with a wider range of ideas and ways of thinking than just those in our specialty. And so Epstein says creative performance is found more in people with broader backgrounds.

Epstein argues that outstanding creative performance also tends to be associated with early exploration of different activities more than with early specialization. Three, the efficiency we perceive from narrow immersion is very often illusory. We tend to assume that when we feel more familiar with the activity or material that we are learning it.

That's part of the strong intuitive appeal for immersion in an activity comes from. It feels like we're learning more when we're more immersed. Epstein argues that the evidence from learning research shows quite often exactly the opposite, that the learning we think we're doing under conditions of immersion is either much less or much shorter lived than we assume.

Robert Bjork's concept of desirable difficulty in learning and the evidence base behind it plays a central role in this argument. This, Epstein argues, tell us that slow learning, which helps us make new connections between a wider range of experiences, is much more conducive to learning in the long run than fast efficient learning from immersion in a narrow subject matter.

Four, match quality is not necessarily the same as early passion. Part of the argument for early specialization is based on the assumption that people have certain interests and talents from early on. And if they can find something that matches them well and start early, they can align their passion with a successful career in that activity.

Epstein argues that what we know about lifespan development tells us that people's passions are not so fixed or narrow and finds a number of cases of exceptionally successful people who spent their lives exploring and trying different things before finding a match that was truly satisfying and successful for them.

Range is an appeal to encourage exploration in our lives from early on, and for experimenting and experiencing broadly in our learning, even though it may seem to be inefficient or slow. Epstein does not deny the immense value of long, deliberate, specialized practice in "kind" domains, or the value of having deep specialized experience in some areas, but he has also made a passionate and well-argued case for making better use of a completely different dimension of performance, a dimension rooted in longer-term developmental outcomes, more exploratory or playful learning, and an ongoing search for ever-better matches between our interests and abilities and our activities.

I think that's a great summary of the book. And in general, these books, to me, seem to merge beautifully, and not actually to be at odds, but more to be a measure of, "Here's the science in this application, and then here's how this gets put together." I worry that the book Range is enormously more popular than either of these other books.

Range on Amazon has 11,420 ratings, Peak has 3,340 ratings, and Talent is overrated at 1,980 ratings. I think people are less served, generally, by the message in Range than by the message in the other books, because it seems to me that many people underestimate the value of being able to actually become a world-class genius.

Maybe it's just the circles I'm exposed to, but I hear a lot more people that believe in the existence of innate talent and ability as being the determinative factor in someone's long-term outcomes than anything else. You hear this in the IQ perspectives, you hear this in discussions of genetics.

People believe this to be the determinative factor, and I don't see the evidence for that position being raised. In addition, people underestimate the value of deliberate practice. The concept of deliberate practice and the ability to apply it is life changing, because it means that you can genuinely develop yourself to be the leader in your career.

I took away from these books a huge emphasis on my incorporating a deliberate practice routine. I've basically rested on a lot of my laurels from younger in my life and younger in my career, and I haven't seen some of my skills actually increase in the last five years because I'm just engaging in continual naive practice, and I realized I need to be continually focused on deliberate practice.

I really do. That's an empowering message. I would like that message to get out into our culture much more than the message from Range, because what it seems like I perceive from Range is that many people who are not familiar with these other aspects of research may simply go out in the world and say, "Well, you don't need to focus at all.

You don't need to focus on getting better. You just need to go out and have a variety of experiences." And I'm in favor of the outcome, but only when it's balanced against the benefit of specialization and benefit of focus. I haven't touched yet on the discussion of physical talent and physical abilities.

David Epstein wrote another book that I have not read called The Sports Gene, Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. I have been wanting to read this book very much because it seems to me that if genetic ability is the key determining factor, then we should be able to see that generally in sports, more so than in other areas like cognitive ability, where we have the ability to measure and we know that the brain adapts, and we should see it in sports.

Do we see it? I don't know. I hear a lot of people very loudly advocating that we absolutely see it and that your genetic base is the key. And it seems obvious to me that genetic base is going to have a significant factor in many areas, but I also am not sure about the other.

So, I'd like to get around to that, but I haven't done it yet. Let me tell you what I think we should do as a result of what I've described in these books. Number one, I think we should believe ourselves and instill the belief in our children and all around us that I can and you can become world-class in any area that you care about enough to really focus on and engage in deliberate practice for enough time.

The amount of time varies. One thing that's interesting is I used to read Malcolm Gladwell's books, and he has in his book, this book, "Outliers," where he talks about the so-called 10,000-hour rule. And that 10,000-hour rule has become basically commonly accepted wisdom in our culture, as best I can tell from "Outliers." But Erickson, whose research was the basic foundation of that 10,000-hour rule, very politely tries to demonstrate how nobody understands the 10,000-hour rule because the research of the 10,000-hour rule came from Erickson's application of his research with violin players.

But Gladwell, as best I can tell, arbitrarily selected 10,000 hours because that was a number that was discussed in the research showing that the elite performers had accumulated 10,000 hours by a certain age, but it's a totally arbitrary number. To be a world-class performer in some fields may require many more than 10,000 hours, and in other fields, it may require much less, just depends on the field.

So there's nothing magical about 10,000 hours being the key that separates an expert from a non-expert. But what is right and useful about 10,000 hours is that you're going to need hours of practice. And this is the same thing that I say in the few areas that I am an expert in, is it's just a matter of the time you put into it.

So when I teach someone about language learning, I focus on the time. If you spend the time with the language, you're going to do it. And that's the key factor. Now, there's good technique and bad technique. There's things that can get you better, faster results and less fast results.

And so that's an expression of deliberate practice in the world of language. But at its core, the key thing is you're going to get better at it when you are engaging in it for a significant amount of time. So we should trumpet this from the rooftops that you can be a leader in a field if you have enough time and you put in enough practice.

The cool thing also, I've adapted this to a couple of other applications. Just this weekend, I was talking with a friend and I was talking about, we've got the 10,000 hour rule, which is what you might need to be a world-class performer. Sure, maybe so. That's a lot of hours that you need to put into an area.

But you can create other versions of this rule. I heard of somebody talked about, and I found out not many people were writing on it, but I found it enormously motivating, the concept of a 100-hour rule that you could probably be in, say, the top 5% of a field if you just did 100 hours a year.

100 hours a year comes out to two hours a week, so call it 20 minutes a day. If you do something for 15 or 20 minutes a day at 100 hours a year, you're never going to be the top person in a field, but you'll probably be in the top 5%.

You can at least develop a skill that's going to dramatically change your life. And so even if you're not going to become an expert at everything, learning some things and becoming expert at more things just through applications a small amount of time is a big deal. And then you could even craft other rules from this.

I was describing the benefits of when I learned to salsa dance. And I had less than 20 hours of instruction in salsa dancing, and it transformed everything in my life. I took one class in college that was Latin dance, and just 20 hours of instruction that I then went on to practice more was totally transformative in my life.

I'll save those stories for another time. But the experience of that 20 hours impacted me enormously. And I think there's lots of things like that, that you don't actually need hundreds of hours. You don't need 100 hours a year. You just need a couple dozen hours of exposure to various things, and you'll gain something from it.

So I'm firmly in the camp of the generalist being valuable, but the message we need to teach people is just to say that you can do it. So try, get started. I think where we can see this the most obviously has to do with academic subjects, and that was the context of Friday.

I can't find any evidence that there's any innate difference in innate ability for people who are good at math and people who are not good at math, or innate ability for people who are good at writing and who are not good at writing. I can't find it. If it exists, tell me.

I've looked for it. I haven't done an exhaustive search, but if you know of it, find it. I can't find any evidence that any innate ability for academic subjects in school counts. On the contrary, I can find lots of evidence that fit all of the model of Erickson's book, Peak.

It had to do with motivation, has to do with the time spent, has to do with interest and how that interest is cultivated that indicate it. I don't see why every person, every student is not capable of being very good at mathematics, is not capable of being very good at writing, is not capable of being very good at history, and not being capable of being very good at science.

I don't see any reason why every student can't perform very well in all of these areas. I don't see any reason why you have to specialize in the early years. It seems self-evident to me that poor performance in any one of these areas has much more to do with teaching methodology, bad pedagogy, uninspiring teachers, inconsistent practice, the wrong kind of practice than it does with anything else.

So, what's the foundation of a good educational plan? I think reading is the foundation of a good educational plan. If you go back and listen to my series on how to invest in your children at an early age, I go through a lot of the arguments. Number one is exposure to verbal language.

Children should be surrounded by lots and lots of language. In so doing, they will gain lots of words that they will know, and they will gain lots of general knowledge about the world. Then, when they are readers, we want to help them to read very extensively. That comes from inspiring interest.

So, when a child is highly motivated to read, he or she is going to read very widely. That reading widely is going to allow the child to have broad general exposure to the world, huge vocabulary, and to absorb the structures of written language, which are different than the structures of colloquial verbal language.

That is likely to cause the child to naturally be skilled with writing. So, if we pull writing apart into its component parts, writing consists of two basic elements. The ability to use words to take abstract thought and convert it into concrete words, and secondarily, the skill of actually putting down sentences on paper with the physical act of writing, proper orthography, proper grammar, things like that.

Well, that's very trainable if we pull it apart and train it. If a child has a broad bank of literary knowledge, then the child is likely to be a skilled writer. And creativity grows over time, and writing skill grows with practice. And so, every child should be a great writer through lots and lots of practice.

What about other subjects? Well, math is the obvious example. To me, mathematics is obviously something that everyone is capable of with the right kind of practice. So, what is often missing in people who are bad at math? Well, first, they've often probably missed out on motivation. Nobody's come along and inspired them about mathematics.

They may not have understood the subject in a way that is applicable, which is why I think we should do more narrative math and less worksheets and just kill and drill worksheets. But even if we're doing worksheets, we should do them consistently in modest doses, not to overwhelm the attention span of the child, and do them much more consistently.

Math, the way that it's taught in the context of the school year with enormous breaks for summer, is just a catastrophe, because these are skills that need to be practiced every day. And so, if we take this skill and we do math six days a week, 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, an hour a day, and growing over time, how can a child not be good at mathematics?

And especially if we get individualized instruction where we're always teaching to exactly the thing that the child is needing to learn, and we're not going too fast. And so, the child is not getting lost with a class that can grasp a concept faster than he can, but rather is just going at his own individual pace.

So, I don't see why any child shouldn't be very skilled with mathematics. It all builds systematically, and if you do the work day by day, year by year, then you're going to wind up with the necessary skills and the fullness of time. What about history? Well, same thing, interest.

Interest, narrative, spending time with the subject. Why are so many students bad at history? Well, because you sit down in ninth grade and you're handed a stupid, boring, sawdust textbook to read, and you have no context for everything. But if you've spent 10 years before that reading stories of the past, then you have all these different pegs to hang things on, so you can hang the facts and the dates onto people that you've lived with for years.

You've read their stories, you've read the historical fiction, you've read their biographies, you've read the narratives that involve them. And so, these are living creatures, living people with whom you have a relationship. So, now, facts and figures and meaning and all of that can easily be absorbed in that context.

Same thing with science. Why are people bad at science? Well, again, it's just because you're handed a textbook out of the blue in 10th grade that's about biology and said, "Learn this." But it's all new vocabulary, and you have 100 and, call it 150 or 160 days to absorb all this vocabulary.

You don't have any framework to hold it on. But in my model, if you've read great scientists, their biographies, and their stories of how they invented things, and you've spent all your time with all these wonderful living narratives that have engaged you with the context, and you've spent your time studying through and you're doing it over the course of years rather than trying to do it all in one year, then it should be pretty doable for you to do really well on your A-levels or get a five on your AP biology exam because you've sat with the information for so long.

And it's not just try to stuff down your head. So, there's a whole world of learning science that I'm not even talking about here. But at its core, I think we can expect any child to learn effectively and to be skilled in all of these areas. This should transform how we teach children.

This should transform every aspect of what we do. To apply generalization, I think children should have a general education. The model should be general and then allow them to self-select into the areas that are the most interest. If we know that certain skills are actually going to have a physical impact on the body and the brain, we should stress those skills.

And from an academic perspective, children should do math, not because they're going to use it, but because it makes them smarter. It grows gray matter in their brain. When I read Peek, I found all the math bits. I read it to my children. This is why we do math, guys, because it grows your brain.

It literally adds gray matter to your brain. So, you do math so that you're smarter. And when you're smarter, because you've grown the gray matter in your brain, you're more capable of doing better math. So, 10 years from now, everyone's going to say, "Well, math just comes easily to you." Yeah, it comes easily to me because it didn't come easily to me in the beginning, but I built gray matter in my brain that made it come more easily to me.

So, we know that math ability impacts IQ. We know that doing math makes you smarter. It grows your brain. So, therefore, we should do math consistently and over time. I call math, basically, mathematics, the barbell for the brain. And by a little speech to my children, I read a book one time on how to teach math to young people, and the author made a big point.

Don't tell people that they're going to use math. So, don't tell your ninth grader, "Yeah, you definitely need this geometry because you're going to use it." That's a lie. You know he's not going to use it. Why do you do math? Because it makes you smarter, and in the same way that a barbell is infinitely adjustable for any body.

You can put a barbell on a 99-year-old old woman's life on her back and teach her how to squat it, and you can find a barbell exercise that's appropriate for her, and it will help her to grow muscle and get stronger. You can put a barbell and load it up for a 30-year-old powerlifter at the peak of his career with 800 pounds on it, and the barbell is the tool that allows you to add the necessary appropriate stress with the desirable difficulty to the human body.

That's what's so powerful about a barbell. Well, mathematics, I see, is the same thing. It is an appropriate tool that you can work through with a five-year-old that is going to allow the five-year-old to learn at an appropriate level, and to the 55-year-old double PhD in theoretical mathematics, he's still sitting there doing math, thinking, and getting his brain smarter.

Math is infinitely scalable. So it should probably be the core academic skill that is applied to everyone because it's infinitely scalable up and down. And in the same way that with a barbell, we can add an ounce to the bar and get you just a little bit stronger, or we can add 10 pounds to the bar, the student can go through math very slowly or very quickly, depending on current ability and what the math is that we're doing right now.

So the reason we do math is to make you smarter. Why do we do music? Well, music makes you smarter. It grows your brain. It allows you to access the aesthetics of the world in a different way. So we should all study music, learn music. Music is one of those other things that we know it increases IQ.

So we should practice and learn music. Incidentally, when I talked about this a long time ago, I mentioned that I was going to be testing a bunch of apps. I am profoundly persuaded now of the value of modern apps for teaching music as a great thing. SimplyPiano is the one that I've tested the most.

It's fantastic. I think it's best used with a teacher, but it's fantastic. I could go on and on. It's a good example of deliberate practice. So consider these. I'll skip that for now. But music is something that all students should learn because it is helping their ability. It's making them smarter.

Other artistic expressions, same thing. Drawing, painting, these are things that are important. They're aesthetic disciplines that help you to see the world differently, and they will change how your brain works in a positive way, give you a more diverse array of abilities. Language, same thing. Language makes you smarter.

I'm not aware of any evidence that reading increases IQ, but I think reading absolutely makes you smarter in the common sense of it. It's got to increase IQ, but I just don't know. I haven't read anything of that being the case. But reading is how you learn about the world.

It makes you smart. It makes you understand how the world works, which is the definition of smartness, not just being able to do well on an IQ test. And so being widely read is an important component, and that should be in your native language. But then in addition to being widely read, you should be working your way up systematically.

All students should be working their way up the scale of complexity and difficulty. If you are actually a reader who reads a lot and doesn't just read fluff for the brain, then when you get to things like an SAT exam, it's a joke. You never have to study for that stuff.

It's just a joke because you're reading complex novels, complex material, philosophy that has difficult ideas, historical analysis that has difficult vocabulary, very complex writing styles. That's what you should be reading, growing up to it little by little. We also know that foreign languages make your brain bigger, grow your gray matter in your brain.

So you should be doing this in multiple languages and systematically just working your way up the structure because it's making you smarter. Now, take this student who's just being gently led up this structure through a dozen or 15 years of education and now bring it to a specialty. And I think this is the right model where you're going to have all of that generalist background that then gets applied to an area of special interest where you really go deep, but yet you didn't go too deep too early.

That's the takeaway. That's what we should be doing. The other thing I didn't talk about, though, was physical ability and athletic ability. I believe the same basic concept applies. When I was younger, I had this stupid idea that somehow some people are just born athletic and other people aren't.

It seems fairly obvious to me that some people are naturally more athletic than others are. I see this in family members. I see this in myself with comparison. I have a brother who is just always naturally athletic. I was always naturally clumsy and uncoordinated. But then what happens is we tend to funnel people into different pathways based upon this basic natural ability.

And a friend of mine who is a physical trainer, he was explaining, he was like, "Children, why don't some children move?" Well, they don't move because it doesn't feel good to move. Why doesn't it feel good to move? Because they don't know how to move oftentimes. And so moving to them doesn't feel good, so they don't want to do it.

Well, they don't do it, and then it feels worse and worse for them. Whereas for the children who know how to move, then they know how to move, so it feels good for them to move, so they move more. And as they move more, they get better at moving, their skills of knowing how to move increase with practice, and they just naturally move more and they become athletic.

And so this particular trainer friend of mine, when we talked about how to train children with athletics, a big focus of his was teaching movement skills, teaching people how to move. Because if you can teach a child that doesn't move a lot how to move in a way that doesn't generate pain, but instead generates pleasure, then he's more likely to move more.

In hindsight, I look at them and say, "Duh, obviously, that should be the key." But what that means is that we need good physical training for young people, consistent environments where they're training constantly. And a lot of that should be done in the context of play, but there should be focused training for children so that their play can be better.

So this is the area I know the least about from my own personal ignorance, but I'm trying to engage in it and try to build it. And a lot of this, I think, should be generalized movement patterns, not sport-specific movement, but generalized movement patterns and strength building. As best I can tell, the dominant theory of physical education in the United States today seems to be that if you play sports or play, then you'll learn how to move.

And that's not the only way to approach it. There's a fascinating pathway you can go down. If you look at the infamous example of La Sierra High in California in the 1960s, where you had this high school implemented this school-wide athletic training program, PE program, for all of its students, where they focused on teaching strength rather than teaching sport.

They created some of the most high-performing sports teams, and they created a student body of young men and young women that was beautiful, flat-out beautiful. I'm using that word very intentionally. If you go back and you look at the videos and you see just an entire student population of beautifully muscled, strong young men, beautifully coordinated, strong young women, you see the men more than the women in the old videos.

That's what we want. And unfortunately, with the death of President Kennedy, all of that basically disappeared in the American system, and it's all disappeared in the wake of sport. And we've got a bunch of fat slobs that are ugly high school students instead of beautiful in what should be the most beautiful part of their life.

There's people working at it, and we should be supporting them. But at the very least, we owe it to ourselves and to our children to teach them movement patterns, teach them strength, so that their later specialization with sport will come into play. And we've got great science in that world.

It's just not spreading across to the general population. So I believe that we can and should be advancing ourselves and as a culture and as a civilization. We could fix all of these problems. We just lack the will to do it. We don't care to do it. We haven't persuaded our neighbors that they should care.

And we have enormously dysfunctional systems. So what I've done is I've just withdrawn from all of that, from the system, and I've said, "I can do it better, and let me prove it." And that's what I'm myself working on. I don't mean to sound arrogant or kind of bragging, but it's important sometimes to say things in advance before you do them.

In the way that what Laszlo Polgar, if he had just had three daughters who were really skilled with chess, and he didn't set out in advance and say, "This is what I'm going to do," his story would not be nearly as impactful. So I'm telling you the same in advance while I'm in it.

But I don't believe there's any limit on human performance. I believe that every person is capable of getting better, and that most people are capable of extreme high performance if they have the right environment, the right inputs, and the right coaches teaching them. And so I'm doing my best to do that in my homeschool, to do it on an academic level, to do it on a physical level, to do it on an ideally social grace level.

I think that's the hardest, but I'm working at it. That's where I've had the most failures. But I believe we should create, we should be able to create superhumans in terms of having the qualities and characteristics that we desire. If elite schools for years have been able to do this, I have a great interest in this.

I've gone and studied as best I could find the curricula of the world's elite boarding schools and things like that. There's no question that these schools have succeeded in producing very high performing students. So we need to understand that. And I wish I could go and snap my fingers and change the whole government school system in the US, but I can't do it.

But what I can do is I can experiment in my own house, and I want to encourage you to experiment with your children and find the best science that you can, use your intuition to filter that science to the specifics of your children, teach them, and then let's compare notes on what's working, what's not working.

Let's figure out how we can do that so that our great-grandchildren can do so much better. I see myself as the patriarch of a dynasty. I see you as the patriarch of a dynasty, the matriarch of a dynasty. I see you as having a very important role to play in that.

And what you're doing today in your household, based upon your philosophy of learning and of genius performance and knowledge and all of that, the family culture that you're building will impact your great-great-grandchildren as it should. So, you should be thinking about that. You should be eating healthy today, not just for yourself, but you should be eating healthy today so that you can set the example in front of your children, so that they'll be healthy, so that the epigenetic long-term outcome of your great-great-grandchildren is superior.

We need that kind of superiority in the human race. And don't ever let the fact that other people may not be able to do what you do to cause you to pull back. The world is served in no way by your playing small, by your shrinking back. The world is served by your playing hard and well so that you become strong and so that your family becomes strong so that you can reach out a hand to those nearby who are weak and lift them up.

I shouldn't go down this path. What angers me so much about our current philosophical argumentation is that it seems like a substantial number of our neighbors want to basically destroy high performance due to jealousy. They want to tear down the wealthy due to jealousy. They want to tear down the smart and the beautiful because not everybody can be smart and beautiful, and we need equity across population.

This is the most destructive thing possible. Jealousy of another person is sin. It is absolute sin, and it is one of the most damaging long-term things. Being covetous of what someone else has is totally destructive, and it's totally sinful, and it destroys your society. I've looked for this anecdote years ago.

I read an anecdote. I thought it came from The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, but I went and searched the book one time and I couldn't find it. But the author of the book was giving an example, and he was giving the example of the difference between the United States, the culture of the United States of America, and the culture of the Middle East.

And he was showing how children in the Middle East, well, children in the United States look up to the man who has a house on the hill, and they're taught, "Hey, Johnny, someday you, if you work hard enough, you yourself can have a house on the hill like that man has." Whereas the children in the Middle East are taught, "Muhammad, someday, if you work hard enough, you can blow up that house on the hill." And there's just such an obvious example of that metaphor, as obviously offensive as it is to so many people.

It's such an obvious truth that if you teach your children that the goal is to go out and blow up and destroy the houses on the hill, you're going to be left with a totally raised neighborhood that's nothing but destruction and poverty and misery. But if you teach your children to build houses on a hill, and that they too, if they work hard enough, can build a house on the hill, you're going to have a neighborhood that is full of beautiful houses on a hill.

What do you want? Pick it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, with your children, don't teach them to hold back. Teach them to be as absolutely high-performing as they're capable of being. And whenever they run up against a genetic potential or an intelligence potential, just kind of ignore it and say, "That's all right.

I can keep studying." I myself feel this all the time. I feel stupid. I know that I'm smarter than a lot of other people. I'm not saying this in a self-deprecating way. Sometimes I listen to stuff, I listen to people, and I just feel dumb. And I say, "How am I ever…?

What do I know? I feel utterly stupid." But I remind myself with the philosophy that that's okay. I'm not responsible for the intelligence that God gave that man over there, I'm just responsible for my own. And if I'll just keep on working at it, I can probably learn in 10 years from now what that guy's saying today that I don't get, I'll probably get it if I keep working at it.

And that's the power of philosophy. You should cultivate this philosophy in yourself and in your children, because regardless of what the science says or what the science doesn't say, it's a useful, functional philosophy that will put you in a position of having better outcomes. And then remember, "To whom much is given, much is required." If you are given intelligence, you're not given that so you can go out in the world and puff up your chest and say, "Well, I'm just so much smarter than you, and here's my MENSA membership." You're given that so that you can serve your fellow man.

You have to use your gifts and your talents and your abilities and your intelligence and your athleticism and your strength to help others who are weak. If you were given much, if you are privileged, you are going to be held accountable to that. I am enormously privileged in my life, and I'm going to be held accountable for that based upon how I use my skills and my gifts to serve others.

The same for you. If you grew up wealthy, you have an obligation to steward that wealth for the benefit of the poor. If you grew up in a loving household with two parents who loved you and made an amazing life for you, you have an obligation to use that and spread it in the world.

You have an obligation to open your mouth and talk about it to help others to have the same results. If you're intelligent, you have an obligation to use your intelligence for the good of mankind. Your ambition should be to be a Nobel Prize winner so that the whole world can benefit from the work of your hands and the work of your mind.

I hope that's a good place to leave this subject. I would encourage everyone to read these books. I've just touched on the foundation. I really like the order that I read them in. I like reading "Peak Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by Anders Ericsson first, followed by "Talent is Overrated" by Jeff Colvin.

I think those two could be swapped out either way. They're compatible. And if you wanted to skip them, skip one of them. They're very good. They're just different. But my favorite of the three was "Peak," then "Talent is Overrated," and then "Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein.

All of them available in audio. All of them are available pretty cheap on Kindle and paperback. They're super cheap, and they're well worth your time. And it's important that you have a good scientific foundation for these beliefs. And I hope that I've inspired you to check it out. Hope I've inspired you to take these things and do them.

I just want to close by saying, the world needs you and your genius. The world needs your children and their genius. We're all in this together. Your work is important. So get at it. Searching for your next car? Don't settle. Thrive. At CarMax, it's easy to shop online or in person.

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