
Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice - tokenadult
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/181637371.html
======
unoti
I've long felt that my intelligence is only average, and I've always tried to
compensate by working hard. It had been 20 years since my last calculus class
when I returned to college, and I was quite worried I'd not be able to keep
up. I worked my way through most of a small calculus book before starting the
class, to refresh what I'd forgotten. During the class, I spent something like
5-6 hours per day during the week working on Calculus, and around 10 hours per
day on the weekends. I worked and reworked every problem until I fully
understood what was going on, comparing my answers to the answer key for the
odd problems, and computer algebra systems for the even ones when possible. I
worked so hard it would have been embarrassing to admit it to my classmates.
Only a retard would have to work so much, I thought, but I was determined to
be the best I could. I ended up at the top of the class.

The point is, if you're really determined, working hard can go a long way. The
key is to try not to worry about the other people that make it look easy.
Later I heard this quote:

"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem
so wonderful at all." - Michaelangelo

~~~
jordan0day
You know, the title of the article is "Never mind talent, practice, practice,
practice."

I really think that this ability to doggedly focus, practice, and maintain
this level of effort is, itself, a talent.

I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's
certainly a talent I wish I had.

~~~
kamaal
>>I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's
certainly a talent I wish I had.

I bet if you try enough you can add another 5 minutes to those 10 minutes. And
then later another 5 minutes, and then later another 5... And so on and some
day you will go to 10 hours.

People often ask how somebody can sleep only for 6 hours. Or get up to work at
3 AM in the morning. That's possible only after trying hard enough for weeks a
little bit at a time.

~~~
shanelja
In relation to your bottom paragraph:

I play a text based online game where activity is extremely important and I
often only have 3 or 4 hours of sleep every day, and even that is broken in to
chunks so I can be online every 3 hours - and this is for the past 5 and a
half years.

Outside of the obvious physical and mental stress it can put you under, you
are perfectly right when you say that it takes time to perfect, at first I was
tired from having 8 hours of sleep, now I can have 3 hours of sleep per night,
wake up and operate at 100%.

I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the line I lost the need for sleep, I
don't get tired any more or yawn and even on nights where I _can_ sleep as
long as I want, I find myself only wanting 4 or 5 hours anyway.

I'm without a doubt the highest ranked player on the game, fought for through
perseverance and a refusal to let my ego take a hit, but was it worth it? I'm
not sure.

~~~
kamaal
Please note though you can train yourself to sleep only 4 hours a day, it
doesn't mean you must. What I mean to say is, rest is essential to any long
term productive endeavor. I think athletes and gym freaks can attest to this.
How much you rest and how quickly recover from stress can decide how
productive while you are awake. And probably affects your larger health
situation on the longer run too.

>>but was it worth it? I'm not sure.

I won't comment on your habits and whats important to you. But speaking
objectively. I would say its bad use of time.

If you are in need of entertainment, which demands a lot of engaging activity
I would advice you start to learn playing a music instrument. Again not
risking your health in the course of it, but music is a liberating experience.
Especially if you learn how to play yourself. It can be very joyful.

And its generally a good skill to have and a lot better than fighting for
internet points.

------
sown
So what about when you have someone like me who works hard and still fails? I
vary my methods. change my environment to make it easier, pay for training, do
what ever. I examine what I did wrong, I still get it wrong, no matter what.

Let me share with you an anecdote: In undergrad, I took an intro computer
networking class. Everyone else could understand what was going on. There was
no assigned reading material and lectures didn't follow from any text. I
always was the lowest student in the class, no matter how hard I tried.
Everyone else could understand it quickly. I worked hard on that class but it
didn't matter. Not everyone who works hard will show positive results, I
guess. I more or less flunked my way through school. Sometimes I'd work hard,
sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter.

Or, if I'm facing someone who has worked hard and is also very intelligent? I
don't have a chance.

The rhetoric of these articles and the rest of these posts here have a coded
meaning behind them: there are no disadvantaged people or students -- only
stupid or lazy ones. It's a corollary of Survivor Bias. If you work hard,
everything will be peachy-keen OK and nothing will go wrong. If you work hard
and fail, you deserve only scorn.

For me, it was, never mind if you work so hard that ignored everything else,
worked so hard to not get beaten by your parents, worked so hard to get
mastery of material -- I must be still too lazy or stupid since I failed.

I don't know what it is that I don't have that everyone else does. I'm likely
to not ever know.

This is a topic that I'm very familiar with so that's why I wrote a lot about
it and sound perhaps a little crazy.

~~~
brandall10
The nature of this comment tells me 2 things:

1) You have keen analytical and writing skills, intelligence is not a lack for
what you want to achieve.

2) You suffer from victim mentality being too concerned about the abilities of
others while easily dismissive of your own. No matter how much/hard you work,
without being able to chuck this aside, every failure will be magnified and
your successes will be mitigated to an irrational degree.

The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved with tons of mistakes,
tons of situations where you will feel like an absolute moron. You have to
learn to reframe those moments and treasure them, because they are signals
that you are encountering moments of true growth. Learn to compete against
your own competence and not others. You don't know what they've been through
to get where they are.

Whenever something seems unreasonably tough, break it down into simpler
problems to digest. Hack the art of learning itself. Don't look at the same
problem until you're blue in the face, change it up so that there is a
measurable degree of progress.

Your blockage is more emotional than intellectual.

~~~
sown
If I never quit and I never win, what do you want from me?

~~~
brandall10
Winning? How do you define that?

If it's one big goal - "I want to be an X" - well guess what, you're going to
have to have a thousand smaller victories to get there. And by the time you
_do_ get there you're most certainly going to have bigger goals beyond that on
the horizon. Otherwise life will get very boring.

It's the messy room syndrome, for you only have two hands you can't will the
whole thing into becoming clean at once. You have to pick some part of it that
you can handle and make it clean, then move onto another part. As you make
your way through interesting patterns will emerge that will allow you to clean
smarter, so the first act of cleaning will go much slower than the last act.
You still only have 2 hands, but you have something else - wisdom.

------
chimpinee
This article appeals to our deepest and most widely-held educational values,
which makes it all the more dangerous, being wrong in several ways.

The author rightly belittles the concept of talent but it seems to have found
its way in through the back door: “Two of our four turned out to be musically
gifted and before long were shuttled out of Suzuki to hard-core classical
violin teachers.”

(Talent is just the way we describe people who have some competence in a field
which is inexplicit; nobody knows why they are good, otherwise one could learn
it.)

Another thing to point out is that apparently none of the children have
developed careers in music or composition (yet), so it remains to be seen if
they have any creativity intact.

Why might they have lost creativity in adulthood? Because of childhood
coercion. Those long hours of practice -- children don’t do that without being
forced. It can be subtle, such as the worry of a slight loss of parental
affection, sibling rivalry encouraged, etc.

Children will _play_ for hours on end and this is where true learning occurs.
Some children are bright enough to make their ‘practice’ a form of play, so
they manage to improve despite appearances.

Creative adults continue to play, it’s just that the subject matter appears
more serious. But progress remains open-ended, with stops and starts,
switching between activities, and _unpredictable_ (not ‘guaranteed’) results.
The unpredictable nature of achievement follows from a law of epistemology: we
can’t predict future knowledge (including our own).

------
tokenadult
Paul Graham has mentioned similar issues several times in essays posted on his
personal website. For example, he wrote in "What You'll Wish You'd Known"
(January 2005),

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html>

". . . . In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or
Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike
your other friends.

"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had
to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to
believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. . . . "

In "How do Do What You Love" (January 2006),

<http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html>

he wrote,

"Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and
sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a
new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do
great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find
their niche.

"Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a
good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least
you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy.
Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well."

And in "The Anatomy of Determination" (December 2009),

<http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html>

he wrote,

"In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because
it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being
lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like
talent."

Mathematician Hung-hsi Wu wrote an article more than a decade ago, Basic
skills versus conceptual understanding: A bogus dichotomy in mathematics
education, American Educator, Fall 1999, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 14-19, 50-52,

<http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/wu.pdf>

to point out that any distinction between understanding a topic and having
basic skills in the topic is a "bogus dichotomy." The two go together like two
sides of the same coin.

~~~
unoti
Excellent stuff. Along the same lines: Someone once told me that the
difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional keeps
working on it long after it stops being fun.

This is true in the discussion of Penn & Teller below, as well as game
programming, and probably all worthy endeavors. Wish I could remember the
reference...

------
_nato_
I studied violin at Juilliard with the great Dorothy DeLay. She taught the
greats such as Perlman and Midori, and she insisted that 'talent' was nothing
more than a 'mood.' I will always treat her viewpoint on this as gold having
taught so many youngsters over the decades. So, work hard, and think big of
yourselves as your reward (although that can be so hard to do!)

------
mershad
Interesting to consider, though not discussed much in the article: quality of
practice is paramount. Thoughtful and deliberate generates incremental
progress. Casual, mentally checked-out practice isn't practice at all. Some
discussion & sources here: [http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/25/the-myth-of-
practice-makes-...](http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/25/the-myth-of-practice-
makes-perfect/)

One mantra tossed around of late is "_perfect_ practice makes perfect,"
meaning not to never make mistakes, but to be conscious and analytical when
you do.

------
marcamillion
One of my personality traits is that I don't like taking shortcuts. In fact, I
hate taking them. I much prefer doing things "properly" and thoroughly. From
painstakingly teaching myself programming to not incessantly 'cheesing' in SC2
to washing the dishes multiple times to brushing my teeth slowly.

I am often ridiculed by my wife, and I always wondered where I got this from.
This trait is something I want to teach my kids, but I never knew quite how.

Until I read this article and it reminded me that I too did the Suzuki
program, into classical violin after. I remembered practicing a lot - and I
remember getting frustrated frequently.

I also remember the short burst of adrenaline I would feel, and the
overwhelming feeling of accomplishment, when I get that 'trill' just perfect
or when I perfected my vibrato.

Even though I have since put down the violin, I feel the same accomplishment
when I tackle something hard (in programming) and I eventually figure it out.

I need to remember to thank my parents for insisting that I keep at the
violin, even when I was very frustrated and wanted to rage quit.

------
kiba
Genius is not a thing, but a process. Genius need the proper environment to
cultivate talents like our well endowed genetically engineered corns need
fertilizers and pesticides.

It doesn't matters if you have an IQ of 200 when you're born several thousand
years too early. You never make use of your genius, except to make lot of
babies and become the chief of your tribe, if you're lucky.

Granted, there's lot of people who are innately smarter than you, but chance
are they're also stuck in various positions of life where they can't become a
genius like a job at wal-mart, or having children too early, or is stuck in a
hut in a third world country somewhere.

If you're reading this, chance are you have the money and the time to
rearrange your environment and your behaviors to achieve mastery. The hard
part is figuring out how to do that and how to sustain that.

~~~
sown
> It doesn't matters if you have an IQ of 200 when you're born several
> thousand years too early. You never make use of your genius, except to make
> lot of babies and become the chief of your tribe, if you're lucky.

If you're in a stone age tribe, that is probably the most important thing you
can do. Just because some stone age chieftain can't figure out how to smelt
iron doesn't mean that they failed or are wasting their talents.

------
tchock23
If anyone is curious as to the research on this topic, check out Carol Dweck's
book "Mindset." It has a ton of examples from academia, sports and business on
fixed vs. growth mentalities and how that plays into a person's success in
life.

------
robertk
In light of evolutionary psychology, talent is a combination of domain-
specific neural adaptations and illusions. We know from data mining and
machine learning that more data equals better results. Since one example of
machine learning is neural networks (i.e. you), we know that more data (i.e.
practice) leads to improved performance. For example, we know that the brain
implements certain cognitive adaptations multiple times in differing but co-
adaptive formats. If you had four neural clusters dedicated to spatial
visualization and your friend had only three, you would be better at geometry.
But if your friend practiced a lot, he could repurpose chunks of his neocortex
to use his three clusters and then some with finer heuristics, with the result
of beating you in geometry even though you had more "talent" and potential at
equivalent practice rates. Moral of the story: don't worry about talent,
practice makes better, kids.

------
cafard
Well, yes and no. I remember reading, when I was in my teens, about a star
guard in Louisiana who spent 8 or 10 hours a day playing basketball during his
summers. I realized then that "adequate driveway player" was about where I was
and would remain; I didn't have the drive to put in that kind of work. I
realized also, though, that a) my body probably wouldn't stand up to that kind
of intense work, and b) even if it did, I would be a much better but not much
more than high-school JV quality.

That said, the best do work damned hard.

------
andremendes
"Me, I want to be a natural. I want to show up at the first class and discover
I have a knack for whatever it is we're going to study - pottery, Japanese
calligraphy, racquetball, oil painting, flute. I don't mind work, as long as
it comes easily, with guaranteed results. But I'm usually the class dunce, or
at least that's what it feels like as I struggle to keep up after the going
gets tough. Eventually I quit, loath to spend precious effort on what could be
a mediocre outcome."

This almost hurt me phisically.

------
thinkling
Interestingly, this is exactly compatible with what Andrea Dwork writes about
in "Mindset" [1]: people whose identity evolves around being "smart" or
"talented" are often less willing to take on risks or big projects than those
who have grown up being praised for their efforts.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-
Dweck...](http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-
Dweck/dp/0345472322/)

------
nadam
I would say you have to consider the competition. (how competitive is the
market you want to participate in). If you compete with very hardworking
people ('everybody in the field works hard') then talent will be a
differentiator. If you compete in a competition/market where for some reason
hard work is not yet common then your hard work can be your differentiator.
Choose your fights wisely.

------
argumentum
My favorite PG essay: <http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html>

    
    
      In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because *after a while determination starts to look like talent*.

------
osivertsson
A great book that explores this subject in more depth is Matthew Syed's book
"Bounce - The myth of talent and the power of practice".

------
unicornporn
My girlfriend is a violinist and violin pedagogue. Everybody has always called
her gifted but she has resisted every time and said: it is all about having
the gift to be able to do 4 hours of intense practice each day from an early
age.

Not everybody has the ability to practice this hard.

------
dschiptsov
Practice in studying the most talent ones.)

------
elliott99
HEY EVERYONE: ONE DAY, YOURE GOING TO DIE.

~~~
Gigablah
You have a natural talent for comedy!

~~~
elliott99
I just feel that sometimes on HN people forget this.

~~~
illuminate
What on earth does it have to do with the topic?

~~~
elliott99
Because I feel that people on HN try to micromanage their neurons to an extent
that they evaluate themselves as if they were computer hardware....

"Well I only have so much RAM to do this task, but if increase my computer
processing power through deliberate practice..."

I was a bit offhand, I admit. I was in a bad mood when I made that comment.
But I stand by the fact people on HN take themselves and their capabilities
way too seriously, without any thought to the fact, say, that the internet and
programming are only a minuscule fraction of our history as intelligent
lifeforms. While I love the internet/programming/topics discussed on HN, I
just think that people here are too hard on themselves. You're not a computer
with specs, you are the results of hundreds of thousands of years of
evolution.

