
Getting Better at Getting Better - juanplusjuan
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time
======
gumby
I am uninterested in professional sport but read this anyway and was really
struck by this line:

> "...historically, practice was ... not about mastering skills. People
> figured that either you had those skills or you didn’t."

I suspect many people still feel this way. Those who keep trying to hone their
skills are the fun ones to be with. Unfortunately they appear still to be in
the minority.

~~~
mareofnight
In art, it looks like people on the outside think of "talent" as something you
either have or don't, but people who are artists themselves and involved in an
art community (online, in a school, etc.) tend to focus on practice much,
_much_ more.

~~~
joeperks
Great point.

This is easily observable in the idea that an artist refines his or her's own
style. For example, I recently toured the Andy Warhol museum, and the
progression of his style/projects were clearly showcased.

Certainly, people recognize him as having an intrinsic talent, but one that he
built on to create some of the works for which he is most recognized.

------
moab
This distinction is already visible today in our field. Looking at my batch of
CS grads, there's clear divide between people who took on riskier positions or
joined startups and people who continued to do what they were already good at.
A few years after graduation, and this divide is already fairly stark - with
people in the former being exponentially better than when they left school,
and people in the latter not growing significantly.

The best people in CS are no different than the best workers/athletes in any
field. The challenge for the next few decades will be to see how we can
improve the pedagogy at Universities to help people learn to learn better.

~~~
forgotpasswd3x
> there's clear divide between people who took on riskier positions or joined
> startups and people who continued to do what they were already good at.

Not saying you're incorrect, but there might be some survivorship bias to
this.

~~~
moab
You're probably right. I guess I'm looking at a visible divide in skill and
knowledge occuring in my friends right now and trying to find some sort of
casual factor. While casting people along the 'startup/big-company' variable
gives some immediate separation, it's by no means the only factor.

~~~
tacoman
When I do the same exercise, it seems to come down to not much more than hard
work. The more skilled and knowledgeable people are those that generally work
hard and persevere through difficult challenges.

------
mlucero
This is a great article but I wish it would have also included advancement in
area of steroids. We live in an era where drugs fuel a significant part of
professional sports. Top tier athletes also have top tier drug regimens and
their "doctors" have found ways to 'hack' the testing. It's an area that the
media isn't open about discussing but it is there with the millions of dollars
at stake.

I know I'm leaning heavy on the sports side of the article but this isn't all
a result of refining the skills required for sport. They are also faster,
stronger, and recover more quickly because of the drugs athletes take.

~~~
paganel
> This is a great article but I wish it would have also included advancement
> in area of steroids.

My thoughts exactly. I was a great fan of professional cycling when I was a
kid (I still follow it, mostly for the scenery nowadays), so much so that as
an Miguel Indurain fan I still remember the 8-man chase in the 1996 Tour de
France that saw his reign end
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xsXthk4YIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xsXthk4YIo)).
Each and every one of those 8 athletes from that legendary chase has been
proved as being doped sometimes during their career (and most probably they
all were doped during that stage). It has not been proved yet, but it's an
open secret that Indurain itself might have been a doper, and even Merckx.
This ruined professional cycling for me.

Two years after that 1996 Tour the Festina scandal started and at least
cycling did try to make itself clean. The same cannot be said of football,
where it's absolutely incredible how players like Messi and Ronaldo can play
60+ matches per year at such a high level, consistently. By "incredible" I
mean "more than human".

~~~
zweiterlinde
You might be interested in this New Yorker article then:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/09/man-and-
superma...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/09/man-and-superman)

------
amjaeger
I didn't expect this to be an article about education. But it seems to make a
lot of sense. I have always felt that bad teachers recognize that there is a
problem with their classroom management, however the solutions they come up
with aren't great. I also have seen that most bad teachers have common
problems. Which would imply that with a pretty standard set of instructions a
bad teacher could transform into something better with just a bit of work.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Yes halfway through this article could have been about anything, so broad was
the application of the concept, but education was an interesting choice. There
are surely many other fields that can be similarly improved.

Just focusing not only on doing your job, but how you do it, the little
details, and then having constant feedback and trying to improve constantly,
it's an incredibly valuable concept.

~~~
klenwell
Reminds me of first Bush Treasury Secretary John O'Neill's emphasis on safety
when he took over at Alcoa in the 80's. It was part of a broader strategy that
he referred to as habitual excellence." I first came across it in Charles
Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,
where he provides an interesting account of how it helped mend crippling
mistrust between labor and management. Here's a newspaper article that quickly
summarizes it:

[http://www.post-
gazette.com/business/businessnews/2012/05/13...](http://www.post-
gazette.com/business/businessnews/2012/05/13/Habitual-excellence-The-
workplace-according-to-Paul-O-Neill/stories/201205130249)

We've done something like this at my workplace by moving to scrum (with
regular retrospectives) and, more importantly, by adopting stricter coding
standards together with regular code reviews (weekly as a group and by using
pull requests with continuous integration.)

I would have liked to see us extend this to something even more like O'Neill's
approach with a greater focus on eliminating production bugs (especially with
respect to our deployment practices where unexpected snags abound). But I
haven't been able to get management support for that. (Our more critical
business function is to keep existing infrastructure humming rather than
develop new products so I feel it would make more sense for us than for, say,
a startup, but I guess no one like admitting to themselves that their main
reason-for-being is to maintain the status quo.)

Nevertheless, all together, the changes have made a world of difference.

------
corysama
Here's an example of a school applying Demming's/Toyota's/Lean's techniques to
great success.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZHQnuZXj8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZHQnuZXj8)

------
quickpost
Reminds me a lot of the notion of Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset that Carol
Dweck has popularized.

~~~
mod
I found out about this via one of Aaron Swartz's blog posts:
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck)

It's a good read.

------
tokenadult
This is a very good article. The reference to the newly published book
_Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of
Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them_ by Mark McClusky prompted me
to request that book from my friendly public library. I like how the article
looks at the absolute skill levels among professional competitors in chess and
professional performers in orchestral music and shows that the skill level in
those and many other domains has been steadily rising in my lifetime. There is
still a lot of untapped potential in most individuals alive today that can be
developed even at adult ages.

As the article reports, "What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of
excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide
receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and
his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he
studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so
on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an
oddball. The golfer Ben Hogan, who was said to have 'invented practice,' stood
out at a time when most pro golfers practiced occasionally, if at all. Today,
practicing six to eight hours a day is just the price of admission on the
P.G.A. Tour. Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good." This kind of
cultural change can still go a lot further in a lot of fields on human
performance. A culture of continual efforts at self-improvement has hardly
even begun in many occupations.

The article's conclusion about improving the performance of elementary and
secondary school teachers in the United States is thoughtful, and also refers
to good new books, _Building a Better Teacher_ by Elizabeth Green and _The
Teacher Wars_ by Dana Goldstein. Studies of educational effectiveness in the
United States consistently show that the variance in teacher quality in any
one school swamps the variance in school quality between one school and
another, so any child in any school district is at risk of getting an
ineffective teacher. (Although schools in poor neighborhoods of the United
States, on the whole, have the greatest difficulty in hiring and retaining
good teachers.) Anything that can help teachers learn to teach better before
or after they began working in the classroom will have massive social
benefits. An economist who has studied teacher effectiveness for years shows
that the best teachers are almost literally worth their weight in gold, while
the worst teachers have negative added value for their pupils.[1] Bringing a
culture of continual self-improvement in America's schools is a project of
crucial national importance.

[1] [http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-
teachers-h...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-
much-good-teacher-worth)

~~~
JacobAldridge
In your experience, are there some tools or even a general cultural approach
that benefit homeschooling parents which could be applied to mainstream
teachers?

~~~
tokenadult
This is a quick reply because I'm about to go out. Feel free to ask follow-up
questions. One thing that homeschoolers fearlessly do is reject curriculum
materials if they don't work, and use different materials for different
children. Many classroom teachers are not at liberty to do either of these
things officially, but if they do them on the sly, they will be helping the
learners in their care.

------
thewarrior
Is there any place where I can find a programming coach ?

~~~
diego_moita
> Is there any place where I can find a programming coach ?

I think this is a very good one: [https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-
programmer](https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer)

------
chrisduesing
Does this imply we are headed towards a future where there isn't a 10x
difference between the best programmers and the worst? Where someone comes up
with repeatable training that can help programmers advance throughout their
career?

~~~
jfoutz
This line comes to mind:

Young Composer: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing a symphony. How should
I get started?"

Mozart: "A symphony is a very complex musical form and you are still young.
Perhaps you should start with something simpler, like a concerto."

Young Composer: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8
years old."

Mozart: "Yes, but I never asked anyone how."

~~~
facepalm
His father was a famous music teacher and started teaching him at age 4 (and
he watched his sisters lessons already at age 3).

~~~
jfoutz
If you could take 10 4 year olds and start training them in music that way,
you won't get 10 Mozarts. I doubt you'll get one. (I'll concede they may all
be very good for 8 year olds though) Different people learn different ways.

I guess my point is, for a given training program, you're going to have a wide
distribution of effectiveness of graduates.

~~~
kamaal
Yes,

But if you take 10 mozarts, who don't have a father who is a music teacher,
doesn't have a sister whom he can watch getting trained and his own training
doesn't start at 4.

I'd doubt if they would do anything in Music. Let alone become some one like
mozart.

~~~
thewarrior
There's a real life case study we can use here.

The Jacksons. Joe Jackson pushed his kids really really hard often to the
point of abuse. All of them are good singers now but only one of them became
Michael Jackson.

~~~
facepalm
But is that because MJ was better than the others, or because his marketing
played out better? There might be some factors independent of the skill of the
individual that end up making a star.

~~~
loso
It wasn't all marketing. Not even mostly marketing. When the group was still
young but in the industry all of the industry execs pushed for Jermaine
Jackson to go solo. He considered the cute one by girls and was considered to
have just as much talent as Michael. Or at least close to it. While he had a
decent solo career it was nothing like when Michael got older and went solo.

Basically Jermaine was heavily marketed when he went solo and even had a
bidding war for his services. But it was MJ who was the star and for lack of a
better term had the "it" factor.

~~~
thewarrior
Jermaine could maybe sing as well as Michael but could he dance like him ?

Michael was in another league altogether. Even Quincy Jones says about Michael
, "Sometimes the hand of god just lingers a bit longer over someones head".

------
loso
I found it interesting that the story omitted the name of the person Kermit
Washington punched and got suspended for. It was Rudy Tomjanovich. He went on
to have a hall of fame coaching career. It was probably on purpose so that the
main purpose of the story wasn't derailed but I find it interesting
nonetheless.

------
lipnitsk
Since his name came up in the article, it is worth reading more about the
ideas that W. Edwards Deming[1] lectured on.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)

------
hookey
Too meta.

------
amelius
And how would this apply to hacking? Or entrepreneurship?

~~~
bbcbasic
Look at your current url!

What does YCombinator do?

