
Keys to Being Excellent at Anything - jeffmiller
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-keys-to-being-excellent-at.html
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xiaoma
Here's an alternate view. Practice methods matter a great deal because our
biology allows us to be extremely adaptive. However, not everybody's biology
is identical and those differences will dominate in competitions between
groups of highly motivated and well coached individuals. Phelps is a
particularly clear example:

 _Phelps, the six-times Olympic swimming champion, has size 14 feet, which act
like flippers to propel him through water. He is 6ft 4in tall but has arms
that span 6ft 7in from fingertip to fingertip. “If you’re putting a human
being together from science this is what you want,” said Rowdy Gaines, the
winner of three Olympic swimming gold medals in 1984.

Phelps is also faster at processing lactic acid, the fluid which makes muscles
ache, than any other known human.

After a race, most swimmers measure a lacticity of between 10 and 15
millimoles per litre of blood. Phelps’s count after breaking a world record
last year was 5.6. Genadijus Sokolovas, the Team USA physiologist, has
measured 5,000 international swimmers and failed to find another with a post-
race lacticity count of less than 10._

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-
makes-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-
michael-phelps-so-good)
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece>

~~~
jamesbritt
"Phelps is also faster at processing lactic acid, the fluid which makes
muscles ache, than any other known human."

I wish I could recall some details, but that comment reminded me of something
I heard about Lance Armstrong, that he possessed some way-out-of-the-norm
physiological characteristics that provided some key advantages for bike
races.

You have to wonder how common this is, plus the odds of someone with some
physiological gift also being attracted to and motivated to pursue a well-
matched sport.

~~~
msbmsb
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6273202.stm>

Larger lung capacity, larger heart, lower lactic acid levels, higher Vo2 max.

Also: "Spaniard Miguel Indurain, who took five successive [Tour de France]
titles, had lungs so big they displaced his stomach, leading to his trademark
paunch. Indurain's lung capacity was eight litres, compared to an average of
six litres."

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Jabbles
I'm skeptical of this. I see no evidence that the statement _"10,000 hours of
practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise"_ is anything but a
tautology.

Excellence is vaguely defined at best. Perhaps the people that dedicated
10,000 hours to developing a skill are sufficiently rare that we recognise
them as experts simply because few other people have put in so much effort.

 _xiaoma_ mentions Phelps as an example of someone who has a biological
advantage over other swimmers, even though they must put in comparable
effort/hours of practice. I imagine that if Phelps had been an amateur
swimmer, racking up only 1000 hours of practice, his biology would put him at
a considerable advantage over similar amateurs. If an objective definition of
an "expert swimmer" existed, I imagine Phelps would have obtained that level
with significantly fewer hours of practice that any others. I think the
biological/mental differences will dominate at every stage, not just at the
top level.

The article mentions "scientific research", but does not cite any.

~~~
nick_dm
Here's one, and they cite some others in the paper:

K.A. Ericsson et al. "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of
Expert Performance" (1993).

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169.9712&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

It studied the links between the practice habits and attainment levels of
violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. They concluded that practice
was the dominant factor in attainment and there were no individuals who's
"talent" would make up for reduced practice.

Of course other factors (e.g. talent, quality of teaching) could have affected
admissions to the academy in the first place, but the studying suggests that
these are not significant once a certain level has been achieved.

This was mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" which mentions other
studies including the birthday distribution of professional ice hockey players
(clustered towards the start of the academic year) that suggest that practice
is more significant than genetic ability.

~~~
Jabbles
That looks like an extremely interesting article. Thank you.

A quick skim through showed that the number of violinists they examined was
10, so I am still highly skeptical, but at least after reading this I will be
more informed.

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jasonshen
The Talent Code is an incredibly good book - I recommend anyone interested in
excellence read it. Another thing that's brought up in the book is the idea of
commitment. The people who are most committed to the long term improve the
most at whatever they do. Wrote more about this here:
[http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-
you-40...](http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-
you-400-percent-better/)

------
JabavuAdams
I'm looking for the one key to being excellent at everything.

~~~
jodrellblank
Live forever?

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joshrule
I'm especially interested in the statistic that great performers rarely spend
more than 4.5 hours/day on their craft. I believe it, but I wonder where he
pulls that number from.

Any ideas?

It's the sort of thing that seems especially important to my goal of doing
great science without neglecting my family and other interests
(<http://wayofthescholar.com>).

The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?

