> He was right, of course. What these athletes do was rather interesting, but the people themselves were only fast swimmers, who did the particular things one does to swim fast. It is all very mundane. When my friend said that they weren't exciting, my best answer could only be, simply put: That's the point.
This article (and its conclusions) reminded me a lot of the stuff David Foster Wallace wrote about the world of professional tennis. Wallace portrayed the life of a professional athlete as a kind of modern monasticism. From his Esquire article "The String Theory" (2008):
> Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit [...]
> Sex and substance issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are our culture's holy men: They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to 'excellence' and 'perfection' that we admire and reward (the monk's begging bowl, the RBI guru's eight-figure contract) and like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption.
Point being, the life of a professional athlete in the making is (mostly) not glamorous or exciting, but rather a very narrow existence comprised of pure persistence and dedication to a small set of very specific movements and activities, repeated over and over.
> Point being, the life of a professional athlete in the making is (mostly) not glamorous or exciting, but rather a very narrow existence comprised of pure persistence and dedication to a small set of very specific movements and activities, repeated over and over.
The author of the paper argues somewhat the opposite. It's true that there's a lot of persistence and endurance involved, but athletes _do enjoy_ doing that—making small improvements, finding better ways to do something. It's not unlike other pursuits. It would take a lot of dedication to become a grandmaster, but you won't become one if you didn't enjoy doing it every day to an extent.
When Arthur Ashe died, a sportswriter told of years before talking with Ashe near some courts. Another prominent American player was practicing his serve, working his way through a shopping cart full of tennis balls. Ashe said, roughly,
That guy doesn't know who the president of the United States is. He may not know how many planets there are. I can't live like that.
Obviously a lot can live like that. It is hard to blame those who do, but there is a reason that athletes like Ashe are remembered so fondly.
I had the pleasure of being assigned Ashe's memoir, Days of Grace, during a summer school class(I don't even remember what the class was supposed to be about - some district mandated requirement) and certain of its images have lingered with me for years. Would recommend.
"Point being, the life of a professional athlete in the making is (mostly) not glamorous or exciting, but rather a very narrow existence comprised of pure persistence and dedication to a small set of very specific movements and activities, repeated over and over."
Same as most professionals. But more reward. More risk. More need for innate qualities.
"...like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption."
They "sacrifice" for fame and a comfortable lifestyle, just like everyone else.
> They "sacrifice" for fame and a comfortable lifestyle, just like everyone else.
There are those who stop sacrificing once they attain fame and a comfortable lifestyle. But what of those who attain the fame and comfortable lifestyle but continue to sacrifice themselves?
> Point being, the life of a professional athlete in the making is (mostly) not glamorous or exciting, but rather a very narrow existence comprised of pure persistence and dedication to a small set of very specific movements and activities, repeated over and over.
Today we can actually peek directly into that kind of lifestyle by observing professional gamers on twitch.tv.
... the true tests (such as the dissertation requirement) in graduate school are really designed to discover whether at some point one is willing to just turn the damn thing in.
The willingness to do hard, mundane work may be the most under-rated quality in all of modern life.
I think too little is made of the how the Internet and its various forms of instant entertainment make it all too easy to sidestep the mundane nature of most valuable work. It's worth considering the many long-term consequences.
I don't think this is underrated at all. Primary and secondary education is largely intended to train people to sit still doing mundane work all day IMO.
I think it is, at least nowadays. In my experiences as a teacher, most just aren't doing it anymore. They're not doing anything besides playing on their phones. I'd love to have students who would just do their work. And I think it was true in the past, even before the curse of smartphones. Kids would find other ways to avoid doing their work, and the ones who succeeded were the ones who did it.
What is quite worrying to me is doing hard, mundane work in an “easy” way (eg my job is subpar and I’m not sure what direction is moving in but I’ll just do what my boss says and work a little extra to make sure it’s really good). And I think that sometimes it’s pretty hard to pick hard work that will align right in the long term. I don’t know.
This research paper packs a wisdom of a great book in 16 pages. Very accessible and highly recommended. Some of my favorite quotes:
"What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water. Through the notion of talent, we transform particular actions that a human being does into an object possessed, held in trust for the day when it will be revealed for all to see."
"The features of the sport which the “C” swimmer finds unpleasant, the top-level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring—swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say—they find it peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic."
"Olympic Champions don’t just do much more of the same things that summer-league country-club swimmers do. They don’t just swim more hours, or move their arms faster, or attend more workouts. … Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different."
There are many more gems like that, but I can't find a text-only version of this paper anywhere.
> Talent is a useless concept. Varying conceptions of natural ability ('talent' e.g.) tend to mystify excellence, treating it as the inherent possession of a few; they mask the concrete actions that produce outstanding performance; they avoid the work of empirical analysis and logical explanations (clear definitions, seperable dependent and independent variables, and at least an attempt at establishing the temporal priority of the cause); and finally such conceptions perpetuate the sense of innate psychological differences between top performers and other people.
This is nonsense. Sprint athletes are selected on the basis of being physically optimised for sprinting. Basketball athletes are optimised for height. Aspiring ballerinas are excluded from ballet school if they don't have the right physique.
Other skills - spatial awareness, verbal acuity, musical sensitivity, basic cognitive speed - are all on a bell curve, with an upper limit that is genetic.
Hard work is needed to develop talent, but isn't a substitute for it.
Being born with a genome that makes your body short and dumpy means your chances of a career in professional basketball are not high. Likewise, if you have no feel for rhythm you're going to be a terrible drummer. No amount of practice is going to improve that. At best with years of world-class tuition you can aspire to competent mediocrity.
If you have some native ability, hard work can help you outperform someone who has plenty but hasn't developed it. But their ceiling of potential is still going to be higher level than yours.
Business has more of a problem with talent, because the ability to succeed in business is spread across many more variables.
I used to know someone who had unbelievable social and emotional intelligence. He had an astounding ability to read people for character and motivation and predict the moods and future actions of individuals and groups. That's not usually considered a key business skill, but it was absolutely essential to his promotion to board level.
The problem in business is that "excellence" is as often a combination of class privilege and bluster, perhaps with some sociopathy, as it is any genuine indication of competence. Or talent.
> Sprint athletes are selected on the basis of being physically optimised for sprinting.
Tell that to Usain Bolt. If you feel like maybe Bolt was optimised, reflect on the fact that this was not predicted before the fact, "This range in height appears to exclude people who are very tall or very short in stature."
An interesting idea from the paper is how low achievers often mistakenly think that "working harder" is all that's needed to move up to the next level.
> Having seen that "more is better" withing local situations, we tend to extrapolate. If I work this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work?
> It is not by doing increasing amounts of work that one becomes excellent, but rather by changing the kinds of work. Beyond an initial improvement of strength, flexibility and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. Instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps: noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude, accomplished usually through a change in settings, e.g. joining a new team with a new coach, new friends, etc, who work at a higher level. Without such qualitative jumps, no major improvements will take place.
I made this mistake when I was younger. All I wanted was to be good at drawing. The stock advice given out to budding artists online, and which I ate up at the time, is "draw every day". Just draw. Draw anything. Set a timer and draw what's in front of you. Make it a habit. It's assumed that more quantity is all that's missing. I did this for years and only improved slightly. Then, many years later, I returned to drawing, but with a different approach. This time, I studied other artists and tried to mimic their techniques, and in doing so improved significantly over the course of two months. That experience alone taught me the value of deliberate practice. Unfortunately, most people have become indoctrinated into the School of 10,000 Hours, and it's hard to convince them otherwise.
This article (and its conclusions) reminded me a lot of the stuff David Foster Wallace wrote about the world of professional tennis. Wallace portrayed the life of a professional athlete as a kind of modern monasticism. From his Esquire article "The String Theory" (2008):
> Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit [...]
> Sex and substance issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are our culture's holy men: They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to 'excellence' and 'perfection' that we admire and reward (the monk's begging bowl, the RBI guru's eight-figure contract) and like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption.
Point being, the life of a professional athlete in the making is (mostly) not glamorous or exciting, but rather a very narrow existence comprised of pure persistence and dedication to a small set of very specific movements and activities, repeated over and over.
The author of the paper argues somewhat the opposite. It's true that there's a lot of persistence and endurance involved, but athletes _do enjoy_ doing that—making small improvements, finding better ways to do something. It's not unlike other pursuits. It would take a lot of dedication to become a grandmaster, but you won't become one if you didn't enjoy doing it every day to an extent.
That guy doesn't know who the president of the United States is. He may not know how many planets there are. I can't live like that.
Obviously a lot can live like that. It is hard to blame those who do, but there is a reason that athletes like Ashe are remembered so fondly.
Same as most professionals. But more reward. More risk. More need for innate qualities.
"...like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption."
They "sacrifice" for fame and a comfortable lifestyle, just like everyone else.
There are those who stop sacrificing once they attain fame and a comfortable lifestyle. But what of those who attain the fame and comfortable lifestyle but continue to sacrifice themselves?
Today we can actually peek directly into that kind of lifestyle by observing professional gamers on twitch.tv.
... the true tests (such as the dissertation requirement) in graduate school are really designed to discover whether at some point one is willing to just turn the damn thing in.
The willingness to do hard, mundane work may be the most under-rated quality in all of modern life.
I think too little is made of the how the Internet and its various forms of instant entertainment make it all too easy to sidestep the mundane nature of most valuable work. It's worth considering the many long-term consequences.
Speaking of which, it's time to get back to work.
"What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water. Through the notion of talent, we transform particular actions that a human being does into an object possessed, held in trust for the day when it will be revealed for all to see."
"The features of the sport which the “C” swimmer finds unpleasant, the top-level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring—swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say—they find it peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic."
"Olympic Champions don’t just do much more of the same things that summer-league country-club swimmers do. They don’t just swim more hours, or move their arms faster, or attend more workouts. … Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different."
There are many more gems like that, but I can't find a text-only version of this paper anywhere.
+1
Other skills - spatial awareness, verbal acuity, musical sensitivity, basic cognitive speed - are all on a bell curve, with an upper limit that is genetic.
Hard work is needed to develop talent, but isn't a substitute for it.
Being born with a genome that makes your body short and dumpy means your chances of a career in professional basketball are not high. Likewise, if you have no feel for rhythm you're going to be a terrible drummer. No amount of practice is going to improve that. At best with years of world-class tuition you can aspire to competent mediocrity.
If you have some native ability, hard work can help you outperform someone who has plenty but hasn't developed it. But their ceiling of potential is still going to be higher level than yours.
Business has more of a problem with talent, because the ability to succeed in business is spread across many more variables.
I used to know someone who had unbelievable social and emotional intelligence. He had an astounding ability to read people for character and motivation and predict the moods and future actions of individuals and groups. That's not usually considered a key business skill, but it was absolutely essential to his promotion to board level.
The problem in business is that "excellence" is as often a combination of class privilege and bluster, perhaps with some sociopathy, as it is any genuine indication of competence. Or talent.
Tell that to Usain Bolt. If you feel like maybe Bolt was optimised, reflect on the fact that this was not predicted before the fact, "This range in height appears to exclude people who are very tall or very short in stature."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899678/
> Having seen that "more is better" withing local situations, we tend to extrapolate. If I work this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work?
> It is not by doing increasing amounts of work that one becomes excellent, but rather by changing the kinds of work. Beyond an initial improvement of strength, flexibility and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. Instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps: noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude, accomplished usually through a change in settings, e.g. joining a new team with a new coach, new friends, etc, who work at a higher level. Without such qualitative jumps, no major improvements will take place.
I made this mistake when I was younger. All I wanted was to be good at drawing. The stock advice given out to budding artists online, and which I ate up at the time, is "draw every day". Just draw. Draw anything. Set a timer and draw what's in front of you. Make it a habit. It's assumed that more quantity is all that's missing. I did this for years and only improved slightly. Then, many years later, I returned to drawing, but with a different approach. This time, I studied other artists and tried to mimic their techniques, and in doing so improved significantly over the course of two months. That experience alone taught me the value of deliberate practice. Unfortunately, most people have become indoctrinated into the School of 10,000 Hours, and it's hard to convince them otherwise.