Human Limits

Last week I explored why it is easy to conclude that talent might be highly heritable but hard to get an easy DNA based read on the genetics of talent.  In this post I want to share some thoughts about how exceptional levels of achievement and success seem to run in families and ultimately why this might increase through a process known as “assortative mating” or the tendency of people with certain characteristics to reproduce with each other and perhaps amplify the characteristic of interest over time.  Think tall people marrying tall people and having tall kids for example.  This concept also applies to things like income, intelligence, and unfortunately obesity.

This post also reflects an e-mail discussion with the usual suspects:  David Epstein, Jonathan Wai, Amby Burfoot, and Terry Laughlin.

Darwin’s Family

During some recent academic work on heritability and genetics I stumbled onto the fact that Darwin’s extended family has been loaded with achievers and innovators for about 250 years.  Other families of note include the Huxley family and also the Bohr family from Denmark whose members have made major contributions to physiology and math with two Nobel prizes in physics.

Sports Dynasties

When dynastic families in sports came up, through dumb luck David Epstein was looking through the files he generated on this topic for his book “The Sports Gene”.  Here is David’s stream of consciousness list of exceptional families and a few side comments:

“In the course of book reporting, I came across a lot of families with multiple pro athletes, although not always in the same sports. For example, Jon Jones is the greatest MMA fighter in the world, and his two brothers are NFL players. Then there were rare families like the Alou clan, which had like six straight men in MLB. At one point, three Alou brothers were the outfield for the San Francisco Giants. The Alomars had father and two sons in MLB, and the Bells had four guys in three different generations who all at one point played for the same team! The Boones, Hairstons, and Colemans are three generation MLB family. Clay Matthews’ family is a three generation NFL family. I remember a father and son from the Maldini family in Italy were captains of Champions League winners exactly 20 years apart. I guess there are a few really high profile ones, like the Mannings, the Harbaughs and Ryans, the Sharpes. The Gronkowskis have three currently in the NFL. Cecil and Prince Fielder. In the NBA the Gasols, Brooke and Robin Lopez, the Currys. Kobe and his father (Joe Bryant). Barry Bonds and his father. Rick Barry and his three sons were all in the NBA. I think the Staals have four brothers in the NHL. Eight members of the Sutters have six Stanley Cups between them, and I think the three Howes have some. And I only know the Sauers have two brothers in the NHL and one was in the NFL because I was writing about the brain damage of the NFL brother. There are some prominent identical twin athletes, like Tiki and Ronde Barber, and in track the female Barbers, and the Borlees. The Klitschkos, both world boxing champs at the same time. The identical Bryan bros are the top doubles tennis team in the world. The Griffeys, the three Dimaggios, the three Ripkens. Jackie Robinson’s brother took silver in the 200 in 1936 just behind Jesse Owens. The Alis and Reggie and Cheryl Miller both have a male and female who were both the best or nearly the best in the world. The five Andrettis in auto racing. The Williams sisters of course. …there are a bunch more. I didn’t memorize this, I was just pulling some from a folder where I had been marking these down. Actually, my favorite was an Israeli mother and daughter who were on THE SAME 4×100-meter relay for the national team. How cool is that?”

Basketball Fathers and Sons

David also sent me some back of the envelope calculations made by his colleague Jon Werthheim (Scorecasting)  about the odds of the son of an NBA player making it to Division 1 college basketball:

“We can argue about the ratio of nature to nurture. But, clearly, sons born to fathers who once played in the NBA are statistically more likely to become D-I hoops players. How much more likely? After joining forces with Dr. Ed Feng—Stanford Ph.d in engineering and founder of Powerrank.com —crunching the numbers, and making some admittedly imprecise assumptions, we reached an astounding conclusion: male offspring of former NBA players are currently more than 55 times likelier to earn a college basketball scholarship than a male from the population at large.  Here’s how we arrived there:

• There are (roughly) three million high school graduates each year.

• There is (roughly) a 1:1 male-to-female ratio for 15-64 year olds.

• So there are 1.5 million male high school graduates each year

• Division-I college basketball teams have up to 13 scholarships

• There are 347 Division-I schools that have a men’s basketball program.

• Overestimating that each program uses its full complement of scholarships, there are 4511 scholarships at any given time, 347 * 13 = 4511.

• We divide the 4,511 scholarships by the 1,500,000 males times four years of college. i.e. 4511 / (4 * 1,500,000) = 0.00075.

• In the population at large, a male’s odds of earning a D-I basketball scholarship are .00075 or 1 in 1330.

 

On the other hand:

• There have been 4,699 players in NBA history. (This, however, dates to the 40s and includes current rookies.)

• We make a rough estimate that one-tenth of them had a male offspring born between 1990-1994 — the window for kids in college today.

• So 470 former NBA players had a son born between 1990-94.

• There are (at minimum, as some parentage might be unascertained) 20 current D-I players whose fathers played in the NBA.

• 20/470 = 4.3 percent.

• Among the population of current 18-22 year-old old males born to NBA players, their odds of earing a college scholarship are roughly 1 in 23.5.

• Put another way, they are more than 55 times more likely to play D-I basketball than kids whose father weren’t in the NBA.

When Elites Meet and Mate

Before there were a lot of high level athletic opportunities for women it might have been unusual for elite male and female athletes to meet and mate.  However, with the advent of more competitive opportunities for women perhaps there will be more and more pairings of elites and whatever elements of athletic success are heritable might converge in their kids.   Amby Burfoot pointed this out back in 2008 for the runner and 10k bronze medalist Shalane Flanagan who both “Picked Her Parents Well” and “Trains Her Butt Off”:

“I’ve been writing a bit in recent days about possible genetic contributions to distance-running success. You know: “Pick your parents carefully, and ask them to grow up in the Rift Valley of East Africa.” Flanagan didn’t follow the script precisely, but she sure as hell did a fine job selecting her parents. Her mother, Cheryl Treworgy, was the first woman to break 2:50 in the marathon. The first. Ever. Her father, Steve Flanagan, was a 1:50.8 half-miler, a 4:07 miler, a three-time member of the U.S. World Cross Country team, and a 2:18 marathoner.”

Another example is the cyclist Taylor Phinney, his father was a professional cyclist and his Mom (Connie Carpenter-Phinney) was both a summer and winter Olympian in cycling (gold medalist 1984) and speed skating.  Height obviously matters in basketball and my wife has two former teammates who are both about 6-4 (195cm).  Both of these women have married tall (6-6 and 6-8) men who played college sports and their kids are literally off the charts in terms of height.  It will be interesting to see where their interests lie and how far they go in sports.

Nature, Nurture, Push, Pull?

In a whole series of posts on the topic of talent vs. practice I have favored the idea that talent is hard to define but essential for elite (as opposed to expert) level performance.  I have also argued that talent is nothing without practice.   The examples above also make me think about the role of enriched environments.  If you listen to the parents of elite performers in various fields many will tell you that they did not “push their kids” and that the kid pulled them.  However, if you look further you might also find evidence of what I call an enriched environment with plenty of opportunities for exploration and good early instruction.  Also what role does seeing a parent or parents early in life training or pursuing some other activity they really enjoy (that is also valued by the world at large) have on the ultimate motivation of a child?  Late in life Andrew Huxley, who won the Nobel Prize for figuring out nerves work with his colleague Hodgkin, was interviewed and commented about his very early education and home environment:

“Well, I had always been keen on and quite good at hand work of various sorts, played a lot with meccano and zero-gauge clockwork railways when small. My parents gave my brother and me a quite good lathe when I was about twelve or so, which I still have (he was 79 at the time of this interview). It’s a screw-cutting, metal-turning lathe, which I still use for building my own equipment and I was self-taught on that…”

Huxley did design and build much of the equipment he needed for his ground breaking scientific work.  If you read the whole interview it is pretty clear that he pulled and his parents facilitated while he was exposed to the best educational institutions and minds available in England throughout his life.

Lessons for Parenting?

One thing that hits me as I review these family histories of achievement is that pushing your kids and so-called “Tiger Parenting” is not such a good idea.  Maybe a better strategy is to set a good example by engaging the world in a positive but rigorous way and facilitating and supporting your kid’s interests.  From what I can tell that pattern is common in many of the families mentioned above.

I have done a couple of recent posts on the idea that practice (the so-called 10,000 hour rule) is more important than talent in reaching elite levels of performance.   The main conclusion from all of this is that practice can make most people really good at most things but talent (and also exposure to given activity) are required for truly exceptional levels of performance.  When the topic of talent comes up the assumption is that it is inherited from our parents and other ancestors.  This then leads to the idea that talent is genetic and that eventually genes that confer the chance for exceptional performance are out there waiting to be identified.
You can take the same general line of reasoning and apply it to things like height, weight, or even your risk of getting certain diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes that tend to “run in families”.

Let’s Start With Darwin

Charles Darwin’s ideas pre-date the concept of genes.  He made lots of observations about how animals vary from place to place and adapt to their environment.  One of fundamental ideas is that via the process of natural selection, animals and plants best suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce.  This reproductive success is dependent on the transmission of key characteristics to the offspring which increase their odds of survival.   When this happens generation after generation certain composite traits called phenotypes emerge.

Galton is Next

After Darwin, his cousin Francis Galton came along and started to make statistical estimates of heritability for things like height and intelligence.  His observations showed a strong correlation between parents and offspring for many phenotypes and he commented that:

“I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.”

Galton’s statistical work was later extended and amplified by Pearson and Fisher who are familiar to anyone who has ever taken a basic statistics class.  The figure below is from a paper by Fisher in 1919 showing his estimates of how height was inherited from parents and earlier ancestors.

The First Version of Genes

About the same time that the statisticians got busy the work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered.  Mendel did breeding experiments with peas of different phenotypes and showed via so-called “laws of inheritance” how the various characteristics were transmitted from generation to generation.  None of his observations could be explained in a satisfactory way by earlier ideas about how phenotypes were transmitted from generation to generation.  In about 1909 Wilhelm Johannsen came up with the idea of both genotype and phenotype and:

“Johannsen’s most notable experiments concerned his so-called ‘pure lines’ of the self-fertile princess bean, Phaseolus vulgaris. Studying the progeny of self-fertilized plants, he selected the character of bean weight and found that both the lightest and the heaviest beans produced progeny with the same distribution of bean weights, i e they were genetically identical. He concluded that the variations in bean weight were due to environmental factors and he introduced the terms genotype (for the genetic constitution of an organism) and phenotype (for the characteristics of an organism that result from the interaction of its genotype with the environment). Johannsen favoured the view of de Vries that inheritance was determined by discrete particulate elements and abbreviated de Vries’s term ‘pangenes’ to ‘genes’.”

In this view we have the idea that genotype = phenotype with some modification by the environment.  It also explains why Fisher assumed his estimates of the heritability of height could be explained by this early definition of “what is a gene”.

Genes and Evolution

The ideas about the statistics of heritability, genes and the fossil record were then integrated in the 1930s and 40s into something called the “Modern Synthesis” of evolutionary biology:

“The synthesis, produced between 1936 and 1947, reflects the consensus about how evolution proceeds. The previous development of population genetics, between 1918 and 1932, was a stimulus, as it showed that Mendelian genetics was consistent with natural selection and gradual evolution. The synthesis is still, to a large extent, the current paradigm in evolutionary biology.”

The Changing Definition of a Gene

What happens next is that DNA is discovered and the more general version of a gene is replaced by one based on the idea that DNA is a “read only” genetic code and that has been oversimplified to infer that DNA = phenotype.  There is actually something called the “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology” that has been perhaps unwittingly over extrapolated to infer that DNA=phenotype.   The term “Central Dogma” also has a strangely medieval religious ring to it.

However, it turns out that the genome and the products coming from it are subject to all sorts of environmental influences and that the idea of a linear – one way street – transfer of information from gene to protein to phenotype is a gross over simplification.  There is even evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited.  These newer ideas about what might be described as a more flexible genome also explain why it has been so hard to find discrete DNA snippets that fully or even mostly explain many things including the statistical estimates of heritability exceptional longevity, height, BMI, intelligence and the risk for many common diseases.

For those of you who want to take a deep dive into these issues the link below is to a lecture by Denis Noble who has argued for a far more nuanced view of how genetic information is converted into phenotypes and how this influences how phenotypes are inherited from one generation to the next.

Back to Talent

Many human characteristics including things that might be called talent have a high statistical probability of being inherited from our parents and ancestors.  When the pre DNA definition of gene is used, then it is pretty easy to think about a sort of non-specific genetic explanation for them.  However, when the DNA based definition of a gene is used it is hard to find discrete or obvious DNA based genetic explanations for most things.  So, don’t expect a blood test anytime soon that is going to tell you that your kids are can’t miss at anything, and even if they have all the “genetic” talent in the world will they get exposed to what they might be great at and will they be willing to practice both intelligently and relentlessly?  The author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) who comes from a long multi-generation family line of exceptional achievers said:

“There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.”

On the other hand a standard concept from the sporting world is that you “can’t coach desire”.

Perhaps the truly elite performer in any endeavor needs to have it both ways.

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In my last post I summarized an ongoing e-mail exchange I was having with David Epstein, Terry Laughlin and Amby Burfoot.   The focus of our exchange was on talent in general and the idea the champions are either born and then made or simply made via intense and deliberate practice.  When this topic comes up the first thing that pops into many people’s mind is the “10,000” hour rule as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.  The basic idea is that practice beats talent and that with enough of it “anyone can become world class”.   

The conversation is continuing and David got Jonathan Wai involved.  Jonathan is one of the world’s leading experts on the nuances of intellectual and creative talent, and it has been fun to get his perspectives.  It is also interesting to see how ideas about talent, practice and achievement in academic and creative fields are the same or different than for sports.  So what have I learned in the last 10 days as the exchange continues?

Dr. Ericsson I Presume?

At least some of the ideas associated with what Terry Laughlin described in our exchange as the “10,000 brand” come from K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University.  Ericsson is now either back tracking from some of his original ideas or perhaps they were misinterpreted and oversimplified to begin with.  Here are a few caveats to think about:

• Many of the groups used to make the 10,000 hour argument are elite or nearly elite to begin with.   So perhaps among the most talented people, more practice makes a difference.
• The distribution of practice times to “elitehood” is highly variable and reflects potentially complex interactions between talent, exposure, and what might be called trainability.  Average values rarely tell the whole story.
• There are obvious talents like body size, which trump all sorts of things.  You will never find small shot putters or big gymnasts.
• For academic and creative efforts there are many parallels with sport.  That having been said kids who do really, really, really well on early tests of academic ability end up (on average) with higher levels of academic and professional achievement later in life in comparison to the merely seriously above average.  Practice and motivation matter but so does talent.

Rage to Master!

One of the more interesting topics that came up is the so-called “rage to master” concept.  The idea is that a very few people are both gifted in a given domain and also develop an early interest in pursuing it like their “hair is on fire”.   There are some great examples from the visual art world that include people who draw well early.  There are also well known examples like Picasso.   The image below is the “First Communion” that Picasso painted when he was about 15.   I am not an art historian, but it is pretty clear that he had mastered what might be called classic 19^th century European painting at an early age before moving on to his later innovations.

The other interesting thing about highly precocious highly motivated kids is that they seem to “pull” their environment as opposed to being pushed by parents; again their hair is on fire.   David Epstein sees Tiger Woods as a classic example of pull that went along with any physical talent he had plus the early exposure.   It is also easy to see how under the right circumstances all of these factors can amplify each other with success leading to more motivation, more practice, and then more success……..

Go For Broke!

Tiger Woods (at least the Tiger of old) also conjures up what might be described as the “go for broke” mindset.   Amby Burfoot wonders if that is part of the success of the E. Africans in distance running.  They go out hard and push the pace.  Many crash and burn in big races, but if someone is really on that day, and conditions are right then the odds of a breakthrough time improve.   As I thought more about this it occurred to me that one of the reasons Tiger Woods is not as dominant as he once was is that the wave of golfers just behind him (the 20 somethings) saw him go for broke and now all do it.   Thus, on any given day at least someone almost as good as Tiger gets hot and is there to challenge him.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Terry is a very effective advocate of deliberate practice and he has shown repeatedly that technique and skill matter in swimming, and that it is way more than getting in the pool and mindlessly working out.   He sent a link about the 17 year old Ski phenomenon Mikaela Schiffrin.  The story reinforces many of the ideas we have been e-mailing about:

• She obviously has some ability and is the perfect size.  The picture in article shows what appear to be powerful legs and a low center of gravity.
• She got intensive early exposure but also developed well-rounded athletic skills like juggling while riding a unicycle.
• She seems to have the “rage to master” and by master I mean focusing on flawless and efficient technique.

Where to Leave It?

The conversation is continuing, but where to leave it for now?  There are all sorts of pieces of advice that might flow for our discussion but one thing that is for sure is that we have at least some control over our effort and how well we practice.   The story of Mikaela Schiffrin juggling and riding a unicycle along with the observations in last week’s post on “sample early and focus “ make me think that focusing on general motor and intellectual skills and that mastering a few fundamentals at any age has a lot of merit.   That having been said, here is something about Vince Lombardi explaining his basic plays  in 1965 to center Bill Curry.  Curry was a rookie and Lombardi used nothing more than a yellow legal pad and a pencil:

“Our system is complete, simple, and comprehensive,” he went on. “We can attack the whole field. We have very little trickery. We really don’t need it.  We win with execution. Something works, not because it’s a brilliant piece of strategic or tactical thinking, but because our team has practiced the same plays, the same movements, and the same fundamentals over and over and over again.”

How great a teacher was Vince Lombardi? The best way to answer that is to tell you that, 43 years later, I remember each one of the plays he outlined for me that day. I can draw each assignment, make the calls, and teach their installation. I remember the coaching points for the guards, tackles, and tight ends. I remember it all, as if it were yesterday. “

In sports the fundamentals include superior technique, foot work, balance, timing, and conditioning.  Together they are tough to beat.  They can make the gifted elite and permit the rest of us mere mortals to develop high levels of skill and immense personal satisfaction.

Have you ever gotten into a long three or four way e-mail conversation with friends and colleagues?  Recently I had one that started out on the topic of “talent identification” in sports and headed off into several related directions over multiple days.   In addition to me, the participants were David Epstein, the author of the “Sports Gene”, Terry Laughlin, the creator of Total Immersion Swimming, and the runner/author Amby Burfoot.  Here is a synopsis of some of the things that came up in the exchange.

1.)  The Kid From Fargo

The conversation started when I asked David, Terry and Amby what they thought about the following story.  On the day after Christmas, my wife and I did a short swim workout at our local athletic club.  The next lane was occupied by a young guy who was doing what might be described as a serious swim workout.  During a break in his interval training, I asked what college he swam for thinking that perhaps he was a small college swimmer home for winter break.  Instead I learned he was high school kid from Fargo, N.D. visiting relatives in Minnesota.   We talked a bit more and he told me he could break 1:50 for a 200yd freestyle.  He also did some running with a 2-mile best of around 9:50.   His training regimen sounded serious but modest with no year round running for example.   I also guessed that the mystery swimmer was about 5’10” (9180cm) and  150lbs. (68 kg)…….perfect size for the triathlon.   We finished the conversation with me encouraging him to give the triathlon a try.

So, how good could the kid from Fargo get if he trained seriously for say an Olympic distance (1500m swim, 40km bike ride, and 10km run) triathlon?   The fact that he was training alone while on vacation made me think he was pretty committed.   His times while very good are not great; however, Fargo is not an endurance sports hotbed and who knows what opportunities he might have to really train and improve in college.  My bet is that with training he could become at least a sub-elite regional class triathlete, and with a bit of luck perhaps national or even world class.

2.)  Talent Identification

I have made the point before that in comparison to a country like Kenya there is plenty of wasted aerobic talent in the U.S.  The other critical point is that talent identification works.  A good recent example is the Great Britain Rowing Team Start Programme which seeks to find tall people with a lot of aerobic power and turn them into rowers.  This effort has been successful and resulted in a number of Olympic medals and World Champions and there is also a focus on who is motivated to do the training required to excel:

“The right physical characteristics are of course not the only factor that is needed to achieve that ultimate prize of an Olympic gold medal.  You also need commitment, the ability to train hard and the right mental attitude.  Even with all the physical capabilities described above if you don’t make the full commitment to training and make sacrifices where necessary then even the most talented person will not make it.”

So, when you say lack of talent, my response is lack of talent identification.

3.)  What About Motivation

In our e-mail exchange Terry pointed to an experience about motivation that he had early in his coaching career that I found fascinating:

“The most interesting observation I made while working with younger competitive swimmers–including a fair few elites who I developed–was that intrinsic motivation was a far more significant factor than physical talent. I first noticed this accidentally because my first coaching position was at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, 1972-75.

But the much more interesting observation was about motivation. 

 At Kings Point everyone was on scholarship, so no one swam for that reason. That left two reasons to swim (1) You wanted to, and (2) You did so to escape shit duty, as athletes were excused from reviews, washing latrines, swabbing floors, etc, during the season.. The prevalence of people who swam for intrinsic reasons in the faster lanes, and of escapers in the slower lanes, was even more striking than of body types. That observation remained true for the rest of my career in ‘serious’ coaching which continued through 1988.  And it remains the most influential aspect of the coaching I’ve done since.”

4.)  Early Specialization: Good or Bad?

One of the big ideas out there is that champions in sport and elites in many fields are made and not born via 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.  This would tend to argue for early specialization.  However, David pointed out that for “CGS” sports that are contested in centimeters, grams, or seconds there is evidence that later specialization is better:

“Based on a Danish sample of 148 elite and 95 near-elite athletes from cgs sports (sports measured in centimeters, grams, or seconds), the present study investigates group differences concerning accumulated practice hours during the early stages of the career, involvement in other sports, career development, as well as determining whether or not these variables predict membership in the elite group. The results clearly reveal that elite athletes specialized at a later age and trained less in childhood. However, elite athletes were shown to intensify their training regime during late adolescence more than their near-elite peers. The involvement in other sports neither differs between the groups nor predicts success. It can be concluded that factors related to the organization of practice during the mid-teens seem to be crucial for international success within cgs sports. Future research should adopt a longitudinal design with means of drawing causal inferences.”

Did the late specializers do better because they intensified their training during a key period of physiological growth and development?  Did being a bit older allow the most motivated kids to pick the sport that interested them the most and then really commit to the required training for the internal vs. external reasons mentioned by Terry above?

There is a lot of talk about of how birthdays early in the year are key determinants of who does well in sports like Hockey via what is called the relative age effect.  The idea is that kids who are relatively older do well and thus get more ice time and practice and thus get better and better leaving the younger kids in the dust.   However, on further review this appears to be a superficial analysis:

“Because RAEs are well-established in hockey, we analyzed National Hockey League (NHL) drafts from 1980 to 2006. Compared to those born in the first quarter (i.e., January-March), those born in the third and fourth quarters were drafted more than 40 slots later than their productivity warranted, and they were roughly twice as likely to reach career benchmarks, such as 400 games played or 200 points scored. This selection bias in drafting did not decrease over time, apparently continues to occur, and reduces the playing opportunities of relatively younger players. This bias is remarkable because it is exhibited by professional decision makers evaluating adults in a context where RAEs have been widely publicized. Thus, selection bias based on relative age may be pervasive.”

There are other holes in the 10,000 hour argument that David has covered in his book.  It is certainly an interesting idea that is easy to grasp, but like a lot of ideas that are easy to grasp sometimes the nuances get lost as things get oversimplified for public consumption.

5.)  Limits of Deliberate Practice?

Amby wanted to know what happens to people that really devote themselves to something new later in life.   The example of Dan McLaughlin comes to mind.  Mr. McLaughlin essentially quit his day job as a commercial photographer to see just how good a golfer he could become with 10,000s of deliberate practice:

“On April 5th, 2010, Dan quit his day job as a commercial photographer and began The Dan Plan. Having never played 18 holes of golf in his life, Dan started the 10,000 hour journey with just a putter.  After five months of putting, he received his second club, a pitching wedge. Just before the first anniversary of The Dan Plan, Dan took his first full-swing lesson.  After 18 months he swung a driver for the first time.  On December 28, 2011 he played his first full round with a full set of clubs.  Since then it has been off to the races.

Logging in 30-plus hours a week he will hit the 10,000 hour milestone by December 2016. During this time, Dan plans to develop his skills through deliberate practice, eventually winning amateur events and obtaining his PGA Tour card through a successful appearance in the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School.”

From what I can tell, three years into his plan, Dan McLaughlin currently has a handicap of about 6 meaning he usually shoots about six over par.   I am not an expert on handicap systems but from what I can tell top PGA pros are routinely a few shots under par on their home courses.   At some level this little experiment shows us both the power and limits of deliberate practice.  Dan McGlaughlin is becoming a solid golfer and now is in the 10% of people who actually take the time to post handicaps.   To put it in perspective, about 15% of marathon finishers run under 3:30.

However, I would be remiss if I did not highlight that many positive aspects of deliberate practice including improved performance and learning how to spend more time in a relaxed Flow like state while doing challenging things.    These effects can be hard to quantify but as Terry points out most of the time the key is train well vs. simply harder.

6.)  The Talent Question

To become truly skilled at most things requires practice.  Practice plus the nebulous concept of talent can lead to exceptional performances.  David tells me that the Kenyan runners are convinced they are more talented.  Is this real?  Does their belief increase their motivation and lead the most talented kids to pursue running?  Does it give them a psychological edge in competition?  Or, do they end up simply training harder as a result of their beliefs?

Based on everything I know, most tests of talent are pretty crude especially when you are trying to find the most exceptional person in a field full of exceptional performers.  This is true for tests in the physiology lab, paper and pencil tests of academic performance and also genetic testing for most things.  The tests needed to determine who has 1/100 talent, 1/1,000 talent, and 1/10,000 just are not there.  That having been said, the great NFL quaterback Tom Brady was a 6^th round draft pick with marginal NFL combine scores.   Does the fact he got to the NFL combine mean he was exceptional?  Or, does the mismatch between his “test scores” and performance simply show just how hard it is to determine or predict objectively who will be the best of the best?

Finally, to the extent that talent is something innate we don’t have control over it.  However, we do have control over how we apply it and I hope the kid from Fargo sees what he can do.