"What does it take to become the best at something? The answer may not lie in early childhood practice or in lifelong, laser-focused dedication. Instead the path to becoming exceptional at a skill might look a lot more like meandering. That's according to a new paper, published today in Science, that seeks to untangle what it takes to excel across different disciplines, from sports to chess to classical music."
"Somewhat counterintuitively, performers who showed the greatest promise in their discipline as children rarely went on to reach the pinnacle of their field as adults. The findings blow up the 10,000-hour rule, the idea that if someone spends 10,000 hours deliberately practicing a skill, they will master it, says Brooke Macnamara, an associate professor of psychology at Purdue University, who co-authored the new analysis."
"They tend to engage in multiple disciplines early on and don't shine in one thing at a particularly young age. They accumulated less practice in their discipline and more practice in other disciplines and then rose to the top relatively late, Macnamara says. This pattern doesn't follow the idea of the deliberate practice theory or the 10,000-hour rule, which suggest that starting early and maximizing deliberate practice is the path"
Across domains such as sports, chess and classical music, individuals who ultimately reached the highest adult levels often were not the most promising children. Those who became world-class typically started their discipline later and sampled multiple disciplines in youth rather than specializing early. They accumulated less domain-specific practice during childhood and more practice in other activities, and they achieved top performance relatively late. The 10,000-hour benchmark derived from a 1993 violin sample does not reliably predict who will reach world-class status. Multiple, non-linear developmental pathways can lead to exceptional performance.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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