Talent Is Overrated – de completat

Chapter One: The Mystery

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Great performance is more valuable than ever – but where does it really come from?

Contrary to what any reasonable person would have expected when they were new recruits, they reached the absolute apex of corporate achievement. The obvious question is how.
Was it talent? If so, it was a strange kind of talent that hadn’t revealed itself in the first twenty-two years of their lives.
Was it brains? These two were sharp but had shown no evidence of being sharper than thousands of their classmates or colleagues.
Was it mountains of hard work? Certainly not up to that point.
And yet something carried them to the heights of the business world.

If that certain something turns out not to be any of the things we usually think of, then what is it?

Look at your friends, relatives, coworkers etc. How do they spend their days? Most of them work. They do many other things as well, sports, music, hobbies etc. Now ask yourself honestly: how well do they do what they do? The most likely answer is that they do it fine. They do it well enough to keep doing it. But the odds are that few if any of the people around you are truly great at what they do – awesomely, amazingly, world-class excellent.

But why? After all, most of them are good, conscientious people, and they probably work diligently. Some of them have been at it for a very long time – twenty, thirty, forty years. Why isn’t that enough to make them great performers? It clearly isn’t. The hard truth is that virtually none of them has achieved greatness or come even close, and only a tiny few ever will.

In some cases we can give plausible explanations, that we’re less than terrific at hobbies and games because we don’t take them all that seriously. But what about our work? The figures would show that work is our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most people are just okay at what they do.

When asked to explain why a few people are so excellent at what they do, most of us have two answeres.
– Hard work. People get extremely good at something because they work hard at it. The research shows that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer. So our instinctive answer doesn’t hold up.
– A gift. We will say they have a gift. While this explanation of great performance greatly contradicts the just-work-hard explanation, it’s more satisfying. And it also explains why extraordinary performers are so rare. It also helps us come to terms with our own performance. But it’s wrong. Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.

New Findings on Great Performance

• Some researchers now argue that specifically targeted innate abilities are simply fiction.
  
• In many realms – chess, music, business, medicine – we assume that the outstanding performers must possess staggering intelligence or gigantic memories. Some do, but many do not. So whatever it is that makes these people special, it doesn’t depend on superhuman general abilities. On that score, a great many of them are amazingly average.
  
• The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something called deliberate practice. It definitely isn’t what most of us do on the job every day. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

A few initial observations are key:

• Deliberate practice is a large concept, but a few key factors do seem to account for top performance in many realms
  
• Most organizations are terrible at applying the principles of great performance. An advantage for those that do.
• The difficulty of deliberate practice – one of the most important questions about greatness. The chief constraint is mental, regardless the field.

If deliberate practice is so hard then why do some people put themselves through it day after day for decades, while most do not? Where does the necessary passion come from?

Most apparent is the trend of rapidly rising standards in virtually every domain. People everywhere are doing and making pretty much everything better (PCs, cars, washing mashines etc). In every industry worldwide, businesses have to perform at the highest standard, and then get continually better, just to be competitive. Great performance is becoming more valuable.

The trend is the same in virtually every field of individual human performance. Sports records keep getting broken, but we don’t appreciate just how dramatic the progress has been, or the reasons for it. For example, the Olympic records of a hundred years ago – representing the best performance of any human being on the planet – today in many cases equal ho-hum performance by high schoolers. Today’s best high school time in the marathon beats the 1908 Olympic gold medalist by more than twenty minutes. Contemporary athletes are superior not because they’re somehow different but because they train themselves more effectively. Standards in intellectual disciplines are rising at least as fast as in sports.

The Challenge We All Face

It isn’t just companies that have to keep kicking up their performance more than they ever did before. It’s each of us individually. The pressure on us to keep getting better is greater than it used to be because of a historic change in the economy. The scarce resourse is no longer money. It’s human ability.

Bill Gates has said that if you took the twenty smartest people out of Microsoft it would be an insignificant company, and if you ask around the company what its core competency is, they don’t say anything about software. They say it’s hiring. They know what the scarce resource is.

For virtually every company, the scarce resource today is human ability. That’s why companies are under unprecedented pressure to make sure that every employee is as highly developed as possible and no one knows what the limits of development are.

At the same time, a separate historic trend is putting individuals under unprecedented pressure to develop their own abilities more highly than was ever necessary before, quite apart from anything their employers may or may not do to develop them. That trend is the advent of the first large-scale global labor market.

“World class” is a term that gets thrown around too easily. For most of history, few people had to worry about what world class was. But now that’s changing. In a global, information-based, interconnected economy, businesses and individuals are increasingly going up against the world’s best. The costs of being less than truly world class are growing, as are the rewards of being genuinely great. Understanding where extraordinary performance comes from would be valuable at any time. Now it’s crucial.

The value of better understanding great performance is more than just economic. Being good at whatever we want to do is among the deepest sources of fulfillment we will ever know. Most of what we want to do is hard. So any knowledge about what makes us better at the things we want to do can be used not just to make us richer but also to make us happier.

Chapter Two: Talent Is Overrated

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Confronting the unexpected facts about innate abilities

”There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers.”

What is talent?

People often use it just to mean excellent performance or to describe those who are terrific performers. When the term is used in ways that change the courses of people’s lives, it has a specific meaning. It is a natural ability to do something better than most people can do it. That something is fairly specific – play golf, sell things etc. It can be spotted early, before the ability is fully expressed. And it is innate; you’re born with it, and if you’re not born with it, you can’t acquire it. But we’re wrong.

Probing the Talent Concept

A number of researchers now argue that giftedness or talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. We can all think of examples of people who seemed to be highly talented, but when researchers have looked at a large number of high achievers, at least in certain fields, most of the people who became extremely good in their field did not show early evidence of gifts. Of course such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist. But they suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.

Since talent is by definition innate, there should be a gene (or genes) for it. No specific genes identifying particular talents have been found at the moment. And evidence we’ve already seen suggests that finding talent genes may be a long shot. The extreme increases in top levels of performance in a wide range of fields over the past century have happened far too fast to be connected to genetic changes, which requires thousands of years.

What About Mozart?

Mozart is the ultimate example of the divine-spark theory of greatness. Composing music at age five, giving public performances as a pianist and violonist at age eight, going on to produce hundreds of works, all in the brief time before his death at age thirty-five, if that isn’t talent, and on a mammoth scale, then nothing is.

The facts are worth examining a little more closely. Mozart’s father was Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was deeply interested in how music was taught to children. While he was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue.

So from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him. It’s interesting to note that the manuscripts are not in the boy’s own hand; Leopold always “corrected” them before anyone saw them. It seems noteworthy also that Leopold stopped composing at just the time he began teaching Wolfgang. In some cases it’s clear that the young boy’s compositions are not original, as he put them together out of works by other composers. They seem instead to be the works of someone being trained as a composer by the usual methods – copying, arranging, and imitating the works of others – with the resulting products brought to the world’s attention (and just maybe polished a bit) by a father who spent much of his life promoting his son. Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one.
That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

Any divine spark that Mozart may have possessed did not enable him to produce world-class work quickly or easily, which is something we often suppose a divine spark will do. Mozart wrote music the way ordinary humans do.

The effects of today’s improved training methods apparently swamp the effects of Mozart’s genius as a performer. This is another example of rising standards.

”Ambitious parents who are currently playing the ‘Baby Mozart’ video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard.”

And Tiger?

Tiger Woods is called the Mozart of golf and the parallels do seem striking. Wood’s father, Earl, was a teacher, specifically a teacher of young men, and he had a lifelong passion for sports. Earl had plenty of time to teach his son and was intensely focused on doing so. He was also fanatical about golf.

So here’s the situation: Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed “golf addict” who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible. Before Tiger is two, they are at the golf course playing and practicing regularly.

In Search of Business Talent

We all tend to assume that business giants must possess some special gift for what they do, but evidence turns out to be extremely elusive. In fact, the overwhelming impression that comes from examining the early lives of business greats is just the opposite – that they didn’t seem to hold any identifiable gift or give any early indication of what they would become.

Bill Gates, the world’s richest human and a symbol of fundamental economic revolution, is a more promising prospect for those who want to explain success through talent. He became fascinated by computers as a kid and says he wrote his first piece of software at age thirteen; it was a program that played tic-tac-toe. Gates and his friend Paul Allen, with whom he later founded Microsoft, were constantly contriving ways to get more computer time on the big clunky machines of the day. They started a business, Traf-O-Data, to build computers that would analyze the data from traffic monitors on city streets; Gates says the device worked, but nobody bought it. After going to Harvard, he remained immersed in the exciting and fast-changing world of computers.

Jack Welch, named by Fortune magazine as the twentieth century’s manager of the century, showed no particular inclination toward business, even in his midtwenties. He majored not in business or economics but in chemical engineering. He then got a master’s and a Ph.D. in the same field. He decided to accept an offer to work in a chemical development operation at General Electric. If anything in Welch’s history to that point suggests that he would become the most influential business manager of his time, it’s though – in fact, impossible – to spot it.

It’s clear that Gates’s early interests led directly to Microsoft. The problem is that nothing in his story suggests extraordinary abilities. As he is the first to note, legions of kids were interested in the possibilities of computers in those days. Harvard at the time was bursting with computer geeks who well understood that a technology revolution was happening. What suggested that Gates would become the king of them all? The answer is, nothing in particular. On close examination, it was probably not his software expertise that was most critical to his success. The more relevant abilities were the ability to launch a business and then the quite different abilities required to manage a large corporation. And Traf-O-Data notwithstanding, one looks in vain for signs of those abilities in world-class proportions, or at all, in the young Gates.

In surveying the world’s business titans we find Welch-like stories more often than Gates-like stories, lacking even a hint of inclination towards the fields or traits that would one day lead to fame and riches.

Over and over we find these stories of the early life that tell us nothing of what’s to come, sometimes in even more extreme form. David Ogilvy, regarded by many as the greatest advertising executive of the twentieth century, was expelled from Oxford, slaved in a hotel kitchen in Paris, sold stoves in Scotland, and farmed in Pennsylvania, among many other apparently random occupations that consumed the first seventeen years of his career. Predicting that he would make his mark as an advertising legend would have been difficult, considering that he presented precious little evidence that he would make any mark at all.

More generally, it seems we need to recalibrate our views on the role of specific, innate talents. We need not be absolutists about the matter. For most of us, the critically important point is that, at the very least, these talents are much less important than we usually think. They seem not to play the crucial role that we generally assign to them, and it’s far from clear what role they play.

But even if we have to admit that the case for the central role of specific talent is weak, we may still believe that great achievement requires exceptional, and inborn, general abilities. You don’t reach the high elevations of any field without an IQ that’s off the charts or an XXL memory. Or so we tend to assume.

Chapter Three: How Smart Do You Have to Be?

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The true role of intelligence and memory in high achievement

If you’re like most people, you’ll max out at around seven numbers on the digit span task. You may get to nine, but going further is rare.

Yet SF’s memory, when tested, had been average before he began training. His grades were very good, but his intelligence, when measured by standardized tests, was average. Nothing about him suggested that he would ever achieve amazing feats of memory.

”There is apparently no limit to improvements in memory skill with practice.”

That was the first significance of SF – showing that a person of average general abilities could nonetheless extend one of those abilities to levels that would seem unimaginable.

What Does “Smart” Mean?

That’s especially true in business. Besides prodigious memories, high-performing businesspeople often seem to have tremendous intellects. Even if we’re prepared to question the notion that certain people come into this world with specific gifts for business, most of us still assume that the greats possess tremendous general abilities, especially intelligence and memory.

So it’s definitely surprising to find that research doesn’t support the view that extraordinary natural general abilities – as distinct from developed abilities like SF’s memory – are necessary for high achievement. In fact, in a wide range of fields, including business, the connection between general intelligence and specific abilities is weak and in some cases apparently nonexistent. As for memory, the whole concept of a powerful memory is problematic because it turns out that memory ability is very clearly created rather than innate.

Obviously the most successful people in business or any other domain have something special. But what is it? The idea that it’s an inborn gift for cost accounting or writing software doesn’t seem to hold up. Harder to believe is that it isn’t even more general cognitive abilities. That’s what the research is telling us.

What do we mean when we say someone is smart? It’s one of those concepts that we understand intuitively, but then we dwell on it and realize how complicated it is. Some people seem smart with numbers, others with words, others with abstract concepts, still others with concrete knowledge, and how do all those things of smart fit together? Most of us would come up with a basic definition of smart that parallels closely the much maligned concept of IQ.

IQ tests developed over the past century actually consist of ten subtests that try to capture various aspects of intelligence (the subtests focus on information, arithmetic, vocabulary, comprehension, picture completion, block design, object assembly, coding, picture arrangement, and similarities). Researchers have found that performance on the subtests is correlated, that is, people who perform well on one of the subtests tend to perform well on all of them. Why? The researchers hypothesized that there must be some general factor that influences performance on all the subtests, and they called this factor intelligence, or g. That’s what IQ measures.

For the moment, we stick with the concept of general intelligence as g, measured by IQ. It has a pretty good record. It predicts fairly well (though far from perfectly) how people will perform in school. Professor James R. Flynn, an eminent intelligence researcher, reports that people in professional, managerial, and technical jobs have an above-average IQ as a group. Among workers overall, average IQ increases with the complexity of the work, which seems totally unsurprising. It supports what most of us would support: smarter people do better. Research says they do more demanding work and achieve higher socio-economic status.

The trouble starts when we dig beneath the averages. Consider your own acquaintances. You are virtually guaranteed to know people who have succeeded in the business world, sometimes very considerably, without evincing conventional brainpower that’s in any way impressive. We typically explain this by saying they’re good with people, or they work extremely hard, or they really put their heart into it. Such factors may relate to Gardner’s multiple “intelligences” or Goleman’s EQ, but the critical point is that whatever these people have, it definitely is not general intelligence – our first hint that IQ may not explain great performance as well as we usually suspect it might.

A wide range of research shows that the correlations between IQ and achievement aren’t nearly as strong as the data on broad averages would suggest, and in many cases there’s no correlation at all. For example, bosses tend to think that smarter salespeople are better. But when the researchers compared intelligence with actual sales results, they found nothing. Intelligence was virtually useless in predicting how well a salesperfon would perfom. Whatever it is that makes a sales ace, it seems to be something other than brainpower. It seems our view that intelligence necessarily produces better performance is so deep that it may occasionally even blind us to reality.

The researcher’s conclusion: “that whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning.” This is actually a very good description of what most of us do every day in our working lives, and what the best performers do extremely well. You just don’t have to be especially “smart”, as traditionally defined, to do it.\

Similar results turn up in a wide range of fields. In chess, IQ does not reliably predict performance, hard to believe, since we generally think of chess as an exercise in pure brainpower. Some chess grand masters have IQs that are bellow normal.

IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.

None of this suggests there’s anything wrong with being smart if you want to succeed in business or anything else. Many of the most successful people do seem to be highly intelligent. But the link between intelligence and high achievement isn’t nearly as powerful as we commonly suppose. More important, the research tells us that intelligence as we usually think of it – a high IQ – is not a prerequisite to extraordinary achievement.

How’s Your Memory?

The evidence is similar when it comes to that other general ability we often associate with hypersuccessful people, an amazing memory. Yet a large mass of more recent evidence shows that memory ability is acquired, and it can be acquired by pretty much anyone.

SF did it by working out his own mnemonic system based on his experience as a competitive runner. This is what researchers call a retrieval structure. Apparently average people can achieve extraordinary memory ability by developing their own retrieval structures or being given them by researchers. Thus, memory is developed, not innate.

In short, the widespread view that highly accomplished people have tremendous memories is in one sense justified – they often astound us with what they can remember. But the view that their amazing ability is a rare natural gift is not justified. Remarkable memory ability is apparently available to anyone.

What we’d like to know is what makes some people go so much further than others. And what we have discovered so far is not what makes some people excel but rather what doesn’t. Specifically:

• it isn’t experience: we’re surrounded by highly experienced people who are nowhere near great at what they do
  
• it isn’t specific inborn abilities: we’ve seen extensive evidence that calls into question whether such abilities exist, and even if certain types of them might, they clearly do not determine excellence
  
• it isn’t general abilities such as intelligence and memory: in many fields the relation between intelligence and performance is weak or nonexistent; people with modest IQs sometimes perform outstandingly while people with high IQs sometimes don’t get past mediocrity; memory seems clearly to be acquired

But what does drive great performance?

Chapter Four: A Better Idea

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An explanation of great performance that makes sense

What Made Rice So Good?

Everyone in the football world seems to agree that Rice was the greatest because he worked harder in practice and in the off-season than anyone else. The lesson that’s easiest to draw from Jerry Rice’s story is that hard work makes all the difference. Yet we know that hard work often doesn’t lead to extraordinary performance. We also know that even after an excellent college career, Rice did not possess outstanding speed, a quality that coaches generally consider mandatory in a great receiver. So there must be something else lurking in Rice’s story.

There is. Note several relevant points:

• He spent very little time playing football.

Of all the work Rice did to make himself a great player, practically none of it was playing football games. His independent off-season workouts consistend of conditioning, and his team workouts were classroom study, reviewing of game films, and lots of work with other players on specific plays. The conclusion we reach is that one of the greatest-ever football players devoted less than 1 percent of his football-related work to playing games.

Of course it’s true that all NFL players devote most of their work-related time to nongame activities, and this fact is significant. In the case of Rice, one of the greatest players, the ratio was even more extreme.

• He designed his practice to work on his specific needs.

Rice didn’t need to do everything well, just certain things. He had to run precise patterns; he had to evade the defenders, sometimes two or three, who were assigned to cover him; he had to outjump them to catch the ball and outmuscle them when they tried to strip it away; then he had to outrun tacklers. So he focused his practice work on exactly those requirements. Not being the fastest receiver in the league turned out not to matter. He became famous for the precision of his patterns. His weight training gave him tremendous strength. His trail running gave him control so he could change directions suddenly without signaling his move. The uphill wind sprints gave him explosive acceleration. Most of all, his endurance training – not something that a speed-focused athlete would normally concentrate on – gave him a giant advantage in the fourth quarter, when his opponents were tired and weak, and he seemed as fresh as he was in the last minute. Time and time again, that’s when he put the game away.

Rice and his coaches understood exactly what he needed in order to be dominant. They focused on those things and not on other goals that might have seemed generally desirable, like speed.

• While supported by others, he did much of the work on his own.

Most of Rice’s work was in the off-season. He had the important advice of coaches and trainers, but he did most of his football-related work by himself.

• It wasn’t fun.

There’s nothing enjoyable about running to the point of exhaustion or lifting weights to the point of muscle failure. But these were centrally important activities.

• He defied the conventional limits of age.

The Crucial Finding

To see whether the apparent lessons of Rice’s career might apply more broadly, take a look at a scientific study taken in Berlin, examining a different realm, music.

The object of the study was to figure out why some violonists are better than others. There were three groups of test subjects, we’ll call them good, better and best – which the researchers chose to be as similar as possible in age (early twenties) and sex.

The researchers collected lots of biographical data about all the subjects – the age at which they started studying music, the teachers they had, the competitions they had entered, and much else. The data confirmed the judgements of the music professors: the best violonists had been more successful in competitions than the better ones, who had been more successful than the good ones. The subjects were asked to estimate how many hours a week they practiced for each year since they started. They were given a long list of activities, music-related and not, and asked how much time they had spent on each one in the most recent typical week; they were also asked to rate how relevant each activity was to making them better violonists, how effortful it was, and how enjoyable it was. They were asked a whole deal more.

By many measures, all three groups of violonists were about the same. They all started studying the violin at around age eight and decided to become musicians at around age fifteen, with no statistically significant differences among the groups. By the time of the study, every subject had been studying the violin for at least a decade.

Perhaps most striking, all three groups were spending the same total amount of time on music-related activities – lessons, practice, classes and so on – about fifty-one hours a week. The researchers found no statistically significant differences among the groups on this measure. That is, all three groups were getting up every morning and putting in the hours, throwing themselves at their chosen career in a fairly committed way with a demanding workweek equal to what a great many people clock in a wide range of fields.

The violonists were quite certain which activity was most important for making them better: it was practicing by themselves. And it was number one with a bullet. They all knew it, but they didn’t all do it. Though the violonists understood the importance of practicing alone, the amount of time the various groups actually spent practicing alone differed dramatically. The top two groups, the best and better violonists, practiced by themselves about twenty-four hours a week on average. The third group, only nine hours a week.

Just as the violonists were sure that it’s the most important activity, they were also quite clear that it’s hard and it isn’t much fun. Solo practice ranked way harder than playing music for fun and harder than even the most effortful everyday activity, child care. As for pleasure, practice ranked far below playing for fun and even below formal group performance.

Practice is so hard that doing a lot of it requires people to arrange their lives in particular ways. The two top groups did most of their practice in the late morning or early afternoon, when they were still fairly fresh. By contrast, the third group practiced mostly in the late afternoon, when they were more likely to be tired. The two top groups even slept more, not only at night, but also took far more afternoon naps. All that practicing seems to demand a lot of recovery.

With 168 hours in a week, a person can practice just about without limit. In fact, no one in the study came anywhere near spending every available hour on practice.

So all the violonists understood that practicing by themselves was the most important thing they could do to get better. Though they didn’t consider it easy or fun, they all had virtually unlimited time in which to do it. On those dimensions, they were all the same. The difference was that some chose to practice more, and those violonists were a great deal better.

But if both two groups practiced the same amount, and if more practice equals better performance, why isn’t the best group practicing any more than the middle group? The answer lies in the students’ histories. After cumulating their lifetime totals, by age eighteen, the violonists in the first group had accumulated 7,410 hours of lifetime practice on average, versus 5,301 for the second group and 3,420 for the third group.

So a new framework for understanding why some people are so remarkably good at what they do was proposed because the concept of innate talent was clearly unsatisfactory.

Another theme emerged on top-level performers: no matter who they were, or what explanation of their performance was being advanced, it always took them many years to become excellent, and if a person achieves elite status only after many years of toil, assigning the principal role in that success to innate gifts becomes problematic, at the least.

The phenomenon seems nearly universal. Herbert Simon and William Chase proposed the “ten-year rule”, based on their observation that no one seemed to reach the top ranks of chess players without a decade or so of intensive study, and some required much more time. Subsequent research in a wide range of fields has substantiated the ten-year rule everywhere the researchers have looked. In math, science, muscial composition, swimming, X-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature – no one, not even the most “talented” performers, became great without at least ten years of very hard preparation. If talent means that success is easy or rapid, then something is obviously wrong with a talent-based explanation of high achievement.

Many scientists and authors produce their greatest work only after twenty or more years of devoted effort, which means that in year nineteen they are still getting better.

Deliberate practice makes all the difference.

”The difference between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

Precisely what this means is critically important. It does not mean what most people think it does. An understanding of it illustrates the path to high achievement in any field, not just by individuals but also by teams and organizations.

Chapter Five: What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t

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For starters, it isn’t what most of us do when we’re “practicing”

We all know what practice is. Odds are good that you do it in a similar general way, regardless of what you’re practicing.

The Elements

The concept of deliberate practice, advanced by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, is quite specific. It isn’t work and isn’t play, but is something entirely unto itself. What we think of as practice frequently isn’t what the researchers mean by deliberate practice. Since this activity is the essence of great performance, we have much to gain by banishing preconceptions and opening our minds to what it really is.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining.

• it is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help
  
• it can be repeated a lot
  
• feedback on results is continuously available
  
• it’s highly demanding mentally, wether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports
  
• it isn’t much fun.

Let’s consider each of those attributes of deliberate practice and what it implies.

It’s designed specifically to improve performance.

The key word is designed. It’s the same in almost any field: decades or centuries of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge. At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it’s almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual’s performance. In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as arts, science, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view. There’s a reason why the word’s best golfers still go to theachers.

One of those reasons goes beyond the teacher’s knowledge. It’s his or her ability to see you in ways that you cannot see yourself. In sports the observation is literal; I cannot see myself hitting the golf ball and would benefit greatly from someone else’s perspective. In other fields the observation may be metaphorical. A chess teacher is looking at the same boards as the student but can see that the student is consistently overlooking an important threat. A business coach is looking at the same situations as a manager but can see, for example, that the manager systematically fails to communicate his intentions clearly.

It’s apparent why becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going. Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject’s performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible; for reasons that may be simply physical (as in sports) or deeply psychological, very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance. Even if we could, we could not design the best practice activity for that moment in our development – the type of practice that would put us on the road to achieving at the highest levels – unless we had extensive knowledge of the latest and best methods for developing people in our chosen field. Most of us don’t have that knowledge.

While the best methods of development are constantly changing, they’re always built around a central principle: they’re meant to stretch the individual beyond his or her central abilities. Most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.

Deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Examples are everywhere. Tiger Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie. The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.

Choosing these aspects of performance is itself an important skill. This concept is illustrated by drawing three concentric circles. The inner circle is the “comfort zone”, the middle one “learning zone” and the outer one “panic zone”. Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily, while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.

Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder – these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.

It can be repeated a lot.

High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts. Tiger Woods may face that buried lie in the sand only two or three times in a season, and if those were his only opportunities to work on hitting that shot, he certainly wouldn’t be able to hit it very well.

Repeating a specific activity over and over is what most of us mean by practice, yet for most of us it isn’t especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity in the learning zone, as discussed. The other is the amount of repetition. Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams would practice hitting the ball until his hands bled. More generally, the most effective deliberate practice activities are those that can be repeated at high volume.

Feedback on results is continuously available.

Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: you won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring.

Getting feedback on most practice activities is easy. A bowler looks and knows immediately how he did. Difficulties arise when the results require interpretation. Your opinion isn’t what counts. These are situations in which a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.

It’s highly demanding mentally.

Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate”, as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities.

The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for very long. Four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to ninety minutes. The best violonists in the Berlin study, for example, practiced about three and a half hours a day, typically in two or three sessions.

Violin example
Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded:
”Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in one and a half hours.”
What Auer didn’t add is that it’s a good thing one and a half hours are enough, because if you’re practicing with your mind, you couldn’t possibly keep it up all day.

It isn’t much fun.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see – or get others to tell us – exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue that process until we’re mentally exhausted.

The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

Lessons from Chris Rock

If you’re working in sports and music, you’re probably thinking that Ericsson and his colleagues have explained and elaborated ideas that many people in your world have understood for a long time. But if you’re among the far more numerous people who make a living in business-related fields, you’re probably thinking: this is absolutely nothing like work!

In fact, life at most companies seems almost intended to defeat all the principles of deliberate practice.

What we generally do at work is directly opposed to the first principle: it isn’t designed by anyone to make us better at anything. Usually it isn’t designed at all; we’ve just given an objective that’s necessary to meeting the employer’s goals and are expected to get on with it.

As for the second principle, the activities that would make us better are usually not highly repeatable. When we face ew or unusual challenges – a competitor’s innovation, a shift in customer attitudes – we typically find little past experience to guide us because we’ve had so few chances to deal with those situations. We’re golfers encountering the buried-lie sand shot two or three times a year, but we haven’t practiced it two hundred times. Even in jobs where we do the same few things – negotiating with suppliers, administering benefits – we face few (if any) incentives to get better at them by exceeding our limits and discovering what we can’t do well. On the contrary, while deliberate practice demands that we push ourselves to the point where we break down and then develop a solution, in our business lives the cost of mistakes is often high. Every incentive urges us to stick with what’s safe and reliable.

Feedback? At most companies this is a travesty, consisting of an annual performance review dreaded by the person delivering it and the one receiving it. Even if it’s well done, it cannot be very effective. Telling someone what he did well or poorly on a task he completed eleven months ago is just not helpful.

You could say that work, like deliberate practice, is often mentally demanding and tiring. But that’s typically not because of the intense focus and concentration involved. Rather, it’s more often a result of long hours cranking out what we already know how to do. And if we’re exhausted from that, the prospect of spending additional hours on getting deliberate practice activities seems too miserable to contemplate. Similarly, work is often not fun. But again, that’s not because we’re trying to push beyond the edge of our abilities. It’s because getting anything accomplished in the real world is a grind.

If that’s life in most companies, then the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance, individually and organizationally, would seem to be huge. In fact they are, and we’ll look later at how that can be done. But first it’s helpful to consider a bit more deeply just what deliberate practice is. What’s especially surprising about the cluelessness of most organizations with regard to deliberate practice is that the principles are not counterintuitive or hard to grasp. On the contrary, once we hear them enunciated, we start seeing them – and their effectiveness – in many domains.

Consider, as one example, how the comedian Chris Rock prepared for a high-profile, high-stakes performance he was to give on New Year’s Eve before an audience of twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden. We see all the elements of deliberate practice. Rock designed those small-club appearances for the sole purpose of making himself better; because he already performs at a very high level, he’s completely qualified to design his own practice. The high repetition in the process is particularly striking – appearance after appearance, working the material “over and over”. Feedback happens to be no problem in Rock’s profession; the reaction of the audience – the only thing that counts – is immediate and continuous (and brutally honest). It’s clear that Rock must be focusing intensely on the process and that it can’t be much fun, especially when new material doesn’t work, as must happen often. The result is Rock’s vast success.

A particularly dramatic illustration of deliberate practice is useful because it highlights the principles so clearly. It’s the story of the Polgar sisters. The children’s success would seem to have resulted only from their years of intensive work, which met the definition of deliberate practice in every particular. At the same time, it must be noted that the daughters did not achieve equal levels of success, and none of them reached the very highest level, the world championship. But these factors are also consistent with the principles of deliberate practice. The story the Polgars illustrates how the principles of deliberate practice, when carried to an extraordinary level, produce extraordinary achievement.

What We Need to Know Next

With the deliberate practice framework in mind, examples are everywhere. But questions immediately arise. The most pressing:
Is that all there is?

Does deliberate practice fully explain high achievement? Will someone who does twice as much of it as someone else be twice as successful? The answer is clearly no. Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement – real life is too complicated for that. Most obviously, we’re all affected by luck; time and chance happen to us all. A person’s circumstances, especially in childhood, can powerfully affect his or her opportunities to engage in deliberate practice. Later we’ll take a look more closely at the importance of the supporting environment, much of which may be outside a person’t control, especially in youth.

Beyond simple luck, we know that physical changes are inevitable over time. It turns out that deliberate practice can extend one’s ability to perform at high levels far longer than most people believe, as we will later see. But ultimately we’re all mortal, and our faculties decline. It must be possible for factors outside our control to affect our performance.

It must also be true that the relationship between performance and deliberate practice cannot be simple and direct in every case. That is, there must be qualitative differences between my practice and yours. In many cases these will arise from the varying quality of teachers, coaches, and mentors. Practice is designed, so it can be designed well or badly.

Regardless of how well it’s designed, another important variable is how much effort a person puts into it. Measuring the intensity of practice may be difficult, but it’s clearly significant.

What determines who does it?

Considering that deliberate practice is so demanding and in itself unrewarding, and that high achievement demands thousands of hours of it over a period of many years, why do some people put themselves through it while most do not? If the road to extraordinary performance is apparent, then why do so few people choose to follow it? For the moment we note that merely raising the question introduces another significant issue …

Could the explanation possibly be genetic?

It’s important to note that advocates of the deliberate practice framework have never excluded the possibility of a genetic role in high-level performance. Their stance has been that they have not yet seen the evidence supporting it. For now all we can say is that it’s a hypothesis that has not been tested, let alone proved or disproved.

What is all that practice doing?

While it’s clear that extensive deliberate practice will make someone a superior surgeon or billiard player or public speaker, it’s natural to wonder if the effect can be understood in some general way. Beyond simply making a person better at a specific task they’re practicing, is it doing something that applies across cases? The answer is yes.

Frequently when we see great performers doing what they do, it strikes us that they’ve practiced for so long, and done it so many times, they can just do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.

When we learn to do anything new – how to drive, for example – we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.

For most things we do, including driving, that’s not a problem. We don’t need to be great at such things, just good enough to carry on with our lives. That categoy of activities includes golf for most people who play the game. They don’t need to earn a living at it; they just want to be able to have fun with it. This means our minds are free to focus on other matters that we consider more important. But it does mean that our brains have pretty much checked out when we’re doing these things. If your golfing opponent jingles his change at the top of your back-swing, he can probably reach the part of your brain that responds instinctively to sudden noises; since you’re on autopilot, you’re helpless to stop your now-doomed swing.

By contrast, great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested-development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice – avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible. It’s certainly true that a great performer is able to do many things in his or her field with far fewer mental demands than a novice performer. But ultimately the performance is always conscious and controlled, not automatic.

Avoiding automaticity through continual practice is another way of saying that great performers are always getting better. This is why the most devoted can stay at the top of their field for far longer than most people would think possible.

How does it work?

While it seems intuitively right that extensive deliberate practice would make someone very good, we cannot fully understand what’s happening, and cannot put it to best use, unless we know how it works. What specifically is going on? What changes? How can we help it along?

Chapter Six: How Deliberate Practice Works

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The specific ways it changes us, and how that makes all the difference

The right kind of practice can turn someone of undremarkable endowments into a much better, even exceptional performer. But we’re still left wondering how it happens. So, what makes deliberate practice work?

We need to know which systems, physical or mental, the great performers overstrain and build up. It turns out the answer is the same whether we look at business or sports or any other field, and it isn’t what you might expect.

Indeed, the most important effect of practice in great performers is that it takes them beyond – or, more precisely, around – the limitations that most of us think as critical. Specifically, it enables them to perceive more, to know more, and to remember more than most people. Eventually the effects go beyond even that. Many years of intensive deliberate practice actually change the body and the brain. But the world’s great performers didn’t start out that way, and the transformation didn’t happen by itself.

Let’s examine each of the major ways deliberate practice changes a person.

Perceiving More

Top professionals do indeed have very fast reaction times, and reaction speed can be improved with practice, so professionals work on it. The problem is that improvements in reaction speed follow what scientists call a power law and what the rest of us call the 80-20 rule. That is, nearly all the improvements comes in the first little bit of training. After that, lots more practice yields only a little additional improvement. Top tennis pros have all pushed themselves to the point where it’s tough to achieve any more reaction speed. The very best, however, have found a way to get around that limitation. They had found a way to react faster without improving their reaction time (they looked at the opponent’s hips etc).

Researchers have uncovered the same phenomenon in many kinds of sports and in a wide range of other activities. Top performers can figure out what’s going to happen sooner than average performers by //seeing more// in badminton, cricket, field hockey, squash, and volleyball. Beyond sports, we see a similar result in the mundane but instructive field of typing. Why, specifically, can some people type so much faster than most? The very fastest typist achieve their advantage by looking farther ahead in the text, which enables them to keep moving their fingers into place for the next keystroke just a little bit ahead of time. When researchers prevented top typists from looking farther ahead in the text, they performed scarcely better than novices.

Sometimes excellent performers see more by developing better and faster understanding of what they see. For example, accomplished and novice drivers were tested for their reactions to hazardous situations; they were shown films of various dangerous incident’s from the driver’s perspective. Again, the accomplished drivers, facing the familiar limits on response time, didn’t react any faster than the novices, but they understood what they were seeing much more quickly. The novices remained fixated on the hazardous situation much longer than the experienced drivers did, trying to comprehend it. The better drivers got it right away and thus had more time available to respond.

The superior perception of top performers extends beyond the sense of sight. They hear more when they listen and feel more when they touch. The relevance of these findings for business seems obvious. Specifically, we can abstract from the research a few ways, directly applicable in business, that top performers perceive more.

They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don’t even notice.

Just as top tennis players look at the server’s body, not at the tennis ball, excellent performers in other fields have learned to spot nonobvious information that’s important. Sometimes these signals are profound and become widely known. More often these indicatos are small but telling. Retail executives surveyed the oil stains in a store’s parking lot to see how well the customers are maintaining their cars and thus gauge their financial condition.

Often these nonobvious indicators are well-guarded secrets. More generally in business and other fields, nonobvious indicators may be so valuable that most of us never know about them.

In general, regardless of whether indicators are secret, developing and using them requires extensive practice. For example, if you play tennis, you now know one of the ways that pros returns serves so well. Yet you probably won’t be able to do much with that information the next time you’re on the court because you haven’t spent hundreds of hours learning how to read the subtle movements of your opponent’s hips, shoulders, and arms. Most of the indicators used by top performers requires practice to be of any use.

//They look further ahead//.

When the excellent performers look further ahead than average performers do, they are literally looking into their own future. Knowing what lies ahead for them, they prepare for it and thus perform better. They may be looking only one second ahead, but for them that extra moment makes all the difference. In other fields the time periods are obviously much greater, and the advantages just as important.

This is not about fortune-telling. Most of the power of looking further ahead comes from the simple act of raising one’s gaze and getting a new perspective, and doing it not once or occasionally, but using practice principles to do it often and get better at it. When was the last time you, in your working role, participated in a deep discussion about the state of your business five years from now? How about fifteen years from now, including a look at the future of your business’s environment, competitors, regulators, and other factors? Such discussions rarely happen below the level of the CEO, yet the experience of excellent performers suggests they offer advantages for everyone.

A few companies look far into the future as a matter of policy. Oil companies look further into the future than most because they must.

These days it’s common to question whether looking further ahead is worth the effort, since short-terminism seems rampart. The conventional view is that no one is looking past the next quarter. But like much conventional wisdom, this just isn’t so.

They know more from seeing less.

This ability is essential for success in every real-life domain because we never have as much information as we want. Getting information pushes at the two constraints everyone faces: it takes time and costs money. Making sound decisions fast and at low cost is a competitive advantage everywhere.

Top performers, through extensive practice, learn this ability for decisions that are most critical in their field.

They make finer discriminations than average performers.

Distinguishing several different shades of black is a metaphor for making evaluations of every kind. It’s a matter of seeing black versus five shades of black, and it works in evaluating people, situations, proposals, performances, products, or anything else. In each case, seeing differences that others don’t see is another way of perceiving more.

Note that all these crucial abilities are clearly results of training and practice. We know this because in many cases they are abilities that those in a given field work on diligently, and that instructors try hard to teach. We know it also because research shows that these abilities generally don’t transfer beyond the field in which they were learned. Deliberate practice works by helping us acquire the specific abilities we need to excel in a given field.

Knowing More

”The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge. In the knowledge resides the power.”

World-class chess players didn’t consider more possible moves than the less-accomplished players, nor did they search any deeper (more moves into the future), nor were their rules of thumb for choosing moves any different. In sum, their intellectual engines didn’t seem to be turning any faster. So what made them better?

Part of the answer, which seems to apply in every domain, is that they had more knowledge about their field. Master-level players possess more chess knowledge than good club-level players by a huge margin, a factor of ten to one hundred. Just as important, top performers in a wide range of fields have better organized and consolidated their knowledge, enabling them to approach problems in fundamentally different and more useful ways. Commercial fishermen sort the creatures they haul out of the ocean by criteria with high practical relevance, such as behavior or commercial value; inexperienced fishermen sort the creatures by appearance. In general, the knowledge of top performers is integrated and connected to higher-level principles.

The same phenomena seem apparent in business. Many companies work hard to give their top performers the widest possible knowledge by assigning them to many jobs that are different in nature and location – operating jobs, staff jobs, all around the world – and in this way the top performers have typically learned several, and sometimes all, of the most important parts of the business.

It’s particularly significant that many of the best-performing companies explicitly recognize the importance of deep knowledge in their specific field, as opposed to general managerial ability.

Building and developing knowledge is one of the things that deliberate practice accomplishes. Constantly trying to extend one’s abilities in a field requires amassing additional knowledge, and staying at it for years develops the critical connections that organize all that knowledge and make it useful.

The crucial role of knowledge demand that great performers develop one other key trait. After all, what good is a ton of knowledge if you can’t remember it and bring it to bear at the critical moment?

Remembering More

Top-ranked chess players did not possess incredible general memories but did possess an amazing ability to remember real chess positions. How do they do it? More generally, how can great performers in every realm recall more than would seem possible? Researchers find that excellent performers in most fields exhibit superior memory of information in their fields. What’s the explanation?

When top-level chess players look at a board, they see words, not letters. Instead of seeing twenty-five pieces, they may see just five or six groups of pieces. That’s why it’s easy for them to remember where all the pieces are. These chunks are the units of knowledge. Researchers estimate that good club players have a “vocabulary” of about 1,000 chunks, while the highest-ranked players have a vocabulary of 10,000 to 100,000.

All these people have developed what we might call a memory skill, a special ability to get at long-term memory, with its vast capacity, in a fast, reliable way. They aren’t using short-term memory or traditionally defined long-term memory. Indeed, top performers’ deep understanding of their field becomes the structure on which they can hang the huge quantities of information they learn about it.

That finding applies generally: top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it.

It’s clear that the superior memory of great performers doesn’t just happen. Since it is built on deep understanding of the field, it can be achieved only through years of intensive study. It further requires consistently relating new information to higher-level concepts, which is hard work. It’s also easy to see why experts’ superior memory doesn’t extend beyond their field of expertise: it is a central element of their expertise and can’t be separated from it. Far from being a general ability, it is ultimately a skill that is acquired through many years of deliberate practice.

We’ve seen how extensive, well-structured, deliberate practice develops the specific abilities of great performers to perceive more, know more, and remember more, and how these abilities are critical to exceptional performance. But these aren’t the only ways in which practice works. It exerts an additional, overarching influence that in a way is even more impressive: it can actually alter the physical nature of a person’s brain and body.

Great performers are fundamentally different. Their bodies and brains are actually different from ours in a profound way. In addition, their abilities to perceive, organize, and remember information are far beyond anything that most of us possess. But the exceptional nature of great performers is the result of a process, the general elements of which are clear.

There is in fact a path leading from the state of our own abilities to that of the greats. The path is extremely long and demanding, and only a few will follow it all the way to its end. No matter how far one goes, however, the journey is always beneficial and begins by applying the elements of the process. The question, then, is how.

Chapter Seven: Applying the Principles in Our Lives

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The opportunities are many – if we think about our work in a new way.

Ben’s father first told his son what was good about his letters; they were better than Collins’s in spelling and punctuation. Then he told him and showed him specifically how they were inferior: in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity.

Ben responded to his father’s observations in several ways. First, he found examples of prose clearly superior to anything he could produce, a bound volume of the Spectator, the great English periodical written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. But Franklin then embarked on a remarkable pro gram that few of us would ever have thought of.

It began with his reading a Spectator article and making brief notes on the meaning of each sentence; a few days later he would take up the notes and try to express the meaning of each sentence in his own words. When done, he compared his essay with the original, “discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”

One of the faults he noticed was his poor vocabulary. What could he do about that? He realized that writing poetry required an extensive “stock of words” because he might need to express any given meaning in many different ways depending on the demands of rhyme or meter. So he would rewrite Spectator essays in verse. Then, after he had for gotten them, he would take his versified essays and rewrite them in prose, again comparing his efforts with the original.

Franklin realized also that a key element of a good essay is its organization, so he developed a method to work on that. He would again make short notes on each sentence in an essay, but would write each note on a separate slip of paper. He would then mix up the notes and set them aside for weeks, until he had forgotten the essay. At that point he would try to put the notes in their correct order, attempt to write the essay, and then compare it with the original; again, he “discovered many faults and amended them.”

What is so striking about Franklin’s method is how closely it conforms to the principles of well structured deliberate practice in the cumstances he faced. He did not have a teacher to guide him, but his father was able to identify some specific faults in his writing; Ben in effect created his own teacher by finding examples of prose that were beyond his own abilities. He could scarcely have chosen better; Spectator essays were exactly the type of engaging, topical,innovative writing that Franklin wanted to produce, and they were so good that the volume he studied is still widely available almost three hundred years later. So Franklin identified the aspects of his performance that needed to be improved and found a way to stretch himself, the essential core of deliberate practice.

Significantly, he did not try to become a better essay writer by sitting down and writing essays. Instead, like a top-ranked athlete or musician, he worked over and over on those specific aspects that needed improvement. First came sentence structure, which he attacked precisely in accord with deliberate practice principles. His method of summarizing and reformulating Spectator sentences one by one was designed ingeniously for that purpose. He repeated this routine at high volume, there being lots of sentences in an essay, and he got immediate feedback by comparing his sentences with the original. When he decided to work on another element of performance, vocabulary, he again designed a brilliant practice structure, versification, with high volume and immediate feedback. Note also that since he eventually converted his rhym ing essays back into prose, he was continuing to work on sentence structure. His approach to a third element, organization, was again extremely clever in allowing him to stretch himself repeatedly on that specific skill while also maintaining the others.

One further feature of Franklin’s approach to better writing is important to note. He pursued it diligently.

The details of how Franklin taught himself to write well are worth our attention for two reasons. First, they provide a particularly clear example of how deliberate practice works—in this case how it helped form one of the most effective and influential writers of English prose of his era. Second, they’re an inspiring illustration of how to apply these principles on one’s own in circumstances far from ideal—which unfortunately are just the circumstances in which most people in companies and many other organizations find themselves today.

We saw earlier how hostile to the principles of well-structured de liberate practice most companies seem. That’s all the more puzzling when you consider how many high-profile organizations apart from businesses embrace these principles. The U.S. military has made itself far more effective by studying and adopting these principles, and it funds some of the most important research in this field. But at most companies — as well as most educational institutions and many nonprofit organizations – the fundamentals of great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.

That’s the reality at most organizations, though not all. But since most organizations don’t understand or apply these principles, and since most people aren’t in a position to change how their employer operates, we’ll look first at what individuals can do on their own, like Ben Franklin, to become much better in their fields.

Know Where You Want to Go

Step one, obvious yet deserving a moment’s consideration, is knowing what you want to do. The key word is not what, but knowing. Because the demands of achieving exceptional performance are so great over so many years, no one has a prayer of meeting them without utter commitment. You’ve got to know what you want to do, not suspect it or be inclined toward it or be thinking about it. For now we’ll assume that you’re settled on what you want to achieve, even if it’s only the next step in a general direction.

The first challenge in designing a system of deliberate practice is identifying the immediate next steps. In a few fields those steps are clear. If you want to play the piano, the exact skills you must learn and the order in which to learn them have been worked out by many gen erations of teachers. It’s similar in highly structured professions; at least the initial steps in becoming an accountant, lawyer, or doctor are well established, and you have teachers to guide you.

But in the great majority of careers, and in the advanced stages of all of them, there is no published curriculum, no syllabus of materials that must be studied and mastered. In deciding which skills and abilities to work on, and how to do it, you’re on your own. Most of us are completely unqualified to figure these things out by ourselves; we need help.

From this perspective we can see mentors in a new way—not just as wise people to whom we turn for guidance, but as experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we’re doing. At least that’s the ideal mentor, ideally used. Finding such a person isn’t easy, but it’s always possible to pursue the general principle: In all practice activities it ‘s highly valuable to get others’views about what you should be working on and how you’re doing.

The skills and abilities one can choose to develop are infinite, but the opportunities to practice them fall into two general categories: op portunities to practice directly, apart from the actual use of the skill or ability, the way a musician practices a piece before performing it; and opportunities to practice as part of the work itself.

Practicing Directly

In most jobs the notion of practicing directly is not well established, aside from maybe rehearsing a speech. But in fact the possibilities are surprisingly wide and deep. We can think of them in three general cat egories, based on models used in fields in which practice is accepted as critically important.

The music model.

In the classical tradition, a musician knows what he or she is going to play; the music is written down. What separates the greats from the rest is how well they perform that music. In business we find many analogous situations, far more than you might at first think. The most obvious involve presentations and speeches, and these form the one element of corporate life that is commonly practiced. But how well? These events can be extraordinarily important—a presentation to Wall Street analysts, to the board of directors, to your boss, to a congrcssional committee, or just to immediate colleagues can hold large consequences for you or your organization. Yet for most people, practice consists of perhaps a few run-throughs.

Think of all the ways it could be done much better. One could analyze the text of the talk and in each section determine the most impor tant idea to be conveyed—passion, logical inevitability, common bonds with the audience, humor—and then work on each section repeatedly, constantly striving to express that key idea more effectively, with feed-back after each repetition, either from a coach or by watching video. In the age of YouTube, it may be easy to find video of others giving similar types of presentations that one can then analyze and learn from, noting specifically how other speakers tried—well or badly—to convey the same key ideas that you want to put across.

Is this way more work than anyone you know has ever put into a presentation? Most likely. But it is exactly the type of preparation that great performers put into whatever they do.

Many other important elements of business life can be practiced similarly. One of the most dreaded tasks for many managers is giving job evaluations to their direct reports. This is a music model task; you know what you want to convey, and the challenge is to convey it effeectively. The message can be broken down into pieces and each piece analyzed for intent, then practiced repeatedly with immediate feedback from a coach or by video. Even being interviewed- by a prospective employer or by the news media can be practiced in this way. After all, in those situations you probably know the key messages that you intend to convey, regardless of the questions you’re asked.

We have bypassed the question of how these presentations or speeches get written. It’s often said that anything you write is a performance, which suggests that writing may be considered a music-model activity. For straightforward written work, the multipart Ben Franklin technique would be appropriate; instead of emulating the Spectator, you would choose a superior letter to the shareholders, advertisement, blog entry, or other appropriate model. For spoken presentations, a particularly effective approach would be a juiced up Ben Franklin tech nique: Watch a presentation that you consider especially well done and make notes of its various points; later, after you’ve forgotten most of it, use your notes to create a talk making the same points; deliver the talk and record it; then compare your video with the original.

The chess model.

Excellent chess players practice by studying positions from real games between top-level players, organized by various themes—openings, end-games, attacks, defenses, and many other categories that are far more refined. Thousands of books of such positions have been published. The practice routine is to study a particular position and choose the move you would make, then compare it with the move chosen by the master; if they’re different, figure out why and which is better.

This is practice of a different type, but it still fulfills the requirements of well-structured deliberate practice: It is designed to meet the central demands of the field, in this case move selection, and can be further focused on the types of moves that need to be improved; and it involves high repetition and immediate feedback. Many elements of job performance can be improved through a similar approach.

In fact, the chess model has been used widely in business education for eighty years, but under a different name: the case method. Pioneered at the Harvard Business School, it is strongly analogous to chess practice: You’re presented with a problem, and your job is to figure out a solution. Real life being the way it is, you often won’t know whether the solution chosen by the case’s protagonist was the best one possible, or whether yours was any better. But the process of focusing on the problem and evaluating proposed solutions is powerfully instructive, which helps explain why the case method is used by hundreds of universities around the world.

One of the great strengths of this approach is that it can be focused sharply on specific skills that need improvement, in keeping with deliberate practice principles. You might work in marketing for years and get only a couple of chances to market U.S. products in China, for example, so that’s a skill you probably wouldn’t be very good at. But in a short time you could study a dozen cases about marketing U.S. products in China. That’s one step removed from actually marketing the products, but it puts you many steps ahead of anyone who has not studied that specific skill intensely and repeatedly.

One way to apply the chess model is to take business classes that use the case method. That option isn’t always available, but it holds many advantages. Since the correct response to the case problem isn’t always clear, it’s helpful to hear the perspectives of other students and especially of the teacher, who may be the writer of the case. Classes also typically expose students to a lot of cases; students at the Harvard Business School study more than five hundred of them during the two-year program.

If you can’t go to business school or take business classes, you can still apply the chess model ad hoc. For starters, many of the case studies used at famous business schools worldwide are for sale; you can buy them online and study them yourself. More generally, consciousness of the chess model changes the way you read the news or observe what happens in your own industry or the company where you work. The essence of the chess model is the question: What would you do? Each news event that you read about, each new development in your com pany or industry, is an opportunity for you to answer that question. Oil prices jump, consumer spending tanks, a rogue trader loses $7 billion, Apple introduces the iPhone—don’t just read the news, imagine how it might affect the business you’re in or want to be in, and answer the question: What would you do? Then comes a critically important step: Write your answer down and keep it. Remember, feedback is crucial to effective practice, and people have a tendency to misremember what they thought in the past; we almost always adjust our recollections flat teringly, in light of how events actually turned out. But there’s no escaping a written record. Comparing your own what-would I do with the results of what the protagonist really did is the only way this exercise can yield genuine learning, and that learning can be considerable.

The sports model.

The practice of top athletes falls into two large categories. One is con ditioning, building the strengths and capacities that are most useful in a given sport. NFL linemen build their leg muscles in a way that produces explosive power; tennis players work on stamina so they can still get to the ball three hours into a match. The other category of practice is working on specific critical skills—batting a baseball, throwing a football, hitting a golf ball out of the sand. A characteristic that many of these skills share is that they must be performed differently every time because the situations in which they’re encountered are never the same. That’s why this is different from the music model. For a pianist, the notes in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata never change, but for a quarterback, no two passing situations are ever alike.

What are the analogs in business? For conditioning, we’ll assume that your work makes no significant physical demands; if it does, the appropriate physical conditioning opportunities will be apparent. But if your work is information and service-based, as most work in the developed world is, then conditioning means getting stronger with the underlying cognitive skills that you probably already have—basic math and accounting in financial jobs, basic science in engineering jobs, basic language skills in editorial jobs. In many cases this is stuff you learned in high school or college, and it’s tempting to think you couldn’t possibly benefit from revisiting it. But the truth is that these strengths, like physical strengths, decay if they aren’t maintained.

Conditioning in this context can take various forms. It can mean get ting out those old textbooks or handbooks and reviewing the fundamental skills that underlie your work, becoming faster, more facile, and more confident with them. For example, no matter how long you’ve worked in the world of investments, you will benefit from rereading Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis, a book you probably got when you started; and 1 guarantee you will learn something important that you’d forgotten. For people who write and edit, the same applies to Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements oj Style. Every field has classic guides that will always repay study, just as linebackers will always benefit from leg presses. The difference is that every linebacker from high school on up to the NFL does leg presses, while surprisingly few people in business practice the basic conditioning that supports all they do.

Conditioning can also be practiced with new material. Analyze the basic ratios in an unfamiliar financial statement with pen and paper, even though you have software that could do it all with one click. Do a value-based analysis of a stock. Pencil-edit a magazine article. You won’t be learning new skills; you’ll be building the strengths that make all your skills possible.

The second type of practice in the sports model, specific skill development, is based on focused simulation, and that concept can be applied widely in business, though doing it by oneself may be a challenge. Athletes spend much of their time working on particular skills that aren’t like playing a piece of written music, which doesn’t change, or like certain sports skills that are entirely under the athlete’s control, such as pitching a baseball or serving a tennis ball. These other skills are difficult in part because they have one or both of two traits. First, they may require a fast response to an unpredictable action by the opponent hitting a baseball or returning a tennis serve, for example. Second, they may be fluid and dynamic; a pass receiver may not be open when the quarterback throws the ball but may be by the time the ball arrives.

Unpredictable opponents, fast responses, dynamic situations—how very much like life in business. Practicing these situations can be difficult on your own because by their nature they involve other people. If you can get someone to help you practice a sales call or a negotiation, for example, by all means do so, being sure to remember the principles: trying to improve a specific aspect of your performance, high repetition, immediate feedback. But if you can’t get anyone to help, you can do a great deal of this type of practice by yourself through the fast-growing world of business simulations. It’s quite amazing what’s available. Web-based or downloadable simulation games in marketing, stock trading, negotiating, corporate strategizing, and many other disciplines at several levels of sophistication are widely available, with more being created every day. They are a genuine advance in making this valuable type of practice easy and accessible.

Practicing in the Work

Opportunities to practice business skills directly are far more available than we usually realize, but even these aren’t the only opportunities. We all face a different way to practice business skills, and that is by finding practice in the work itself. It is, to repeat, a different kind of activity. If you’re holding a talk with your boss about your bonus target, you probably can’t say, “Hold on—let’s discuss that point five more times.’ But in that or any other situation you can do different things that will help make you much better. And they’re all done in your head.

Researchers call these activities self-regulation. The “properties of deliberate practice .. . have been studied as key components of self regulation.” Effective self-regulation is something you do before, during, and after the work activity itself.

Before the work.

Self-regulation begins with setting goals. These are not big, life-directing goals, but instead are more immediate goals for what you’re going to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers don’t set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome—win the order; close out my positions at a profit; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. For exam pie, instead of just winning the order, their goal might be to focus especially hard on discerning the customer’s unstated needs.

You can see how this is strongly analogous to the first step of deliberate practice. It isn’t precisely the same; you are not designing a practice activity, but rather doing whatever the requirements of work may demand of you that day. But within that activity, the best performers are focused on how they can get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving a particular passage.

With a goal set, the next prework step is planning how to reach the goal. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They’re thinking of exactly, not vaguely, how to get to where they’re going. So if their goal is discerning the customer’s unstated needs, their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain key words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer’s crucial issues.

An important part of prework self-regulation centers on attitudes and beliefs. You may be thinking that figuring out specific goals and plans for what you’ll be doing every day sounds hard. It is, and doing it consistently requires high motivation. Where does it come from? The best performers go into their work with a powerful belief in what researchers call their self-efficacy—their ability to perform. They also believe strongly that all their work will pay off for them.

During the work.

The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers use during their work is self-observation. For example, ordinary endurance runners in a race tend to think about anything other than what they’re doing; it’s painful, and they want to take their minds of f it. Elite runners, by contrast, focus intensely on themselves; among other things, they count their breaths and simultaneously count their strides in order to main tain certain ratios.

Most of us don’t do work with a significant physical element, but the same principle applies in purely mental work. The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside them selves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.

Metacognition is important because situations change as they play out. Apart from its role in finding opportunities for practice, it plays a valuable part in helping top performers adapt to changing conditions. When a customer raises a completely unexpected problem in a deal negotiation, an excellent businessperson can pause mentally and observe his or her own mental processes as if from outside: Have I fully understood what’s really behind this objection? Am I angry? Am I being hijacked by my emotions? Do I need a different strategy here? What should it be?

In addition, metacognition helps top performers find practice opportunities in evolving situations. Such people can observe their own think ing and ask: What abilities are being taxed in this situation? Can I try out another skill here? Could I be pushing myself a little further? How is it working? Through their ability to observe themselves, they can simultaneously do what they’re doing and practice what they’re doing.

After the work.

Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. Similarly, the practice opportunities that we find in work won’t do any good if we don’t evaluate them af terward. These must be self-evaluations; because the practice activities took place in our own minds, only we can know fully what we were attempting or judge how it turned out.

Excellent performers judge themselves differently from the way other people do. They’re more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay. The best performers judge themselves against a standard that’s relevant for what they’re trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare with the performance of competitors they’re facing or expect to face; sometimes they compare with the best known performance by anyone in the field. Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms what common sense tells us, that too high a standard is dis couraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.

If you were pushing yourself appropriately and have evaluated your self rigorously, then you will have identified errors that you made. A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused the errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: My opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don’t have any natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors. Note that this is not just a difference of personality or attitude. Recall that the best performers have set highly specific, technique-based goals and strategies for themselves; they have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want. So when something doesn’t work, they can relate the failure to specific elements of their performance that may have misfired. Research on champion golfers, for example, has uncovered precisely this pattern. They’re much less likely than average golfers to blame their problems on the weather, the course, or chance factors. Instead they focus relent lessly on their own performance.

The final element of the postwork phase is affected by all the others and affects them in turn. You’ve been through some kind of work experience—a meeting with your team, a trading session, a quarterly budget review, a customer visit. You had thought about what you wanted to achieve and to improve, and it went however it went. Now: How do you respond? Odds are strong that the experience wasn’t perfect, that parts of it were unpleasant. In those cases, excellent perform ers respond by adapting the way they act; average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future. That stands to reason. Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their goal. So when things don’t turn out perfectly, they attribute the problems to vague forces outside their control. As a result, they are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time. Little wonder that they’d rather just avoid going through anything like it again, which of course means they have zero chance of getting any better.

Since excellent performers go through a sharply different process from the beginning, they can make good guesses about how to adapt. That is, their ideas for how to perform better next time are likely to work. So it’s hardly surprising that they are more likely than average performers to repeat the experience rather than avoid it. And when they do repeat it, we can now understand why they go into it with some of the prework traits and attitudes we observed: They approach the job with more specific goals and strategies, since their previous experience was essentially a test of specific goals and strategies; and they’re more likely to believe in their own ef ficacy because their detailed analysis of their own performance is more effective than the vague, unfocused analysis of average performers. Thus their well founded belief in their own effectiveness helps give them the crucial motivation to press on, powering a self reinforcing cycle.

Deepening Your Knowledge

In addition to finding opportunities to practice skills directly as well as in the midst of their work, people in the business world can pursue one more category of activities that utilize the principles of great performance to get better at what they do. We’ve seen how deep domain knowledge is fundamental to top-level performance. You don’t have to wait for that knowledge to come your way in the course of your work. You can pursue it.

It’s crazy that in most jobs and at most organizations, there’s little or no explicit education about the nature of the domain. Engineers, lawyers, accountants, and others go to school to learn the skills of their profession, but when it comes to the company, the industry, financial relationships, and how the business works, most people assume they’ll just pick up what they need to know, and most organizations agree. In reality, maybe you’ll pick up what you need to know or maybe you won’t. But in light of the critical importance of domain knowledge, it’s obvious that this offhand approach to acquiring that knowledge makes no sense.

Imagine the difference if you made domain knowledge a direct objective rather than a byproduct of work. If you set a goal of becoming an expert on your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don’t do now. You would study the history of the business, identify today’s leading experts, read everything you could find, interview people inside your organization and outside it who could provide new perspectives, track key statistics and trends. The exact steps would vary depending on your business, but it’s quickly apparent that you could make yourself impressively more knowledgeable about your business than you are today, and probably do so in short order. With time, your knowledge advantage over others would become large.

The opportunity is richer than you may suspect. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who is one of the all-time great authorities on corporate strategy, prepares rigorously for his consulting assignments by studying the client company and its industry. He once said that with twenty hours of library research (this was pre-Internet) he could know as much about the business as the CEO did. Of course Porter has spent many years learning what data to look for, so maybe it would take you forty hours. That still looks like a high return invest ment. Imagine what an advantage you would hold by gaining such knowledge, especially if your employer, like most, doesn’t educate employees explicitly in the most important information about the company and industry.

As you add to your knowledge of your domain, keep in mind that your objective is not just to amass information. You are building a mental model — a picture of how your domain functions as a system. This is one of the defining traits of great performers: They all possess large, highly developed, intricate mental models of their domains.

The principle applies to all fields that are complex and demanding — corporate strategy, medicine, politics, and a great many others. For example, your mental model of the domain of driving, while adequate for your purposes, is probably quite sparse. You have a general under standing of how the car works, you’re highly familiar with a few well traveled routes, and you pay a bit of attention to gas prices. But a top-performing truck driver possesses an extremely rich mental model of the same domain. He understands in detail all the subsystems of his vehicle—mechanical , hydraulic, electrical—and how they interact. He knows hundreds of routes and their features, including speed limits, road conditions, service facilities, weight limits, weighing stations, police activity, gas prices, state licensing requirements, and many others. Most important, he understands the subtle ways in which all these shifting factors combine to influence his profitability.

For anyone, a rich mental model contributes to great performance in three major ways:

A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge of your domain.

We’ve seen how top performers can reach into their long-term memory in ways that ordinary performers can’t, and how it isn’t because they have exceptional memories but because they have exceptional knowledge of their domain. The organization of that voluminous knowledge in a mental model is what gives it so much power. A mental model not only enables remarkable recall, it also helps top performers learn and understand new information better than average performers, since they see it not as an isolated bit of data but as part of a large and comprehensible picture. For instance, an ordinary accountant might see a particular recent accounting rule change—Financial Accounting Statement 157—which requires companies to measure the riskiness of their assets in new ways, as a big, complicated pain in the neck that amends or deletes portions of forty-seven other statements. But a top accountant sees the change as part of a broad, post-Enron shift toward more detailed risk assessment, and understands who it helps, who it hurts, and why it was made.

A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information.

That ability is valuable when you encounter new factors in a situation because it frees up mental resources to work on what’s really important. In a study, top-performing pilots and apprentices listened to recordings of air-traffic control radio communications, and then were asked to recall what they heard. The apprentices actually recalled more of the “filler” words that had no practical significance than the top pilots did. But the expert pilots recalled far more of the important concept words. Because they heard the communications as part of a rich mental model, they could focus their brainpower on what counted.

Most important, a mental model enables you to project what will happen next.

Since your mental model is an understanding of how your domain functions as a system, you know how changes in the system’s inputs will affect the outputs—that is, how the events that just happened will create the events that are about to happen. Two groups of fire fighters, novices and experts, were shown scenes of fires and asked what they saw. The novices saw what was obvious—the intensity and color of the flames. But the experts saw a story; they used their mental models to infer what must have led to the current state of the fire and to predict what was likeliest to happen next. Note that these inferences and predictions are more than just interesting. They are evidence that the experts are far better prepared than the novices to fight the fire.

A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models. It isn’t possible to do the whole job through study alone. In many fields, much of this work must be done through deliberate practice activities or through metacognitive processes in the work itself, as we’ve discussed. But in addition, significant build ing and enriching of mental models can be done through study and other knowledge seeking, and it would be foolish to leave these tools unused.

You can do a great deal as an individual to apply the principles of great performance in your own life and work. Applying these principles is always beneficial. No matter how many steps on the road to great per formance you choose to take, you will be better of than if you hadn’t taken them. There is no hurdle to clear before the advantages start ac-cruing. This is pure opportunity.

That’s for you as an individual. Chances are you work in an organization. To really turbocharge the benefits of deliberate practice, the principles need to be applied organizationally as well as individually. It can be done, and the fact that it isn’t done very widely makes the opportunity all the more valuable. That’s our next topic.

Chapter Eight: Applying the Principles in Our Organizations

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Few do it well, and most don’t do it at all; the sooner you start, the better.

Not all organizations want to be great. That’s the hard truth. For those that do — that really do — the principles of great performance show quite clearly what it takes to get there. And for those enterprises that are paddling hard just to stay afloat, whose owners and managers may not feel they’ve got the luxury of thinking grandiose thoughts about greatness, these same principles can help make their performance much better. In fact, the principles of great performance can help improve such organizations to the point where they might actually dare to think about greatness. That is, the principles can do this if they’re applied.

Yet the great majority of organizations don’t apply these principles. In today’s economy, that fact is more than just an opportunity. Applying the principles is becoming an imperative for all organizations that want to survive. We’ve seen in chapter 1 how the economy is increasingly based not on financial capital but on human capital, and how the abilities of the people in an organization—much more than traditionally important factors like economies of scale or patent protections— determine an enterprise’s success or failure. And we’ve seen that, in a global economy, standards of performance are rising more quickly and more broadly than ever before, leaving subpar performers no place to hide. Those are reasons enough for organizations to start applying the principles of great performance in a big way.

How the Best Organizations Apply the Principles of Great Performance

Organizations are finding that the advantages of building a big reputation for developing people are even greater than they may have thought. Such a reputation grants these companies “a first pick advantage,” as the RBL Croup consulting firm calls it, an edge in attracting the cream of college and business-school students. By continually attracting the most promising graduates, and then developing them further, these companies become even higher performing organizations, further enhancing their ability to attract the best—a virtuous cycle that makes a company more dominant every year.

The elite group of organizations that apply the principles of great performance follow several major rules.

Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.

That is, the best organizations assign people to jobs in much the same way that sports coaches or music teachers choose exercises for their students—to push them just beyond their current capabilities and build the skills that are most important. About two-thirds of people development comes from carefully chosen job assignments, about one-third from mentoring and coaching (which we’ll examine more closely), and a smidgen from classroom training.

Building people through job assignments seems obvious in theory, but in practice it’s tough. Organizations tend to assign people based on what they’re already good at, not what they need to work on. The merciless competitive pressure on every company makes it difficult to pull accomplished employees out of jobs they do extremely well and put them into positions where they may struggle. That’s a tension every organization must deal with in order to become more successful.

Deliberately putting managers into stretch jobs that will require them to learn and grow is the central development technique of the most successful organizations. It won’t work by itself; it requires the other practices described here to be effective. But these companies understand that for employees trying to improve, making real decisions in real time is the central practice activity that produces growth. Some firms follow detailed rules about which experiences are required; an executive may need to work in at least two territories, for example, or two lines of business. Others are more informal but still observe the principle.

Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful. A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, was in charge of the company’s Asian operations during a major Japanese earthquake and the Asian economic collapse. He says that’s when he discovered that “you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.”

Find ways to develop leaders within their jobs.

We’ve seen the value of domain expertise in any field. In business, that value seems to be increasing. Many top performing organizations report new tension between their need to develop people by moving them through different jobs and the need to develop their expertise in certain domains by leaving them in jobs. This may result from the heightened competitiveness of a global economy; a division has a tough time competing when the boss moves on every eighteen to twenty four months, a typical pattern in many companies. So the challenge is to give people the growth benefits of new stretch assignments without moving them into new jobs so often.

Eli Lilly is one of many companies trying harder to do that. One technique: short term work assignments. Managers don’t leave their jobs, but they take on an additional assignment outside their field of expertise or interest. That increases the burden on the employee, who is doing not just different work but additional work. Managers seem not to mind because they realize they’ve been identified for extra development. The company says the approach has been a big hit. Nokia is trying the same thing and reports a similar response.

Encourage their leaders to be active in their communities.

The advantages to the company are many. Most companies have enunciated values that include respect for the individual, good citizenship, and integrity. When company leaders also become leaders of charities, schools, and other nonprofits, they show their commitment to those values, encouraging and inspiring employees.

Other benefits are more pragmatic. Community leadership roles are opportunities for employees to practice skills that will be valuable at work. For example, most employees will never serve on the company’s board of directors or on any major corporate board. But many of them can serve on a local non-profit’s board, and the experience is an excellent opportunity to develop strategic thinking, financial analysis, and many other skills. At General Mills, an explicit part of many employees’ development plans as set by their bosses is to serve on a nonprofit board.

Understand the critical roles of teachers and of feedback.

We’ve seen that great performance is built through activities that are designed specifically to improve particular skills, and that in many realms teachers and coaches are especially helpful in designing those activities. At most organizations, nobody is in the role of teacher or coach. Employees aren’t told which skills will be most helpful to them and certainly aren’t told how best to develop them. But most top-performing organizations have explicit coaching and mentoring programs. At these enterprises, careful job assignments and other large-scale programs determine the general direction of an employee’s development; mentors provide detailed advice on which sub-skills need attention right now. Many of the CEOs of these companies, when asked how they reached the top, tell similar stories about the importance of a few key mentors who consistently guided and helped them.

The other side of this coin is feedback. Most organizations are terrible at providing honest feedback. The annual evaluation exercise is often short, artificial, and mealy-mouthed. Employees have no idea how well they performed and thus no prospect of getting better.

Yet nothing stands in the way of frequent, candid feedback except habit and corporate culture. Of course cultures can be formidable, but they can be changed. Any enterprise that wants a culture of true candor can have it, and there’s no excuse for not having it. The best-performing organizations have exactly this kind of culture. For example, Immelt of GE says that the people who report to him “get coaching from me every time I see them.”

Many of these companies could do even more to establish a culture of candor. A powerful tool with great potential for most organizations is the U.S. Army’s after-action review. Colonel Thomas Kolditz, who runs the leadership development program at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, says that for the past twenty-five years “it has literally transformed the Army.” The concept is simple. After any significant action, in training or in combat, soldiers and officers meet to discuss what happened. They take off their helmets—a symbolic action indicating that “there’s no rank in the room,” as Kolditz says. “Comments are blunt. If the boss made a bad decision, often it’s a subordinate who points that out.” The session isn’t about blaming; instead, it’s “a professional discussion,” as an army training circular puts it. Part of its strength is that it yields very complete feedback. “The genius of it is that the junior people always know what’s going on,” says Kolditz. “If you put them in a position to speak openly, they will.”

The army has found another benefit of the after-action review: that when people really understand what happened, they’re eager to try to do it better. This reinforces the principles of great performance. As the army training circular says, when an after-action review is done right, “not only will everyone understand what did and did not occur and why, but most importantly will have a strong desire to seek the opportunity to practice the task again.”

The after-action review “is a very powerful process,” Kolditz says. Its potential value to companies and other organizations is obvious. A number of firms have tried using it, usually with mixed results, and the problems are cultural. But cultures can be changed over time, and the best organizations will do the work necessary to change them in order to get the benefits of truly deep and broad feedback.

Identify promising performers early.

Leadership capability can be evaluated on day one of employment.” That’s because day one isn’t really day one for many employees, who have interned at GE for at least one previous summer, enabling the company to observe their performance. A telling indicator is how interns get others to work with them when they have absolutely no authority. Another signal that GE looks at, separate from internships, is whether someone played a team sport in college and what his or her role was.

Working on people’s development early is a big change at most companies, where development programs were long reserved for an elite group several years into their careers. Many of the best-performing companies are trying to move past that. They believe that developing future leaders earlier than other companies creates a competitive advantage that lasts for decades, as their pipelines of high achievers become bigger, better, and more reliable.

Understand that people development works best through inspiration, not authority.

Deliberate practice activities are so demanding that no one can sustain them for long without strong motivation. How can an enterprise con tribute to that motivation? The traditional answer was that it made people do what it wanted by firing, demoting, or otherwise punishing those who didn’t. That never worked very well, and it works even worse in today’s information-based economy, where most employees aren’t turning wrenches but instead are using knowledge and relationships with results that may not be easily observed day-to-day. Try making them do what you say, or even telling them exactly what to do. A. G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble says, “The command and control model of leadership just won’t work 99 percent of the time.”

That is why a favorite word at many of today’s best performing companies is inspire. P&G runs a development program called Inspirational Leadership, which focuses explicitly on teaching leaders how to inspire colleagues. At American Express, everyone at or above the vice-president level attends a program called Leadership Inspiring Employee Engagement. These companies realize that they motivate best through a sense of mission. For some top performers, such as Medtronic or Eli Lilly, the mission is rooted deep in their history of saving lives or treat ing illnesses. For others, identifying or even creating a sense of mission requires a journey deep into the corporate soul. That trip is not for the faint hearted. But it is mandatory for any organization that wants to motivate employees sufficiently to become world-class performers.

Invest significant time, money, and energy in developing people.

You don’t develop people on the cheap, and you don’t just bolt a development program onto existing HR procedures. The CEOs of top performing companies agree that people development is at the center of their jobs. Indeed, the biggest investment involved may be the time of the CEO and other executives. At McDonald’s, for example, CEO Jim Skinner personally reviews the development of the company’s top two hundred managers. At GE, Immelt reviews the top six hundred. Bill Hawkins, CEO of Medtronic, says he spends 50 percent of his time on people issues, and many other top CEOs report similar percentages— making this the largest time commitment they have. Lots of companies claim they’re interested in developing leaders, but the University of Michigan’s Noel Tichy, a top authority on the subject, says testing their commitment is easy: “Just show me the CEO’s calendar.”

The CEO’s time is only the beginning. Many of these chiefs note the “cascading” effect of what they do: As their direct reports see what the boss is focusing on, they also become devoted to developing people, as do their subordinates, and so on. Not that these companies rely solely on the power of example. Virtually all of them evaluate executives partly on how well they’re developing people, including themselves. In American Express’s highly rigorous system, for example, 25 percent of an executive’s variable pay depends on people development.

Further expenses can be big, but no CEO seems to doubt their value. GE’s Crotonville, a beautiful fifty-two-acre campus just north of New York City, obviously costs a bundle, and running thousands of managers through it every year costs even more. But “we fund it through good times and bad,” says Immelt. “I learned that from Jack Welch, and I still do it.” Whirlpool decided a few years ago to upgrade its off-the-shelf development curriculum by developing its own. The program is now bigger than ever, and worth every cent. CEO Jeff Fettig says, “This is the single best investment we make in our company.”

Make leadership development part of the culture.

Though executives at the best companies talk about their leadership development programs, they generally realize the term isn’t quite right. Developing leaders isn’t a program, it’s a way of living. For example, honest feedback has to be culturally okay; at many companies it isn’t. Devoting significant time to mentoring has to be accepted. Working for nonprofits has to be encouraged, not just tolerated. Such cultural norms can’t be dictated on short notice; they have to grow over time. That’s a major reason why GE is so widely regarded as the best at people development. Charles Coffin (CEO from 1892 to 1912) realized that GE’s real products weren’t lightbulbs or electric motors but business leaders; developing them has been the company’s focus ever since.

Applying the Principles to Teams

Any organization that does all these things will build tremendous competitive advantages in its industry because its people will be developed to such an unusually high level. Every enterprise wants to be filled with A players, and rightly so. But that isn’t enough. After all, most people in an organization don’t work alone. They work in teams, strictly or loosely defined. And a team’s performance is emphatically not determined solely by the abilities of its members individually. Maybe you remember something called the World Baseball Classic, a tournament played by a group of national teams in the spring of 2006. You might suppose that no one could beat America at America’s game, especially since the U.S. team was filled with undeniably great players—Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Johnny Damon, among others. Yet the team didn’t win the tournament and lost games to Mexico, South Korea, and—wait for it— Canada. Similarly, the 2004 U.S. Olympic basketball team, consisting entirely of NBA millionaires, finished third and lost to Lithuania, among other previously unknown hoops powers.

Turning groups of great individuals into great teams is a discipline in itself, which also operates on the principles of great performance. That’s why the best organizations follow one additional rule:

Develop teams, not just individuals.

For example, Jeff Immelt recalls, “at the GE I grew up in, most of my training was individually based.” But that led to problems. He’d attend a three-week program at Crotonville, but back at work “I could use only 60 percent of what I ‘d learned because I needed others — my boss, my IT guy — to help with the rest.” And maybe they weren’t on board. Now GE takes whole teams and puts them through Crotonville together, making real decisions about their business. Result: “There’s no excuse for not doing it.”

Applying the principles of great performance to team development is not conceptually difficult. The same basic elements that work for individuals — well-designed practice activities, coaching, repetition, feedback, self-regulation, building knowledge, and mental models— all work for teams as well. The problems are practical. They center on forces within the team that prevent it from realizing the benefits of the great-performance approach. Organizations that are the most successful at building team performance are especially skilled at avoiding or addressing potential problems that are particularly toxic to the elements of deliberate practice, such as the following: kicking the wrong team members. Every team wants great individual performers, but combining them is a skill all its own, in business or any other domain. “Some of the worst teams I’ve ever seen have been those where everybody was a potential CEO,” says David Nadler, a senior partner at the Oliver Wyman consulting firm, who has worked with executive teams at top global companies for more than thirty years. “If there’s a zero-sum game called succession going on, it’s very difficult to have an effective team.”

Chemistry and culture are key. Henry Ford II successfully brought in the Whiz Kids, a preassembled team of U.S. Army managerial stars that included Tex Thornton, later founder of Litton Industries, and Robert McNamara, later president of Ford and then U.S. secretary of defense, when he sensed that Ford needed a revolution after World War II. The Whiz Kids had a record of working together effectively from their army days. But fifty years later, when Ford CEO Jacques Nasser correctly decided that the company needed another revolution, he stuck with the old-guard team already in place. Like most old guards, they weren’t ready for a real revolution, and when push came to shove, Nasser got ejected. More seriously for Ford, the revolution didn’t happen.

For a notably successful method of choosing team members, look at Worthington Industries, the Ohio based steel processor. When an employee is hired to join a plant floor team, he works for a ninety day probationary period, after which the team determines his fate by vote. It works because much of the team’s pay is at risk, based on performance, so team members are clear eyed and unsparing in evaluating a new candidate’s contribution. CEO John McConnell could be talking about teams at any level when he says, “Give us people who are dedicated to making the team work, as opposed to a bunch of talented people with big egos, and we’ll win every time.”

The most inspiring U.S. Olympic team ever, the 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviets at Lake Placid, was built explicitly on similar principles. Professional players weren’t eligible back then. More fundamentally, coach Herb Brooks wanted to build a team on personal chemistry combined with extremely intensive practice. In the movie version of the story, called Miracle, Brooks’s assistant looks at the coach’s roster and objects that he has left out many of the country’s greatest college players. To which Brooks responds with the essential mix – is critical philosophy: “I’m not lookin’ for the best players, Craig. I’m lookin’ for the right players.”

Low trust. Read the extensive literature on team effectiveness, or talk to people on teams in sports, business, or elsewhere, and it always comes down to this: Trust is the most fundamental element of a winning team. If people think their teammates are lying, withholding information, or plotting to knife them, nothing valuable will get done. Similarly, team members may not trust one another’s competence. Such teams don’t create synergy. They create its opposite, dysergy — two plus two equals three, with luck.

So-called dream teams may be in trouble right from the start because team members often have particular reasons to be distrustful. In sports settings, all-star teams are brought together only briefly from teams that spend the rest of the year trying to beat one another. Even if team members can set aside that antagonistic mind-set, they rarely have time to develop confidence in one another’s behavior and abilities. It’s similar in business: Even if team members aren’t battling for the next promotion, someone is always getting moved or stolen away. “A major problem is that people are transient, “says consultant Ram Charan. Especially on an all-star team, “there’s all the headhunting, and there’s a constant tug to have people pulled out of the team. Instability is a major issue.” That’s a big problem because trust by its nature is built slowly. Many companies try to speed up the trust-building process. In the eighties there was a virtual epidemic of people falling backward off tables into the arms of coworkers as a way of learning trust. Maybe it even helped. Today consultants have developed many additional exercises that involve people sharing personal stories or revealing their personality type, based on the valid insight that reciprocal vulnerability is the beginning of trust. But the process can be rushed only so much.

In fact, trust is so fragile and so laboriously created that it may never extend very far in a top-level team. “Building a really high-performing executive team at the highest level is a mirage,” says a famous management consultant who doesn’t want his name used because this particular message is such a downer. “When such teams do exist, they’ll consist mostly of two people, maybe three.” It’s just too hard to build trust more extensively at the top level, where everyone is supposedly a star.

And sure enough, the legendary top executive teams are almost always pairs. Think of Roberto Goizueta and Donald Keough at Coca-Cola in the eighties and nineties, or Tom Murphy and Dan Burke at Capital Cities/ABC from the sixties to the nineties, or Reuben Mark and Bill Shanahan at Colgate-Palmolive for two decades until 2005, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway from the sixties to today. No one would have called those pairs dream teams back when they got together; at the time, most people had never heard of them. They all developed deep trust over many years and produced outstanding results.

Maybe you noticed something else about those teams: Each consists of a boss who became famous and a much less famous number 2 who devoted his career to the success of the enterprise. Such devotion is rare and points to another pathology that frequently sinks teams…

Competing agendas. You don’t often find examples of the best and worst executive teams involving the same person, but consider the case of Michael Eisner. For the first ten years of his reign at Disney, he and COO Frank Wells formed one of the great teams, saving a storied company and making shareholders rich. They were a classic top pair, with a clear number 1 and number 2, neither one famous outside the industry when they took the jobs. This productive partnership ended suddenly and terribly when Wells died in a 1994 helicopter crash.

Eisner then formed one of the most famously disastrous teams in recent history, bringing in uberagent Michael Ovitz as president. He lasted only fourteen months. In the extensive postmortems, the overriding theme is conflicting business and personal agendas. Ovitz wanted to buy a major stake in Yahoo!, expand Disney’s book and record businesses, and buy an NFL franchise, among other big ideas that Eisner dismissed as off-strategy. Ovitz also seemingly had notions of his own future — he spent $2 million remodeling his office —that did not sit well with Eisner. Bottom line: team failure.

It’s a common problem. Just as great individual performers possess highly developed mental models of their domains, the best teams are composed of members who share a mental model — of the domain, and of how the team will be effective. Eisner and Ovitz held strongly conflicting models of Disney’s domain and of their own team. More broadly, as noted, when everyone wants to be a CEO and has good reason to think it’s possible, the conflicts can become overwhelming. And while it’s easy to condemn the political hardball and hotdogging that result, don’t be too quick to do so. After all, suppose you’re toiling away beneath the world’s radar and your boss gets fired—what happens to your career? Some companies even like to spotlight rising stars because it’s good for the business; as these managers advance, employees want to follow them.

The challenge is to keep the inevitable personal agendas from be coming destructive. That’s part of the leader’s job. For example, Ameritech in the nineties had an all star team of top executives that included Richard Notebaert, future CEO of Ameritech, Tellabs, and Qwest; and Richard Brown, future CEO of Cable & Wireless and EDS. Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy, who was advising the company on leadership development at the time, recalls that CEO Bill Weiss told the team bluntly every week that if he caught anybody trying to under mine the others, the guilty party would be fired.

Jack Welch used a different approach to managing potential successor conflicts at GE. He recalled his own miserable experience as one of the CEO finalists twenty years earlier, when the company promoted him and the other main contenders to jobs at headquarters, which politics soon turned into a steaming swamp. Two decades later, Welch kept his own top candidates in operating jobs hundreds of miles apart.

Even when ego-driven stars aren’t fighting for the same job, a team can still be torn apart by another curse.

Unresolved conflicts. Colonel Stas Preczewski, coach of the army crew team at West Point a few years ago, faced a baffling problem. Through extensive testing he had determined the strengths and abilities of every rower on his team. He had measured each man’s power on ergometers and had composed crews in every possible combination in order to calculate each member’s contribution. He was able to rank his rowers objectively and precisely from best to worst. He then put the eight best in his varsity boat and the eight others, the weakest, in the junior varsity boat. The problem: The JV boat beat the varsity boat two-thirds of the time.

The situation is explained in a famous Harvard Business School case, which also notes that the varsity boat was full of resentment over who was contributing most, while the JV rowers, feeling they had nothing to lose, supported one another happily. But the case doesn’t tell how Coach Preczewski solved his problem.

One day he lined up the varsity crew in four pairs. He told them they were to wrestle for ninety seconds. Only rule: no punching. “It was like the WWF,” he recalls. When he stopped them, he noticed that no one was winning. Each man was discovering that his opponent was just as strong and determined as he was. Preczewski then had them change opponents and wrestle again. By the third round they were choosing their own opponents—”One guy would point at another and say, ‘You!’” Preczewski says. On the fourth or fifth round, one of the rowers started laughing, and they all piled into a general brawl. Eventually someone said, “Coach, can we go row now?” From then on the varsity boat flew, and made it to the semifinals in the national tournament. You probably can’t order members of an executive team to wrestle, tempting though it may be. But there are other ways to discharge tensions that are crippling a group. These conflicts are the flip side of competing peting agendas; instead of being focused on the future, they typically linger from the past. Bringing them out into the open and then resolv ing them is one of the team leader’s most important jobs. Doing it is an important element of dealing with a more general threat to team performance…

Unwillingness to face the real issues. The usual metaphor is the elephant in the room. Former Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias called it the moose on the table. George Kohlrieser, a professor at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, has developed the metaphor particularly well: “Put the fish on the table,” he says. It’s smelly, and cleaning it is messy work, but you get a good meal in the end.

Most people don’t want to be the one who puts the fish on the table, especially on a team where it might not be culturally okay. “There’s a veneer of politeness,” says David Nadler, “or unspoken reciprocity we won’t raise our differences in front of the boss.” Consultant Ram Charan describes a $1 2 billion division of ABB that was headed for bankruptcy. “One reason,” he says, “was its culture of polite restraint. People didn’t express their honest feelings” about the most important issues. The unit s leader turned it around by insisting that team members say what was really on their minds—though the first time, he had to endure sixty seconds of tense, angry silence af ter calling on an executive to explain why he was so clearly upset.

Jack Welch was one of the great champions of putting the fish on the table—confronting reality, as he says. Often overlooked were his efforts to make doing so easier for the top team. GE’s dream team was and is the Corporate Executive Council, which used to meet at head quarters in a formal atmosphere with rehearsed presentations and little real discussion. Welch moved the meetings off-site, forbade prepared presentations, jackets, and ties, and lengthened the coffee breaks to en courage informal discussion, among other changes. At GE they call this social architecture. Business scholars believe it was a critical element in the success of Welch’s revolution.

Applying the principles of great performance in an organization is no easier than doing anything else in an organization. It’s hard. But in an increasingly competitive global economy, enterprises that want to survive and thrive will face little choice. If we suppose that every organi zation will sooner or later be trying to apply these principles, then it’s important to remember that starting early confers a significant advantage. The effects of deliberate practice activities are cumulative. The more of a head start your organization gets in developing people individually and as teams, the more difficult it will be for competitors ever to catch you.

Chapter Nine: Performing Great at Innovation

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How the principles we’ve learned take us past the myths of creativity

It isn’t true that everything can be commoditized. It just seems like it is.

One of the miracles of our networked world is that buyers know so much more about what they’re buying, which is a major problem for the surprisingly numerous sellers who used to depend on customer ignorance. Most people still don’t buy cars online, but most car buyers do shop online before buying; you see them walking into a dealership with a dealer’s invoice, which they found online and printed out. That changes the balance of power.
Prescription drugs have cost less in Canada for eons, but it didn’t matter to the pharmaceutical industry before the Internet; now it does. Families with kids in college had long been floored by the exorbitant cost of textbooks in the college bookstore, but what choice did they have? Now they know they can often order the very same books from the United Kingdom for much less.

In the digital age, any products that can be compared will be compared, and any directly comparable products will be commoditized.
Most brutally, this phenomenon takes the form of the reverse auction. An automaker, for example, needs a million injection molded plastic parts. It designates eight suppliers as worthy to compete for the business, and tells them the specs, where and when the products will be needed, and the terms on which the winning supplier will be paid. Then it tells them all to get online Tuesday at eight AM and gives them an hour to beat the living daylights out of one another on price. When the bell rings at the end of the hour, the low bidder gets the business.

It’s tempting to think that only a few low value products could be bought this way, but in fact purchasers are finding ways to use this procedure for buying — that is, for commoditizing — all kinds of things, including high value services. Tyco International (postscandal) used a reverse auction to hire a law firm to handle its product liability cases. A Kansas City-based firm called Shook, Hardy & Bacon won the business with an eighteen month fixed fee bid.

If you’re wondering why innovation is one of the hottest topics in business — why leading magazines are full of articles about it, conference organizers are putting on $2,700-a ticket conferences on it, and top tier management consulting firms are building practices around it — this is a big part of the answer. In a world of forces that push toward the commoditization of everything, creating something new and different is the only way to survive. A product unlike any other can’t be commoditized. A service that reaches deep into the psyche of the buyer can never be purchased solely on price. Creating such products and services was always valuable; now it’s essential.

Yet fighting commoditization won’t do much good if you don’t keep it up. You can never stop because product life expectancies are getting drastically shorter. In the good old days, Wrigley produced the same three flavors of gum (Spearmint, Doublemint, and Juicy Fruit) for fifty nine years and succeeded so grandly that William Wrigley built one of Chicago’s great office buildings and bought Catalina Island, among other things. By contrast, consider the twenty first-century saga of Wrigley’s Chicago neighbor, Motorola —heroic and innovative pioneer of the cell phone at first, then scorned failure when it didn’t jump fast enough to digital phones, then reborn champion when it created the sleek RAZR, then goat once again when it couldn’t produce a successor, and finally a casualty of competition with its decision to unload its cell phone business completely. Motorola achieved lots of great cell phone innovations —just not enough of them.

As products and services live shorter lives, so do the business models of the companies that sell them. Time was when you could turn the crank on a good business model for thirty or forty years, and sometimes much longer; the regulated-utility model of AT&T and electricity companies worked for close to a hundred years. But now we hear the startling sound of CEOs admitting publicly that their business models don’t work anymore. Paul Allaire said it out loud when he was CEO of Xerox; Michael Armstrong said it at AT&T; Bill Ford said it at Ford. Now companies with the most vaunted and successful business models of all time are being forced to change them. Southwest Airlines built itself into America’s most valuable airline with a low fare model that gave no special perks to business travelers; then results began to sag, and now it’s offering special deals to exactly those customers. Dell became the world’s largest PC maker with a model that sold directly, and only directly, to end users; then Hewlett Packard surged ahead, and now Dell sells through Best Buy and other retailers. Adrian Slywotzky, an author and consultant who has worked with America’s biggest companies for thirty years, has said that many companies now have to create innovative new business models every three or four years—eight to ten years is heaven today.”

Creativity and innovation may even be the key to the future economic prosperity of America and other developed countries, at least according to one line of thinking. The theory, though somewhat radical, resonates with various trends. It’s radical because for three hundred years the source of economic dominance has clearly been leadership in science and technology; the countries or regions that were most advanced technologically have also been the most prosperous. But now a number of analysts, including Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, and Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, argue that this era may be ending. Technology will become commoditized by China and India, they say, being dispersed and adopted almost instantly after it’s created. Economic value will arise instead from the powers of the right brain — creativity, imagination, empathy, aesthetics.

Exhibit A in their evidence is the Apple iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 music player; several models had been around for a few years before anyone had heard of the iPod, but they had never gone anywhere. Apple took an existing product and gave it an elegant design, created a simple, intuitive user interface, then added the business innovation of the iTunes Music Store, and somehow imbued the whole package with coolness. The result is 75 percent market share in music players and online music sales, a reordering of the music industry, and a multibillion dollar boost to Apple’s market value. The key wasn’t technology. It was creativity, design, and a deep empathy with the customer.

In a different industry, how does Target thrive as a discount retailer against the massive power of WalMart, a company more than five times its size that commands by far the world’s most advanced retail computer systems? In part it does so by arranging for some of the world’s top designers, such as Michael Graves and Isabelle de Borchgrave, to design some of the home’s most pedestrian products, such as teakettles and breadbaskets, and then selling them in massive volume at discount prices. Following that strategy, Target can never be commoditized.

The phenomenon is sufficiently widespread that the MFA degree—master of fine arts—is gaining ground 011 the MBA as the preferred graduate degree for young people who want to make their mark in business. New York University has even begun offering a joint MBA/MFA degree.

Creativity and innovation have always been important; what’s new is that they’re becoming economically more valuable by the day. The issue, then, is how individuals and organizations can best respond. To help them, all those consultants, conferences, books, and magazines have coalesced into a vast innovation industry that offers virtually in finite advice and guidance. Our task is not to inspect it all—impossible and fruitless—but rather to see if the principles of great performance provide any deep insight into the nature of creativity and innovation that would be useful to anyone trying to grow on these dimensions. They do, and these insights are especially valuable because, as with great performance generally, they run counter to many people’s deeply held beliefs.

What We Think We Know

Two views in particular characterize what most of us “know that just ain’t so” about innovation and creativity. One is that creative ideas come to us in the way a famous one came to Archimedes, in a eureka moment when everything suddenly becomes clear. It makes sense that we believe this, because history as we learn it in school is filled with such stories. Often they’re unforgettable. Archimedes running through the streets naked, having just settled into his bath and realizing he could measure the volume of an irregular object by water displacement, is an image no schoolchild will forget. Similarly, we see Abraham Lincoln on the train to Gettysburg, writing in a burst of inspiration one of the most eloquent speeches in American history. Or we picture Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who by his own account awoke from an opium-induced sleep to find “two to three hundred lines” of Kubla Khan standing fully formed before him in his mind. Great creators seem time and again to be struck by lightning bolts that reveal what no one else had seen or thought or imagined before.

The other thing we all think we know about creativity is that it can be inhibited by too much knowledge. We often say that someone is “too close to the problem” to see a solution. The broader principle is that if you know too much about a situation, a business, a field of study, then you can’t have the flash of insight that is available only to someone unburdened by a lifetime of immersion in the domain. Edward de Bono, the best known business consultant on creative thinking, has stated this view explicitly: “Too much experience within a field may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should he done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.” Again, we have good reasons for believing this. We’ve seen it confirmed at the organizational level countless times. Why didn’t Western Union invent the telephone? Why didn’t U.S. Steel invent the minimill? Why didn’t IBM invent the personal computer? Over and over, the organizations that knew all there was to know about a technology or an industry failed to make the creative breakthroughs that would transform the business.

At the individual level the story is similar. Dean Keith Simonton, a professor at the University of California at Davis, conducted a large-scale study of more than three hundred creative high achievers born between 1450 and 1850—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, Rembrandt, for example. He determined the amount of formal education each had received and measured each one’s level of eminence by the spaces devoted to them in an array of reference works. He found that the relation between education and eminence, when plotted on a graph, looked like an inverted U: The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college. Less education than that—or more—corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity.

Other research seems to confirm de Bono’s view. In a famous series of experiments first conducted more than sixty years ago, Abraham and Edith Luchins gave their subjects the task of measuring certain amounts of water using a set of different-sized jugs; for example, the jugs might hold 127 units, 21 units, and 3 units, and the task might be to measure out 100 units precisely. The subjects learned a set routine that worked for solving the first several measurement tasks they were given. When they were then given a measurement task that could be done using their learned routine or a much simpler one, they consistently failed to see the simpler one. And when they were given a task that could be done only with a simple but new routine, they failed to see it, and instead just kept trying to apply their known routine. Subjects who had never learned the original routine, however, saw the simple solution easily. These concepts have permeated our views on creativity and in most of us have helped form those two core beliefs: Inspiration will strike when it’s good and ready, whenever that may be; and if you want a creative solution to a problem, you’d better find someone who knows a little about the situation but not too much. Those beliefs, though they seem to be supported by evidence, will steer us wrong. They direct us away from the creating and innovating that we’re capable of. The evidence underlying the principles of deliberate practice and great performance shows that in finding creative solutions to problems, knowledge—the more the better—is your friend, not your enemy. And it shows that creativity isn’t a lightning bolt.

Know More, Innovate More

The greatest innovators in a wide range of fields—business, science, painting, music—all have at least one characteristic in common: They spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough. Creative achievement never came suddenly, even in those cases in which the creator later claimed that it did. Whether it was the transistor or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album or the cell phone or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles dAvignon, it always followed a long earlier period of extremely hard work, and in most cases the creative products themselves were developed over a significant period. Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation.

The evidence is strikingly consistent. A study of seventy six composers from many historical periods looked at when they produced their first notable works or masterworks, designations that were based on the number of recordings available. The researcher, Professor John R. Hayes of Carnegie Mellon University, identified more than five hundred works. As Professor Robert W. Weisberg of Temple University summarized the findings: “Of these works, only three were composed before year ten of the composer’s career, and those three works were composed in years eight and nine.” During those first ten or so years, these creators weren’t creating much of anything that the outside world noticed. Professor Hayes termed the long and absolutely typical preparatory period “ten years of silence,” which seemed to be required before anything worthwhile could be produced.

In a similar study of 13 1 painters, he found the same pattern. The preparation period was shorter—six years—but still substantial and seemingly impossible to defy, even for supposed prodigies like Picasso. A study of sixty-six poets found a few who produced notable works in less than ten years, but none who managed it in less than five; fifty-five of the sixty six needed ten years or more.

These findings remind us strongly of the ten year rule that researchers have found when they study outstanding performers in any domain. Other researchers, who weren’t necessarily looking for evidence of this rule, have found it anyway. Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard wrote a book length study (Creating Minds) of seven of the greatest innovators of the early twentieth century: Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Mahatma Gandhi, Martha Graham, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. A more diverse group of subjects would be hard to imagine, and Gardner did not set out to prove or disprove anything about the amount of work required for their achievements. But in summing up, he wrote, “1 have been struck throughout this study by the operation of the ten year rule… . Should one begin at age four, like Picasso, one can be a master by the teenage years; composers like Stravinsky and danc-dancers like Graham, who did not begin their creative endeavors until later adolescence, did not hit their stride until their late twenties.”

Not even the Beatles could escape the requirements of deep and broad preparation before producing important innovations. Professor Weisberg of Temple has studied the group’s career and found that they spent thousands of hours performing together—sessions that closely matched the description of deliberate practice—before the world ever heard of them. In the early days they performed very few of their own songs, and those songs were undistinguished; we would never have known about them if they hadn’t been dug up long after the group became successful. The group’s first number 1 hit was “Please Please Me” (1963), written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney after they had been working together for five and a half years. One could certainly debate what kind of creative achievement that song represented; successful as it was, it was by no means a significant innovation in popular music. That had to wait until the group’s so-called middle period, when they produced their albums Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Those albums, consisting entirely of original music, transformed the domain. By the time of Sgt. Pepper, Lennon and McCartney had been working together—extremely hard—for ten years.

As for what exactly is going on during those long periods of preparation, it looks a lot like the acquisition of domain knowledge that takes place during deliberate practice. It is certainly intensive and deep immersion in the domain, frequently under the direction of a teacher, but even when not, the innovator seems driven to learn as much as possible about the domain, to improve, to drive himself or herself beyond personal limits and eventually beyond the limits of the field. Gardner looked back on the stories of the seven great innovators he studied and saw so many common themes that he combined them into a story of a composite character, whom he dubbed Exemplary Creator, or E.C. At some point in adolescence or early adult life, “E.C. has already invested a decade of work in the mastery of the domain and is near the forefront; she has little in addition to learn from her family and from local experts, and she feels a quickened impulse to test herself against the other leading young people in the domain.” As a result, “E.C. ventures toward the city that is seen as a center of vital activities for her domain.”

We see some elements of deliberate practice apparent here: the large investment in mastering the domain, the quest for more advanced instruction, the constant pushing past the comfort zone. As that constant pushing continues, eventually “E.C. discovers a problem area or realm of special interest, one that promises to take the domain into uncharted waters.” That journey can never be easy, and so here we see further parallels with great performers in other realms: “E.C. works nearly all the time, making tremendous demands on herself and on others, constantly raising the ante. In William Butler Yeats’s formation, she chooses perfection of the work over perfection of the life.” We have seen these extremely demanding regimes before, whenever we have looked at how deliberate practice has produced great performance.

Those examples largely from aesthetic fields are highly relevant for business because many of the most important business innovations in today’s world are right-brain, aesthetic creations. Many other vital business innovations are in the realm of science, and here the notion that too much knowledge may interfere with innovation is even harder to support. Consider, for example, one of the most celebrated instances of creative problem solving in all of twentieth-century science, James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Professor Weisberg, in a detailed study, has shown that several other distinguished scientists—including one, Linus Pauling, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for other work—were trying to solve the same problem at the same time, each from a different perspective. If we presume that too much familiarity with a problem is a disadvantage, then we would expect to find that Watson and Crick came at this one unburdened by the excessive data that clouded the thinking of the other researchers. But in reality, the story was just the opposite. In those pre-Internet days (the early 1950s), research findings were not disseminated nearly as easily as they are today, and Weisberg has shown how Watson and Crick came into possession of various papers, X-ray photographs, and raw data, as well as an understanding of X-ray crystallography and physics, that combined into a sum of critically important knowledge that none of the others possessed in total. Specifically, Watson and Crick had information leading them to deduce that the helix consisted of two strands (Pauling thought it was three), and that the strands were on the outside, with the “bases”—the steps in the spiral staircase—on the inside (some researchers thought the bases projected outward from the strands). They were able to calculate the pitch of the helix—the angle at which it spiraled—and how the bases connected to each other.

Watson and Crick were not the first to find each of these pieces of the puzzle. Other scientists realized earlier that the helix must be double, not single or triple, and two other teams beat Watson and Crick to the realization that the strands were on the outside of the Yet Watson and Crick were the first to solve the overall problem of DNA’s structure because they, and they alone, had all the necessary facts. As Weisberg concludes, “one does not have to assume that Watson and Crick were different (or better) thinkers than the others. They simply had available what was needed to develop the correct model of DNA, and the others did not.”

If we’re looking for evidence that too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement, we have not found it in the research. Instead, all evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.

And what about evidence for the related notion that excessive schooling is correlated with lower creative achievement? The contradiction may amount to much less than it seems. Most obviously, years of school may not be a very good measure of domain knowledge, especially in certain realms. Someone with a Ph.D. in literature, for example, has acquired considerable knowledge about the history and interpretation of literature, usually of a specific type; but that’s quite a different domain, requiring different knowledge and skills, from actually creating literature. Indeed, in many creative fields the person who pursues an advanced degree has consciously chosen a path that leads to a professorship, not to a life of innovating in that domain; it makes perfect sense that in these fields, those with the most years of formal schooling would be less eminent as innovators.

In science and technology the situation is different. Advanced education is absolutely required for creative problem solving in today’s world; no one is going to cure cancer as a college sophomore. That’s the reality of today, but remember that the study correlating higher education with lower creative eminence covered the the period from 1450 to 1850. For the first half of that period, science as we know it scarcely existed; getting a high-level degree would not necessarily confer much scientific knowledge in an era when the fundamental principles of the scientific method were still unknown.

For a research period that was in large part prescientific, it shouldn’t be surprising that formal schooling and creative eminence in science didn’t correlate. In short, in a wide range of fields, knowledge of the domain may bear little relation to years of schooling.

The bigger picture is that the great innovators aren’t burdened by knowledge; they’re nourished by it. And they acquire it through a process we’ve seen before, involving many years of demanding deliberate practice activities.

Inovation Doesn’t Strike – It Grows

From here it’s a short step to rethinking the popular view that great creative achievements are without precedent, that they spring “into sudden existence, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter,” as an admiring nineteenth-century author said of James Watt’s steam engine. A closer look at notable innovations in business, the arts, and science (including Watt’s steam engine) shows that they do not arise from nothingness; they are not even remotely unprecedented. Innovation doesn’t reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who’ve mastered the domain as it exists.

Examples are everywhere, though none is more dramatic than Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, deemed by art historians the most important painting of the twentieth century. Both Weisberg and Gardner, in their studies of creativity, consider it at length. It would be hard to name a creative work that seems more disconnected from anything that came before, with its grotesque inhuman faces on human bodies and aggressive nudity; in 1907, this was scandalous. Yet even this shocking creation was built up from many existing influences in art to which Picasso had been exposed—ancient Iberian sculpture, primitive art of Africa and the South Pacific, specific figures and compositions in paintings of Cezanne and Matisse. None of that diminishes the painting’s power; but extensive research has shown that even this landmark work was not created out of nothing, as it may well seem, but was rather a brilliant new combination and elaboration of elements that had been developed over time and absorbed by an artist who had worked many years at mastering his field.

As in art, we also find this in science and technology, despite what we may occasionally have been taught in school. James Watt did not invent the steam engine, and what he did invent most certainly didn’t spring into existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. Many steam engines had been invented before Watt went to work in 1763, and several engines of the type invented by Thomas Newcomen were in commercial use in Britain, pumping water out of coal mines. Not that Newcomen invented the steam engine either; his device was improvement on earlier machines, stretching back in a chain of developments such that no individual can be said to have invented the steam engine. The Newcomen engine wasn’t very efficient, and Watt’s design was much more efficient. It was also, of course, a giant innovation that through its role in the industrial revolution changed the course of history. But it was not some previously unimagined conception that burst forth like a miracle. Just the opposite: It came about because Watt was trying to improve on what already existed, the Newcomen engine, and his long training as a maker of scientific instruments gave him the skills and knowledge with which to do it.

Similarly, Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin. Many machines had been developed to remove the seeds from cotton bolls, and they worked, but only with long-staple cotton, which wasn’t economical to grow on a large scale. Whitney’s device, using many of the same principles as existing machines, worked with short-staple cotton, and that made all the difference. Again, none of this diminishes the importance of the achievement; Whitney’s machine revolutionized the economy of the American South and changed history. But it didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was a brilliant improvement on existing designs that was possible only because Whitney understood what came before.

The steam engine and cotton gin were two of the most significant business innovations ever, and the stories of how such innovations come about remain the same up until the present. From the telegraph to the airplane to the Internet, they’re all adaptations and extensions of what existed, made possible by great insights but entirely impossible without a deep knowledge of, and reliance on, past achievements. Less exalted innovations are no different. Inventor Jim Marggraff, who created the popular LeapPad electronic reading system for kids and the FLY computer pen, which digitizes and stores what you write, told the New York Times that “each creation built on the work that went into making the previous one.”

In his experience, as in the experiences of other creators, innovations don’t get easier to develop if you distance yourself from the problem. Instead, “the aha moments grow out of hours of thought and study,” he said. Douglas K. van Duyne, an Internet entrepreneur who cofounded the Naviscent consulting firm, expressed the same view to the Times: “The idea of epiphany is a dreamer’s paradise where people want to believe that things are easier than they are.”

How Inovators Become Great

It’s important to realize that innovation on the scale of the FLY computer pen, which may seem far removed from Beethoven’s symphonies or Einstein’s theories, is not fundamentally different in type. Until recently, researchers have often thought of creativity in two categories: Big-C creativity, which yields famous, influential products like the integrated circuit or Huckleberry Finn; and little-c creativity, which produces everyday creations like a TV commercial or a florist’s arrangement of flowers. But Ronald A. Beghetto of the University of Oregon and James C. Kaufman of California State University at San Bernardino have suggested that both types of innovation exist “on the same developmental continuum,” and that the continuum extends even further back than little-c creativity, to what they call mini-c creativity. In this framework, “all levels of creative performance follow a trajectory that starts with novel and personally meaningful interpretations (mini-c), which can then progress to interpersonally judged novel and meaningful contributions (little-c) and even develop into superior creative performance (Big-C).”

This perspective is highly significant because it ties together the evidence showing that creative achievement is attained in the same way as other kinds of achievement. As Beghetto and Kaufman state, “Big-C performance is more likely influenced by intense deliberate practice within a particular domain than by some special, genetic endowment of a few individuals.” As creativity scholars, they see the work of Ericsson and his colleagues as providing “compelling empirical evidence in support of this developmental perspective, demonstrating the important role that deliberate practice plays in superior creative performance.”

That is, innovators become great in the same way that everybody else does.

Yet we still face those research studies showing how people get stuck in ruts when they deal repeatedly with the same kinds of problems. How can these be squared with the experiences of real-world innovators that we’ve seen? An answer emerges when we look more closely at the research. In the famous water-jar experiments, subjects in a laboratory setting were given jars and a series of five problems, each of which could be solved by the same routine of filling and transferring in a certain way. They were then given a group of different problems, one of which could be solved only by a simpler procedure, which the subjects were unable to see. That result seemed to show that too much familiarity with a problem blinds a person to innovative solutions.

But if we step back and consider this situation, we see how different it is from the cases of actual creative problem solvers. These research subjects had not devoted themselves to the study of this domain or spent thousands of hours understanding problems of this type; as far as we can tell, everything they knew about this field was what they learned from the five same-solution problems contrived by the researchers and presented to them. If it then turns out that the subjects weren’t very good at devising solutions to other, different problems, we should not be surprised; we certainly shouldn’t suppose that this result tells us much about the factors that help or hinder eminent innovators. These experiments have been interpreted as showing what happens when people become too immersed in solving problems of a particular type, but they could be interpreted perhaps more plausibly, even compellingly, as showing what happens when people have not immersed themselves in their field of problem solving nearly enough. The experiments showed that subjects with no previous exposure to the problems were able to find a simple solution that the experienced subjects couldn’t see, but the experiments didn’t involve subjects who would be of most interest to us—those who had devoted major time and study to the problems.

The research studies are interesting and justly famous, but they don’t contradict what we’ve seen in the experiences of great creators and innovators.

And what about those legends of great creative products appearing suddenly and fully formed before their creators? The answer is simple: They aren’t true. Coleridge may have been as good a public relations man as he was a poet, or so believes one critic who says Coleridge made up the dream story to help sell the poem. In any case, an earlier version of the poem has been found, showing that Coleridge revised it considerably before publication. Even in Coleridge’s own version of the events, he says he faded into opium-induced slumber while reading a seventeenth-century book called Pilgrimage, then woke to see his famous poem that begins “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .”As the critic John Lowes discovered, Pilgrimage describes Khan’s city in a passage that begins, “In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace … ” Coleridge, like all great creators, built on an existing foundation.

Abraham Lincoln’s pen did not trace out the immortal words of the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope while he was riding to the battlefield; a number of drafts of the speech, on White House writing paper, have been found. As for the original eureka moment, nothing in Archimedes’ extensive writings, or in the writings of any of his contemporaries, supports or even hints at the bathtub story. Scholars have concluded that it’s a myth.

Making Organizations Innovative

Just as the principles that produce exceptional creativity and innovation in individuals are the same as the principles that produce great performance in general, the lessons are the same for organizations. All the steps described in the last chapter for helping organizations im prove their performance will help them become more innovative as well. In addition, organizations can observe a few other principles that will specifically improve their chances of producing valuable innova tions. The vast innovation industry has produced countless books on organizational creativity; but with the principles of deliberate practice and great performance in mind, a few ideas stand out.

The impression that emerges most strongly from the research on great creators is that of their enthusiastic immersion in their domain and their resulting deep knowledge of it. Since organizations are not innovative—only people are innovative—it follows that the most effective steps an organization can take to build innovation will include helping people expand and deepen their knowledge of their field. In the previous chapter we saw some of the ways an organization can do this. An additional approach, identified by McKinsey, is creating innovation networks within the organization—finding ways to connect people so that they can talk with one another about the problems they’re working on, the approaches they’re trying, and what they’re learning. The rationale, as explained by McKinsey’s Joanna Barsh, Maria M. Capozzi, and Jonathan Davidson, is that “Since new ideas seem to spur more new ideas, networks generate a cycle of innovation.” We’ve seen that exceptional creators often build these networks on their own, a pattern observed by Howard Gardner, which he indicates when he notes that his Exemplary Creator moves to the big city in order to be among the leading figures of her domain.

One of the main reasons why the people in organizations don’t produce more innovation is that the culture isn’t friendly to it. New ideas aren’t really welcomed. Risk taking isn’t embraced. Corporate surveys show this, but we don’t need the surveys; we all know it from experience. A revealing finding from McKinsey research explains why the problem doesn’t get fixed very often: Top management doesn’t think it’s a problem. In a survey of six hundred executives, those at the top thought the main reason why their company wasn’t more innovative was that it didn’t have enough of the right people. Lower level managers hi^ld a markedly different view—that the company had the right people, but the culture kept them from innovating as they should. Any one who has spent time in organizations knows which of those two groups is more likely to be right. Changing an organizational culture to be friendlier to innovation, or in any other way, is a massive, long term project that we can’t explore in detail here, aside from making one observation: Culture change starts at the top. As long as those C level executives think the culture is fine, it will never change. That’s why McKinsey s survey explains a great deal about why so many companies aren’t as innovative as they want to be. Organizations can take two other steps that are especially effective in light of how innovation really happens: telling people what’s needed, and giving them freedom to innovate.

Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speaks often to business groups and typically takes them through a little exercise. He finds someone in the group whose birthday is that day, or the day before or after, and brings that person forward. Then he says to the group, “It’s Mary’s birthday! Sing her her song!” Without another word of instruction, the group immediately sings “Happy Birthday” to Mary. Then Zander says, “Well, that was very good. But you know what ? I think you can do better. Now please sing it again, but this time — better. Go!” Complete silence. No one makes a sound. After several awkward seconds, Zander points out what has just happened: When everyone understood what to do, they did it easily, together, and with out being led. But when they didn’t understand—when told simply to sing it better—they became paralyzed.

It’s often the same with innovation in organizations. Leaders exhort the troops to be innovative, but no one understands clearly what that means. Unsure where to go, they go nowhere. Organizations that want more innovation would benefit from telling everyone what kind of in novation would be most valuable. Because waiting for lightning bolts won’t work—people would have to devote enormous time and effort to mastery of the field in which they hope to innovate—resources can be massively wasted if those people are pointed in the wrong direction. The right direction should be stated clearly: We need new ways to extend a product line, or new ways to expand in Latin America, or new ways to identify the needs of our customers, or new ways to lower our capital costs. What’s important is that people understand the organization’s priorities and thus know where innovation will do the most good.

The other step, giving people freedom to innovate, is a matter of motivation. The topic of why people put themselves through the rigors required for great performance is discussed in the last chapter, but it’s worth noting here that on creative tasks in particular, some research suggests that people perform more innovatively when they are offered no extrinsic rewards; offering them a reward can actually reduce their creativity. Not all the research agrees, but the point is intuitively plausible: People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money. As we’ve seen, money is never at the top of the list of motivators anyway, and when we’re ask ing people to become masters of their field, we want to rely on the strongest possible inducements. That helps explain why some of the most notably innovative companies, such as 3M and Google, let employees spend a certain amount of their time, typically 10 to 20 percent, on any project that they find personally compelling. Such projects will not always help the company; that’s a risk. But the benefit is that follow your heart policies embody a culture of trust, which is, as noted, an important contributor to creativity and almost impossibly difficult for many companies to adopt. That’s why companies that adopt it hold a competitive advantage.

Understanding where innovation comes from is particularly important because we tend to believe deeply that this type of performance, even more than others, is a mysterious gift. It’s easier for most of us to be lieve that a great tennis player achieved his success through the principles of deliberate practice than to believe that a great inventor got there that way. But the evidence shows that the most important factor in their high achievement is the same for both. Professor Raymond S. Nickerson of Tufts University has written that “the importance of domain-specific knowledge as a determinant of creativity is generally underestimated, even though investigators have given it considerable emphasis.” What makes the biggest difference is the willingness to go through the demanding process of acquiring that knowledge over time.

David N. Perkins of Harvard, surveying the many factors that have been proposed as important elements of creativity, wrote, “The clearest evi dence of all demonstrates the connection between creative thinking and values broadly construed—a person’s commitments and aspira tions Much more than we usually suppose, creating is an intentional endeavor.” Wanting to achieve mastery of a field, committing to the long, hard work of achieving it, and then intending to innovate—that’s how it happens.

The heavy burden of the evidence is that creativity is much more available to us than we tend to think. The most significant constraint, as with all kinds of exceptional performance, is mostly likely to be our willingness to do the difficult work required. On that point, the study of innovation in particular has raised questions that are actually sig nificant for all types of top performance: How early in life should the work of deliberate practice begin, and how late in life is it effective? In creative fields such as music, people may begin training when they’re very young and keep working until they’re very old. What is the larger meaning of this? Does achieving exceptional performance take longer than it used to? If so, what is the role of the supporting environment? It turns out that the power of deliberate practice extends very broadly through life. We turn next to why that is so and what it implies.

Chapter Ten: Great Performance in Youth and Age

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The extraordinary benefits of starting early and continuing on and on

Why are Nobel Prize winners receiving their awards at increasingly advanced ages? They are, and at a fairly dramatic rate.

The explanation reveals a number of trends and basic realities about exceptional performance. It shows why reaching the highest levels in many fields is harder than it used to be. That fact forces us to examine the effectiveness of deliberate practice throughout life, from the earliest ages to the oldest. It also leads us to consider the kinds of support structures that will be needed to help anyone reach exceptional achieve merits in the future—for one of the most consistent findings in the research is that nobody makes this journey alone.

The advancing ages of Nobel laureates and other innovators was discovered by Benjamin F. (ones of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He examined the winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics as well as others who had made the most notable advances in science and technology over a period that was roughly the twentieth century. When he determined the ages at which they had made their outstanding advances, he found a surprising fact: The average age had increased by about six years during just a one hundred-year period. The finding survived every test of statistical significance. Something big was going on, but why?

The most obvious explanation would be that average life spans increased greatly over the twentieth century, so this finding makes perfect sense. Of course Nobel laureates were getting older; so was everybody else. The trouble is, this explanation doesn’t hold up. Scientists and economists very rarely make important contributions in their later years, so it doesn’t matter that they might be living to eighty rather than sixty five. In addition, confirming this logic, Jones was able to use sophisticated statistical techniques to control for the aging population, and he found that its effect was zero.

The real explanation was at the other end of the spectrum. These eminent innovators were getting older not because the oldest ones were pulling the average up, but because the youngest ones were pushing the average up. Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics for work he did at age twenty-six, and no one thought that was remarkable. Quite the con trary. Paul Dirac, who also won a Nobel Prize in physics for work he did at age twenty-six (in 1928), wrote a famous verse on exactly this point: “Age is, of course, a fever chill/ that every physicist must fear./ He’s better dead than living still/ when once he’s past his thirtieth year.”

Yet by the century’s end, any physicist who died before the age of thirty would probably remain unheard of. Jones found that the innovators he studied began making active contributions to their fields at age twenty three, on average, in 1900, but by 1999 the average age had risen to thirty-one, a very large increase of eight years, and of course the ages at which they made their greatest contributions were even later. The reason Nobel laureates and other innovators are getting older is not that they’re living longer but that it’s taking them significantly longer to make a contribution in the first place.

Other research shows that this trend applies not just to the most ad-vanced thinkers. The age at which people receive their first patent, across a wide range of fields in business and government, has been in-creasing at a rate of six to seven years per century. Jones concluded, “Taking the facts together, we see similar trends among both the great est minds and ordinary inventors. We appear to be seeing a general phenomenon.”

It’s general because it’s happening in all heavily knowledge-based fields, including those in which many people work. Knowledge is the foundation of great performance, and in fields where important advances are being made continually, mastering the accumulated knowledge takes longer all the time. That’s easy to see in physics. When you think of all the twentieth-century giants in this field—Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi, Feynman, and many others—it’s clear why today’s aspiring physicist needs many more years of preparatory study than even Einstein did.

But the same principle holds beyond physics and the other hard sciences, extending into all knowledge-rich realms, emphatically including business. Economics and corporate finance have been transformed in the past hundred years. Marketing, operations research, organizational behavior—al l have developed into advanced disciplines that require far more study than in the past. Even the ever-swelling U.S. tax code— now four times longer than War and Peace—demands many years of devoted study by those whose work requires that they understand it. The Nobel Prize effect is happening in all these domains and many more.

Reinforcing that effect are generally rising standards, which are forcing more intensive preparation on anyone who hopes to excel. We saw in chapter 1 how several factors are pushing standards up in virtually every domain as competition increases and methods of advancement are constantly improved. And not just in the world of work: All parents with kids applying to college seem to be extremely glad that they applied back when they did, and not today.

The Supporting Environment

As the demands of excellence increase in every field, so grows the importance of the supporting environment in which prospective achievers dwell, starting at the earliest age. No one becomes extraordinary on his or her own, and a striking feature in the lives of great performers is the valuable support they received at critical times in their development.

Certainly some great performers have had to fight poverty and discouragement, but that’s not the same as lack of support. In virtually every case, the supporting environment is critical. It exists at several levels, some of which you can’t do much about— though the findings on supporting environments at every level furnish insight that’s valuable in shaping environments that you can control.

Dean Keith Simonton has observed that “expertise of the highest order is most likely to appear in a particular sociocultural context.” For example, Kenneth Clarke, the famous English art critic and author of Civilization, believed that great art was usually created amid stability; you won’t get many great statues or symphonies from residents of a city under siege. Simonton’s research found that “exceptional creators are less likely to develop during times of anarchy but are more likely to develop during periods of political fragmentation, when a civilization is divided into numerous independent states,” which is a pretty good description of Renaissance Italy. Cultures encourage or discourage specific pursuits at different times. In Western cultures today you’ll get plenty of support for medical research into a cure for cancer, but two hundred years ago phony cancer cures were so prevalent that you would have been regarded as a dangerous charlatan.

If the culture is at one end of the spectrum of supporting environments—the widest, most immutable part—then at the other end is the home, and wide research suggests that it is by far the most important part. The circumstances in which people begin developing in their eventual field of achievement can make a major difference, and even in business and other domains where development often begins later than childhood, findings about effective supporting environments in the home hold larger lessons that can be applied more generally.

The greatest value of a supporting home environment is that it enables a person to start developing early. We’ve seen that in a few specialized fields, such as baseball pitching and ballet, the body can be adapted in critical ways only at early ages, after which the bones calcify and the changes become impossible; the pitcher will never get his arm back and the dancer will never turn her feet out as fully as necessary. Brain adaptations seem to follow a similar pattern in at least a few cases.

Violinists’ brains devote more territory to the workings of the left hand—the one that plays the notes—than do other people’s brains, and also more space than is devoted to the workings of their own right hands, with the effect much more pronounced in people who started their music study at an early age. A separate effect involves myelin, the substance that wraps slowly around neurons with practice, insulating and strengthening key connections in the brain. Practice in childhood causes myelin to build up more than does practice in adulthood. A study of professional pianists found that the more practice they did before age sixteen, the more myelin they had in the critical parts of their brains.

Starting early holds advantages that become less available later in life. Yet even more important than these advantages is a different factor, and that is the simple matter of time and resources. As we have seen repeatedly, becoming world-class great at anything seems to require thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice. For example, the top-ranked violinists in the Berlin study had accumulated about ten thousand hours of practice by age twenty, at which point they were practicing some twenty-eight hours a week and spending many additional hours studying, taking lessons, preparing, and organizing. For an adult facing the responsibilities of a family and a career, devoting that kind of time to purely developmental activities—activities that cost money rather than earn money—would be exceedingly tough. Only in childhood and adolescence will the time typically be available.

That reality creates another advantage to starting early, a competitive one that we’ve considered before. In any field where people can start early, starting late may put one in an eternal and possibly hopeless quest to catch up. For example, when those top ranked violinists turn professional, they don’t stop practicing. On the contrary, they practice even more, averaging more than thirty hours a week, accumulating more than fifteen hundred hours a year. Any adult thinking of starting a professional career in any field in which some participants begin their development as small children should first get out a calculator and face the music.

What Homes Can Teach Organizations

The specific nature of the supporting environment is obviously crucial, and a number of researchers have identified the most important char acteristics. In the largest and most famous examination of the topic, the legendary educational researcher Benjamin S. Bloom directed a study of 120 young men and women who were among America’s top performers in widely divergent fields piano playing, sculpting, swimming, tennis, mathematics, and neurology. After extensive interviews with the performers and their families, his team found that their home environments shared a number of traits.

Despite wide variations in the parents’ backgrounds, professions, and incomes, their homes tended to be child oriented. Kids were important, and the parents were willing to do a lot—almost anything—to help them. The parents also believed in and modeled a strong work ethic. Work came before play, obligations had to be met, goals were to be pursued. In one of the most cited conclusions from Bloom’s report, he found that “To excel, to do one’s best, to work hard, and to spend one’s time constructively were emphasized over and over again.” In an organization, this would be called the culture—the norms and expectations that are simply in the air.

The parents of these high achievers gave them strong guidance on the general choice of a field, but chance played a large role in the specific choice. The artists tended to come from artistic parents, the athletes from athletic parents, the mathematicians and neurologists from very learned parents, and the parents provided early encouragement in those directions. But a child might end up studying the piano because a piano was available, or become a swimmer because the swimming team needed one more member. The children were not irresistibly drawn to specific fields, nor did their parents force them.

The parents did choose teachers, which was one of their most important roles as their children progressed and needed to be challenged at higher levels. The child’s initial teacher was almost always someone who happened to be convenient—a local coach, teacher, or relative. But invariably these kids progressed to a level where they needed a better teacher, and these next teachers were frequently not convenient; parents had to devote lots of time and energy to finding the right teacher and then driving the child to and from lessons. Ultimately these young achievers moved on to some form of master level teacher, a step that demands major sacrifices of time, money, and energy by both parents and students.

In an organization this progression is analogous to choosing developmental assignments that continually stretch an employee’s abilities.

Employees aren’t children, but many of them, like children, will not voluntarily keep seeking new work experiences that stress their weak est professional muscles; the temptation to continue doing what you do comfortably is too great. Employers, like parents and coaches, have to keep pushing them to develop, and the lesson for employers is that the process requires sacrifices on their part as well—in the form of suboptimal performance by a business unit when a manager is taken away from it for a developmental assignment elsewhere, or periods of little or no productivity from an employee while he or she is learning new skills. But the lesson also is that these sacrifices pay off.

In addition to choosing appropriate new teachers, the parents in the research project monitored their children’s practice, made sure there was time for it, and made sure they did it. This is worth a closer look not only because practice is centrally important to achievement but also because kids in particular seem to hate it. If the research suggests factors that contribute to kids practicing, those findings may be valuable to everyone. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago and colleagues investigated why it’s easier for some adolescents than others to sustain concentrated, effortful study, the core of deliberate practice and high achievement. The research focused on the students’ family environments, evaluating them on two dimensions, stimulation and support. A stimulating environment was one with lots of opportunities to learn and high academic expectations. A supportive environ ment was one with well-defined rules and jobs, without much arguing over who had to do what, and in which family members could rely on one another. The researchers classified family environments as stimulating or not and supportive or not, creating four possible combinations.

Adolescents living in three of those combinations reported the typical low interest, low energy experience of studying. But in the fourth combination, the environment that was both stimulating and supportive, students were much more engaged, attentive, and alert in their studying.

This key finding fits exactly with observations in Bloom’s research.

The environments he examined were also stimulating—”parents encouraged the curiosity of their children at an early age and answered their questions with great care”—and were structured and supportive, with everyone having clear roles and tasks, and parents going to some lengths to support their children’s practice. In this light we see another clue to why so few organizations produce a steady flow of top performers. Most organizations are not intellectually stimulating, even when the field itself might seem fascinating; rather than offering opportunities to learn and rewarding curiosity, the typical organization leaves inquisitive employees to find their own ways to learn. And instead of furnishing structure and support—meaning clear roles and responsibilities in a positive, forward looking, build-on-successes environment- many organizations operate in a cover-your ass culture that is mainly about avoiding blame. Such cultures have always seemed like a miserable fact of life, but the research on supporting environments shows specifically why they’re poisonous. It shows additionally why any organization that can buck the trends by providing stimulation, structure, and support is not only rare but also powerful .

Should We Create Business Prodigies?

We’ve seen often that early training can produce high achievers who are surprisingly young, and the research has shown us how that hap-pens. We’ve grown accustomed to watching sixteen year-old pianists, chess players, and gymnasts who are astoundingly good. Yet why is it that in certain other fields, notably business, we never see sixteen year-old wonders? The glib answer is that a kid of that age can’t legally sign a check or a lease; in fact that answer embodies larger truths about when to begin training a young person in particular domains, how to do it, and what the principles of early development mean for business and related fields.

The fundamental reason why there are no teenage prodigies in certain domains is that it’s impossible to accumulate enough development time by the teenage years. Sometimes the reason is simply physical size.

A five year-old can practice the piano or violin—reduced-size violins are made for that purpose but cannot practice the trombone or double bass because they’re just too big. So world-class trombonists and double-bassists tend to be older. In other cases a decade of development is not enough. This is the Nobel Prize effect : There are no teenage par tide physicists, even though a child can start learning math and science at age five, because acquiring the necessary knowledge these days seems to take at least twenty years.

Is that why we don’t see eighteen year old business wizards because the sheer volume of necessary knowledge is too great to be acquired by that age? The explanation doesn’t seem completely persuasive.

Let’s leave aside those businesspeople who are actually scientists on the payroll of a corporation, and focus on managers. The knowledge and skills needed to be a successful manager are formidable for sure. On the other hand, as any manager who’s being frank will tell you, running a business is frequently not rocket science. Formulating a business unit strategy is a lot of work, but not work on the order of, say, proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (which took 357 years).

The answer may instead be that traditionally, training in business skills doesn’t start early. Our discussion of early development will have caused any businessperson to reflect that virtually nothing like this happens in business—there isn’t intensive, focused development of business skills in young people that’s anything like what happens with swimmers, artists, and mathematicians, for example. The question then arises of whether it’s even possible. Postponing for a moment the issue of whether it’s desirable, would it be possible and effective to train young people intensively in business knowledge and skills?

The answer is clearly yes. Development must always begin at the beginning, so you wouldn’t try teaching a five-year old about the capital asset pricing model or the inner workings of the Food and Drug Ad-ministration. But you could start teaching basic domain knowledge— the facts of a specific business—and of course this was done routinely for centuries until fairly recently. Kids started learning the family business or some other business before age ten. We can appreciate the wisdom of the apprenticeship system, which immersed people in a particular field under a skilled teacher’s direction from a young age, in keeping with the basic principles of early development.

Beyond general domain knowledge, it would be possible to train quite young people in more specific business skills. Basic finance con cepts would fit perfectly well in an elementary level math curriculum; just ask Ram Charan, one of the world’s most eminent management consultants, who says his deep feel for corporate finance began with what he learned in his family’s shoe shop in India, where he worked from the age of eight. Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell and one of the most celebrated CEOs of recent decades, will tell you something similar about his childhood experiences in his own family’s shoe shop in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Fairly young children could also be educated in the business aspects of probability and statistics, which are extraordinarily important in making good economic decisions and avoiding the irrational errors that people very commonly commit, as the study of behavioral finance has revealed. Corporations’ number-one complaint about new young employees is that they’re terrible at writing and speaking, training them in those skills from a business perspective could begin at a very early age. From such beginning steps, it would seem possible to train young people several hours a day over a period of many years for high achievement in a specific business.

It would be possible—but would it be good? Should we use the principles of great performance and early development to turn out little Jack Welches and Donald Trumps prepared to be corporate titans by the time they reach voting age? The evidence suggests we could do it, or at least come close, yet most of us instinctively reject that idea. Why?

The instinct is worth examining.

Developed countries don’t use the apprenticeship system anymore because in the nineteenth century the nature of work changed. Most Americans back then got no more than an eighth grade education, which was all you needed to work on a farm, and that’s what most peopie did. But as the industrial revolution made farming more efficient— thus requiring fewer people—and sparked the growth of factories, which needed more people, eighth grade schooling was no longer enough. In the early twentieth century something called the high school movement swept America as towns nationwide decided that every student should complete twelve years of schooling. At first this was job training; the new high schools taught students basic math, English, and science skills, and sometimes much more specific skills as well, that would equip them for the growing industrial economy. But later, as the country got richer, high school curricula expanded beyond job skills into all corners of the liberal arts. More students went on to college, the great majority pursuing liberal arts majors. It became a mark of the developed world’s twentieth-century prosperity—many would say one of its proudest achievements—that a full, rounded, advanced education came within reach of almost everyone. Your work and daily life might never require you to know Homer or Shakespeare or the history of Russia, or, for that matter, trigonometry or chemistry. But there’s more to life than work, and knowing these things enriches your life and makes you a more fulfilled person.

Seen from that perspective, the idea of adults deciding to sacrifice their child’s broad education in order to put little Max or Ashley through hours of daily training to become a top-notch business executive by age twenty-one seems barbarous. And maybe it is. But as we think about it, let’s keep a couple of points in mind.

First, our society has very little problem with kids being directed toward fields other than business at early ages. No one seems to think that Earl Woods was a bad father for directing Tiger emphatically toward golf from the age of eighteen months. On the contrary, he seems to have been a wonderful father, and his son adored him. Nor do we seem to mind when young achievers in other fields sacrifice a broad education in order to focus on their chosen domains. A bit of tut-tutting followed LeBron James’s decision to go straight from high school to pro basketball, but now that he’s enormously wealthy and popular, that’s all forgotten. The Polgar sisters learned enough about nonchess subjects to pass the required exams, but they never went to school at all; nonetheless, the Hungarian public hailed them as national heroes. In these and other cases of high achievement at early ages, the brilliance of what has been achieved blots out any sight of what has been given up. If similar techniques were applied to early training in business, and similar results produced, would the same effect follow?

Second, even if we reject the notion of purposefully turning five-year-olds into future banking executives or textile plant managers or retail strategists, other societies may not hesitate. Fast-developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will view the research on early development from their own perspectives, and there’s no reason to assume they’ll be just like ours. If governments or families in some of these countries decide to focus on turning out managers who are whizzes at age twenty-one and will just keep getting better, we will have to confront that reality and perhaps think again about our own views.

Defying Age

Our look at how some people reach remarkable heights at early ages should not obscure an important fact about age and achievement: Even when young people perform exceptionally, they usually develop further.

Yo-Yo Ma was a world-famous cellist at age twenty, but he was much better at forty. Jamie Dimon was an amazingly accomplished financial services executive at age twenty-nine, but he was much better at fifty, as CEO of JPMorgan Chase. The reality of continued improvement over many years has led researchers to study how great performers develop over their lifetimes. The findings illuminate how performance is—and isn’t—affected by advancing age.

One of the best established and least surprising findings in psychology is that as we age, we slow down. Remembering things, solving unfamiliar problems—these take about twice as long in our sixties as they did in our twenties. We move more slowly. Coordinating our arms and legs is more difficult. We’ve all seen it happen, and anyone in their thirties or beyond has experienced it. So we might reasonably suppose that this unavoidable trend spells doom for excellent performance. If our minds and bodies deteriorate with the march of time, there would seem to be nothing we can do to maintain top-level performance beyond a certain number of years.

Thus it’s surprising to find that this isn’t true at all, and not just in a few notable cases, but generally.

Somehow, excellent performers manage to continue achieving at high levels well beyond the point where age-related declines would seem to make that impossible.

Example: On January 10, 2008, the New York Philharmonic made an announcement that shocked those who were intimately familiar with the orchestra as well as those who knew nothing about it. The news was that Stanley Drucker, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, would retire after the 2008-2009 season. That surprised aficionados, because Drucker was such a fixture of the Philharmonic that it was hard to imagine the orchestra without him. But it surprised nonfans even more because it seemed impossible to believe: By the time of his retirement, Drucker would have been performing with the Philharmonic for sixty-one years. Possessing what must be one of the working population’s shorter resumes, he joined the orchestra at age nineteen and would be retiring at eighty.

Cases of people working for the same employer for extremely long times are not rare, but this is different. How could anyone as old as Drucker possibly perform at the level required of the lead clarinetist in one of the world’s preeminent orchestras? How could he move his fingers fast enough? How could he remember long clarinet concertos, which he continued to perform from memory as a soloist?

Research reveals an answer that applies across fields. Studies in a very broad range of domains—management, aircraft piloting, music, bridge, and others—show consistently that excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise. For example, a study of older expert pianists found that their general processing speed had declined just as their age would predict. Among the general population this decline is evident in many ways. Psychologists measure how fast people can push a button in response to a question on a screen or how fast they can tap their fingers or coordinate finger movements; all these things slow down with age. But while excellent pianists slowed down like everyone else in how fast they could respond to a choice on a screen, which is not a skill that makes much difference to a pianist, they didn’t slow down at all when it came to piano-related skills like finger tapping or finger coordination. They could do those things as if they hadn’t aged at all. It’s the same story in many other fields.

When it comes to tasks that are part of their domain of expertise, great performers can keep performing at a high level even after their skills outside their domain have deteriorated.

In light of what we’ve seen about the nature of great performance, this finding shouldn’t be surprising. After all, we’ve seen repeatedly that great performance doesn’t come from superior general abilities; it comes from specific skills that have been developed in a particular way over a long period of time. So it makes sense that when general abilities decline with age, that decline need not affect the specific skills that undergird great performance. It need not affect them—yet there must be more to the story, because of course there are plenty of great performers whose skills do indeed decline with age. For every Stanley Drucker, there are many others whose names we’ve forgotten, high-level performers in many fields who faded away after brief, successful careers. So why do some carry on, but not others?

The explanation seems to be the factor that made them excellent performers in the first place, deliberate practice. Just as mere experience, even decades of it, is not enough to make anyone a great performer, neither is it enough to defy the effects of age, even in a person’s field of specialization. Several studies have shown that just continuing to work at a job is not enough to stave off age-related declines. Architects have presumably developed strong spatial abilities, for example, but in a study of architects who were not distinguished except by continued employment, those abilities declined predictably with age. It takes something more, and what it takes is effortful, focused, designed practice. Those expert pianists who maintained their piano skills as they aged were compared with a sample of amateur pianists, some of whom had forty years of experience but had long since given up anything that could be called deliberate practice. The amateurs, unlike the experts, suffered predictable, across-the-board age-related declines.

The reason deliberate practice works in this way is no mystery, for we’ve already seen the effect. In general, well-designed practice, pursued for enough time, enables a person to circumvent the limitations that would otherwise hold back his or her performance, and circumventing limitations is the key to high performance at an advanced age. In a study of excellent chess players, the older ones chose moves just as well as the younger ones, but they did it in a different way.

They didn’t consider as many possible moves because they couldn’t, but they limitations is the key to high performance at an advanced age. In a study of excellent chess players, the older ones chose moves just as well as the younger ones, but they did it in a different way. They didn’t consider as many possible moves because they couldn’t, but they compensated through greater knowledge of positions.

More generally, continued deliberate practice enables top performers to maintain skills that would otherwise decline with age, and to develop other skills and strategies to compensate for declines that can no longer be avoided. That approach can work for a long time. The piano virtuoso Wilhelm Backhaus said that in his fifties he increased his practice of etudes, which he felt he needed in order to maintain his technical skills.

At a later age, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein felt that he could no longer play as fast as he used to, but he developed a strategy for compensating: In the passages preceding the fast ones, he would slow down more than he used to, so the following passages, even though he played them slower than in the old days, would seem faster by contrast. He continued to perform publicly, to great acclaim, until he was eighty-nine.

Just as improved methods of practice have raised standards of performance in virtually every field over time, they are also enabling top performers to continue achieving at high levels lor more years than previously thought possible. We see the effect dramatically in sports, where the average age of professional players has been edging up for years. In baseball, Julio Franco played for the Atlanta Braves in the 2007 season at age forty-nine, thanks to a regimen of intense exercise and carefully designed diet that’s unlike anything that was used in baseball decades ago. His trainer told the New York Times, “When I got at quainted with him, I learned quickly that you can’t associate him with people of his age. His discipline is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” Franco is by far the oldest player 111 major league baseball, and that’s assuming you believe he was born in 1958, as his official bio states. Early bios said 1954, which would make him a fifty three year-old major league player.

Other sports have their Methuselahs. In pro football, Atlanta’s Morten Andersen is forty-seven, and in pro basketball, Houston’s Dikembe Mutombo is forty-two; each is at or near his sport’s all time-record age, and as of this writing, each is still playing. The same phenomenon is happening in amateur sports—running, swimming, and others. Researchers are finding many examples of runners who, through harder and better-designed training, maintain performance as they age at levels never previously matched, and even some who improve, running faster at sixty than they did at fifty. A seventy four year-old man in 2004 ran a marathon in 2:54:44, which is four minutes faster than the gold medal performance in the 1896 Olympics.

We can also train our mental abilities far later in life than previously believed. For decades the conventional view in medicine was that once we reach adulthood, we can only lose neurons, not add them, and our brain’s ability to adapt itself to new challenges, known as brain plasticity, shuts down. More recent research shows that none of this is true. Our brains are perfectly able to add new neurons well into old age when conditions demand it, and brain plasticity doesn’t stop with age. Give your brain the right kind of training- for example, by making it try to do two things at once—and plasticity will increase in the regions that normally show the greatest atrophy in later years.

A phenomenon like the aging of professional athletes may be occurring in purely cognitive fields as well. Certainly we’re seeing businesspeople performing at the highest levels at advanced ages. Warren Buffett continues to run Berkshire Hathaway brilliantly in his late seventies. Rupert Murdoch, at about the same age, is aggressively expanding his huge media conglomerate, News Corporation. Henry Kissinger continues his work as a consultant in his rnideighties, and Sumner Red stone continues to run Viacom and CBS at the same age. This is not merely an instance of life expectancies increasing generally; what’s significant is that these executives and others are able to continue working effectively at the top echelons of business ten or twenty years past what used to be considered normal retirement.

Even Benjamin Jones’s study of top scientific innovators may be worth updating. Recall his finding that the upper limit of their ages at the time of their innovations wasn’t increasing; achievement fell off sharply after about age forty, and the average age of the whole group was about thirty-nine. His study period ended in 1999, but if one looks at Nobel Prize winners in physics since then, one finds a noticeably older group. Their average age at the time of their achievement was about forty one, and in this discipline where Nobelist Paul Dirac thought a person was “better dead than living still” after age twenty nine, we find among the twenty two winners from 2000 through 2007 some who made their mark at ages fifty eight, sixty-one, and sixty five.

Our insight into how it’s possible to maintain top level performance into the later decades of life helps us understand those cases in which it doesn’t happen. Most people stop the deliberate practice necessary to sustain their performance. We can’t necessarily criticize them. It may be a completely rational decision, for example in the case of a pro athlete who has earned millions of dollars and has little to gain but much to lose, in the possibility of serious injury, by continuing to play.

Businesspeople who get rich early may see no further reason to keep challenging themselves.

More broadly, every high performer is continually making a cost benefit analysis when it comes to deliberate practice, and as the years go by, the costs increase while the benefits diminish. Improving per formance becomes more difficult, and the performer focuses more on just maintaining a given level; as even that become unrealistic, the performer seeks ways to compensate for the encroaching weaknesses. The hours required for all this remain punishing, and it’s easy to understand how elite performers may come to feel the effort is no longer worth what it produces. The key concept, however, is that for many years in a person’s life—more years than most of us believe—performance deterioration in our chosen field isn’t an inexorable process. It is, rather, a choice about how much effort we want to invest in our performance.

As Karl Malone, the NBAs second all time top scorer, told the Los Angeles Times about aging athletes,”It’s not that their bodies stop, it’s just that they’ve decided to stop pushing it.”

Eventually, of course, everyone’s performance declines. Even the most diligent deliberate practice cannot fend off the advancing years forever. When Arthur Rubinstein gave up performing publicly at eighty nine, it was because he was becoming blind and deaf. He couldn’t practice his way past that. And then there’s the ultimate slowing down, which even the greatest performers must confront. Warren Buffett told his shareholders in his 2008 letter, “I ‘ve reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death—abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term thinking outside the box. ”

The perspectives of both youth and age raise a profound question about great performance, one we’ve touched on before but now must face directly. If it’s all about the punishing demands of deliberate practice, the continual, painful pushing beyond what’s comfortable, for hours a day and years on end, then why does anyone do it ? A parent can make a child practice, but not with the focus and intensity needed to become great. Something else must make the child do that. At life’s other extreme, Stanley Drucker doesn’t need to work, and he certainly doesn’t need to put in the hours required to remain the top clarinetist in one of the world’s greatest orchestras. Warren Buffett doesn’t need to work. Why do they push themselves? Why does a chess player study four or five hours a day when becoming even one of the world’s top ranked grand masters does not necessarily bring wealth? Why do some young businesspeople push themselves beyond their jobs’considerable daily demands to acquire more knowledge and skills when the payoff is uncertain and may be years away?

We know that great performance comes from deliberate practice, but deliberate practice is hard. It’s so hard that no one can do it without the benefit of passion, a truly extraordinary drive. So we need to know where that originates.

Chapter Eleven: Where Does the Passion Come From?

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Understanding the deepest question about great performance

Consider what Shizuka Arakawa had been through by the time she won the gold medal in figure skating at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. She was twenty-four and had been training as a skater since age five. Winning the gold requires flawless performance of moves that the rest of us would consider simply impossible; Arakawa’s specialty was something called a layback Ina Bauer—bending backward almost double with the feet pointing in opposite directions—leading into a three-jump combination. Perfecting such moves requires huge quantities of practice, and falling down during much of it. For Arakawa it took nineteen years.

A study of figure skaters found that sub-elite skaters spent lots of time working on the jumps they could already do, while skaters at the highest levels spent more time on the jumps they couldn’t do, the kind that ultimately win Olympic medals and that involve lots of falling down before they’re mastered.

Falling down in figure skating means landing on your behind, protected only by a thin costume, on hard, cold ice. A few moments with a calculator tell us that by an extremely conservative estimate, Arakawa’s road to the gold medal involved at least twenty thousand derriere impacts on an unforgiving surface. But they paid off. The results included Olympic glory, national adoration, and the suddenly fashionable use of “Ina Bauer” as a vogue word throughout Japan.

Arakawa’s story is not just impressive in itself but also valuable as metaphor. Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from. That fact raises the question of why anyone would go through it for a reward that is many years away. This is the deepest question in the study of exceptional performance. In a sense, it is infinitely deep. It’s a question about what people decide to do with their lives and what kind of passion drives them. The answer may extend so far into a person’s psyche that no one can get all the way there. It sometimes takes us beyond psychology and into psychiatry. But that doesn’t mean the question is a black hole or that pursuing it is hopeless. On the contrary, many findings provide intriguing hints as to why great performers pay the price they must pay. The research also sheds light on how we can answer the question as it applies to ourselves.

Two Kinds of Drive

The central question about motivation to achieve great performance is whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic. Do people do it because they feel driven, or is it possible to induce them to do what it takes? Most of us believe the drive must be ultimately intrinsic, because we feel nothing could make someone endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless that person carried his or her own compulsion to do it. Much of the research supports this view. In particular, research on motivation in creativity has focused on the question of intrinsic versus extrinsic, and it’s helpful and relevant for two reasons: In many fields creativity represents the highest level of excellent performance, where people go beyond anything already achieved and make new con-tributions; and creativity, like effective practice in any domain, requires intense focus and concentration, which is the element that’s most demanding and difficult to sustain.

The consistent finding reported by many researchers examining solve this problem?) and not on themselves (What will solving this problem do for me?). Young people who excel in science and math are more intrinsically motivated than their lower-performing peers. Scientists who make important discoveries are found to be passionately involved in their field. A wide range of creative achievers seem to be devoted to great questions or problems in their field—scientific, commercial, artistic—and feel driven to pursue them for decades.

Look at the issue from any perspective and the results seem to be the same. People who rank high for intrinsic motivation on various psychological tests consistently produce work that is judged more crea tive in studies. Conversely, people who work in professions demanding creativity (artists, research scientists) reliably rank higher on tests of intrinsic motivation.

The work of University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszent mihalyi suggests one specific mechanism (of many that might exist) that could link intrinsic motivation with the demands of deliberate practice. His famous work on “flow “describes a state in which a person is so totally involved in a task that time slows down, enjoyment is heightened, and the task seems almost effortless. This “high” is achieved when the challenge just matches the person’s skills; if it’s too easy the experience is boring, too hard and it’s frustrating. As people master tasks, they must seek greater challenges and match them with higher-level skills in order to keep experiencing flow. Csikszentmihalyi has argued that this is exactly what many people in creative pursuits do, a process that parallels the deliberate practice routine of continually pushing past one’s current abilities.

The concept of flow might even help explain one of the particular puzzles of motivation to practice. It’s a considerable “might” because the research has not been done. But the theory of deliberate practice keeps running up against a minor real world contradiction. In the theory, makes sense. But in the research, top level performers, at least in sports, often report the opposite. In studies of wrestlers, skaters, soccer play ers, field hockey players, and martial artists, practice activities rated fairly high on a scale of enjoyableness. As the tennis champion Monica Seles told the New York Times in 1999, “I just love to practice and drill and that stuff.”

These reports contrast sharply with the feelings of Ericsson’s violinists, who rated practice a pretty miserable way to spend their time. It may well be that athletes enjoy practice because for them it’s a social activity, while for violinists it isn’t. But at a deeper level one has to suspect that practice is somehow meeting an inner need for anyone who can maintain it at an intense level for years. It seems plausible that the role of practice in producing the highly enjoyable flow state could be part of it.

It certainly seems plausible as well that something more profound could also be going on. In some fields, such as science and math, fascination with the available problems seems to drive excellent performers.

Benjamin Bloom, in his study of top ranked young performers in several fields, found this motivation in some of them from their early years: “For most of the mathematicians, the joy of discovering a new way of solving a problem was more important than a high test score, receiving a good grade, or getting the teacher’s approval for their work.” Many studies of scientists have reported a similar finding; they get excited by new problems and find rewards not just in the solution but also in the process of seeking solutions.

In business, motivation has been the subject of endless research studies, books, articles, and consulting assignments. The all time number 2 best-selling reprint from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 article on motivation (the number 1 best seller is about time management). But the great majority of the research has focused on what motivates

Where Does the Passion Come From?

that small subset have uncovered a wide range of driving forces, practically all of which are intrinsic. They may include a need for achievement, a need for power over others, even a need to do good in the world. But the drivers are almost never extrinsic, which makes sense when we observe the most eminent executives and entrepreneurs; long after they’ve accumulated more money than they could ever use and more fame than anyone could hope for, they keep working and trying to get better. It all fits with the big picture idea that intrinsic drive is by far the most powerful .

Yel that can’t be the whole story. Intrinsic motivation may dominate the big picture, but everyone, even the greatest achievers, has responded to extrinsic forces at critical moments. When Watson and Crick were struggling to find the structure of DNA, they worked almost nonstop because they knew they were in a race with other research teams. Alexander Graham Bell worked similarly on the telephone, knowing he was in competition with Elisha Gray, whom he beat to the patent office by just hours. Such people are driven by much more than fascination or joy.

In extensive research on what drives creative achievement, Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School at first proposed a simple hy-pothesis: “The intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.” It’s easy to see why she considered extrinsic motivation bad news; many studies showed exactly that. In one of Amabile’s own projects, for example, college women were asked to make paper collages. Half the subjects were told their collages would be judged by graduate art students; the others were told that researchers were studying their mood and had no interest in the collages themselves. When the collages were then evalu ated by a panel of artists, those produced by the subjects who expected to be judged were significantly less creative. Other studies showed that oYtornal attpmnt tn rnnstrain nr rnntrnl thp work results in less creativity. Just being watched is detrimental. Even being offered a reward for doing the work results in less creative output than being offered nothing.

All these results were replicated many times. But other studies, going in other directions, were finding something else. Extrinsic motivators were of many types, not all of them controlling, and some of them seemed to enhance creativity. Specifically, extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic motivation could work quite effectively. Like what?

Recognition that confirms competence turned out to be effective. While the mere expectation of being judged tended to reduce creativity, personal feedback could actually enhance creativity if it was the right kind- “constructive, nonthreatening, and work focused rather than person focused,” in Amabile’s words. That is, feedback that helped a person do what he or she felt compelled to do was effective. Even the prospect of direct rewards, normally suffocating to creativity, could be helpful if they were the right kinds of rewards those “that involve more time, freedom, or resources to pursue exciting ideas.” These findings prompted Amabile to revise her hypothesis: Intrinsic motivation is still best, and extrinsic motivation that’s controlling is still detrimental to creativity, but extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic drives can be highly effective.

We’ve looked closely at motivation in creativity because, as noted, it has much to teach about the larger issue of what makes people persist through the demands of high achievement. Looking more broadly reveals further evidence that extrinsic motivators can, in certain circumstances, be helpful . For example, large parts of what we call creative work aren’t very creative. Once a problem has been identified and solved—the creative part—it’s necessary to evaluate the solution, write accounts of what was done, and communicate with others about it. All those jobs can be hard slogging, and the types of extrinsic motivators described above can be helpful in moving the work along.

The main objectives of deliberate practice, sometimes benefits from extrinsic motivators, especially in the early stages. Even the elite perform ers studied by Bloom required plenty of extrinsic motivation when they were starting out in their field. Their parents made them practice, as parents have always done, though it’s interesting to note that in these cases, when push came to shove and parents had to make a direct threat, it frequently played of f the student s intrinsic motivators. So it wasn’t “If you don’t do your piano practice we’ll cancel your allowance,” but rather “we’ll sell the piano.” Not “If you don’t go to swimming practice you’ll be grounded Saturday night,” but rather “we’ll take you off the team. II the child truly didn’t care about the piano or swimming, the threats wouldn’t have worked.

Other extrinsic motivators were also important, and while their effect was to help kids persevere through the challenges of deliberate practice, they were entirely consistent with the effective extrinsic mo tivators specified by Amabile for creativity. Feedback from coaches and teachers focused on the task and doing it better. Several teachers kept track of the child’s performance, giving evidence to the child that he or she was making progress and could keep making progress. Recitals and contests were motivating because winning or doing well resulted in praise. Attention and acclaim, as a result ol perlorming well, were significant motivators.

With time, however, “the students increasingly became responsible lor their own motivation,” Bloom reports. They set their own goals. Intrinsic motivators still played a role; students wanted to do well in pub lie performances or competitions. But in part that was because doing so confirmed that they were making progress toward their goals, which is what they really cared about. These events also brought the students together with other top-level performers, so each student could figure out “what he or she must still do to reach the highest level of attainment

How Organizations Blow It

It must be noted that, on this subject, as with the other findings on great performance, most organizations seem to be managed brilliantly for preventing people from performing at high levels. Since intrinsic drives are strongest, people will work most passionately and effectively on projects they choose for themselves. How many companies allow that?

A few do, as noted in the previous chapter, and those companies have produced outstanding results. Yet most other companies steadfastly refuse to learn from them. Executives may protest that they have a business to manage and can’t let employees run around working on who-knows-what. Fine; but those executives mustn’t complain when their company’s ideas are no better than the competition’s. Nor should they claim to be mystified when employees lack passion and engagement.

How often is feedback at most companies constructive, nonthreatening, and work focused rather than person focused? Evaluations at most companies are exactly the opposite: telling the hapless employee what he did wrong, not how to do better, and specifying personal traits (attitude, personality) that must be changed, all under the unspoken looming threat of getting fired. This is so precisely unlike the way effective teachers and coaches help students persist in the demanding work of getting better that one can only gaze in wonder. A more potent system for discouraging people from the rigors of day-to-day improvement would be hard to design. As for rewards, at most companies they almost always entail more responsibilities and less freedom. Extra responsibilities are always part of rising higher in an organization, but if they don’t come with the potential for more self direction, the promotion will feel more like a burden than a reward. Extrinsic motivators may be, by definition, the only type that a company can offer employ

The weight of the evidence is that the drive to persist in the difficult job of improving, especially in adults, comes mostly from inside. Next question: How does it arise—that is, where does the passion come from? What determines who has it and who doesn’t? Some researchers have argued that at least in some cases it’s truly innate, present at birth.

Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, years ago coined the wonderful term “the rage to master” to describe the over whelming drive felt by some children, starting at extremely early ages, to work in a particular field. She has described, for example, the case of Peter, who started drawing at the age of ten months (versus two years for the average child) and before long “was waking up in the mornings and bellowing for paper and markers before getting out of bed.” He drew obsessively virtually all day every day for years thereafter, and his drawings were very advanced, far beyond what the average child of his age could produce.

There are precocious children like Peter in many fields in addition to art, including music, chess, and math, and their stories are quite amazing. While most children have to be made to practice, these children can scarcely be restrained from it, and their performance is far beyond their years. What do these very powerful stories tell us? One possible explanation is that these kids are somehow born with a compulsion to work in a particular domain. In keeping with the principles of great performance, they become very accomplished because they’re practicing for huge numbers of hours. This explanation does not depend on any miracles, nor does it violate the ten year rule; while these kids perform far in advance of other kids their age, they’re still nowhere near world-class levels of achievement. That would have to wait much longer. In this theory, exactly why they were born with their specific compulsion remains a mystery. So far in the decoding of the compulsively, or play the guitar or read or play chess, to name a few other fields in which precocity has turned up. A different explanation, favored by Winner and some other researchers, is the reverse: Instead of compulsive practice producing high ability, high ability leads to compulsive practice. In this explanation, these kids are born not with a compulsion to practice but with an ability to learn far more quickly than average in a particular domain.

They practice all the time, setting new goals for themselves and increas-ing their skill, because their ability to learn makes it so rewarding for them. This explanation would not seem to cover all cases; it seems ex tremely unlikely, for example, that Peter was drawing compulsively at ten months because of the progress he was making.

Note that this explanation is not merely a separate proposal for how the mechanism of deliberate practice gets set in motion. Winner argues that these precocious children are not just more diligent but also quali tatively different from others. Besides their higher ability to learn in their field, they also, in the case of artists, are more likely than average to be left handed or ambidextrous and to be weak at verbal skills. In this theory, as in the previous one, exactly where the innate factor comes from—in this case, how a child is born with a superability to learn in a specific field—remains a mystery.

If neither of these explanations seems totally satisfying, they become even less so when we take a step back and consider the possibility that maybe the focus isn’t quite right in either case. The drive we’re looking for seems to be largely intrinsic, and that fact leads us to wonder what traits great performers are born with. But maybe that isn’t as important as most of us assume it is. Intrinsic doesn’t necessarily mean innate, that is, inborn. The idea that many of our traits and behaviors develop over time as a result of our experiences is noncontroversial , and everyone’s life is an example. Possibly the intrinsic drive we’re seeking also seems it must be innate. Perhaps in some of those cases it is, though in some of them it may not be. Winner cites the case of Yani, a Chinese girl who by age five was producing paintings in the Chinese tradition that were strikingly skillful. Yani’s father was an artist, and Winner reports that the young girl “spent many hours a day in her father’s art studio painting alongside her father.” Yani was a prodigy for sure, but from available evidence it would be hard to conclude that she was driven by anything truly inborn, either a compulsion to practice or an ability to learn, as distinct from the effects of spending all those hours with her artist father.

Even in those cases of child prodigies with proclivities that appear to be innate, studying them doesn’t get us very far in understanding the passion behind great performance. That’s because the large majority of these prodigies, as far as we can tell, don’t grow up to be great performers. A few do, but most don’t maintain the intensely focused daily work for the many years necessary to achieve at the highest levels.

Whatever it is they bring into this world, it seems to be a star that shines brilliantly for a time and then usually fades. Josh Waitzkin, the child prodigy chess player whose story was told in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, suggested an explanation when he once told Fsychology Today, “The most gifted kids in chess fall apart. They are told that they are winners, and when they inevitably run into a wall, they get stuck and think they must be losers.”

Conversely, the people who do become top level achievers are rarely child prodigies. That is certainly true in business; the early lives of the Welches, Ogilvies, and Rockefellers almost never hint at the success to come. Looking at more scientific research, this is one of the most notable findings in Bloom’s large study, which examined performers at the highest level—people who had achieved national or international recognition before age forty. For example, all of the twenty-four pianists upon them,” in the words of the study, just the opposite of the kids who seemed driven to sit at the piano as toddlers. Similarly, in no case did the parents of the future champion swimmers foresee their child’s eventual achievements. Time and again the story is the same: Even by age eleven or twelve it would have been difficult to predict who the future exceptional performers would be.

Even more important for our purposes, another common theme is that at some point not long past that age, these future achievers experienced an almost palpable shift in their stance toward their field. Their drive became intrinsic. One of the pianists recalled the life-changing experience at age fifteen of sitting just three feet away as a great pianist performed: “I remember feeling inundated and overwhelmed with the dynamic range, with the expressive potential, with hearing the real bite of the sound, the real softness of the sound… . at that point I became serious like I never had before. 1 cut out horsing around at the piano. I cut out sightreading for two hours a day just for the pleasure of it. 1 worked.” Like all the pianists in the study, he had been forced to take lessons. It seems safe to say he had not been born with any kind of innate drive or rapid learning ability. But at that point he developed the intrinsic drive that would keep him going.

The Multiplier Effect

In our search for the source of the motivation that sustains people through the trials of getting better, the evidence is pushing in a clear direction. The passion doesn’t accompany us into this world, but rather, like high level skills themselves, it develops. That finding fits well with what we observe in real life. World-class achievers are driven to improve, but most of them didn’t start out that way. We’ve already seen that in domains where it’s possible to start work at an early age, such many years before specific domain-related work can begin, such as business and high-level science, we commonly see that future stars may be decidedly undriven even as young adults. That was obviously the case with Steven Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt sitting in their cubicle at Procter & Gamble. Both young men went on to business school (Ballmer to Stanford, Immelt to Harvard) and over time developed the drive to work prodigiously hard, not just in general, but specifically at building the particular skills that brought them to the top of the corporate world. Both men became famously focused workers. But they obviously did not possess that drive from day one.

If the drive to excel develops, rather than appearing fully formed, then how does it develop? Several researchers have separately proposed a mechanism that suggests an answer. Part of its appeal is that it helps explain why some people but not others develop high level skills and at the same time develop the increasing motivation needed to do ever more advanced work. Stephen J. Ceci, Susan M. Barnett, and Tomoe Kanaya of Cornell University have called it the multiplier effect.

The concept is simple. A very small advantage in some field can spark a series of events that produce far larger advantages. For example, they say, imagine someone who is just slightly above average in eye hand coordination, forearm strength, and reflexes. Initially, this individual may take satisfaction in doing slightly better at baseball than his schoolyard peers This satisfaction may lead such an in dividual to practice more, search more aggressively for others willing to play after school and on weekends, try out for teams (not just school teams but also summer league teams), get professional coach ing, watch and discuss televised games, and so forth. Such an in dividual is likely to become matched with increasingly enriched.

It’s easy to imagine the same process playing out in any other domain. As these researchers describe the general effect, “Each increase in competence is matched to a better environment, and, in turn, the better environment will be expected to further enhance their competence.”

Note that this multiplier effect accounts not just for improvement of skills over time but also for the motivation that drives the improvement, as the young baseball player’s satisfaction leads him to practice more. The sequence proposed by these researchers is strikingly similar to the actual experiences of future achievers reported in Bloom’s re search. He observed, “In all the fields most of these young students were regarded as fast learners by their first teachers… . Whether or not they were really faster learners than others is not known. . . . However, the attribution of’fas t learner’ to them by the initial teacher was one major source of motivation. The teacher soon regarded and treated them as ‘special’ learners, and the students came to prize this very much.”

Before long, the multiplier effect was clearly developing the drive of these students: “As they began to receive recognition for the talent in the early years of instruction, the children’s investment in the talent became greater. No longer was the prime motivation to please parents and teachers. It now became the individual’s special field of interest.”

The concept of the multiplier effect is embedded in the fundamental theory of deliberate practice. Part of the way it works, as first explained by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, is that a beginner’s skills are so modest that he or she can manage only a little bit of deliberate practice, since it’s highly demanding. But that little bit of practice increases the person’s skills, making it possible to do more practice, which increases the person’s skill level more. Thus, “In our framework we expect that increased level of acquired skill and performance would increase the maximal level of deliberate practice that can be sustained.” The theory fits the evidence reported by others. In virtually every field, beginners can’t manage more than an hour of practice per day, and sometimes themselves up to handling four to five hours a day. It isn’t quite right to say only that the practice caused the performance or that the performance helped support the practice. Over time, each contributed to the other.

The evidence for the multiplier effect is powerful , in addition to which it makes sense and explains quite a bit. It then raises a very large question: What triggers the effect? If it all begins with some small advantage—a little difference that somehow tips a balance and starts a self fueling cycle of increasing motivation and performance—where does that difference originate?

Ceci and his colleagues, in first describing the effect, assumed the difference was genetic; the reason that kid had better than average eye-hand coordination and other traits that gave him a small advantage in baseball is that he was born with them. Obviously this possibility can not be denied, especially with regard to body traits that are heavily influenced by genes. In addition, it’s easy to imagine how intelligence and other traits with a genetic component might trigger a multiplier effect, even if the significance of the genetic component is in dispute. After all, a small advantage is all it takes. We saw in chapter 3 that intelligence and other general abilities play a much smaller role in top-level performance than most of us believe, but even if intelligence isn’t the critical performance factor in many fields, a small intelligence advantage at an early age could still trigger a multiplier effect that would produce exceptional performance many years later. Clearly these traits would not be guaranteed to set of f multiplier effects in every case. If the kid with the baseball advantage lived in a time or place where baseball was unheard of, he’d be out of luck, and we can easily imagine endless other scenarios in which some trait that could conceivably trigger a multiplier effect in one setting would produce no effect in another.

The much more intriguing possibility is that events or situations when someone begins training at an earlier age than others in the field.

Many researchers have observed that as people start learning skills in virtually any field, they’re typically compared not against the world’s greatest performers in that field but against others their own age. Nobody considered whether the ten-year-old Tiger Woods was a threat to the top professionals; what mattered was that he was much better than other ten-year-olds. One way to get a very good shot at performing bet ter than others of the same age is to start training earlier than they do (as Woods did), thus accumulating more deliberate practice. Standing out at any given age is an excellent way to attract attention and praise, fueling the multiplier, and it can be done without relying on any innate ability. It’s worth noting that studies of swimmers, gymnasts, chess players, violinists, and pianists show that the more accomplished per formers started training at earlier ages.

A similar way to ignite the multiplier effect is to begin learning skills in a place where competition is sparse. It’s a lot easier to stand out as a math whiz when your town has only a hundred other kids your age than when it has a hundred thousand. Many of the young achievers in Bloom’s study reported the same experience: being local celebrities, only to move on to a higher level of competition and find that plenty of others are at least as good as they are. As one of the pianists recalled about his arrival at an elite music school, “It was a shock. It’s not easy to find out that there are other people who really play very well when you’ve been isolated and made to think you’re something.” But it’s okay; by this time, these performers had developed the drive to keep going.

Would they have developed that drive in a setting where they received an early message that they were nothing special? Howard Gardner, in his study of Einstein, Stravinsky, and other exceptional creators, observed that they generally didn’t come from major cities. Instead, they developed their skills in smaller environments and then moved on to the big time. The opposite way? It seems plausible that mildly superior performance at an early age or in a small milieu, no matter how attained, could attract the extra praise that builds motivation for more intense practice, and so on. But since the process is circular, could we start it spinning not with superior performance but with extra praise? That is, could simply telling someone that he or she is especially good, regardless of actual performance, motivate the extra practice that leads to improved performance, attracting more praise, and so on? This also seems plausible. Recall that, even though Bloom had no evidence that his research subjects were fast learners, their teachers saw them that way. He reported that, in general, “The teacher soon regarded and treated them as ‘special’ learners, and the students came to prize this very much.”

In addition, many of these students had parents who told them they were special, as parents so often do, regardless of actual evidence. Here again, it seems possible that a factor quite independent of any innate ability could start the multiplier effect turning, or at least give it a good shove.

It seems possible, and even likely based on available evidence—but it isn’t proven. The rigorous research that would nail down this possibility hasn’t been done. It could be and perhaps will be. Stephen Ceci and his colleagues believe “it is a testable empirical question” whether “environmental factors”—such things as earlier deliberate practice, extra praise, or others—could “jump start the dynamic multiplier effect.” But they conclude that so far “this has not been tested in an empirically adequate manner.” So we just don’t know for sure.

What Do You Believe?

That conclusion is highly significant for our purposes because it means that, research-wise, we’ve reached the end of the line. It’s the end of the line not iust on the Question of motivation, but also in a much larger

Our quest for the source of great performance has taken us past many wrong turns and through a great deal of useful knowledge, and has led us finally to the issue of where the drive to persevere comes from. We’ve learned a lot even about that. Most significant, we’ve seen that the passion develops, rather than emerging suddenly and fully formed. We’ve also seen hints that childhood may be especially important in how the drive’s development gets started. Anders Ericsson goes so far as to say, “The research frontier is parenting. Push children too hard and they respond with anger. You have to develop an independent individual who has chosen to be involved in this activity. It’s how you as a parent can make individuals feel freed to reach these levels and aware that this is going to be a long process.” Yes, maybe that is what it’s all about. But as he says, that’s the research frontier. The work hasn’t been done yet.

Ultimately, we cannot get to the very heart of this matter; we cannot explain fully and generally why certain people put themselves through the years or decades of punishing, intensive daily work that eventually makes them world-class great. We’ve reached the point where we are left without guidance from the scientists and must proceed by looking in the only place we have left, which is within ourselves. What would cause you to do the enormous work necessary to be a top performing CEO, Wall Street trader, jazz pianist, courtroom lawyer, or anything else? Would anything? The answers depend on your an swers to two basic questions: What do you really want? And what do you really believe?

What you want — really, deeply want — is fundamental because deliberate practice is a heavy investment. Becoming a great performer demands the largest investment you will ever make—many years of your life devoted utterly to your goal—and only someone who wants to reach that goal with extraordinary power can make it. We often see the nrirp npnnlp nav in their rise to the top of any field: even if their field typically cannot. Howard Gardner, after studying his seven exceptional achievers, noted that “usually, as a means of being able to con tinue work, the creator sacrificed normal relationships in the personal sphere.” Such people are “committed obsessively to their work. Social life or hobbies are almost immaterial.” That may sound like admirable self-sacrifice and direction of purpose, but it often goes much further, and it can be ugly. As Gardner notes, “the self-confidence merges with egotism, egocentrism, and narcissism: each of the creators seems highly self-absorbed, not only wholly involved in his or her own projects, but likely to pursue them at the cost of other individuals/ The story of the great achiever who leaves a wake of anger and betrayal is a common one.

So what would it take for you to accept all of that in pursuit of a goal? What would you want so much that you’d commit yourself to the necessary hard, endless work, giving up relationships and other inter ests, so that you might eventually get it ? Whatever it is that the greatest performers want, that’s how much they must want it.

The second question is more profound. What do you really believe?

Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work, properly designed, with intense focus for hours a day and years on end, your performance will grow dramatically better and eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there’s at least a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance.

But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, or by a lack of general abilities at a level that you think must be necessary, then there’s no chance at all that you will do the work.

That’s why this belief is tragically constraining. Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible dif ficulties a chance of moving on to ever better performance. But those who see the setbacks as evidence that they lack the necessary gift will give up — quite logically, in light of their beliefs. They will never achieve what they might have.

What you really believe about the source of great performance thus becomes the foundation of all you will ever achieve. As we noted much earlier, such beliefs can be extremely deep-seated. Regardless of where our beliefs in this matter originated, however, we all have the opportunity to base them on the evidence of reality.

The evidence offers no easy assurances. It shows that the price of top-level achievement is extraordinarily high. Perhaps it’s inevitable that not many people will choose to pay it. But the evidence shows also that by understanding how a few become great, anyone can become better. Above all, what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.