It’s a funny thing, the more I practice the luckier I get.
Arnold Palmer, golfer
So far, we’ve been on a whirlwind journey through the worlds of health, wealth, and business – and seen the paradox of control at work wherever we go. We’ve also delved into the murky depths of psychology and statistics, learning how to accept, assess, and augment uncertainty along the way. But the story is far from over. And, arguably, the plot has thickened yet further. Once you’ve augmented the uncertainty you face, it becomes harder than ever to make a decision. In order to help you in deciding, this and the next chapter will take one final excursion into the intricate complexities of the human mind. Is it one of nature’s great masterpieces or a hopeless biological lost cause?
In particular, one important topic we deal with is how to allocate our time. If – as we have maintained throughout the book – chance is so pervasive in our lives, it’s tempting to conclude that there’s little we can do to improve our personal Fortunes. Nothing could be further from the truth – and we hope to prove it. Practice and feedback are extremely beneficial in the acquisition of skills that influence the outcomes of our decisions. Chance, of course, is still important. But as the nineteenth-century French scientist Louis Pasteur put it a hundred years or so before Arnold Palmer coined his much-quoted witticism about practice, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Some people are undisputed geniuses. Take, for example, William Shakespeare, or two of our own personal heroes from the modern day, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. But these intellectual giants themselves offer us contrasting perspectives on the human mind.
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!
Shakespeare1
Errors of judgment are often systematic rather than random, manifesting bias rather than confusion. Thus, man suffers from mental astigmatism as well as from myopia, and any corrective prescription should fit this diagnosis.
Kahneman and Tversky2
The rosier-tinted Shakespearean view is well documented: men on the moon, super jumbo airplanes, organ transplants, and the like. But so is the bleaker outlook. We all know from our own experience and (if we’re so inclined) the extensive literature in cognitive psychology that people routinely make errors of judgment – sometimes really bad ones. Just read today’s newspaper if you’re in any doubt! And we’ve already seen together, in chapter 9, how simple, statistical models often make more accurate predictions than human beings. So the big question is: when – or under what conditions – do human beings make accurate judgments? In other words, when should you trust someone’s judgment, including your own?
In his best-selling book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a Kouros (an ancient Greek statue of a male youth). The Kouros in question was acquired by the Getty Museum in California for some $10 million after an exhaustive fourteen-month investigation. But doubts about its authenticity lingered. After a single glance – or blink – at the statue, lasting only a few seconds, some experts in Greek art had an immediate sense of “intuitive repulsion.” It just had to be a fake. In a few seconds, says Gladwell, “They were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.”3
“Blinking” isn’t confined to artistic judgments either. During an exhibition tour in 1909, Capablanca, the Cuban world chess champion, played twenty-eight matches simultaneously and won them all. How did he do it? How many moves ahead did he consider when he only had a few seconds to look at each game? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is reported to have said, “but it is always the correct one.”
As a well-structured but complex game, chess has provided a wonderful laboratory for studying the capacities of the human mind. It is to the cognitive sciences what the fruit fly is to geneticists. Initially, everyone thought that the amazing intellectual feats of chess grandmasters were due to three factors: photographic memory; high IQ; and an ability to analyze the implications of many different possibilities several moves ahead. However, scientific research has rejected these ideas – and come up with three totally different factors!
The first key requirement for a grandmaster is to focus intuitively on the best move. Researchers have placed cameras under chessboards to record the eye movements of great chess players. They’ve discovered that, once the opponent’s turn is over, three out of four times a grandmaster’s eyes focus on the best move available (as agreed by other grandmasters). Next, he or she examines other possible moves – often of equal quality – only to return (three out of four times) to the first move considered. Thus, grandmasters demonstrate two important abilities. One is to come up with high-quality (and often creative) moves spontaneously; the other is the analytical skill to check this move against other possibilities. It sounds as if Capablanca wasn’t overstating his case after all. Genius blinks – it’s official.
The second differentiating factor is pattern recognition – another blinking ability. When grandmasters are shown, for only five seconds, chess pieces on a board from an ongoing game between other grandmasters, they can reproduce what they have seen with approximately 90% accuracy. The few mistakes they do make are usually in the minor pieces, mostly involving pawns. Expert players, on the other hand, can’t recall more than a few details, while novices are incapable of remembering any positions accurately. Just as importantly, no one, including grandmasters, can remember the positions on a board where the pieces have been placed by chance – that is, when they’re not the result of a real game. The memories of grandmasters are highly dependent on recognizing patterns – not unlike most people’s abilities to recognize a familiar tune after hearing the first few notes.
Third and perhaps most importantly, there’s the “practice factor.” Scientists have found that it takes years of practice to reach the level of the chess grandmaster. Not just any old practice though. Aspiring grandmasters must deliberately target continuous improvement, which means a lot of repetition, and seek constant feedback. Consistent hard work is also crucial. Great achievers – in chess as in many other fields – have been found to practice, on average, roughly the same number of hours every day, including weekends and holidays. Finally, research indicates that the more they practice in this way, the better their performance. Continuous, painstaking practice facilitates “deeper” or better information processing and helps retain, as well as develop, skills. Curiously, it seems that, to become good at blinking, there’s a lot of painful thinking along the way.
Contrary to popular belief, then, it looks as if talent owes more to hard work than natural gifts.4 Genius, in chess and elsewhere, comes from long, deliberate, thoughtful practice. Herbert Simon, whose wisdom we’ve drawn on several times already in this book, estimated that, through years of intensive practice, the typical grandmaster develops a long-term working memory amounting to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 “nuggets” of chess information. Because grandmasters can retrieve this information effortlessly, they’re free to concentrate on evaluating the most promising moves that come spontaneously to mind. In contrast, weaker players generate and examine many alternatives without being able to focus on the essential. They lack the 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information stored in the brains of grandmasters.
So it turns out that the critical skill of playing chess is not analytical. Instead, it’s the capacity to focus, instantly and effortlessly, on the best move (or moves), a capacity that’s developed through long, deliberate practice. The role of analysis, although indispensable, is secondary: first as part of the practicing, then to verify or reject alternative moves during the game.
The cognitive skills demonstrated by chess grandmasters stand in stark contrast with the poor judgmental abilities we’ve documented so far – among experts as diverse as doctors, fund managers, and management gurus. If this book were a chess match, Shakespeare would be drawing level with Kahneman and Tversky by now. Unfortunately, however, in the rest of this chapter we’ll see how the human mind is both genius and fallible. Then we’ll look at some of the evidence on “blinking” and contrast it with “thinking,” defined as the process of reasoning our way to a decision. Finally, we’ll further investigate the related issues of practice and feedback. We can’t turn you into a chess grandmaster, but we may be able to help you harness the power of deliberate practice and reliable feedback.
Autistic savants (known in less politically correct times as “idiot savants”) are as interesting a group as chess grandmasters. They are intellectually brilliant in some areas and completely challenged in others. Some are polyglots – they speak many languages fluently. Others can perform complex arithmetical calculations in record time. They may be able not only to tell you what the day of the week was on, say, April 23, 1981, but also to describe what the weather was like that morning. Others can estimate exact distances, measure time without a clock, memorize π (pi) to hundreds of decimal places, or recall long sequences of football scores – even after minimal exposure. Contrary to popular mythology, there are also savants with incredible artistic and musical gifts. At the same time, many polyglots can’t calculate the sum of two plus three, while the arithmetically talented savants may not be able to read or write. In general, savants are both super-gifted and super-hopeless. They’re both genius and fallible in the extreme. Most cannot lead normal lives because of their autism or some other learning difficulty. Above all, they lack what the rest of us call “common sense.”
It seems that some parts of the brains of savants are highly developed, while others are underdeveloped – hence their unique abilities combined with total helplessness. Perhaps it’s the closest the human mind gets to a computer. Your PC performs mechanical calculations with lightning speed but it hasn’t yet been programmed to exercise common sense. When computers beat grandmasters at chess, it’s by brute force of mathematical computation and clever algorithms designed by humans. There’s none of the creativity that we observe in human beings at the top of the game – and certainly no blinking.
So much for grandmasters and autistic savants – what about the rest of the human race? The human brain evolved to allow us to cope with a variety of tasks that require very different abilities. We have to learn at least one language, acquire common sense, and master social skills. Eventually, most of us specialize in our studies or learn the tools of a trade. Our minds are flexible. We can learn to do what may have initially seemed impossible. Think about skiing down a steep mountain, windsurfing in a force-eight gale, climbing the highest mountains, gliding high in the sky, and diving deep under the sea. The same is true of the mental processes involved in achieving breakthrough inventions, or coming up with highly creative ideas. This is all in addition to the activities we perform each day, the myriads of problems we solve continuously and effortlessly, and the great number of good decisions we habitually make. Humans are capable of meeting many challenges, as Shakespeare so eloquently celebrated.
Although our brain is an intricate and complex tool, the world in which we function is even more complicated. Trade-offs and mistakes are inevitable. And, given the complexity we face, our minds must frequently use mental shortcuts to take decisions, often in a split second, and using only limited information. It’s inevitable that some of these decisions will be bad ones, but without them, we’d be unable to function. At the same time, as argued by the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues, shortcuts may also lead to good decisions.5 We’ll return to this issue later in the chapter.
Paradoxically, if we could evaluate all information in a super-rational way, the subsequent lack of “noise” would probably diminish opportunities for original and novel problem solving. We’re not just talking about creativity in art or poetry, which often relies on irrational mechanisms, such as cubism or metaphor, but about genuine breakthroughs in science, engineering, or business. Had we always functioned rationally as a species, it’s possible that today we would have no cars, personal computers, the internet, or search engines – just to mention a few – because conventional wisdom once maintained that there was no need for them. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw put it:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.6
The challenge is to accept that, together with the genius of our minds, imperfections are also part of the human package. Once we’ve accepted our mental shortcomings, we must find ways to avoid or minimize their undesirable consequences. Oddly enough, it’s a contemporary of Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, who best sums up our position: “while we falsely extol and admire the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.”7
In what follows, we’re going to distinguish between “blinking” (as coined by Malcolm Gladwell) and “thinking” (our own refinement of the everyday concept) as ways of making decisions. In blinking, we are unaware of – or cannot articulate – the way in which we reach decisions instantaneously. In thinking, although we may not be aware of every factor influencing us, we largely understand – or can articulate – our decisions.
A tennis player in the Wimbledon final returns the serve of his opponent traveling at 130 miles an hour. His decision to stretch as far as possible and place his racket at just the right place and time to meet the ball is remarkable. This is one decision that’s certainly not made by thinking through all alternative possibilities, collecting all available information, and then evaluating all the alternatives to make a choice. On the contrary, the decision is taken in a blink – subconsciously and without any analysis. For much of this book, we’ve been insisting on the role of luck in our lives. But the return of the Wimbledon finalist is no lucky shot. The ability to make this decision on Centre Court is honed by many years of deliberate practice, which provided objective feedback on how to return extraordinarily fast serves. Like chess grandmasters, professional tennis players apply the rule of continuous, effortful, and punishing practice. That’s how they acquire the abilities necessary to return serves traveling at incredible speeds even at full stretch.
Our mind performs many blinking decisions superbly well. Consider the ability to recognize faces, even of people you don’t know well and haven’t seen for years – for example, an old college classmate who has mysteriously acquired wrinkles, gray hair, and a large belly. The same type of blinking occurs when you realize that the voice on the telephone belongs to Margaret, your old friend who you haven’t talked to since last Christmas. Recognizing a face or voice means processing a lot of information stored deep in our minds. Somehow, the image we see or the sounds we hear must be compared with thousands of others, accumulated in our mind over a long period, in order to come up with the right answer. But this is done in nanoseconds, effortlessly and efficiently, without any conscious thinking on our part. Even today’s speediest supercomputers don’t come close.
Now think about the decision to make an emergency stop that halts your car a couple of feet away from a pedestrian who crossed the street against a red light. When re-playing the scene in your mind, you’re amazed that you were lucky enough to avoid hitting somebody who appeared before you so unexpectedly. But again, this was skill, not luck. It was another of the many blinking decisions you take, without fully realizing what you are doing. These types of decisions happen daily and – precisely because you don’t have to think about them – make life a lot easier. Yet we mustn’t forget that they require high levels of cognitive skills, substantial decision-making abilities, and awe-inspiring coordination between the thinking part of our brain and that controlling our muscles.
If you wanted any further proof of your amazing blinking abilities, take what you’re doing right now: the simple task of reading this page. First you recognize single letters and the shapes of whole words. Then you make sense of each sentence. And all the time you’re deciding, among other things, if you like what you read as a whole or if parts of it are worth remembering for later. You’re probably also judging the originality and usefulness of this book in relation to others you’ve already finished. These are not trivial intellectual achievements, and yet you accomplish them with ease – like a walk in the proverbial park.
There is no doubt that Shakespeare was right. Our mind is a superb instrument, capable of storing vast amounts of information that it can retrieve at will, exactly when needed, to make the perfect (blinking) decision.
On the other hand – and as we’ve seen over and over again – some of our decisions, both trivial and important, are terribly irrational.8 Remember, from chapter 2, the case of Ben Kolb, the seven-year-old boy, who died in a routine ear operation at the Florida Martin Memorial Hospital. Then there was the single mother who was wrongly diagnosed with AIDS after being screened for HIV in the mid-1990s. These tragedies were the result of faulty decisions, taken by otherwise intelligent people. They’re not isolated events either. As discussed in chapter 3, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the USA. Many of our decisions are just plain wrong, and some have catastrophic consequences.
In one of his books, Gerd Gigerenzer cites the following example given by a physician speaking at a conference:
Physicians in Essen, Germany, amputated one or both breasts of some 300 women, despite most of them not having cancer. When this was proven, one physician set fire to his records and then himself. 9
Were these doctors blinking or thinking? Why did they fail their patients so miserably? Finally, who can guarantee that future decisions in your own life, both medical and non-medical, won’t be equally disastrous?
To illustrate the key to good blinking more clearly, meet the two Rogers. Roger F is a well-known tennis player. He is also rather good (in 2007 he won Wimbledon for the fifth time in a row). Roger G is an emergency-room physician who works at a large hospital in metropolitan Chicago. Contrast the quality of the feedback the two Rogers receive in the course of their work. Every time Roger F hits a tennis ball, plays a point, a game, or a match, he gets virtually perfect feedback. He has also hit a tennis ball many, many thousands of times.
Roger G works in a very different environment. His job is to decide – very rapidly – what priority to give to each patient who arrives in the emergency room. He sees people of all ages and walks of life with conditions from minor cuts to heart attacks or gunshot wounds. To complicate matters further, there are even a few patients with mysterious complaints that could be imaginary. Roger G is doing a good job if he sets his priorities such that every patient gets treated by the right doctor in time. Once he has handed over to a particular physician, it’s on to the next patient with barely a moment to breathe. These emergency rooms are really busy. And the problem is this: Roger G never learns what finally happens to the patients he passes on. He hears that some get treatment in other parts of the hospital, some move to other hospitals, some go home, and others . . . well, he just doesn’t know. The only feedback he ever gets is if a receiving physician complains.
The main similarity between the two men is that they’re both required to blink for a living. And the main difference isn’t just one of lifestyle or earning power. Roger F lives in a world with plenty of good feedback. Roger G doesn’t. Although they live and work worlds apart, it’s obvious which Roger is likely to make more accurate judgments. Hint: it’s not the one who has to make life-or-death decisions!
Most of us have jobs that aren’t just about blinking. There’s no doubt that doing business, for example, demands decisions based on thinking, but many commercial judgments have a blinking element too. Even though there’s usually time for some analysis, information is often incomplete and comes with intense pressure to move fast. So recently, one of the authors did a study to assess the quality of feedback business managers receive about their daily activities. A group recruited from classes for executives agreed to complete short questionnaires when prompted by text messages on their cell phones at various unpredictable times across several days. Briefly, they were asked to describe the last decision they had taken and how they would know if they had been correct. The result: executives get little feedback and often have no idea whether the feedback they do get is accurate.10
There’s little doubt that evolution – and our tacit learning processes – have equipped us well for performing tasks where we get both pertinent information for making decisions and regular, accurate feedback. Whereas these conditions characterize many of the physical environments we encounter in the course of our lives (like navigating through a crowded street), they’re typically absent from tasks we face in the socio-economic domain (like running a company). Here, the world does not present us with the relevant information, unless we specify it, and the link between action and feedback can be missing or distorted. So it’s hardly surprising that our decisions – based on imperfect information and faulty feedback – are led astray by emotional forces, such as greed, fear, and hope. At the same time, it’s only natural that we should want to feel in control of our destiny. Just like when we’re walking down a crowded street.
Shareen, a seventeen-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, was thoroughly enjoying seeing the sights of New York for the first time, when she stopped an elderly gentleman to ask for directions. “What’s the way to Carnegie Hall?” she asked. “Practice,” came the response, “practice, practice, and practice!”
According to psychologist Anders Ericsson and other researchers, the process of practice extends over at least ten years. And it’s not much fun either.
Individuals should attempt to maximize the amount of time they spend on deliberate practice to reach expert performance. However, maximization of deliberate practice is neither short-lived nor simple. It extends over a period of at least ten years and involves optimization within several constraints. First, deliberate practice requires available time and energy for the individual as well as access to teachers, training material, and training facilities (the resource constraint). Second, engagement in deliberate practice is not inherently motivating. Performers consider it instrumental in achieving further improvements in performance (the motivational constraint). The lack of inherent reward or enjoyment in practice as distinct from the enjoyment of the result (improvement) is consistent with the fact that individuals in a domain rarely initiate practice spontaneously. Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint).11
That’s not all. Further research shows that it’s not necessarily the smartest person who develops the most expertise and succeeds. High intelligence combined with the greatest motivation achieves more than the highest intelligence with average motivation. The implication is that it is possible to reach the expertise level of chess grandmasters, or the equivalent in other fields, as long as you are willing and able to practice, in a deliberate manner involving effective feedback, for at least ten years.
So becoming a chess grandmaster, concert pianist, or tennis champion sounds simple. Just practice for ten years! After all, experts are made, not born. As we’ve seen, the available scientific evidence suggests that success is not just due to natural talent or unique gifts – apart from a few basic requirements, such as above-average height for basketball players. So what’s the problem: why doesn’t anyone who wants to become a superstar? Unfortunately, things are not that simple.
To visualize the difficulties involved, imagine that – for ten whole years – you have to practice for five, six, or more hours every day, including weekends and holidays. And this is just the cost of entry. Moreover, it’s not just any old practice. It must be deliberate practice, where the aim is to improve your performance continuously, to do a little better each time, and never to feel satisfied with your achievements. This requires an incredible amount of effort. The influential journalist Geoffrey Colvin, of Fortune magazine, has written at length about “What it takes to be great”:
Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, ‘If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.’ [. . .] Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. [. . .] In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice – passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow – practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up. [. . .] Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age – 18 months – and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18.12
If you’re still aspiring to greatness after reading that extract, remember that the type of practice demonstrated by Churchill, Horowitz, Jordan, Rice, and Woods requires tremendous perseverance. Worse, it’s monotonous and can become boring for everyone except the super-motivated.
So the good news is that real expertise is indeed available to all. The bad news is that you must be motivated and keep going despite serious obstacles and without immediate rewards. The even worse news is that nobody can tell you how to motivate yourself, or persevere in the face of tedious practice sessions. Researchers are totally unable to answer the question of why some people are motivated and others are unable (or just don’t care) to practice in order to improve their performance.
On a brighter note, psychologists do know how to make deliberate practice work well. First, outstanding guidance from an accomplished teacher is essential. The value of good training can be seen from the number of top tennis players, famous musicians, or great artists who emerge from the same schools. The instructor should make the student familiar with existing knowledge in the field, teach the various methods available, and give a thorough demonstration of their advantages and drawbacks. Last but absolutely not least, the trainee should receive feedback, not only to improve performance but also to reach, as soon as possible, a level where he or she can start to give self-feedback. Only then can the long, thorough period of deliberate practice begin.
There is a great deal of evidence for the value of deliberate practice. For instance, world records in sports keep improving over time. If we take an event like the marathon, where technology has barely contributed to improving athletic performance, we see substantial progress. In the first modern Olympics held in Greece in 1896, the winner, Spyros Louis, ran the then 24.85-mile marathon in 2 hours 58 minutes and 50 seconds. If we rather generously assume that Louis could keep up the same average speed for today’s 26.2-mile race, his time would be 3 hours 8 minutes and 33 seconds. At the time of writing, the world record for the official 26.2-mile marathon is over 33% better: 2 hours 4 minutes and 26 seconds. Shoes, diet, gradient, and climate notwithstanding, the biggest difference between Spyros Louis and Haile Gebrselassie, today’s record holder, is the way they train. Thanks to more and better training, the same types of improvement have been reported in chess, music, and many other areas.
Deliberate practice sets objectives just beyond your existing level of competence. However, you only know that you’ve made it to that next level if you get relevant and, ideally, measurable feedback. In well-structured games like tennis or chess, that kind of feedback is plentiful. In other fields, as we glimpsed earlier, it starts to get more difficult. In music, for instance, feedback is subjective, but often validated by experts such as teachers or critics. By the time you reach business, politics, medicine, or economics – the world of the social sciences, where so many of life’s decisions are made – getting good feedback is nigh on impossible.
Is the turnaround strategy of Dell, announced in the middle of 2007, working, for example? Clearly, bringing a company back to health may take several years. You can’t give up at the first sign of difficulty. Nor, while you’re waiting for concrete figures such as increased sales, profit, or share price, can you be sure the feedback you’re getting is objective. INSEAD professor and leadership expert Manfred Kets de Vries likes to say that many top executives surround themselves with “liars,” people who distort information to avoid being blamed for errors or to take credit for successes. This corruption of feedback occurs to a greater or lesser extent at all levels in the management hierarchy. No one likes to criticize the boss’s decision and put their own promotion in jeopardy. The result is a vicious circle. The boss believes (erroneously) that he or she is right; the subordinate (untruthfully) reinforces the belief. And so it goes on.
Can we learn anything from those who have practiced their way to greatness? Is it possible to do the same in our own mundane worlds of business or the social sciences? Although far from the Olympic Stadium or Carnegie Hall, we believe there’s a lot to be learned from the model of deliberate practice and, in particular, the emphasis it places on feedback. But to apply the model, you need the right culture. General Electric, for example, is known for demanding frequent, objective feedback from its executives, and many other companies are following their example. The other obvious lesson is that it’s not enough just to collect feedback and file it away. It must be evaluated and used to change behavior if necessary.
One big challenge for executives is to resist the temptation to punish errors, and allow people to learn from their failures and thus improve their future performance. L’Oréal, the French cosmetics giant, is an interesting case in point. All their managers have the “right to make an error.” But if they make the same mistake twice, it suggests an inability to learn – and their career is at risk.
But the biggest challenge of all is probably our old foe, the illusion of control (which we haven’t seen for a little while). It can be a great impediment when we’re evaluating feedback. As we saw in the story of the twins in chapter 8, most of us are guilty of attributing our success to our skills and failure to bad luck – or the fault of someone else. Many others are serial “deniers” who, despite the facts, are unwilling to accept the evidence, or incurable optimists, who always believe that success is just around the corner.
Finally, it is important to realize that expertise in one domain, say chess or entrepreneurship, does not necessarily transfer to other domains – even those that appear related. Just because someone is a great musician, it doesn’t mean they can become a great actor overnight. Perhaps that’s the downside of long, deliberate practice. The skills that it develops are only applicable within the specific field of training. To become an expert in another area, well, it takes another ten years – and all the motivational energy you can muster. Remember when basketball superstar Michael Jordan tried to become a top baseball player. He didn’t make it.
So what should you do? We wish we could give you one of those simple recipes for success, so beloved of gurus and self-help books, but by now, you know our views on such matters. Most importantly, any such advice wouldn’t be useful to you.
Having said that, there are two things that we can tell you. The first follows from the fact that that the road to greatness is extremely long and uncertain. Its surface is also potholed with many sacrifices. The demands of deliberate practice imply, for example, giving up many of the usual small pleasures of life. Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi13 interviewed ninety-one famous people in an attempt to discover what made them “great.” His conclusions were that they possessed “dialectic” personalities. In other words, a bit like the autistic savants we mentioned earlier, they are people of extremes. They are smart yet naive, extroverted yet introverted. Furthermore, Csikszentmihalyi reports that none of those he interviewed was popular during adolescence, or even more brilliant than their classmates in college. They concentrated on what interested them and focused on achieving their future objectives through their work. While their contemporaries pursued day-to-day pleasures, those destined for greatness plugged away at their practice.
Our first piece of advice therefore is as follows: carefully consider what we’ve just said and decide whether you have the courage, motivation, and personality to venture on to the long and arduous road that might lead to greatness. In addition, remember that, no matter how smart and motivated you are, there will always be others who are at least as intelligent and hard working as you. That is, for every great chess grandmaster, Olympic athlete, Nobel Prize winning scientist, or entrepreneur-turned-billionaire, there are probably several hundred who are equally good but don’t achieve greatness. Each year there are only one or two Nobel Prize winners in each category, yet the selection committee considers many hundreds. The same is true for the Oscars and the Pulitzer Prize. Just behind the winners, there are many other hugely talented contenders, who we never hear about.
In other words, to return to our central theme, greatness is partly a game of luck. The attempt to reach the pinnacle of success is like participating in a lottery with very expensive tickets. As with any lottery, the probability of winning is very small, but the price of entry, in the form of ten long years of practice, is phenomenally high. To win a Nobel Prize or an Oscar – or equivalent – therefore requires the luck of the draw as well as intricately crafted skills acquired through at least ten years of deliberate practice.
For some perspective on this, let’s go back to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman whom we cited at the beginning of this chapter. What was the source of his success? In his own words,
Although I owe a great debt to my mother, and a great debt to my late collaborator and friend Amos Tversky, my debt to pure blind luck is surely the greatest of all.14
Now Kahneman is extremely intelligent and creative and has worked hard all his professional life. So was his statement just “false modesty”? No, to his credit, we believe Kahneman was being honest because we know from his work that he understands the illusion of control as well as the fact that many hard-working, creative, and intelligent scientists fail to win the Nobel Prize.
Our second piece of advice is more modest but pragmatic. Becoming great is extremely hard and, by definition, achieved by only a few. However, becoming better at what you do in any given domain is not. And gaining competence in almost any activity will do wonders for your self-esteem – and probably earning power. The principles of deliberate practice, in the form of expert training and good feedback, can be used by all of us to increase our skill levels at work or play. It’s never too late to improve some of your job-related skills or to seek more accurate information about your performance. Whether you need to become a better public speaker or a more proficient sailor, water-colorist or parent, you’ll add to your personal Fortune by increasing your expertise. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but – with the right feedback – it can bring satisfaction . . . and better decisions.
The question remains, however, as to how to make those decisions. When is it better to blink? When should we stop and think? Actually, in many cases it’s best to do neither! The plot thickens one last time . . .