Start early or die soon
‘Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.’
Albert Einstein
In the world of football it’s really all about the Brazilians. When you study FIFA’s list of the world’s best footballers since their Player of the Year award was first handed out in 1991, you will find that eight times out of twenty it has gone to a Brazilian. Now think about that. What are the chances of 40 per cent of the winners of a hugely prestigious award for the world’s biggest, most popular sport coming from the same country? But impossible as it seems, this is what has happened. And Brazilian dominance does not stop there. In the 2010/11 Champions League, the world’s finest club tournament, 79 Brazilians had time on the pitch, compared to only 25 Britains, 26 Germans and 49 Spaniards – and not a single Brazilian team takes part in the competition!
Over the last few years the mass exodus of football players from Brazil has been huge. Since 1999 more than 1,000 Brazilian players each year have left their homeland to seek their footballing fortune, hoping for financial windfalls in Europe, Asia and the US, as well as in other South American leagues.
This apparently endless stream of excellent football players has been an irresistible bait for agents, coaches, journalists and scouts from all over the world. They have flocked to the Brazil in the hope of discovering the secret of this Gold Mine.
As usual, far-fetched explanations are rife. Special footballing genes, unique training methods, the natural joy of ‘the beautiful game’ and time spent playing football volley on Copacabana Beach are just a few of the ideas that have been laid on the table.
Europeans have assiduously attempted to mimic the ‘Brazilian way’. Clubs have built beach pitches to replicate Copacabana. Samba rhythms have been introduced at training sessions. Players have been forced to kick a ball about barefoot just like the Brazilian boys in the favelas of São Paulo. Everybody wants to crack the code and discover how to create a new Ronaldo, Ronaldinho or Neymar, but so far without success. My own search for answers about Brazilian footballing excellence led me deep inside one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Guns, cool cash and football as a religion
Felipe nudges the ball with his foot as it rolls across the filthy street. He is one of twelve boys who have just organised a match in the middle of Rio’s biggest favela, Rocinha. The houses around the pitch are built on top of each other like Lego bricks to accommodate the constantly rising population. Some 300,000 people currently live in Rocinha.
Felipe lopes about the asphalt pitch in a grimy jersey with ‘Ronaldinho’ printed on the back. He is only nine years old, but he already has an agent from Germany who pays for his shoes and his parents’ rent and electricity bills. Of course, they want something in return, hoping that Felipe’s footballing skills will one day land him a major contract. All the boys on the pitch in Rocinha have one thing in common: they know that their future depends on their abilities as footballers. No other opportunities exist. Even if they dream of becoming lawyers or businessmen, they know that in reality such dreams are unrealistic. Their families can hardly spare enough money to send them to one of the few, poor schools in the favela. So the boys play on the asphalt pitch in Rocinha every day.
Around the pitch, some shady looking people are gathered. A young man about twenty years old saunters round the edge of the asphalt with his son. Every now and then he turns away from the pitch, puts a small can to his nose and sniffs. It is glue. This is by no means a rare sight.
This, Rio’s brutal dark side, is just twenty minutes’ drive from the city’s fashionable Ipanema neighbourhood and the beach at Copacabana with its rows of exquisite restaurants and affluent tourists lounging in deckchairs. In Rocinha the drug gang bosses have the last word in a lot of people’s lives – they are involved in everything from issuing planning permission, to helping people settle their differences, to deciding what colour clothes people should wear. If a colour is associated with a rival gang, people are not allowed to wear it. In 1996 Michael Jackson had to seek the permission of the gangs to record his music video ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ in the Santa Marta favela.
For young people with few, if any, opportunities, the gangs can offer a decent living. They can make up to 5,000 reais (£1,850) a month working for them. The gangs recruit members as young as ten years old. At that age they start by selling cocaine in small envelopes on the streets. The gangs prefer to use the really young kids to carry out the dirty work because they only have to serve short prison sentences. In the event of disputes between gangs or when fighting with the police breaks out it is not unusual to see teenagers walking the streets with AK-47s and grenades hanging off their belts. This is the world that will swallow Felipe and the other eleven children on the pitch unless their footballing skills can secure them a ticket out of there.
It is also not unusual for the best Brazilian footballers to have connections among the drug set. Flamengo superstar Vagner Love had some explaining to do recently when he was filmed on his way to a concert escorted by a crowd of drug dealers. And Adriano had to explain to the police how he had got his hands on a motorbike that was registered in the name of a drug dealer’s mother. Other Brazilian top footballers have, over the years, dedicated some of their goals to gang bosses.
For the gangs, football represents a way of demonstrating their power. Once a year they hold the Coppa Rocinha, in which all the favela’s teams play against one other. The matches are played with such intensity that one would think they were a question of life or death. On the sidelines, the drug dealers’ talent spotters stand side-by-side with those from the big clubs like Flamengo, Cruzeiro and Fluminense, looking determinedly for potential material for their clubs. Felipe and the other boys on the pitch know that if they don’t get discovered by the major teams there is good money to be earned playing for the gangs’ teams. A contract with the Mafia pays 50 reais a match. One of Felipe’s friends was recently offered a motorbike if he transferred to a gang’s team.
I watch Felipe glide along the asphalt, hit the ball with the extreme tips of his toes and score. He clenches his fist. His team wins the day’s match and the boys hug each other in jubilation.
More than 90 per cent of Brazil’s top players grew up in poverty. In Brazil, football is the most obvious way for the people of the favelas to rise out of their difficult circumstances. While this escape route may be easy to visualise, it is also demanding. But Felipe knows that he has a chance – he sees the evidence upon the slopes of Rocinha where the great players from his district have built impressive homes for their families. These are daily reminders to all the boys of what they can become if they work hard enough.
The author playing with the boys in Favela Rocinha
Copacabana is overrated
‘Forget Copacabana,’ says the Godfather of Brazilian football, gesticulating at me with the fat brown cigar that is burning between his chubby fingers. ‘When people come here to find out how we produce the world’s best footballers the first place they go to is the beach at Copacabana. But they go there in vain. Copacabana is a myth.’
It is the day after my experience in the Favela Rocinha, and I am sitting face to face with 65-year-old Eurico Miranda. For ten years he was the president of Vasco da Gama, but he lost he position last year. That hurt. So much, in fact, that he has decided to take back the throne. And Eurico Miranda does not have a reputation for doing things by the book.
One of Brazil’s major newspapers wrote of his entry into football politics: ‘The other clubs’ managers sat playing cards until Eurico Miranda kicked down the door, sat down at the table and started playing according to his own rules.’
It took me weeks to establish contact with Miranda. He is sick and tired of telling all and sundry about his football philosophy, he tells me, as we talk in his office in central Rio de Janeiro. But today he will make an exception, in spite of the fact that he is obviously not at all pleased that I am wearing shorts in his office.
‘Our top players are not hatched on Copacabana or Ipanema,’ he says. ‘95 per cent of them have been created on the street corners of the favelas. Just think how many times a Brazilian boy playing for hours on end every day in the street touches the ball. That is the kind of head start that you can’t catch up with. The biggest mistake they make in Europe is being too well organised. Brazilian footballers are not a product of organised talent development. The secret is spontaneous, unorganised football. Our academies do not do anything different or better than those anywhere else. They just have to make sure not to ruin the raw material they take in. The work has already been done for them.’
Just pick them up in the streets
When I study the great Brazilian players in depth, it turns out that Miranda is perfectly right. It’s the same story with many of the Brazilian players – Pelé, Ronaldinho, Robinho, Ronaldo, Zico and all the others grew up in poverty playing on the streets every day. Very little of their training was done in clubs. They practised on their own. In fact, Brazilian talent development was not systematised until five years ago, when the first academies along the lines of those in Europe began to be set up. In other words, the top players we see today in the major international football arenas were not trained in an established system; they are the direct products of unorganised football on the streets.
I get exactly the same impression when I fly into Congonhas Airport in São Paulo a couple of days later, landing amid the enormous skyscrapers of this vast metropolis. With a population of twenty million, São Paulo is the world’s fifth-largest city. The chaos here makes a traffic jam in New York seem like a trivial misunderstanding on a quiet residential street.
I’m here to visit the football academy established by the supermarket chain Pão de Açúcar. The training ground consists of three pitches and an office block juxtaposed between giant hotels, motorway bridges and slum districts.
Pão de Açúcar Football Academy is located in downtown São Paulo
As I arrive at the ground the Academy’s under-seventeen team is getting ready for the weekend match. Behind one of the goals stands the academy’s director, Thiago Mendes, keeping an eye on them.
‘A fifteen-year-old European boy knows that if he can’t make a go out of football, his country will take care of him,’ he says. ‘That’s not the way it is here. You either earn millions playing football or you end up with nothing. Most of our players come from the favela, where they often have four or five siblings they have to provide for. Football is their only chance.’
Three years after opening, Sendas Pão de Açúcar is a tremendous success. The academy has already produced several national youth team players and sent a good number of them off to top clubs in Europe. But according to Thiago Mendes, the academy itself cannot really take credit for this success.
‘In reality, all we have to do is go out onto the street and pick them up. No Brazilian club needs to worry about what they have been doing up to the age of thirteen or whether they have put in the necessary hours of training. It is our streets that develop our players. If we didn’t have players with that level of skill at thirteen years old then we would have nothing,’ Thiago tells me.
The deeper I delved into the world of Brazilian football, the more apparent it became to me that their mass production of top players has very little to do with the quality of the country’s organised talent development. It is down to the fact that most boys in this country of 200 million people play football, gaining an extreme number of training hours early in their lives playing on the streets. And for most of them there really isn’t any alternative – becoming a good footballer is their only route out of a life of poverty.
This creates a recruitment base not seen anywhere else in the world. Even grade B Brazilian players are top notch. Take, for instance, the major club Cruzeiro which rejects 4,000 players under the age of fifteen for every one which it takes in. Carry that figure forward to the under-twenties, where the competition is even fiercer, and you get one in 126,000. To give some point of comparison, Sweden scarcely even has that many players. As Thiago Mendes explains: ‘Nowhere else in the world do we find so many boys with that many hours of training under their skin at such an early juncture in their lives.’
Although at times it may seem that Ronaldinho and Neymar fell from heaven as blessings to ‘the beautiful game’, the truth is much simpler. The many millions of times they touched the ball throughout their childhood on the streets prepared them to do what we see them do on the pitch today. The Brazilian football empire therefore invites us to consider the following question: when we think we see God-given talent, are we not in fact simply seeing people who have consciously or unconsciously trained a hell of a lot at an early age?
The expert on experts
Interestingly enough, this theory enjoys huge support in the scientific world, which over the last 30 years has intensified its quest to understand high performance. Anders Ericsson, a Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, is the expert on experts. He has spent the last 30 years interviewing and analysing high-flying experts in all kinds of fields, from gymnasts to chess players to violinists.
In the 1990s Ericsson and a group of scientists carried out a study at an academy for elite musicians in West Berlin. Their results would prove to challenge the most fundamental conceptions of what leads to elite performances. The academy lay in what was then West Berlin and had a reputation for producing some of the world’s very best musicians. The vast majority of its students later joined the world’s most reputable symphony orchestras or became soloists on the international stage. With the help of the academy’s lecturers and professors, Ericsson and his colleagues divided the institution’s violinists into three groups. Group one consisted of the stars who were expected to become world-class soloists. Group two consisted of first rate and promising violinists who were not quite of the same standard as those in group one. Group three consisted of those violinists who were not expected to join the world elite, but who were likely to make a living from music, for example as school and college teachers. To be specific, Dr Ericsson’s mission was to clarify the reasons for the different standards of the three groups. Why had some become better than others?
It turned out that all the violinists had started playing their instrument at more or less the same age, around eight years old. They typically decided to go all out and pursue a career as a musician seven years later, at the age of fifteen. All of them also had the exact same teachers and they received the same amount of scheduled instruction during the week at the academy. In other words, everything pointed to the fact that it must have been raw talent that made the violinists in group one better than those in group three.
As part of the study the students were asked to decide which activity had been the most decisive in improving them as violinists. All agreed that self-training was the most effective activity; the practice they did on their own. What is more, not only did they agree that it was the most efficient form of training, they also said it was the most mentally demanding, and far from enjoyable.
The interesting thing was that while the students understood the importance of this kind of practice and had the time to do it, not all of them spent a lot of time doing it. Group one and group two each studied for about 24 hours a week on their own, but members of group three studied for only about nine hours. Simple arithmetic shows a difference of 780 hours a year in the time spent practising.
All this provides a convincing explanation as to why groups one and two were more competent than group three. It does not, however, explain why group one was superior to group two. If the number of hours spent practising is the critical factor when it comes to being a first-rate player, why do we not find the stars in group one practising more than the merely promising violinists of group two?
Ericsson and his team answered this question by taking an in-depth look at the students’ training histories. On top of assessing the number of hours they currently put in, all of them had been asked to estimate the amount of time they had spent per week year-on-year since they had first picked up a violin. When the researchers compared these figures, everything became clear. As eighteen year olds, the violinists in group one had spent an average of 7,410 hours of their lives practising; group two had spent an average of 5,302 hours; and group three had only practised for 3,420 hours. In other words, students in group one had worked much, much harder than students in groups two and three.
The study of the Berlin violinists shocked the music world, which seems to have quite a deep-seated belief in the idea of innate talent. It seems an obvious explanation for why some people are tone deaf while others play so well that your hair stands on end. In fact, Ericsson and his team did not find any violinists who were among the best but who did not put in the same amount of practice as the others – nobody was that talented. It is equally interesting to note that neither were there any violinists who had put in the hours of training generally required but who had failed to rise to the level one would therefore expect.
As Ericsson puts it: ‘When a musician has reached a standard high enough for him or her to be admitted to an elite academy [again: you just have to be “good enough”], the number of hours they currently spend practising and have spent practising in the past are the critical factor which separates the best from the second best and the second best from the rest. Nothing else.’
In other words, high performance seems first and foremost to be a choice that you can make – as long as you are willing to invest what it takes.
Two hours and forty-four minutes every day for ten years
The deeper researchers on high performance have delved into the history of so-called elite performers, the more they agree that their journey to success is rarely, if ever, a short sprint and is usually an exacting marathon. There is even some consensus on the amount of training required to become world class: 10,000 hours. Ten thousand hours of training is equivalent to putting in two hours and forty-four minutes every day for ten years. This gave rise to the so-called Ten Years Rule, which has been very succinctly expressed by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon: ‘Becoming world-class in any domain, from mathematics to violin to chess, requires ten years of committed training.’
Or in the words of neurologist Daniel Levitin: ‘In study after study of composers, basketball players, authors, skaters, pianists, chess players and even criminals (if they are not caught and jailed too often), the 10,000 hours turn up time and time again.’
So there is no doubt that you must pool at least a decade of focused training to truly master anything. In a 1985 study of 120 elite athletes, artists, biochemists and mathematicians, every single top performer invested a minimum of ten years’ training to achieve international recognition in their field. Olympic swimmers and the best pianists actually trained an average of fifteen years before attaining the highest level. The ten-year rule is a very rough estimate of what it takes to achieve international class; most researchers regard it as a minimum. In music and literature, for example, elite performers often do not reach the pinnacle of their careers for twenty or thirty years. There are no shortcuts. As Bob Bowman, coach of the American swimming legend Michael Phelps, once said: ‘Michael has not taken a single day off in five years. He even trained on Christmas Eve and on his birthday.’
When people who are leaders in their fields are asked about the secret of their success, it is very rare indeed to hear them say: ‘I was just better than the others, I was more talented.’ They are far more likely to say that they focused more, made greater sacrifices, worked harder and were more passionate about what they did. It seems that anyone who thinks that talent means that success will come quickly or easily is setting themselves up to be disappointed. As Anders Ericsson explained to me: ‘When we look at the people we like to call talented, it would appear that they do not have to work particularly hard to succeed. They make everything look so easy. But the opposite is actually the case. Almost invariably the best performers are those who train the most. I have yet to meet someone who did not earn their success through hard work and thousands of hours of training.’
Six-year-old girls and their hitting partners
So the explanation of the success of Brazilian players is far simpler than we tend to think. Let’s jump back to young Felipe in Favela Rocinha. Having had a kick about and a chat with the Felipe and the other lads, I punched the number of hours they train every week into my pocket calculator. When I multiplied all their weekly training hours in school, the club and on the street together, I found that they put in 22 weekly training hours. If a nine-year-old Brazilian boy has trained for 22 hours a week since the age of five, he will have accumulated 4,576 hours of training. If he continues at this rate he will have reached the magic 10,000 hours by age thirteen! Just like the musicians in Ericsson’s study, the Brazilian boys did most of their training on their own. The fact that this self-training is so crucial raises the question of what really matters in the performance of a teacher, coach or manager. Is it what they make their charges do while they are with them, or is it rather what they can inspire them to do when they are not?
The 10,000 hours seem to be inescapable. It seems that when we are convinced that we see raw, innate talent, we are in reality simply seeing 10,000 hours of training consumed at a very early stage in a person’s life.
Brazil is a huge country, with a population in excess of 200 million, where virtually every boy plays football, where there is a football pitch on the first floor of most condominiums and where it is by no means unusual for a boy to have played 10,000 hours before his thirteenth birthday.
It seems clear enough that this is the reason that Brazilians have scooped half the awards for the best footballer in the world since 1993. And this correlation of training hours with success is also borne out by the other five Gold Mines.
We have yet to explore the Russian tennis Gold Mine in depth but there it is by no means unusual for six-year-old girls to have hitting partners and their own personal physiotherapists. Not only do the Russian girls start training far earlier than, for instance, their American counterparts, but they also do so for different reasons. At Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow, children’s coach Elena Kosiskya explained to me: ‘We start training them five times a week from the age of five here. In the United States they start to do that when the children are nine or ten, and for the first few years they only play for fun. Here, we train them to be champions from day one.’
A Russian girl training at Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow
Little girls in Moscow getting clear instructions
More or less the same pattern manifested itself in South Korea, where it is not unusual for South Korean junior golfers to train three times as much as American juniors. As one of the coaches, Won Park, said to me as we sat at the driving range in Seoul: ‘We have a rule here: you train from sunup to sundown and then you do physical training.’
Morning training at a driving range in Seoul
The latest hit in South Korea is virtual golf. The country now has more than 3,000 golf cafes and more than 12,000 golf simulators, most of them in Seoul. Players can check in at any time of the day with their own golf clubs for a virtual round on the world’s most distinguished courses. Young South Koreans frequent golf cafes like Americans go to Starbucks. I arrived at my hotel in Seoul at around midnight and business executives were still honing their skills at the hotel’s indoor driving range down in the basement.
Still running with his school books
The Ethiopian Gold Mine is Bekoji. Despite having a population of only 30,000 people it spits out one long-distance running world champion after another. Yet again people here seem to hit the target of 10,000 training hours early on. The infrastructure in Bekoji is poor, to put it mildly. The town is five hours by car from the capital Addis Ababa, the last three hours along deeply pitted dirt roads. Because of this, only two of the town’s 30,000 inhabitants have cars.
The preferred means of transport here is ‘Shanks’s pony’ – walking, or rather running. Old people walk or run 20 km to market and 20 km back again every week. Many children run as far as 10 km to school and 10 km home again. Added to this is the fact that Bekoji lies 3,000 metres above sea level, meaning that simply by living there the population produces masses of red blood cells, which are vital to long-distance runners. They live slap bang in the middle of perfect conditions and so benefit from this natural form of blood doping. One could say that Bekoji boys and girls train to be super athletes without even being aware of it. They certainly achieve 10,000 hours of training time at a very early stage in their lives, and under these highly beneficial conditions.
The entrance to the only running track in Bekoji
Boys of Bekoji training from 6 a.m.
On my last day in Ethiopia I meet the legendary Haile Gebrselassie. With eight World Championships under his belt, two Olympic gold medals and more than 25 world records, his CV speaks for itself. Haile is in many respects the perfect example of the substance of the Ethiopian superstars. He was born in the town of Assella, 50 km from Bekoji, where he grew up in poverty on a farm and, like many other children, had to run 10 km to school every morning and 10 km home again every evening.
‘Running 10 km to school every day at high altitude turned out to be the perfect preparation for my career,’ he tells me.
It also gave Gebrselassie a very special running style. He always runs with his left arm slightly bent. There’s a very simple reason for this: he used his arm to carry his books on the way to school. Over time, it simply became part of his running style. Even today, Haile Gebrselassie runs as though he is still carrying his school books.
‘This hand is not always very active,’ he says, looking down at his right arm. ‘I used to carry my books in the other hand. My carrying hand was always my strongest.’
The author meeting Haile Gebrselassie in Addis Ababa
It’s a similar story among the Kenyan runners. Many began their running careers as early as four or five years old, looking after the family’s goats. If they came home and there was a goat missing they were in serious trouble, so they were constantly vigilant, and didn’t mind running around the hills to keep tabs on the herd. Many of them also ran to and from school.
As Moses Kiptanui puts it: ‘We ran to school to avoid a caning for being late. We were actually training to become athletes without realising it. The teacher didn’t realise, either, that she was actually training us by punishing us when we turned up late.’
Of course, all this is not to say that all people have equal potential, and that everybody could become a world-class runner. Haile Gebrselassie and Moses Kiptanui, even if they hadn’t spent countless hours running to school in high altitude, would probably still have been good runners. But without those hours to school, they would never have reached the heights of achievement which they have.
The huge amount of training that East Africans get under their belts at a very early age, consciously or unconsciously, gives them a foundation which no-one in the Western world can match. As one of the best American marathon runners of all time, Alberto Salazar has said: ‘In Kenya there are maybe 1 million schoolboys who run 16–20 kilometres a day. An eighteen-year-old Kenyan runner will have run about 25,000 to 30,000 kilometres further in his life than your average American boy.’
It is interesting to think what might happen if you took ten American girls and boys aged eight to live in Kenya, in Iten’s running environment. Would they also develop into some of the world’s best middle- and long-distance runners? Or could a British invasion of the rostra at the 2016 Olympics be achieved if you took a group of English children, put them up with host families in the Pyrenees and got them to run between 80 and 110 kilometres every week for the next seven years?
There is no way an experiment like this would ever be carried out, of course, but as a thought experiment it helps us to challenge our convictions about what it is that creates world class.
Early starters stay ahead of the rest
Let us return to the roots of this discussion: the Brazilian favelas, where the foundations for great accomplishments in the world’s football arenas are laid. Take a look at the training curve of Felipe from Rocinha (the solid line) who, just like many other Brazilian boys, will achieve his 10,000 hours at the age of thirteen.
This is in glaring contrast to an English lad (the dotted line) who maybe also starts when he’s five but who only trains for a couple of hours three times a week. Following a programme like that, at the age of thirteen he will only have trained for 2,544 hours, and if he continues at that rate it will take him until the age of 30 to reach 10,000 hours. If, at the age of fifteen, he is good enough to get into an English football academy – where they train four or five times a week – he will achieve his 10,000 hours a few years earlier. However, it is probably already too late to catch up with a Brazilian boy.
So there is a lot to indicate that early training is vital for success. They are aware of this in South Korea. Indeed, some parents are so concerned about making sure their children train enough that they take their children out of school, sometimes as early as at the age of ten. As Won Park explains: ‘If you reach the age of 25 and have not yet won a significant tournament you are a catastrophe. You must start early if you are to get anywhere.’
This does not only apply to the world of sport. Think back to the violinists in Berlin. The only reason people in group one (7,410 hours of training) were better than those in group two (5,302 hours) and group three (3,420 hours) was that they had worked harder. Far, far harder. Not just today or yesterday, either, but since they were seven years old.
A young violinist in group three might decide to aim to join the world violinist elite at age eighteen. Unfortunately, the brutal fact is that the best violinists in his age group, those he needs to match, have already spent more than twice the number of hours practising than him. To catch up, he would have to spend many, many more hours practising than his counterparts.
And if he is in group three (spending about nine hours a week in practice) then he would have to more than double his current hours simply to match the training schedules of the group one students (about 24 hours a week), let alone go beyond them. In other words, the late starter would be a pensioner before he had the necessary amount of training under his belt. Although in theory it would be possible for someone in this position to practise their way into the world’s violinist elite, in reality it would not be achievable.
Windows of opportunities
The hours of practice early starters put in are not just valuable in themselves – they also physically and mentally prepare them for the many subsequent hours they will need to spend in order to truly excel. In Bekoji and Iten, for example, the kids who run everywhere in their bare feet are unconsciously building up their motor apparatus, which will enable them to cope with large amounts of training later in life. They are training in order to be able to train even more.
The view that early training carries benefits beyond merely helping a person to reach the magic 10,000 hours at an earlier age is backed up by research. Psychologists and neurologists speak of there being particular windows of opportunity in our development – specific phases, during which training is decisive if one is to remain in the running as a potential world-class performer in a given field. If you do not learn the necessary skills during that period, the window closes and you lose the chance of being among the very best.
Michael Jordan learned this the hard way. After he left basketball as the greatest player of all time, he tried to repeat the trick in baseball. He signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox. However, he was as great a failure in baseball as he was a success in basketball. He got nowhere near playing in the best American league. But why? Here was one of the world’s very best athletes, a genuine winner, totally committed to succeeding in his new sport. But despite his extreme training efforts he ended up failing to make a mark.
In his book Why Michael Couldn’t Hit, neurologist Harold Klawans presents his theory of what went wrong. One of the main reasons, as he saw it, was that Michael Jordan was way past his window of opportunity. Being among the best hitters in baseball requires outstanding hand-eye coordination and body-balance control. These relatively complex skills require early specialisation. It is reasonable to assume that if there’s a twelve year old you have not trained adequately to receive and hit the ball shooting towards you, you can forget all about joining the world elite. No matter how good you are at basketball.
People can always improve, though not always to the highest level. According to Harold Klawans, if you do not start training in a particular discipline until you are twenty, it will be impossible to programme the brain with the required skills to the required level, and you will never be able to catch up with those who started ten years earlier. Hence Michael Jordan’s attempt at a second sporting career was always doomed to failure.
Dr Anthony Kalinowski, a researcher at the University of Chicago, made another important finding relating to early specialisation. Kalinowski discovered that on average, American swimmers who make the national championships will have started training at age ten. In comparison, those selected for the United States Olympic team started training at an average of seven years old. Similarly, the best violinists of the 20th century – all of whom had international careers as soloists spanning over 30 years – were found to have begun practising their instrument at an average age of five, while violinists of merely national prominence started at eight. Getting a head start really makes a difference.
Why you should start early
So precisely how early can and should you start training if you want to become world class in your field? And when is it too late? The answers to those questions depend largely on three parameters.
1. Competitive pressures in the discipline
The effort required to achieve world-class performance depends on the level of competition in the particular discipline. If you want to reach the top in curling, you can probably do so with significantly less than 10,000 hours of training and also get away with starting out later in life. If you want to make it big in football, in which the physical demands are higher and competition much more intense, it’s a different story. Show me a footballer who has played in the Champions League and got there with fewer than 10,000 hours of training – in most cases it will be a lot more than that. Likewise, show me a basketball player in the American NBA who has trained for less than 15,000 hours, a top South Korean golfer on the LPGA tour who has trained less than 20,000 hours.
There are none, and if you can find any I will gladly run naked from Iten in Kenya to Bekoji in Ethiopia. My travels and research in the six Gold Mines showed that if you want to become world class in sports like tennis, golf, football and athletics, you are more likely to need 20,000 hours of training than 10,000 – the competition is that fierce. In Japan, children trained in gymnastics for up to twelve hours a day in order to prepare for the London Olympics in 2012. Working at that rate means you can hit 10,000 hours in only a little over two and a half years.
The lesson here is simple: your own speed means nothing if other people are running faster. It’s no good having 10,000 training hours in your knapsack if your competitors have 20,000, and this is where the rule comes unstuck. What it takes to achieve world class in a specific field is a dynamic concept and changes over time. As records are broken, the bar is raised when it comes to the number of hours of training you need to consume to become world class.
The same principle counts in business. How much effort and how many hours you are going to have to practise to become the best are defined by your market. In many markets, it takes 10,000 hours of preparation to win because most people give up after 5,000 hours. In other markets where the rewards for succeeding are huge and the competition ruthless, the number is probably closer to 20,000 hours or more. For endeavours like being CEO of a Fortune 500 company or partner in a worldwide consultant firm, 10,000 hours might not be enough.
2. The complexity of the discipline
The more complex the skills you have to master, the more crucial early practice is. One example is gymnastics, which is extremely physically complex, requiring highly developed balance, coordination, muscle-control and so on. If you do not start specialising as a seven or eight year old you will never make the world elite. Your ‘window of opportunity’ will have closed.
In contrast, take long-distance running, which in purely technical terms is not nearly as complex. In this discipline you could get away with specialising much later than age seven and still manage to become world class. The three-times steeplechase World Champion Moses Kiptanui may well have run as a child, but it was not until age eighteen that he began to train consciously and seriously in order to join the world elite.
An interesting pattern emerges when you study the British medal haul from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. British athletes brought home a total of 119 gold medals, which is surely an acceptable performance for a nation with a population of 60 million. It was only bettered by the major powers – China, the United States and Russia. The interesting thing, though, is that the gold medals were won across very few disciplines. Cycling, canoeing/kayaking, rowing and sailing are particularly prominent in the statistics and account for almost 90 per cent of all the British gold medals.
These sports are known as ‘big engine sports’. That is, they do require a lot of strength and stamina but are relatively simple in their technical demands. In theory, you could take a world-class rower and transform him within a few years into a world-class cyclist. The critical factors required for success in both disciplines are similar to, and overlap, each other.
Take, for example, Eric Heiden, the American speedskater who won five Olympic golds. After his speed-skating career, Heiden became a professional cyclist, and went on to win the American championships and complete the Giro d’Italia. Because of its relatively low technical complexity, cycling is not a sport in which you have to specialise at an early age, so Heiden was able to transfer his physical capacities from speed-skating directly to cycling and quickly achieve results. Another example is the Cuban Alberto Juantorena. Originally a basketball player, he became an Olympic 400- and 800-metre running champion later in life. This kind of transition can only successfully be made to a sport which does not require early specialisation. There is no way Juantorina would have succeeded if he had taken the plunge into gymnastics, skating, table tennis or baseball, all of which demand far earlier specialisation than middle-distance running. Remember the lesson of Michael Jordan.
This all tells us the reason that Britain does not win medals in gymnastics, taekwondo, tennis and table tennis: the Brits simply do not train early enough in some disciplines, meaning their windows of opportunity have already closed.
3. The point at which you must peak
The earlier you need to peak in your discipline, the more important it is to specialise early. This applies in gymnastics, in which girls typically peak between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. If they are to train in gymnastics for 10,000 hours before they reach that age, they must specialise as four or five year olds. The best female gymnasts at the 2012 Olympics will have been born around 1995. Generally speaking, girls have to specialise earlier than boys, simply because they develop earlier and therefore have fewer years at their disposal before their window of opportunity closes.
The same principle applies in football, where players are peaking earlier and earlier. If you have not acquired the basic technical skills of football by the time you are twelve you can forget all about playing international football professionally. Golf, on the other hand, is a sport in which many people peak relatively late, meaning that it is not absolutely necessary to start before you are ten.
It is also important to understand that early specialisation and many hours of training early in life are far more decisive factors in sport than they are, for example, in commerce or the arts. This is primarily due to physical factors, which in sport naturally impose limits on the length of an athlete’s career.
Nothing else to do
I understand that all these calculations of what you need to do to become the best in the world at something may sound cold and cynical. The fact is, however, that you really do have to be this single-minded and focused on your goal. You have to make sacrifices.
But here is something else to think about: not everyone has to aim to be the best in the world. To make significant, even life-changing progress in a particular area (to advance professionally, for example), you most likely don’t have to devote yourself to your goal with the single-minded ferocity that is required to become world class. However, understanding the features in common which allowed Ronaldinho, Haile Gebrselassie or the Berlin violinists to become the world’s best will very likely show you how to get better at what you do as well.
And the evidence is clear: training is not what you do when you’ve got where you’re going. It is what gets you there. Whether you are a mathematician, a footballer, a business executive or run a sandwich bar, if something extraordinary is to come out, then something extraordinary must go in. Large quantities of practice hours make you good. Exceptionally large quantities make you excellent, perhaps even world class.
It is very unlikely many world stars sit down and calculate how much time they need to train and how early they need to start in order to be among the very best. Their beginnings are often much more arbitrary than that. For example, we often underrate the fact that people simply become good because there is nothing else to do where they live. Remember Bekoji in Ethiopia – people there become good runners because there is simply nothing else to do.
Before I went to Bekoji, Richard Nerirkar, the former British elite runner and director of the Great Ethiopian Run, told me this: ‘You can’t do anything there. You can’t earn any money, you can’t get a good education and you can’t really build a business. Running gives people in Bekoji meaning and purpose.’
We’ve already seen that the same thing is true in Brazil, where the dearth of choice drives millions of Brazilian boys into intensive football training very early in life. Or we could point to Tärnaby, a village in north-west Sweden with a miniscule population of 533 which, over the years, has produced some of the world’s best skiers – Anja Pärson, Stig Strand and the legendary Ingemar Stenmark are but a few of them. The village lies isolated in the snow-covered Swedish wilderness and choices there are limited, to put it mildly. In other words, the optimum conditions exist for children to put in an extreme number of skiing hours early in life. Life in Tärnaby is certainly far less brutal than in Rocinha, but just like in the Brazilian favela, the buffet consists of very few dishes.
This is in stark contrast to most of the Western world, where people have enormous freedom and are given all kinds of opportunities. But if you want to be good at something, is having so much choice a good thing? How can you possibly achieve your 10,000 hours of training early enough if you grow up in an El Dorado of choices, all of them open to you and between which you can surf at leisure?
The Paradox of Choice
We typically prize having choices; we usually want to have as many as possible. We see autonomy and freedom of choice as critical to our well-being. However, though people in the West today have more choice than any group have had in history (and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy), they don’t necessarily benefit from it. Too much choice can be a bad thing, causing decision paralysis and unhappiness. This phenomenon is widely known as the Paradox of Choice.
In 2000 two American psychologists, Dr Sheena S. Iyengar and Dr Mark R. Lepper, set up a tasting booth at an upmarket grocery store in California. Each day they set out a selection of jams; some days there would be six types, other days there would be 24. Although the wider selection attracted more shoppers, more people actually bought the jam when faced with the narrower range. The more choices people had, the harder it was for them to make a decision.
This is generally true of modern life – we are bombarded with an endless stream of mundane little decisions. We stand in the breakfast cereal aisle of the supermarket and are confronted with shelf after shelf of different ways to eat corn and wheat, stretching away as far as the eye can see. The internet gives us access to news, games, television, Facebook and a million other ways to pass our time. Young men and women are increasingly reluctant to make the ultimate commitment and get married, and that is likely due at least in part to all the other glittery options competing for their attention: friends, professional success, the media and all the people in the world they haven’t yet dated. Our grandparents had a couple of TV channels to choose between, we now have 850. It’s impossible not to constantly wonder if there’s something better, or someone better.
The reason that this causes anxiety for many people is that choice always involves a loss. When you choose one direction, you lose the opportunity of going in another. Economists use the term ‘opportunity costs’ to describe the things a person misses out on when they choose one thing over another. Thus the more options we are faced with, the more opportunity costs we have to accept, and the more unhappy and restless we potentially become. Sometimes we simply freeze and check-out, not choosing anything at all in order to avoid dealing with the opportunity costs of our decisions. We get stuck at the jam table of life, wanting to choose something but unwilling to shut any other choices out. This doesn’t just happen when people are shopping; it happens when we’re doing much more important things, such as choosing our career path.
There is an old saying, ‘If you want to take the island, then burn your boats,’ meaning that if you totally commit to something, giving yourself no way to go back, you are more likely to succeed. For the modern person, making that kind of commitment is harder than ever before.
Why not start early?
Since we live in a world of intense, global competition, anyone who wants to develop their talent in any sphere, be it sports, business, the arts or education, must constantly improve him or herself. If training – and preferably lots of it – is the most decisive factor when it comes to improving oneself, then shouldn’t we try harder to inspire children to pursue their passions and interests in a more dedicated way, and as young as possible? Or, if they have not yet found a passion, perhaps we should train them to do something so well that they will naturally develop an enthusiasm for it. In the words of Haile Gebrselassie: ‘I started running to school because I couldn’t afford a bike. I realised I was fast, so running became my way out of poverty, and then suddenly, I started loving it. I realised that I could help other people by running fast and that it was a great way of learning what you can achieve if you really want.’
Ideally you want young people to take responsibility for their own training as young as possible. You want them to start reaching beyond the programme they are given, addressing their development needs on their own. But how do you get them to that point quickly as? This is what Marjie Elferink-Gemser, a Dutch professor of sports science, has called ‘early ownership’. If we stop worrying about early training and commit to it then we give ourselves the chance to create a framework in which it is possible to achieve the necessary 10,000 hours quickly while still allowing the child’s personality to develop at the same time.
Why not abandon the illusion that a child needs to do a little of everything – yoga on Wednesdays and French on Thursdays – for them to be ‘complete’? Why not accept that top performance requires a very one-dimensional focus but that a child can easily have a good life and feel at ease with what they have not chosen as well as what they have? Theoretically, if you start training a child in business and finance from the age of five (which they are unlikely to enjoy), by the time they reach the age of 25 you could have them operating at the standard of another executive twice their age. Yes, I am perfectly aware that most people believe that you can only be really great at something if you love it. I don’t agree with that. Love can certainly help, as it will make you more likely to spend time training, but many people still stink at the things they love. Loving something doesn’t mean you’ll be great at it.
The main reason that people find this lesson hard to digest is that they really want to believe effort is a myth. They would prefer to think that in-born talent is the key to success. But effort really is crucial. As the American marketing expert Seth Godin puts it: ‘Effort takes many forms. Showing up. Taking risks. Getting rejected. Investing yourself. Being kind when it’s more fun not to. Paying forward when there’s no hope of tangible reward. Doing the right thing.’
But again, it’s easier to bet on luck. That’s why diet books that simply say, ‘eat less, exercise more’ maybe don’t sell many copies, as good as that advice may be. Effort is really a choice. Being world class often demands a great deal of effort in an early age, the option of improvement is completely available to everyone. All the time.
What you should never forget about
PRACTICE
1. Practice is the mother of all world-class performance. When you think you see god-given talent in a business leader, a musician or an athlete, what you really see is likely to be somebody who consciously or unconsciously got 10,000 hours of practice in at an early age.
2. Just because you love doing something, doesn’t necessarily mean you will ever be great at doing it. The greatest payback often comes when you least want to carry on.
3. World-class performance requires that people start practising at an early age; just how early depends on the discipline. The more complex the skill set you need to master, the earlier you must start. However, improvement is available for everyone.