ICRAVE Practice and Preparation

Is there such thing as innate talent?  The obvious answer is yes. 

Achievement is talent plus preparation. 

• The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
  • People at the top work much, much, much harder.

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise.  In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

• It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
• And what’s ten years?  Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice.

Re-source: Repetition

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

• Even Mozart – the greatest musical prodigy of all time – couldn’t hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in.
• People like Bill Joy and Bill Gates both toiled away in a relatively obscure field without any great hopes for worldly success, but then – boom! – The personal computer revolution happened.
  • They had their ten thousand hours in.  They were ready.
  • It’s not that those guys were smarter than everyone else; it’s that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.
• The Beatles performed 8 hours, seven days a week in Hamburg. Because of this, they got better and gained more confidence.
  • They had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times.  Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers.
    • The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.

craving and resource from “The Outliers” – The Story of Success – by Malcolm Gladwell