Human Potential

I'm sure we're all familiar with the 10,000 hours rule. It's this idea that greatness comes from intense, hyper-focused practice.

Tiger Woods, he is the poster child for this. At 7 months old, his father gave him a set of golf clubs. Two years later, he was showing off his perfect swing on the Mike Douglas Show on live television.

Tiger trained militaristically. His father would scream in his backswing, whisper insults in his ear, to harden him up, to try to get him to crack. But Tiger never did crack. He used his practice to win every national teen golf tournament he could.

Then, he went on to Stanford, where he was notorious for 5 am wakeups, practicing before class, after class, before practice, after practice. He hit golf balls at night with a headlamp. He fell asleep to slow-motion golf swing videos.

And as the most accomplished and skilled golfer of all time, we can confidently conclude that all his hard work payed off.

Now, That story is very inspiring. This idea that Tiger put his head down, he practiced as hard as he could, and he achieved his goal is so amazing and cherished.

Let's take another great of their sport: Roger Federer. Now, He didn't start playing tennis regularly until he was 14 years old. That's a little strange. But that might be a one off case. It's not like he's the most accomplished tennis player of all time.

One of my favorite basketball players of all time, Hakeem Olajuwon, didn't start playing organized basketball until he was 15 years old. Tim Duncan, Didier Drogba, he too started in his late teens. (Also check out Norway's dominance in sports. Club teams are forbidden to restrict their other sports before age 13)

This is just confusing, and it confused me, too.

When researchers looked at elite athletes, they found that the best ones didn't specialize early. They sampled. They played lots of sports, they explored, they delayed commitment, and when they finally did specialize, they had broader skills and fewer injuries, too.

Roger Federer played basketball, soccer, he skateboarded, he wrestled, he played rugby, he basically played every sport under the sun when he was a teenager, and now he is one of the best tennis players to ever play the game.

And the thing is, this doesn't just happen in sports. In education systems in England and Scotland, a study found something similar. Students in England are forced to specialize early. They pick a topic, they study hard, and they earn higher wages at first. However, they're more likely to change their job when they're older.

But students in Scotland, however, they are allowed to explore; they're encouraged to explore. And when they finally do enter the job market, they find jobs that give them more satisfaction and stronger long-term growth. Scottish students did not win at the start, but they found something that they really liked, and they continued and they progressed.

This is interesting. It's just a weird phenomenon because we're taught that practice makes perfect, that the early bird gets the worm.

But Duke Ellington shunned music lessons as a kid to play basketball and to paint.

Claude Shannon, the man who invented the binary system in all of our computers, wanted to be a philosopher. And he learned about that binary system through a century-old idea that coded true and false statements as ones and zeros.

Vincent van Gogh picked five other disciplines before declaring his true calling, picking up the ABCs of drawing and enrolled in art school, being twice the age as every other person around him.

And my favorite, Frances Hesselbein. She didn't take a professional job until she was 54 years old. But that job was in the Girl Scouts. She became CEO of the Girl Scouts, which was a dying company. She saved it, tripled minority membership, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Then, at 82, she left the Girl Scouts to start her own leadership foundation, which she ran until she died 3 years ago at 107 years old.

Why do we never hear about these stories?

I think it's because we can apply the Tiger Woods story to almost anything in our lives because it's easy to put our head down and practice, but it's not good because golf isn't a good model on almost anything us humans want to learn.

Psychologist Robin Hogarth has coined the term kind versus wicked learning environments. You can think of kind learning environments as ones that are dictated by stable rules and repetitive patterns. Feedback is quick and accurate, and work next year will look like work this year.Think of golf or chess. A ball or piece moves according to a set of rules and a set of boundaries, and feedback is apparent.

But in wicked learning environments, feedback might not exist. It could be absent, delayed, inaccurate altogether, and work last year may not look like work this year.

We live in a wicked world, and early specialization can backfire.

A study across 12 different countries compared general education to more specified career-focused education. They found that people with career-focused education tended to earn more money at the beginning and be hired quickly. However, they were less adaptable to such an extent that they had to take time out of the workplace to learn and grow.

Another example is a 20-year study done on political and economic predictors. And they found that the best predictors, the best forecasters, were those who didn't specialize early. Because the hyper-specialists had been focusing on such narrow problems for so long that they came to see the view through a single lens.

So, the question now is to ask, what is the map to success? What's the right path? And that's a difficult answer because there are a lot of paths, actually. And it doesn't just look like a straight line. It can look jagged or even like a loop.

A study done on technological innovations found that the most impactful patents were not those authored by individuals who dug deeper and deeper into one area. They were authored by a large group of individuals who didn't specialize and had a wide variety of interests.

My favorite example of this is Gunpei Yokoi. Yokoi didn't do well on his mechanics exam at school, so he had to settle for a low-tier maintenance job at a toy shop in Kyoto. Realizing he wasn't equipped to work on the cutting edge, he noticed that there was a wealth of information out there and that all he had to do was combine it in a way that specialists might overlook.

And so, he took well-known information from the credit card industry and paired it with other information from the toy industry and created a small handheld game, like a Game Boy. And it was a hit. People loved it, and he transformed that small company started in a wooden shack in the 19th century into a toy and game powerhouse called... Nintendo.

There's an analogy that I really, really like from David Epstein. He is a frontrunner on this kind of research. In a healthy ecosystem, we need both frogs and birds.

Frogs are down in the mud, digging deeper and deeper into one area of an ecosystem, trying to find out everything possible about that one area.

Birds are above, not necessarily seeing the same details of the frogs, but integrating the knowledge of the frogs.

The problem is... we incentivize being a frog.

And in Epstein's words, in a wicked world, that's increasingly short-sighted.

Because head starts are overrated.

I challenge you all to explore, not by digging deeper into one topic, but by widening your view of the world. And if you feel behind, good, because you might get ahead later.

Thank you.