So You Want to be an Expert? You Can Be.

August 16th, 2010

By “expert” I mean world-class, whether or not you’re super smart or super talented.

I’m starting to lose my faith in innate “talent” after some recent reading.   Two of the books are Talent is Overrated and Outliers.   I’ve got another book on this topic coming, too, more on the inspirational side of things.   Some of the basic points I’ve been thinking about are also covered in The Ten Thousand Hour Rule, and other variations floating around the internet for a few years, too.

When I was six, I thought that the thing that distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom was our intelligence, so I decided that being smart was important.   I am classically smart, and have a high IQ.   That helps a little with some things, especially on the beginning steep part of the learning curve, but that advantage doesn’t compete well against sufficient deliberate practice.

I’ve climbed the hill of expertise several times in my life, although I don’t know that I’ve managed to put in 10,000 hours of serious work into anything.   Maybe astronomy.   Maybe writing.   But I doubt it.   It takes about ten years of serious hard work to get to the 10,000 hours, and without serious effort to improve the hours don’t count much.

I was good at drawing as a kid and considered going to college for art, and had aspirations to draw comic books.   I like fine art, but I know what I love.   I had a solo show of my drawings and paintings my senior year of high-school.   As a teenager, I won prizes at science fiction conventions in the art shows.   I kept up a bit in college and grad school, and have a few pieces that are good, but I knew how far I still had to go to attain a professional level of skill, and I lost my inspiration.   I started requiring classes to draw, whereas I was writing nearly every day without outside prompting.

I was pretty good at chess, too, in high school and college.   The first six masters I played I drew.   I drew former world champion Boris Spassky (while he was playing 49 other people simultaneously).   I had a closet full of trophies.   I was the Missouri State Amateur Champion in 1986.   I won a $500 chess scholarship.   I let myself quit in college — I didn’t have the time to get better, and spending the time took away from my studies and social life.   Six years of effort into chess, and I was on track to make master within another four I believe (I quit rated 1950, 250 points from master level).   Also, I realized that there were some chess masters who weren’t very bright outside of chess — they tended to live in their parents’ basements and study chess a lot.

More recently, I put in the training to run a marathon.   Serious hours per week, over about five months.   I improved my running a lot, and did the marathon in about four and a quarter hours.   My dad, an experienced marathoner in his day, thought I had the potential to run 3:30 if I kept working at it.   I didn’t.   Too time consuming.   Serious runners, even quite old ones in their 40s and 50s, talk about seven years to reach their peak ability.

In fiction, we talk about writing 2 million words of crap before we get good.   Most “new” writers are in their 30s and 40s, and 30 is a pretty normal age to break in after years of effort.   Reading, writing, and critiquing for 10,000 hours over ten years it what it takes for most of us.   I haven’t written 2 million words of fiction yet, although I may have written over 2 million words total.   Writing 2 million words in 10,000 hours is a leisurely 200 words an hour — a little slower than I write and I’m not the fastest.   Ballpark, it’s 10,000 hours to work through the crap.   Again, I know some pro writers that I wouldn’t consider even of average intelligence, except they’re nearly geniuses at writing.

In astronomy, and the physical sciences, grad school is usually 5-6 years, and then there’s usually another 3-6 years of postdocs before getting a faculty position.   That’s ten years, and while that’s also probably more like 40-60 hours a week, it’s probably more like 20-30 hours a week of the kind of practice that helps one improve.   There are a lot of other things to do, too, in academia.   And there’s the danger of getting good enough in a niche to stop pushing hard learning.   I’ve seen a lot of professors, myself included, who hesitate to put in the hard work to learn new software, or keep up with the latest in the scientific literature, because we can coast on our past experience.   I’m going to work harder on that in the future.

In the books cited above, they talk about chess masters who can play blindfolded and remember all the pieces on the board at a glance.   I was able to do that when I quit chess.   They also talk about more general expertise, developing mental models, patterns, that let larger quantities of information in the expertise to be grasped and retained easily and quickly — and I have experienced that myself with astronomy and writing both.

So, I don’t think I’m saying anything here too insightful compared to the books above, or the other blogs I’ve read about the ten thousand hour rule.   I’m just putting my personal experiences up against those ideas, and finding they match up.

What I think my belief at six years old really let me do was to develop an attitude of relentlessness.   I wouldn’t quit.   I wouldn’t admit that I was too stupid to solve a problem.   One of the books talks about how quickly people give up on math problems before deciding they’re “too hard” to do.   American students give up after a few minutes, Asian kids after something more like ten minutes.   In college and grad school, perhaps even high school, I worked on individual problems for DAYS until I understood them inside and out and had good solutions.   That’s the kind of deliberate practice that brings expertise.   One expert at math teaching said math ability was more a matter of attitude than innate talent.

The other thing I have had going for me is passion.   I’m really deeply interested in things.   I like to learn and to study, if it’s something I care about.

On the other hand, having too many interests has been my downfall at some level.   I’m a good astronomer and a good writer, but I feel like I could be great if I focused more.   Boy, that’s hard though, isn’t it?   Once you’re married with kids and a steady job, it’s hard to have the time required to train yourself to expertise.   Even within your job, the situation is not always conducive to get better at.   People get good enough, then many have a tendency to phone it in, doing well enough but not improving.   Improving takes hard work, extra hours.

I’m 42.   I still have time in my life to develop another expertise, or to reinvest in one of my partially developed areas and try to take it to master level (although it won’t be chess — I like the game now but my passion is gone).   I still love the astronomy and writing, and they are the two things I’ve invested the most effort in and have paid off the most for me.   I have to acknowledge that I am driven in part by outside recognition, and getting tenure as a professor and publishing novels has taken the edge off the push.   I have to find the energy to want to be great for its own sake in a position in life where I’ve already been recognized as pretty good, much better than most, at a time when I am also considering marrying again and having a family while I’m still young enough to properly manage it.

Anyway, this is some reflection and soul searching on my part.   There are a limited number of hours in my lifetime left to do this, and everything else I like to do (socializing, traveling, playing games, etc.).   This is the really hard part, knowing its there if I want it, and having to make the decision to go for it.   Again, or continuing, without settling for good enough.

And for those of you reading this, know that you can become world class at almost anything, physical limitations permitting, if you put the work into it.   You may not become the best in the world, but you can compete with them, or just make a decent living in a dream job, or perform for adoring crowded of some size.   But you have to make that time, and there’s sacrifice.   I remember skipping movies with friends in grad school in order to go to work.   I remember turning off the tv in order to get my three hours of writing time in.   I remember seeing the chess set waiting for me in my room when I finished my homework.

Want to be an expert?   Get to work!

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