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Musings Report #23 6-4-16 10,000 Hours Isn't Enough
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10,000 Hours Isn't Enough
In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers, which proposed that mastery required 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
As noted in the blog earlier this week, Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code (sent to me by Ron G.) upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It isn't--in his words, it's grown by deep practice,the ignition of motivation and master coaching.
Coyle's work explains that the core concept of the 10,000 hour rule--deliberate practice for 10,000 hours advances the practitioner to mastery--isn't the whole story. (The 10K hour rule is sometimes called the 10-year rule--that it takes a decade of deliberate practice.)
The primary factors are: constantly being pushed to failure, developing the passion/motivation to keep pushing through failure and guidance from those who have mastered the skills being developed.
Author Tim Ferriss (The Four-Hour Chef) claims that once students understand how we learn (what he called meta-learning), high -level skills can be acquired within a matter of months. The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Wrong. How to Really Master a Skill.
This raises the key question: what is mastery? Is it only skill, or does it include problem-solving and creativity?
I would say that high-level skills are useful but the real value is leveraging skills and knowledge into problem-solving and creativity--creating something that was not in existence prior to their work.
Value is created by scarcity, and what's scarce is problem-solving, solutions and creativity. Scarce skills create value, but not as much as problem-solving skills and creative solutions.
To take one of Gladwell's examples of the 10,000-hour rule, the Beatles: their value was not in being practiced musicians but in being creative songwriters, and that process is only marginally connected to deliberate practice. Plenty of musicians are highly skilled and have logged 10,000 hours, but very very few are master-songwriters.
The nature of creativity and its weak links to practice was explored in a Scientific American article, Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice.
The article noted that:
--Creativity is often blind.
--Creative people often have messy processes.
--Creators rarely receive helpful feedback.
--The "10-Year Rule" is not a rule.
--Talent is relevant to creative accomplishment.
--Personality is relevant.
--Genes are relevant.
--Environmental experiences also matter.
--Creative people have broad interests.
--Too much expertise can be detrimental to creative greatness.
--Outsiders often have a creative advantage.
--Sometimes the creator needs to create a new path for others to deliberately practice.
In the case of The Beatles, key elements of their success included: 1) the friendly but fierce competition between John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write better songs and lyrics; 2) the musical suggestions and knowledge of producer George Martin; 3) McCartney's household of music (his father was a musician); 4) the early death of McCartney's and Lennon's mothers (as McCartney noted, "...a very big bond between John and me, because he lost his mum early on, too;" (though it seems odd or even macabre, the early death of a parent is often a factor in successful entertainers/ creators) and 5) psychedelics (a factor rarely mentioned because it's not politically correct in an anti-drug era, though the lads themselves mentioned it frequently as a major influence on their 1966-on creativity).
In simple terms, a skilled musician can make a piece of music his/her own with an interpretation, but it takes another entire level of competence to improvise or compose.
In my own life, I've logged thousands of hours in three fields: construction, music and writing. I don't claim any special expertise in any of the three, which shows that 10,000 hours of experience is useful but not necessarily magical.
Many of these hours were not spent in deliberate practice, i.e. pushing myself to the point of failure, but such experiences were common and memorable.
In general, I think we tend to reach plateaus in our knowledge/skills that are comfortable, and so our motivation to push for higher skills diminishes: we know enough to accomplish quite a lot (write a book, build a house, compose a song, etc.) and so that's a big enough playing field for our ambitions.
The higher and more spacious the plateau we've reached, the greater the potential to move incrementally higher, but the difficulty of advancing also increases. Once you're proficient, great leaps of skill/knowledge become rarer and more difficult to accomplish.
My own experience suggests that motivation and setting high goals become critical components of advancing problem-solving and creativity. If a writer of essays decides to write an entire book (not just an assembly of essays), the task requires a quantum leap in often-subtle abilities. (I can vouch for this personally.)
If a musician sets out to improvise a full minute of original music without accompaniment, i.e. a cadenza, with the further goal of connecting that improvisation musically to the entire piece, that is a challenge that is a quantum leap above merely playing the composition. The skills required to improvise a great cadenza are so high that few classical musicians even attempt it; to my knowledge, the vast majority simply play a cadenza composed by a previous master.
As for construction, the real value creation is in acquiring skills to solve problems and increase productivity. (The same can be said of writing.) "Tricks of the trade" are difficult to teach in the classroom or communicate in a book, because they are learned as specific solutions to specific problems in the real world.
Yet they're the difference between a job taking three days or one day. That gain in productivity creates the value.
Creativity = problem solving = value creation.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
The Structure of Collapse: 2016-2019 6/3/16
It's Time to Ditch 4 Years of Costly College for Directed Apprenticeships 6/2/16
Flexible Labor Is the Future 6/1/16
The Five Stages of Central Bankers' Failure 5/31/16
The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure 5/30/16
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A 2-hour international conference call on flow-money and the CLIME system. Most interesting....
Market Musings: Suppressing the VIX = It's Difficult to Hedge Stocks
The classic tool of central-planning manipulation of the stock market is to sell volatility (VIX) to drive stocks higher. Selling volatility pushes VIX lower, which pushes stocks higher.
The problem with this manipulation is that it it makes it impossible for hedge funds and other institutional players to hedge being long the market by owning volatility (VIX): since the VIX is kept low regardless of market action, it no longer works as a hedge.
In the pre-manipulation days, you could buy volatility as a hedge: as the market fell, volatility would rise, offsetting losses in stocks.
Now the VIX stays in a low trading band because authorities have decided stocks cannot be allowed to fall and therefore VIX cannot be allowed to rise.
A low VIX is generally understood to reflect a "no worries, mate" lack of risk in the global economy. But are risks actually low in the global economy? The short answer is no.
So once again, central-planners have chosen to manipulate a "signal" to tell everyone that all is well and risks are low: suppress the VIX, and people might believe risk has vanished.
But if risk hasn't actually disappeared, volatility will eventually break free of the manipulation and soar much faster and higher than most people believe possible after months of low VIX
From Left Field
Geoffrey West on the Life and Death of Companies (via Lew G.)
"Greed & Fear Are Great Teachers" Black Swan Author Tells Graduates "Always Have Skin In The Game"
Fight to Save Antibiotics (via Joel M.) -- we're running out of antibiotics...
Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education (20:40) (via Lew G.)
11 Beautiful Japanese Words That Don't Exist In English -- "aware" (ah-wah-ray) is one I often invoke...
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works (via Lew G.)
Unclouded vision: Forecasting is a talent. Luckily it can be learned
How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant -- what I've been saying for years...
College Then and Now: Letter to a Bright Young Woman -- it's skills that count, not credentials...
No Great Technological Stagnation (via Lew G.) -- progress in efficiencies still being made...
Why Uber and Apple Won’t Save The Economy: Rana Foroohar’s deeply reported new book takes direct aim at the financial industry and calls for a new compact between business and society. -- Banks and banking are designed to fail--and so they do...
Mark Applebaum: The mad scientist of music (16:50) (via Lew G.)
“BEAUTY WILL BE CONVULSIVE or it will not be at all.” André Breton
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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