lukajk / blog / what matters for getting good

The debate of "talent" vs. "hard work" and how the two balance against each other is an endless topic of discussion in every community with some competitive glint. But what actually matters? In another post I wrote that the unconscious human brain is quite amazing and there's really no reason to believe that virtually anyone has a any meaningful advantage there at birth (as opposed to the "conscious" aspect of the brain where clearly there is a difference). This leads me to the assertion that in theory with optimal practice, anyone can get basically anywhere in anything, sports generally excluded. Assuming a "perfect training," - a regimen perfectly suited to an individual to address their weaknesses and drive long-term improvement in as effective a manner as possible - anyone could get to the highest levels of competition in quite a lot of things. However, that's not quite the reality of how things work. Coaches are imperfect, and people have varying mentalities and other factors that will influence how driven they are and how effectively they practice. Understanding how all these factors work together is at least what I've attempted here.

"...the clearly innate limitations seem to be physical. Once you’ve matured physically, you can’t do much about your height, and if you’re five feet tall you’re just never going to be an NFL lineman, while if you’re seven feet tall you will not be an Olympic gymnast. Overall body size is also partly innate, so champion sumo wrestlers can probably never make themselves into elite marathoners. While you can develop your voice in all kinds of ways, the dimensions of your vocal cords impose limits; a tenor cannot make himself into a basso profundo."

Because of their straightforward nature, it's just easier to address that first. However scenarios like these are by far the exception (perhaps somewhat by necessity since if every activity were founded on pure genetic endowment there wouldn't be much intrigue to them - "I wonder if the 7'1 or 7'8 man will win the 'World's Tallest Living Person' contest?") and as will be expanded on much of building skill is to the individual's agency. But what about IQ? In another post I mention a study mentioned in Anders Ericsson's "Peak" where chess players' IQ correlated with their initial strength but their hours of practice became the determinant of their ability over time. In a study of violinists done by Ericsson (and misinterpreted by Malcolm Gladwell, formulating the highly questionable "10,000 hour" rule) the hours of practice were found to be the only significant metric that violinists of three tiers of skill at a music school were found to have. However, there are two large caveats to that: first, general intelligence (IQ) is not expressed as much in highly "optimized" learning environments such as perhaps epitomized by the musical instrument pipeline (a coach is basically necessary for optimizing improvement), and secondly, that general intelligence is far from the only natural mental advantage that you can have. As a straightforward example of the latter, given two people starting out in very comparable positions aside from one having a mentality where their mistakes are something that can be improved upon with dedicated practice and the other is convinced their mistakes are the product of their "genetics" and unchangeable, naturally the first will have an easier time of improving, in the hypothetical where everything else is truly equal. But where did this first person get that healthier mindset? Maybe they're a more optimistic person in general, but where did that come from? Genetic predisposition? A product of their earlier life circumstances? Who knows, and frankly it doesn't really matter where it came from since mentalities can certainly shift... if the subject is willing. But these "natural" advantages, some perhaps genetically predisposed and others purely environmental, still amount to natural talent when it comes to starting something new - in fact, as far as I understand, this IS natural talent. Well, that and IQ (as mentioned chess strength did correlate at first and we all have plenty of anecdotal evidence regardless). It makes sense to me to define talent as just any factors that gives someone something of a natural headstart when learning a new activity, since that's already how it is used, if unknowingly typically (people attribute to "talent" with an assumption that that factor is something they were naturally endowed with when often it is a quite learnable skill). Maybe someone was in a sports club before and picked up that you have to switch up aspects of an exercise for effective growth, and they can apply that to a new field they start in. Maybe they picked up a clever approach from some media, or their parents, or whatever. A mixture of these small differences in outlook can vastly affect how "talented" two individuals seem in comparison when starting out. Additionally, there is also the complex interaction of motivation. Maybe someone is always the "underdog," is used to applying themselves thoroughly and has built up learning strategies over time and is able to perform at a high level because of that, whereas someone who is accustomed to cruising through school might write something off immediately that they had a lot of potential in because they hit a roadblock early on and assumed "they just weren't suited for it." Small factors build up outlooks and play off each other in nuanced fashions so there's quite the infinitude of how these sorts of considerations play into the whole. For example, aim training on mouse and keyboard is generally agreed to be... pretty damn boring since you're just staring at dots moving around on an otherwise quite bland background. However some people have addictive personalities where the feedback of numerical scores or just focusing on their technique or whatever is enough to keep them engaged. These people, although this is not typically the sort of thing that comes to mind when someone says "natural talent for aiming," is very important in someone's long-term potential. So if someone "just picks something up faster," it can be a composite of many different factors. Perhaps they just had particularly conducive concepts that built up an advantageous mindset. Or maybe they're particularly good at reflecting on their mistakes, or are just generally intelligent and observant, or all of these. So some types of talent are more innate than others, and all are theoretically overcomeable (mentioned exceptions notwithstanding), and with yet another caveat - autodidacticism/metacognitive capacity. # Autodidacticism However, that still isn't the end of the influence of general intelligence. As mentioned earlier, it's less expressed in highly optimized training contexts, so in the converse situation where self-teaching is either expected or virtually required, it will naturally be an asset. It's far from the full picture, as the other types of "effective natural talents" covered in the last paragraph can have marked influence as well, but the two together essentially make up your decision-making ability, and ultimately how effectively you can teach yourself something. Metacognition is one last crucial aspect to the picture. Your self-teaching abilities are not fixed in any capacity, theoretically. By taking in new information and feedback, whether that's direct from others or simply by observing your own failures or just situations where something didn't turn out how you expected, you can adjust your working strategies and learn more effectively (with perfect training anyone could become a "master" self-learner as well..? It definitely gets highly theoretical here because this would require bootstrapping to a higher level of abstraction which seems a bit untenable to say that it would be accomplishable by everyone). Finally, I have the intution that even in optimized learning environments someone that is able to pick up what the teacher is getting at and run with it will improve faster, so autodidactic capability would be a factor even in environments like that. However, that does seems to be contradicted by the findings of those chess and violinist studies (naturally such "talented" students should improve at a notably faster rate). I haven't actually read those papers so this perhaps warrants that further investigation. Well I hope that wasn't too convoluted but I seriously doubt it