Talent vs. Practice
October 6 by Leon Ho | Uncategorized, Work
Practice makes perfect, or raw talent means everything? This is the question that pops up in my mind in a while when interviewing candidates, and look at the direction of my career.
A article called, Talent vs. Practice references couple of researches and experiments on topics of experts do they born with more natural talents, or they are just practice more than other average people?
K. Anders Ericsson found high level of improvement can be achieved by deliberate practice. This is an interesting concept:
“A lot of people like to do things that they’re already good at, but what deliberate practice says is you need to find those things that you are weak at and that there’s room for improvement and that’s the activity you should focus on,” Ericsson says.
The superiority of an expert is they are able to find areas for improvement and focus your time and efforts practicing and improving those areas.
This single tip could help millions of people breaking out from the average on any field. What do you think?
Talent vs. Practice – [ScienCentral]
The August 2006 issue of Scientific American has an article called “The Expert Mind”. This article focuses on research in the expertise of chess grandmasters, and states several conclusions on the acquisition of expertise. The article is a free online feature on their website:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945&sc=I100322
In particular, expertise is gained by practice, but also requires that the student take on challenges that are just beyond their current level. “. . . what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence.”
“The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.”
If the goal is “breaking out from the average,” then you should NOT focus on improving what you’re weak at. To paraphrase John C. Maxwell, you should focus on the areas that you’re already good at (i.e. maybe a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10) and work primarily on improving those gifts. This is not to say that you should never work on weak areas to become better at them. I can’t sing–I’m like a 2. I could hire the best voice coaches and practice and practice, day after day, but I’ll never become as good as Luciano Pavarotti. I might move from a 2 to a 3 or a 4. But people don’t stand in line for, pay for, or rave about threes or fours. So take those areas that you’re good at (7 or 8), and work on making them great. People pay for nines and tens.
Sorry that what I wrote above, which was supposed to be the number eight followed by a right parenthesis, was interpreted as an emoticon.
[...] Ein Artikel auf lifehack.org regte mich an darüber nachzudenken, ob es nicht sinnvoll wäre das gerne zu machen was man nicht kann. Es zu einer Gewohnheit machen, Dinge die man nicht so gut beherscht als neue Herausforderung zu sehen. Wäre es nicht klasse, wenn jeder Mensch so denken würde? [...]