THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

"It was impossible to make a bad shot with those.”

This is not true, and I can demonstrate the extreme falsehood of this statement if you watch me golf for one hole.  The King Cobra is quite capable of hitting the water trap in front of the tee.

If this guy practiced golf for 8 hours a day every single day of his life, it would still take him 3.4 years to accumulate 10,000 hours.

More reasonable assumptions of 4 hours a day for 250 days a year gets you 1,000 hours a year. 10 years to acquire 10,000 hours of practice.

In the article he says it’s 6 hours per day, 6 days per week, for 6 years.  That would get him to 11,232 hours.

The question for me is how he can support himself for 6 years with no regular job.  It mentions 100K in savings, that sure wouldn’t get me through 6 years.  Maybe he’s getting some funding for a book deal or something.

If I could figure out a way to get the funding, I would totally dedicate my life to hitting the batting cage and working with coaches to figure out how good a hitter I can make myself.

The article suggested 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, 6 years. 

He can take a… 6 week vacation each year.

The 6666 plan.

So, what is the hypothesis being tested here? From what I gather, it’s that the difference between success and failure is the persistence to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately that is not precise enough to test. For example, having intimately known a couple of classical musicians, I can state with confidence that there are lots of classical musicians who put in that kind of time over their lives but never even managed to play in a prestigious orchestra. Does that amount to success or failure? To a lot of people who have practiced intensely since childhood it doesn’t feel like success.

To turn the subject to baseball, there are plenty of stories of guys who knock around in the minors until they’re thirty or so, but can’t make it to the big leagues because they just don’t have the innate talent to hit well enough. Are they success stories? I’ll bet if you talked to them, they’d feel like they failed at what they wanted to do, which was to play in the big leagues. A lot of average baseball fans, however, would love to have had even that much of a career.

In short then, that 10,000 hours may be the magic number of greatness in Gladwell’s mind, but objectively that greatness may just be mediocrity, or only relative to the person who never put in the time.

Gladwell’s thesis wasn’t that you needed 10,000 hours of practice to become incredibly good at something. You need tremendous talent AND 10,000 hours of practice to master something.

In some cases, this doesn’t make much sense, this 10,000 hour thing.

There are, for example, half a million people being paid to be full-time computer programmers in North America alone.  With 5% of the world population, it’s easy to see that there may be at least 5 million programmers in the world. 

Putting in 10,000 hours as a computer programmer from scratch will make you an average, or below-average, computer programmer.  Say it puts you #4,000,000 worldwide.

Is that a success?  Did it prove anything?

So, I suppose this 10,000 hour rule has to apply to something less common. 

Sounds like one more of those Gladwell rules that make sense if you don’t think about it too much.  Like I did.

"Gladwell’s thesis wasn’t that you needed 10,000 hours of practice to become incredibly good at something. You need tremendous talent AND 10,000 hours of practice to master something. “

Yeah, and if someone practices for 10K hours and doesn’t make it or “master it” ... well, then obviously they didn’t have enough talent to begin with. Shuh.

So, basically if you have a lot of talent and work really had at something you’re interested in, there’s a great chance you’ll be good at it or master it.

My grandpa would say “Thesis my ass”. You can’t state the obvious and call it a thesis ... nor can you state it in a way that makes it essentially impossible to disprove.

It’s easy enough to disprove: Find someone who’s the absolute best (one of a handful at the very top) at some profession/activity that practiced less than 10,000 hours. Find a tennis player of Roger Federer’s caliber that practiced less than 10,000 hours. Find a programmer of Bill Gates’s caliber that spent less than 10,000 hours practicing. Find a chess player as good as Gary Kasparov that played less than 10,000 hours.

I’m not saying these people don’t exist. I’m saying Gladwell’s thesis is not “impossible to disprove”. It’s actually quite easy to disprove if Gladwell is not right.

this part made me laugh:
“In Portland, throughout his late 20s, he took pictures of dental equipment, which let him buy his own home but also left him with a dissatisfied feeling.”

The 10,000 hours would be a “max”.  So, you could have say Geena Davis practice archery, and be near world-caliber, and you can bet she didn’t practice for 10,000 hours.

Gladwell has a formula for writing books. He puts forth a thesis that is true in a very loose sense, and makes an entertaining book out of it. He did that in Tipping Point and Blink as well. Those books don’t hold up under careful scrutiny either. However, it’s probably unfair to demand too much from him. He gives you something to think about, but he’s not to be taken too seriously. Can one ask anything more from a popular writer?

Does Shawn Kemp count?

All you need to do is find an endeavor that requires more talent than skill.

A lot of the examples mentioned are skill-based activities.

Rob Nen didn’t spend 10K hours learning to pitch. I’m certain of that.

Christian Okeye in football.

Ericsson’s thesis is not that a mere 10,000 hours spent doing an activity is sufficient to become an expert but rather that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice leads to expertise. This is an important distinction as for example most adults have spent 10,000 hours driving but very few are experts. Deliberate practice entails intense difficult focus, the kind of focus hard to maintain for long stretches. Most of us just get good enough at an activity so that we can perform the task on auto-pilot, this is not deliberate practice. Those seeking expertise must constantly ward off settling into such a groove. This fellow seems to be taking the right strategy by only spending time on that which he has not mastered. We may take our shots at Gladwell but this is based on solid research.

I have seen in sabermetrics that those who really spend a lot of time working with the data over a period of years are those who have the most and best insights.  Intelligence and expertise from other fields help, but those who spend a lot of time getting their hands dirty are really the ones who end up making contributions and discoveries.

Same thing with writing.  I’ve noticed that the more I write, the better I get at expressing my ideas, over a period of years.  I’ve seen the same thing happen with other writers.

It is an admirable and fascinating experiment.  And obviously the “10,000 hours” is not a hard and fast rule.  And for ALL athletics, there has to be some sort of innate aptitude and athleticism.

From the article:

He grants that there’s a “99 percent chance I’m not going to become a PGA golfer.” But that’s not the point.

If that is what he things and it is true, I would say that there is a 99% chance that he does not last 6 years.  Not even close.  You have to love the game and there has to be some payoff at the end other than being a real good golfer.

At 21 years old, I’d give him a fighting chance (to make the PGA tour).  At 31 (so he would be 37 when done), zero chance.  He could definitely make the Champion’s tour with enough committment and practice if he is willing to wait that long (have to be 50)…

"You can’t state the obvious and call it a thesis ... nor can you state it in a way that makes it essentially impossible to disprove. “

A better summary of the pointlessness of Gladwell I’ve not seen.

This is like when Tango links a piece by Murray Chass and the substance of the linked content is judged by many based on the name behind it. As MGL said, this is an admirable and fascinating experiment, and I think that’s all enhanced by being publicly documented. But, hey, Gladwell’s an idiot, so let’s focus on that rather than what Dan McLaughlin is attempting.

It seems that in athletics there would be too many examples of this not being true for you to take it seriously.

For example, you could make the argument that Trevor Hoffman is the best closer of all time (not that I’m saying he is). He is, after all, the all-time leader in saves. But he didn’t start pitching until he was 23 years old after flirting with the mendoza line as a 22-year old shortstop in single-A.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/three-straight-major-champions-in-their-20s-larry-nelson-gets-prestigious-award/2011/04/12/AFUelbSD_story.html

What made Nelson such an inspiration was his late start in the game. He spent two years in Vietnam with the Army, and didn’t start playing golf until he was out of the service. He read Ben Hogan’s book, “The Five Fundamentals of Golf,” broke 100 the first time he played and broke 70 for the first time within nine months.

“Larry Nelson is one of golf’s consummate champions, who performed at the highest level on many of the game’s grandest stages and has carried himself with dignity and grace to become one of the sport’s most respected ambassadors,” PGA of America president Allen Wronowski said.

What I took from Gladwell’s book was, paraphrasing, “Exceptional people often aren’t as exceptional as we initially think.” Their exceptional performance is often connected to the unique opportunities they had, rather than solely their “talent,” “desire,” etc.

He uses the anecdote of Bill Gates having access to world-class computers as a young teen, at a time when less than 1,000 people his age worldwide had them.  Then he continued to program in college when very few were doing that, due to lack of access. 

Someone mentioned Trevor Hoffman above.  Sure, Hoffman was a late arrival to pitching.  But he played baseball all his life, and he developed arm strength as a shortstop, and he never had to unlearn poor Little League mechanics b/c he didn’t pitch there, etc.  He made it to professional baseball, where he received excellent instruction.  So he’s not “One in 5 billion”; instead, he’s the best of a much smaller group of people whose dads had them play little league baseball, who then played all through high school, etc.  He is much less unique and exceptional than I think the average Joe would assume on the surface.

I would argue that Trevor Hoffman is less “exceptional” than Darin Erstad or Mark Ellis, guys who were raised in North/South Dakota and became one of the few people in history from their state to have a long major league career.

Trevor Hoffman had a ton of advantages.  He was raised in Southern California, where it’s warm enough to play baseball year round, and where some of the best amateur baseball in the country is played, so there are scouts and college coaches abound and good talent to compete against.  He had a brother, Glenn Hoffman, who was a major leaguer. So clearly he had the confidence, good coaching, contacts, exposure, etc. that all of that entails.

I’n not attempting to refute anyone’s previous point with this next statement, but it’s correlated to this thread and Gladwell’s point: 

The 40-man rosters of the 30 MLB teams are not even close to representing the 1,200 best potential baseball players in the world.  It’s the best 1,200 guys who had the opportunity, upbringing, and natural talent to boot.* Imagine how many African-Americans that excludes, or people from countries who have no interest in baseball. Justin and B.J. Upton’s dad is a passionate baseball fan and an excellent amateur coach.  He raised his boys to play and love the game. Many, many athletic kids - of all ethnicities - aren’t given the exposure and coaching in baseball that they were.

*That statement is absolutely not true of the NBA.  There are few people in the world with the size and athleticism to play NBA basketball who didn’t end up doing it.  Those guys get found, partially because of how physically unique they are, and because it’s a worldwide game.  That’s part of why I like the NBA much better than college basketball - I feel like I’m watching the rarest, most elite athletes in the world.

"Deliberate practice entails intense difficult focus, the kind of focus hard to maintain for long stretches.”

Yeah, and here’s another piece that can be used in any fashion.

So, if you are talented, and you did practice hard for 10K hours and did not become an expert, then you probably didn’t practice with enough focus.

Then what? You’d didn’t drink 6 12oz glasses of water per day? Oh, it’s gotta be bottled water not tap water.

You didn’t get 8 hours of sleep?

You didn’t get 1g of protein per kg of bodyweight?

I am being the devil’s advocate in this thread because I don’t like when people state the obvious as if it’s some great insight. Okay, so if you’re talented and work hard, smart, and consistently on something you’re highly interested in .... you’ll likely attain mastery level. *grin* Intended to be funny, light-hearted, not mean-spirited sarcasm.

Obviously I advocate practicing a lot and with good design and focus, and taking care of yourself, but ...

I would love to hear from pro athletes, how much time they spent PLAYING their sport with their buddies outside of the coach-directed practice. I bet the time is 2:1 (at least with guys in my generation). Just shooting baskets while everyone else is inside watching TV, playing at the diamonds while other kids are on the computer, throwing the ball against the wall, playing against your brother and his buddies incredibly valuable, IMO)

One of my concerns is that kids are moving away from “playing” (on their own) the sports and are moving toward all of their activities being coach/adult-driven ... or to fit this thread “focused, concentrated, specific, hours of practice”.

Gladwell lovers and haters will probably find this amusing:
http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/
(click through a few times)

A lot of his empirical bluster doesn’t stand up, but I think it’s also true that in this country we give far too much credit to talent and skill and not enough to luck and chance.
This is key, because we talk about this point here every day.
That was one of the points of his book, and I think it’s an important one when considered whether bankers should make hundreds of millions of dollars, for example.

Further reading (via Kottke.org) shows it was Dr. Anders Ericsson who actually developed and initially popularized the theory about 10,000 as the threshold for expertise. His research was performed scientifically and Gladwell’s work helped move the research into a pop culture idea.

EXPERTISE refers to the mechanisms underlying the superior achievement of an expert, i.e. “one who has acquired special skill in or knowledge of a particular subjects through professional training and practical experience” (Webster’s dictionary, 1976, p. 800). The term expert is used to describe highly experienced professionals such as medical doctors, accountants, teachers and scientists,  but has been expanded to include any individual who attained their superior performance by instruction and extended practice: highly skilled performers in the arts, such as music, painting and writing, sports, such as swimming, running and golf and games, such as bridge and chess.

http://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html