Practice matters, but in many fields it matters much less than you might think.
to one of the most frequently studied groups in expertise research, chess players, he found that, in addition to working or short-term memory, three more components of cognitive ability—fluid reasoning, comprehension knowledge, and processing speed, all abilities that are, to some extent, heritable—were related to performance. This was especially true of younger and less experienced players. If you’re naturally better, you don’t have to practice quite as much to get good.
What’s more, the explanatory power of practice fell even further when Hambrick took exact level of expertise into account. In sports—one of the areas in which deliberate practice seems to make the most difference—itthat the more advanced the athlete, the less of a role practice plays. Training an average athlete for a set number of hours yields far more results than training an élite athlete, which, in turn, yields greater results than training a super-élite athlete.
So where else, exactly, do performance differences come from? While Hambrick’s work has been focussed more explicitly on practice and genetics, David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, has been approaching the question from a slightly different angle: through what’s called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth , a longitudinal study of the lives of students who, by the age of thirteen, had scored in the top one per cent of mathematical-reasoning ability and...
That is not the whole story, though, as Lubinski points out. To him, the interesting finding is the striking range of abilities within this élite sample. “Individual differences in the top one per cent matter,” Lubinski told me. “People think of the top one per cent, whether in I.Q. or reasoning or what have you, as categorical. But that top contains one-third of the ability range you see in other samples. There is a huge amount of psychological diversity among the gifted.
Part of the difference in accomplishment, it turns out, really is due to practice, just like Ericsson argues. “What separates intellectually talented kids from their intellectual peers when it comes to actual creative advances? A lot of it is how much people are willing to work,” Lubinski told me. Some people are gifted, or “intellectually talented,” as he prefers to refer to them, but don’t want to work forty hours a week, while some want to work more than sixty hours.
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