Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE), Sunday!
Here are three ideas on human potential for you to ponder in the coming week.
TIWIKE #1: Innate Talent is Not Real
Anders Ericsson has spent a lifetime, more than 30 years, studying world-class performers.
His ground-breaking book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise blew my mind so much in the last couple of weeks that I decided to dedicate this entire edition of TIWIKE to a few ideas I found inside.
The first big idea struck at the heart of a notion I was raised to believe was an undisputed fact: that we come into this life with a fixed amount of innate talent, which made our job to coax as much of it out as possible. It turns out that all the scientific literature exploring this idea over the last several decades points to it being completely false.
In Ericsson’s own words:
“The bottom line is that no one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with ‘innate talent.’ No one has ever found a gene variant that predicts superior performance in one area or another, and no one has ever come up with a way to, say, test young children and identify which among them will become the best athletes or the best mathematicians or the best doctors or the best musicians.” p. 236
There is no better way to dismiss a person’s accomplishments while justifying your own inferiority than to say they were “born with it.”
The surprising conclusion here is that natural-born prodigies do not exist. Sure, you need to have the baseline attributes to succeed at a particular skill. It’s tough to get to the NBA if you are 5’5″. But this ends up limiting us far less than we are led to believe.
Think of some of the most famous prodigies in history: Mozart and Beethoven, Tiger Woods and Serena Williams, Pablo Picasso and Bobby Fischer.
Ericsson explores many of these examples in depth only to find that they all were subjected to rigorous practice routines from a young age. What normal people see as prodigious turns out to be the result of thousands of hours of deliberate practice. Beware the myth of innate talent, for it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It only exists to the extent that we are all born with brains and bodies that can adapt to almost anything.
In the traditional sense, Innate talent is not real.
TIWIKE #2: We Can Create Our Own Potential
The brain adapts to the particular needs of the individual.
Potential is developed by the wiring and re-wiring of neurons for the brain to perform particular tasks.
“But we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones. In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential.” p. xx
Consider the implications!
We aren’t limited to some arbitrary, fixed set of skills. We can learn how to do anything. We can get very, very good, even world-class, at anything, if we are committed to putting in thousands of hours of focused practice.
Since there are no preset talents, there are also no limits on just how good we can get.
“In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve.” 21
So you can master any skill and there is no telling how good you can get if you keep trying.
We can create our own potential.
TIWIKE #3: Deliberate Practice Makes Possible What was not Possible Before
How exactly do we create our own potential?
Ericsson calls the process he discovered for doing just that deliberate practice, and it differs a lot from common approaches.
Our uniquely human ability to get very good at almost anything comes, ironically, from the fact that our biology strives to stay the same. “The technical term for this is ‘homeostasis,’ which simply refers to the tendency of a system—any sort of system, but most often a living creature or some part of a living creature—to act in a way that maintains its own stability.”
And this is our secret weapon.
“This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination. But there’s a catch: once the compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the physical activity that has previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.
This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.” 40
This is precisely why the normal approach to practice is not the path toward mastery.
The standard idea is that “practice makes perfect.” But that isn’t true.
“The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone. In this view, all that you are doing with practice—indeed, all that you can do—is to reach a fixed potential.
With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.” 48
To create your own potential in any domain, develop a deliberate practice regimen and stick to it over many hours and years.
If you want to dig deeper into the tactics for designing such a program, Ericsson wrote an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review here.
If you’re more of a book reader like me, then I highly recommend checking out Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.
Deliberate practice makes possible what was not possible before.
The Big Bad Plan Challenge Update
I’m thrilled to say 16 people have committed to beta testing the Big Bad Plan Challenge that I’ve been working on for the past few months in October.
Originally, the plan was to cap this beta cohort at 24 participants, but I’ve realized that I won’t be able to support more than 20. So if you are interested in securing one of those remaining four spots, please reply to this email as soon as possible. I have meetings with four more people in the coming week, so I don’t expect there to be any slots remaining by next week’s newsletter.
The whole goal of the challenge is to build a custom plan for how to create more potential as an entrepreneur, so if this week’s edition resonated, then we might as well do this thing together, right?