I am uninterested in professional sport but read this anyway and was really struck by this line:
> "...historically, practice was ... not about mastering skills. People figured that either you had those skills or you didn’t."
I suspect many people still feel this way. Those who keep trying to hone their skills are the fun ones to be with. Unfortunately they appear still to be in the minority.
Your comment puts me in mind of my new favorite spectator sport, timed professional cooking competitions (specifically, Chopped on the Food Network -- there's a collection of 25 shows available on Netflix), where I find this dichotomy is often in play.
I like trying to guess who will win the competition based on their profiles at the beginning. One of my rules: always pick the older classically trained chef (especially if he's French). In my extremely limited edited-for-tv experience, it's been a successful betting strategy. (Well, except in the cases where the chef, refusing to suffer the least mediocrity, fails to plate anything at all in the appetizer round. But even then, he was brought back for a "redemption" show and took the prize.)
That brings to mind Carol Dweck's research on mindset in which she categorized people who bore either the fixed or the growth mindset.
Fixed mindset presumes that our aptitude are static and that we cannot change in any way; success is merely the result of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard. The striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. In other words, a huge amount of ego is tied to it that does not help progress. And unfortunately, this is very limiting to allow for the full potential of any individual to take shape. This article is an important reminder that it is not how good we are but how good we want to become.
In art, it looks like people on the outside think of "talent" as something you either have or don't, but people who are artists themselves and involved in an art community (online, in a school, etc.) tend to focus on practice much, much more.
This is easily observable in the idea that an artist refines his or her's own style. For example, I recently toured the Andy Warhol museum, and the progression of his style/projects were clearly showcased.
Certainly, people recognize him as having an intrinsic talent, but one that he built on to create some of the works for which he is most recognized.
it's always interesting how a single sample (in this case Kermit Washington) can be extrapolated to a general trend. it reminds me of the movie Tin Cup where the Kevin Costner character gets a golf doctor and starts winning and then everyone wants his doctor to achieve the same results. perhaps it was just random chance?
The example from the article regarding the Track & Field results might imply otherwise. Would random chance be able to exhibit a performance curve which begins to plateau?
I think it probably could, if for example the population of athletes was growing the entire time: then with a larger population, the #1 athlete (the person farthest out on the tails) will keep 'setting records'. If you draw from a distribution like the normal distribution 1000 times, the single most extreme datapoint will (almost always) be much more extreme than if you sample just 10 times.
To check this, you'd try to figure out some measure of population of Track & Field athletes (or maybe a crude proxy like entire USA or global population?), apply extreme-value theory to estimate how much the record should increase each year, and see if it undershoots the observed increases.
But wouldn't a plateu in performance also cause a plateu in record setting? I suppose if it proves that records continue to be broken without gains in performance than random chance is likely at play.
An aside, thanks for the EVT reference. Something new to learn.
> But wouldn't a plateu in performance also cause a plateu in record setting?
No, not if there's variability in performance and an expanding population. Records are set by the most extreme person, not by the 'average performance'. If you have a billion runners, even if the average runner is slower than before (performance not just plateauing, but diving), you may still wind up with some freak with perfect genetics and simian arms and obsessive personality setting a new record, because when you look at a billion runners, odds are one of them will be bizarre in just the right way to set a new record.
> "...historically, practice was ... not about mastering skills. People figured that either you had those skills or you didn’t."
I suspect many people still feel this way. Those who keep trying to hone their skills are the fun ones to be with. Unfortunately they appear still to be in the minority.