Yale: “In the finishing results between sprinters, what’s the difference
between a top 10 sprinter and the top 1 sprinter?” ProPublica
investigative reporter David Epstein asked the audience, during a March
30 talk on campus sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. The answer, he said: 0.5%.
Epstein
opened his talk — titled “Genius in Sports: Is it Nature or Nurture?” —
by citing Stephen Jay Gould's hypothesis about excellence and affirming
its validity, saying: “The more well-developed a human endeavor
becomes, whether that's sprinting or stock trading, the smaller the
margins that separate performers at the top.
“In sports that are
easily measurable, [that margin is] now typically less than 1%,” Epstein
continued. “So the importance of understanding which variables we can
actually alter [to improve performance] is more important than ever.”
Author
of the New York Times bestseller “The Sports Gene,” Epstein talked
about, among other things, how “software” plays a key role in sports
performance.
One humorous example of this, he noted, was when
Barry Bonds, one of the top-hitting baseball players, known for his
arrogance, was struck out by Jennie Finch, a softball pitcher. Bonds was
being cocky, said Epstein: He challenged Finch to pitch against him and
was so confident that he wanted to film the whole thing, assuming that
if he could hit 100 m.p.h. fastballs, he surely could hit a ball that’s
both bigger and is thrown at a comparatively slower 68 m.p.h.
The
reason Bonds failed has to do with sport-specific “software,” Epstein
told the audience: Bonds was so used to seeing specific baseball
pitchers’ techniques and forms when they threw their pitches that he had
no clue what to do when Finch’s torso wound up and she delivered her
pitch using softball’s underhand technique.
Similarly, after being
shown a picture of a chess game for only several seconds, chess
grandmasters can recreate what they see with ease while the general
public would probably only manage to recall only a snippet of the board,
noted Epstein. However, if you show these same chess grandmasters a
chess game where all the pieces are in impossible places, they fare no
better than the general public in recalling what they saw, he said.
Epstein
then went on to disagree with the “10,000 hours rule” that Malcolm
Gladwell famously proposed — Gladwell, a Canadian journalist, said that
it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field.
“It’s
actually more like the ‘10,000 hours plus or minus 10,000 hours’ rule,”
David remarked. “You need to know about the range … one man’s 3,000
hours can be another man’s 25,000 hours.”
Epstein was referring to
the results of an experiment carried out in 2007 by psychologists
Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet. They recruited 104 competitive
chess players from novice to expert skill levels for a study of chess
expertise. While the average hours of practice required to reach master
level for the participants of the study was 11,053 hours, the range
varied heavily; one player only needed 3,000 hours to reach master
level, while another player required 23,000 hours.
Epstein
concluded his talk by sharing a quote from J.M. Tanner, a British
pediatric endocrinologist, who said, “Everyone has a different genotype.
Therefore, for optimal development, everyone should have a different
environment.”