Sunday, October 15, 2006
One pillar that I believe most aspiring chess players lean on is the idea that some people have a natural gift for the game. The patzers that stumble and thrash around like dieing fish on the beach are just doing the best they can with the limited resources that they were born with. It's the classic debate of hard work verses God giving talent. The implications of answering this question are unnerving to anyone that invests any serious time in the game.
Why should the answer bother chess players? Well for those of us that are not Grandmasters it means we are either not working hard enough or the level to which we can rise is predetermined. Both these answers are unsatisfactory, but most people are not comfortable or willing to accept that they are in control of their own destiny. The truth is that it's easier to blame fate for our situation. So we simply accept that some people just have it. Through no fault of our own we are just missing "the chess gene". I find this line of thinking absolutely unacceptable.
As a disabled child I recognized very early that I was going to have to work harder than most to achieve my goals so I naturally fell into the camp of hard work is the key. This belief was constantly reinforced by my love of chess. Through chess I could quickly see the correlation between hard work and success. When I was five or six years old I loved playing chess against my uncle, but he always won. One day after getting beat, again, I was complaining about how it wasn't fair that I always lose. My uncle said something to me that day that has followed me ever since. He asked me what I did before we played to win. My answer was a simple, I didn't do anything. Then it hit me. I understood even at that early age the point of his question. Success in chess is directly linked to the amount of work you are willing to put into it. Life is exactly the same way. What better lesson could a child possibly learn?
This idea of hard work sounds plausible, but do I have anything to backup these claims besides my own inclinations towards controlling your own destiny. This debate between nature and nurture has been going on for a long time, but with current advancement in the area of psychology we are finally gaining some scientific evidence. K. Anders Ericsson at Carnegie-Mellon University did several experiments to examine if the age old adage of "practice makes perfect" is true. He studied musicians in there 20s that attended a music school in West Berlin. He had the instructors at the school group the students into three categories. First group was the students that appeared to have the gift for music, the second group were good, and the final group was adequate to below average. Ericsson asked each group how many hours they practiced each week since they started their musical training. The first group averaged about 10,000 hours, the second group 8,000, and the third group about 5,000 hours. This experiment also had each group keep track of how many hour they were practicing now and the top performers were still practicing more than the other groups. But what about people like Mozart, right? Well it so happens that Mozart's father was a great musician himself and placed a very hard musical regiment on the young Wolfgang. (Ericsson paper) The relationship between practice and success was later confirmed by John Sloboda and Michael Howe with a similar experiment where they interviewed parents of kids that were categorized as "gifted" to see if they need to practice less than the "normal" kids to reach the same level of play. There experiment showed that if both students practiced the same amount of time they both progressed at the same rate. (Howe and Sloboda paper)
To complicate this debate even further the talent myth is unknowingly perpetuated even further by the very people involved in the "talent" search. Here's the scenario that was found to be very common. For example, a chess instructor sees a young player involved in a game. The young player makes what appear to be some extraordinary moves so the instructor labels the child as having talent. This label causes the parents and instructors to focus more energy in cultivating this gift. The child, who's getting this special treatment, likes this attention so they work harder at chess. It's a classic positive reinforcement scenario.
I think that we confuse ambition with talent. From all the things I've read the one constant seems to be a personal drive to excel in a specific field. There are no free lunches in life. The people that are at the top didn't get there easily. Years of hard work and sacrifice are the ingredients for success.
Below are some of the source sites I used to generate this post. They are worth a read.
Outstanding Performers: Created, Not Born?
Scientific American: The Expert Mind
Why should the answer bother chess players? Well for those of us that are not Grandmasters it means we are either not working hard enough or the level to which we can rise is predetermined. Both these answers are unsatisfactory, but most people are not comfortable or willing to accept that they are in control of their own destiny. The truth is that it's easier to blame fate for our situation. So we simply accept that some people just have it. Through no fault of our own we are just missing "the chess gene". I find this line of thinking absolutely unacceptable.
As a disabled child I recognized very early that I was going to have to work harder than most to achieve my goals so I naturally fell into the camp of hard work is the key. This belief was constantly reinforced by my love of chess. Through chess I could quickly see the correlation between hard work and success. When I was five or six years old I loved playing chess against my uncle, but he always won. One day after getting beat, again, I was complaining about how it wasn't fair that I always lose. My uncle said something to me that day that has followed me ever since. He asked me what I did before we played to win. My answer was a simple, I didn't do anything. Then it hit me. I understood even at that early age the point of his question. Success in chess is directly linked to the amount of work you are willing to put into it. Life is exactly the same way. What better lesson could a child possibly learn?
This idea of hard work sounds plausible, but do I have anything to backup these claims besides my own inclinations towards controlling your own destiny. This debate between nature and nurture has been going on for a long time, but with current advancement in the area of psychology we are finally gaining some scientific evidence. K. Anders Ericsson at Carnegie-Mellon University did several experiments to examine if the age old adage of "practice makes perfect" is true. He studied musicians in there 20s that attended a music school in West Berlin. He had the instructors at the school group the students into three categories. First group was the students that appeared to have the gift for music, the second group were good, and the final group was adequate to below average. Ericsson asked each group how many hours they practiced each week since they started their musical training. The first group averaged about 10,000 hours, the second group 8,000, and the third group about 5,000 hours. This experiment also had each group keep track of how many hour they were practicing now and the top performers were still practicing more than the other groups. But what about people like Mozart, right? Well it so happens that Mozart's father was a great musician himself and placed a very hard musical regiment on the young Wolfgang. (Ericsson paper) The relationship between practice and success was later confirmed by John Sloboda and Michael Howe with a similar experiment where they interviewed parents of kids that were categorized as "gifted" to see if they need to practice less than the "normal" kids to reach the same level of play. There experiment showed that if both students practiced the same amount of time they both progressed at the same rate. (Howe and Sloboda paper)
To complicate this debate even further the talent myth is unknowingly perpetuated even further by the very people involved in the "talent" search. Here's the scenario that was found to be very common. For example, a chess instructor sees a young player involved in a game. The young player makes what appear to be some extraordinary moves so the instructor labels the child as having talent. This label causes the parents and instructors to focus more energy in cultivating this gift. The child, who's getting this special treatment, likes this attention so they work harder at chess. It's a classic positive reinforcement scenario.
I think that we confuse ambition with talent. From all the things I've read the one constant seems to be a personal drive to excel in a specific field. There are no free lunches in life. The people that are at the top didn't get there easily. Years of hard work and sacrifice are the ingredients for success.
Below are some of the source sites I used to generate this post. They are worth a read.
Outstanding Performers: Created, Not Born?
Scientific American: The Expert Mind
4 Comments:
I generally agree with you on this article. The only thing that I would add is that you have to study the right things in chess to improve.
Thanks for the post, John. I saw it at the Personal Development Carnival. And thank you for the links to the research. I've used them for a post on the same subject.
There are also people who invest enormous time and energy yet aren't reaching the top in their field.
I believe talent and effort both play a role.
I believe that you are pointing out a key word that I neglected to use in my post. And that is that you have to study the right stuff.
You can't spend 10,000 hours studying the rook vs. king endgames and expect to go very far. I realize this an extreme simplification of your point, but I think the scientific evidence can not be denied. If you study correctly you can achieve expertise in any area.
Please keep the comments comming!
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