The Perils of Single-Sport Participation | Changing the Game Project

Patience is a good word. Easy to say, hard to do. You are talking about parents and their children and you can't false them for being passionate about their kids. They just can't allow themselves to be blinded by that passion. It lead to bad relationships.

from the article:

To be an elite level player at a college or professional sport, you need a degree of exceptional athleticism. And the best medically, scientifically and psychologically recommended way to develop such all around athleticism is ample free play and multiple sport participation as a child.

http://changingthegameproject.com/the-perils-of-single-sport-participation/

The Perils of Single-Sport Participation

 For the last few days, my email and social media accounts have been lit up by a simple image first shared with me on Twitter by @ohiovarsity. It is amazing because the image portrays something that is widely known among experts, widely discussed in coaching circles, and has certainly been written about by me and others many times. Yet this excellent blog article on a high school sports site got over half a million shares in the first 3 days it was out because this image touched a nerve

Why? Well, here is the image:

The question I was asked over and over this week was "What do you think of this?"

My answer, over and over was, "Amen, agreed, hopefully now people will start paying attention."

If it takes an infographic of Urban Meyer's football recruits at Ohio State to shift the paradigm in youth sports, then so be it. The image above, which clearly demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of his recruits are multi-sport kids, is not new information, but it has caused quite a stir. Here is what it says in a nutshell:

To be an elite level player at a college or professional sport, you need a degree of exceptional athleticism. And the best medically, scientifically and psychologically recommended way to develop such all around athleticism is ample free play and multiple sport participation as a child.

Why? Well let's see what the experts say:

Coaches and Elite Athletes:

Pete Carroll, former USC and now Seattle Seahawks Football coach, says here "The first questions I'll ask about a kid are, 'What other sports does he play? What does he do? What are his positions? Is he a big hitter in baseball? Is he a pitcher? Does he play hoops?' All of those things are important to me. I hate that kids don't play three sports in high school. I think that they should play year-round and get every bit of it that they can through that experience. I really, really don't favor kids having to specialize in one sport. Even [at USC], I want to be the biggest proponent for two-sport athletes on the college level. I want guys that are so special athletically, and so competitive, that they can compete in more than one sport."

Dom Starsia, University of Virginia men's lacrosse: "My trick question to young campers is always, 'How do you learn the concepts of team offense in lacrosse or team defense in lacrosse in the off-season, when you're not playing with your team?' The answer is by playing basketball, by playing hockey and by playing soccer and those other team games, because many of those principles are exactly the same. Probably 95 percent [of our players] are multi-sport athletes. It's always a bit strange to me if somebody is not playing other sports in high school."

Or in this interview with Tim Corbin, coach of NCAA Champion Vanderbilt

Baseball, on why he chooses multi-sport athletes over single sport kids.

Or Ashton Eaton, world record holder and gold medalist in the decathlon, who never participated in 6 of the 10 required decathlon events until he got to the University of Oregon.

Or Steve Nash, who got his first basketball at age 13 and credits his soccer background for making him a great basketball player, a similar story to the 100 professional athletes interviewed in Ethan Skolnick and Dr. Andrea Korn's Raising

Your Game .
The list goes on and on.

What about the medical experts? 

As I have outlined in my ebook "Is it Wise to Specialize?" and echoed in world renowned orthopedic surgeon James Andrew's book Any Given Monday, there are strong medical reasons for not specializing at a young age:

1. Children who specialize in a single sport account for 50% of overuse injuries in young athletes according to pediatric orthopedic specialists.
2. A study by Ohio State University found that children who specialized early in a single sport led to higher rates of adult physical inactivity. Those who commit to one sport at a young age are often the first to quit, and suffer a lifetime of consequences.
3. In a study of 1200 youth athletes, Dr Neeru Jayanthi of Loyola University found that early specialization in a single sport is one of the strongest predictors of injury. Athletes in the study who specialized were 70% to 93% more likely to be injured than children who played multiple sports!
4. Children who specialize early are at a far greater risk for burnout due to stress, decreased motivation and lack of enjoyment
5. Early sport specialization in female adolescents is associated with increased risk of anterior knee pain disorders including PFP, Osgood Schlatter and Sinding Larsen-Johansson compared to multi-sport athletes, and may lead to higher rates of future ACL tears.

And the sport scientists?

In January 2015, I had the honor of sitting in a lecture with Manchester United Performance Coach Tony Strudwick, winner of 13 titles as the fitness coach for Manchester United's first team. His advice was that a multi-sport background prior to the age of 12 set up soccer players for long-term success by lowering the rates of injuries and making them more adaptable to the demands of elite level play. "More often than not," he stated in a recent interview with SoccerWire.com, "the best athletes in the world are able to distinguish themselves from the pack thanks to a range of motor skills beyond what is typically expected in a given sport." He recommended tumbling and gymnastic movements, as well as martial arts, basketball, and lacrosse as great crossover sports for soccer.
Here are some other advantages I have previously written about:

1. Better Overall Skills and Ability:Research shows that early participation in multiple sports leads to better overall motor and athletic development, longer playing careers, increased ability to transfer sports skills other sports and increased motivation, ownership of the sports experience, and confidence.

2. Smarter, More Creative Players: Multi-sport participation at the youngest ages yields better decision making and pattern recognition, as well as increased creativity. These are all qualities that coaches of high-level teams look for.

3. Most College Athletes Come From a Multi-Sport Background: A 2013 American Medical Society for Sports Medicine survey found that 88% of college athletes surveyed participated in more than one sport as a child

4. 10,000 Hours is not a Rule: In his survey of the scientific literature regarding sport specific practice in The Sports Gene, author David Epstein finds that most elite competitors require far less than 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Specifically, studies have shown that basketball (4000), field hockey (4000) and wrestling (6000) all require far less than 10,000 hours.

5. There are Many Paths to Mastery: A 2003 study on professional ice hockey players found that while most pros had spent 10,000 hours or more involved in sports prior to age 20, only 3000 of those hours were involved in hockey specific deliberate practice (and only 450 of those hours were prior to age 12).

Are all sports the same?

No, they are not. They each require specific athletic, technical, and tactical skill sets. Some sports, in order to be elite, require early specialization, such as gymnastics and figure skating.

Other sports are so dependent upon physical prowess (American football, basketball, volleyball, rugby and others) that the technical skills and tactical know how can be developed later. There are many stories of athletes taking up these sports in their teens, even 20's, and playing at a very high level because of the ability to transfer skills learned in one sport to another.

And then there are sports like hockey and soccer, which without a doubt require an early introduction to the sport. There are technical movements and skills that are most sensitive to improvement prior to a child's growth spurt, and it is unlikely that a post-pubescent child is able to catch up if that is their first introduction to the sport.

HOWEVER, there is no evidence that pre-teen athletes in these sports should only play a single sport. As both the hockey evidence and the interview with Tony Strudwick mentioned above demonstrate, playing multiple sports early on sets these athletes up for longer-term success. They can better meet the demands of elite level play. They are less likely to get injured or burnout, and more likely to persist through the struggles needed to become a high-level performer.

If you want your child to play at a high-level, then the best thing you can do is help them find a sport that best suits their abilities, and help create an environment that gives them the best chance of success. 

That environment is a multi-sport one. The evidence is in. It is pretty conclusive.
It is time for our youth sports organizations to not only allow but encourage multi-sport participation. Yes, it is tough on the bottom line. But ask yourself this:

The Power And Problem Of Grit : NPR

I say if you pack an article with Dr. Angela Duckworth's work on GRIT, Carol Dweck's work Growth Mindsets and Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule then you've got a power packed article.   Enjoy.


from NPR.org 

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-problem-of-grit

The Power And Problem Of Grit

Daniel Fishel for NPR

Before she was a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth was a middle school math teacher. As a rookie teacher, she was surprised when she calculated grades. Some of her sharpest students weren't doing so well, while others who struggled through each lesson were getting A's.

"The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters."

This revelation led her back to school, this time as a graduate student, to study a character trait she calls grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-terms goals. She studied national spelling bee contestants, Green Berets, public school students, West Point cadets, sales representatives, and teachers. Across all these domains, she found those who made it through and did the best were not always the smartest, but they were the grittiest. Since then her work has captured the attention of high-ranking CEOs, educators, and coaches—among them Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks. (You can find out your grit score here). Angela believes grit is made up of four key psychological assets: interest, practice, purpose, and hope.

Most of us can quickly grasp the importance of perseverance for success. But that's only half of the equation, according to Angela. The other half is an abiding interest and passion for a singular pursuit. Gritty people wake up thinking about the same questions they go to bed thinking about. Rather than being "discovered" through angst-ridden introspection, psychologists believe interests are developed and deepened over time through continuing engagement with a pursuit.

And psychologists find people at the tippy-top of their fields engage with their work differently. You've probably heard of the "10,000 hour rule," the average number of hours it takes an expert to become an expert. That's based on research by K. Anders Ericsson, who found that experts do an intensive-kind of practice called "deliberate practice."

In her interviews with people at the top of their fields, Angela found they describe their work as being imbued with meaning and a desire to help others. She finds they are driven by a purpose beyond the self. This is also what psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz have find in their research. If you haven't heard last week's episode, Shankar talked with Amy about how people find meaning and purpose at work.
Gritty people also have hope. They're optimistic about the future and their ability to improve and affect change. To cultivate hope, Angela points to Stanford Professor Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset, the belief that intelligence isn't fixed but can change over time. Angela also points to her PhD advisor Marty Seligman's work on learned optimism.

But other research has also pointed to a potential downside to grit. Like stubborness, too much grit can keep us sticking to goals, ideas, or relationships that should be abandoned.

Psychologist Gale Lucas and her colleagues found in one experiment that gritty individuals will persist in trying to solve unsolvable puzzles at a financial cost. And that's a limitation of grit: it doesn't give you insight into when it will help you prevail and when it will keep you stuck in a dead-end.

So what can teachers, coaches, and parents do to cultivate grit? Psychologists are still working that out, but Angela has assembled research on what they do know here.

Angela's first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance comes out next month.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Kara McGuirk-Alison, Maggie Penman and Max Nesterak. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here. You can also follow us on Twitter@hiddenbrain, @karamcguirk, @maggiepenman and@maxnesterak, and listen for Hidden Brain stories every week on your local public radio station.

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 http://angeladuckworth.com/qa/


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The 4 Rituals That Will Make You An Expert At Anything

People can nit-pick the 10,000 hour rule all they want, they are missing the forest for the trees.

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2016/03/expert/?utm_source=%22Barking+Up+The+Wrong+Tree%22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=efa1317945-anders_3_13_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_78d4c08a64-efa1317945-56480777

The 4 Rituals That Will Make You An Expert At Anything

We hear a lot about "10,000 hours" being what it takes to become an expert. But the majority of people totally misunderstand the idea.

So I decided to go to the source and talk to the guy who actually created the theory.

Anders Ericsson is a professor of psychology at Florida State University. His wonderful new book is
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.

So what does everybody get wrong? 2 things.

First, the "10,000 hour rule" is not a rule and it's not an exact number. The amount of time varies from field to field. It's an average. But it's always a lot and more is better. Here's Anders:

In most domains it's remarkable how much time even the most "talented" individuals need in order to reach the highest levels of performance. The 10,000 hour number just gives you a sense that we're talking years of 10 to 20 hours a week which those who some people would argue are the most innately talented individuals still need to get to the highest level.

What's the second mistake? Becoming an expert is not merely doing something over and over for 10,000 hours. There's a right way — and an awful lot of wrong ways — to spend that time.
Let's learn the right way…

1) Find A Mentor

The most important part of deliberate practice is solitary practice. Hard work. But that's not the first step.

The first step is social. You need to know what to do. And that's where mentors, coaches and teachers come in. (To find the best mentor for you, click here.) Here's Anders:

They need to talk to somebody that they really admire, a person that is doing something in a way that they would like to eventually be able to do. Have this person help you identify what it is that you might need to change in order to be able to do what that other person is doing. Interview that person about how they were able to do it, and then have that person help you identify what is it that you can't do right now and what are the steps towards reaching that desired level of performance.

The secret here is "mental representations." You want to be able to clearly and specifically visualize the right way to do something in your head. This is what separates the experts from the chumps.

From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields… These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than anything else, explains the difference in performance between novices and experts.

How good can those mental representations get? Top chess players can play blindfolded.

They can see the board in their mind's eye. And Anders explains that they don't even train to do this, with enough hours it just occurs naturally.

So you need a clear idea of what it is you're trying to do, whether it's playing an instrument or performing an appendectomy. The clearer your vision of it, the better you'll be able to detect and correct mistakes. Here's Anders:

What a skilled musician does is think about what kind of experience they want to give the audience. Once you have an idea here about what it is that you want to produce, then you can now start working on trying to be able to generate that experience. That requires a representation about what it should sound like. Then, when you try to do it, you're going to find that there are going to be differences between the representation and their performance. Those differences you can now focus on and eliminate. Successively, you're going to be able to produce that music performance that sounds like what you had originally imaged.

And you want to keep improving those mental representations as you learn, creating a clearer and clearer image of every detail.

(To learn the four rituals new neuroscience research says will make you happy, click here.)

Okay, you talked to someone who is better than you and you've got an image in your head of how to do things right. Now just do that over and over until you begin crying uncontrollably, right? Wrong…

2) It's Not "Try Harder", It's "Try Different"

Anders says the biggest problem most people have with getting better at something is that they're not actually trying to get better at something.

Doing something over and over again does not necessarily make you better at it. If it did, we would all be excellent drivers. Repetition is not expertise.

To prove the point (and to scare the crap out of you) I'll mention that this applies to doctors as well. Think your surgeon is better because he's been doing this for 20 years? Nope. He's probably worse.

From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

Research on many specialties shows that doctors who have been in practice for twenty or thirty years do worse on certain objective measures of performance than those who are just two or three years out of medical school. It turns out that most of what doctors do in their day-to-day practice does nothing to improve or even maintain their abilities; little of it challenges them or pushes them out of their comfort zones.

To improve, you need to get out of your comfort zone. Anders says this is one of the most critical things to remember. Mindlessly going through the motions does not improve performance.
When you try to get better at something is it fun? Yes? Congratulations, you're doing it dead wrong.
Anders cites a study where they talked to singers after practice. Who was happy? The amateurs. The experts were pushing themselves. It was hard. And they were tired afterwards, not elated.
Dan Coyle says you only want to be succeeding in 50-80% of your attempts. Less than that and you'll get frustrated. More than that and you're not pushing yourself.

And you want to be working on your weak points. That's how you get better.

From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you've figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions.

And your goals need to be specific. Don't say, "I want to be better at business." Say, "I want to get better at engaging the audience at the beginning of my presentations."

(To learn how to be happier and more successful, click here.)

So you've accumulated the knowledge on what's right, what you're doing wrong and what you need to do to get better. And that's where most people breathe a sigh of relief. And then they fail miserably. Here's what's missing…

3) It's About Doing, Not Knowing

You've read half this blog post. Are you half of an expert now? No.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that knowing equals doing. It doesn't.

Watching a lot of football does not make you a great quarterback. 60 years of sitcoms hasn't made people funnier.

From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.

Once you have the knowledge, you need to focus on building the skills. Remember the three F's:

1. Focus
2. Feedback
3. Fix it

You need to concentrate on having your execution match your mental representation. Then you need objective feedback on how well you performed. Then you need to analyze what you did wrong and how to do it better.

From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress.

(To learn the schedule that the most successful people follow every day, click here.)

So you know the right system for improving any skill. But a lot of people might say, "I'm not a violinist or an athlete. This won't help me in my career." Wrong…

4) Study The Past To Have A Better Future

Sometimes feedback isn't fast. And this is a big problem for most jobs you want to get better at. Only getting an annual review turns 10,000 hours into something more like 10,000 years.

Anders says doctors can improve their skills by looking at older x-rays where the patient's outcome is already established. Here's Anders:

One way that you could actually train this more effectively is to have x-rays for old patients where they now know what the correct diagnosis was, and now you can guess these diagnoses and get immediate feedback. That turns out to be a very effective way of actually improving performance, where you can now, maybe in an afternoon, encounter and get as much feedback as somebody might accumulate over a year or even longer.

Look at examples of work that has already been evaluated. Can you detect the errors? Or what was done well? This is a good way to develop your mental muscles and improve your skills when feedback is scarce or slow.

When's the best time to do the work needed to get better? First thing in the morning, when you're fresh. Here's Anders:

Often it's ideal to make that the first activity of the day. Then you can basically move over and do whatever else you need to do. I think that constraint of for how long you can actually sustain this deliberate practice, where you're really attending 100% and stretching yourself to really change, that that time is actually limited.

(To learn how to get people to like you — from an FBI behavior expert —  click here.)
Okay, let's round up what we've learned about learning and get the happy secret to staying motivated…

Sum Up

Here's what Anders says can make you an expert:

• Get Help: Find a mentor who can help you develop that image in your head of the best way to do something.
• It's Not "Try Harder", It's "Try Different": Design specific activities to address your weak points.
• It's About Doing, Not Knowing: Remember the three F's: Focus, Feedback, Fix it.
• Study The Past To Have A Better Future: Find examples that have been judged and quiz yourself.

Don't worry; you do not have to be a genius to become an expert at most things. In fact, Anders says it might be an advantage not to be a genius.

When elite chess players were studied, the ones with lower IQ's often worked harder and then did better because they felt they were at a disadvantage.

From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

…among these young, elite chess players, not only was a higher IQ no advantage, but it seemed to put them at a slight disadvantage. The reason, the researchers found, was that the elite players with lower IQ's tended to practice more, which improved their chess game to the point that they played better than the high-IQ elite players.

Expertise takes a lot of hard, solitary work. That can be difficult to get motivated for. But this is where friends come in. Surround yourself with people who love and support you.
From Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors.

When I interviewed Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, he talked about just how important the people who love us are in the process of achieving our goals:

It's very important for people to understand that when they make a positive change in their lives it doesn't just affect them. It affects everyone they know and many of the people that those people know and many of the people that those people in turn know. If you make a positive change in your life it actually ripples through the social fabric and comes to benefit many other people. This recognition that we are all connected and that in our connectedness we affect each other's lives I think is a very fundamental and moving observation of our humanity.

There's an old saying, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." I believe it.

Panik and Susac move from prospects to made men

Baseball America Prospect Report


It looks like these guys will be moving off the prospect list once and for all. They are officially "made" men.

SF		MAJ		Panik, Joe 2B		4		2		2		0		.314		2B (7), BB (14)
SF		MAJ		Susac, Andrew C		5		2		2		3		.288		2B (4), HR (3)

It's nice to see Susac show his stuff at the bat as I initially thought he was rushed up due to the need presented by the Sanchez concussion.  This was based entirely on my observation that Susac "only" had 836 minor league AB's  prior to his call up and the number of AB's other Giants prospects had prior to their call ups.

A cursory look at Baseball Reference data showed the following:

Posey 750 AB's (2008-10)

Sandoval 1818 AB's (2004-08)

Belt 922 PA (2010-11)

Crawford 1189 PA (2008-11)

Sandoval was an INTL signing and the other three were collegiate draftees. 

Some other blasts from the past:

Conor Gillaspie 2223 PA's - College

Nick Noonan 3000 PA's - HS

Kieschnick 2000 PA's - College

Culberson 2900 PA's - HS
Jackson Williams 2000 PA's - College

Wendell Fairley 1600 PA's - HS

Burris 920 PA's 

Freddie Lewis 2727 PA's

Schierholtz 2428 PA's

Gary Brown 2500 PA's - College

Of the recent Giants call-ups:
Joe Panik 1620 AB's
Adam Duvall 1883 AB's
Matt Duffy 942 AB's
Andrew Susac 836 AB's

It seems like for prospects, the organization would seem to know what it has somewhere around the 1,000 AB mark for college hitters and around the 1,500 - 2,000 AB's for a HS hitter. This makes sense intuitively since the HS hitters is making his first 1,000 AB's in the minors. I don't want to get pinned down to a definitive marker and get yelled at and ridiculed like Erricson and the 10,000 Hour Rule, but as a rough rule of thumb, this seems to be the line in the sand that organizations employ. This takes into consideration that some guys are rushed due to organizational need (due to injury or performance) and some guys are blocked at a certain position and their stay in the minors is, in effect, over-extended. I still feel that Gillaspie was blocked in this way with the Giants, but Oh well.

An issue for further study. Here is another story that looks into the issue somewhat as well.
--
from the Hardball Times:
The historic risk of Manny Machado’s promotion – The Hardball Times:

Machado was promoted to the majors after just 928 minor league plate appearances. There have been just six other first-round picks since 1997 who were drafted as position players out of high school and were called up to the majors with fewer than 1,200 plate appearances. Only one of these had fewer plate appearances than Machado.

Cameron Maybin (830)
Justin Upton (957)
Jason Heyward (1010)
Corey Patterson (1015)
Josh Hamilton (1148)
Joe Mauer (1177)

Hamilton had some extenuating circumstances, and was ultimately 26 years old when he made his major league debut, so let’s take him out of this discussion. With the exception of Mauer and Upton, this list is a collection of promise that has thus far gone unfulfilled, and even Upton has had hiccups in two of his five full major league seasons.

...

While minor league numbers often mean little when it comes to gauging a prospect’s potential, I’m a big proponent of allowing a player to dominate a level before moving on so that he gets a taste of what it takes to truly succeed, especially when that player has such an ability to do so. Too often, organizations are willing to play the “young for his level” card to upgrade an average performance in their own eyes.

Heyward is the most recent example of the possible pitfalls of a rushed prospect. Much like Upton and Mauer, he dominated the minor leagues, posting a .968 OPS in his final season, including a 1.057 mark in a half-season in Double-A. In his rookie season in 2010, Heyward looked like one of the few who could handle the limited developmental time, making an all-star team and finishing with an OPS+ of 131.

But the major leagues are unkind. Since then, Heyward has hit .248/.331/.433 and an OPS+ of 106, despite a nice job rebounding this season. He’s just 22, and I still believe Heyward will be a star, but his 2011 season should serve as a warning flag for those teams who believe prospects are ready without significant time in the upper minors.

'via Blog this'

And then, the only piece of expert evidence is from John Farrell, where he doesn’t really comment on the point, but implies that the gap between AAA and the majors is wider in bigger markets. Yet plenty of the prospects mentioned as under-performing were in small markets.

Here’s the concluding paragraph:

Too many at-bats in Triple-A is not going to stunt a player’s development, as seen with Andrew McCutchen. Calling up a player too soon, however, has the potential to have serious ramifications years down the road. As the 2014 rookie class clearly demonstrates, the recent trend of accelerated development clearly has not yielded the immediate success at the major league level they are designed to generate.

1. McCutchen, as the article even indicates, actually represents a bit of a departure from the prospect development of stars. Here’s another quote:

Among the notable successes in this class of prospects was Jay Bruce (405 PA), Evan Longoria (158 PA), Jacoby Ellsbury (400 PA), Andrew McCutchen (881 PA), Jason Heyward (13 PA) and Carlos Gonzalez (237 PA).

Now, it’s true, this doesn’t necessarily disprove the point that excess time in AAA can stunt growth. But that’s also not demonstrated by the article. Excess time in AAA didn’t stunt McCutchen’s growth. One data point is hardly generalizable.

2. “Calling up a player too soon, however, has the potential to have serious ramifications years down the road.” This was never really proven by the article, and is a strong, strong statement.

3. “As the 2014 rookie class clearly demonstrates, the recent trend of accelerated development clearly has not yielded the immediate success at the major league level they are designed to generate.” I would be fine with this, but there’s no real indication that there was any grand “design” in place, at least in the absence of some reasonable understanding of either the outside expectations or, more difficult to ascertain, the internal expectations. In other words, this could be true, but isn’t sufficiently proven, either.

Your Big Doubts About the 10,000 Hour Rule Are Well-Founded | Library of Economics and Liberty

Great stuff on the Nature versus Nurture debate, the Ten Thousand Hour Rule and more from what may seem like an unlikely source, the Library of Economics and Liberty. BTW this site and this article demonstrates my theory that you can judge a site by the quality of the comments in the comments section and this site is top notch, top quality and first class all the way. Therefore, it is appropriately bookmarked and highly recommended.


Your Big Doubts About the 10,000 Hour Rule Are Well-Founded | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

				Your Big Doubts About the 10,000 Hour Rule Are Well-F... Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer's
				View on econlog.econlib.org	Preview by Yahoo

Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer's "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (PSYCHOLOGICAL Review 1993) isn't just one of the most famous articles in the history of academic PSYCHOLOGY.  Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, the article's bullet points are now famous around the globe.  It is from this article and related RESEARCH the Gladwell distills his "10,000 Hour Rule."

What does the 10,000 Hour Rule really say?  A few caveats aside, the Rule says that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is both necessary and sufficient for world-class expertise.  Listen, for example, to Gladwell talk about musical expertise.

The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top MUSIC SCHOOL, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This may seem like journalistic hyperbole, but it's quite close to the original RESEARCH.  Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer:

Contrary to the popular "talent" view that asserts that differences in practice and experience cannot account for differences in expert performance, we have shown that the amount of a specific type of activity (deliberate practice) is consistently correlated with a wide range of performance including expert-level performance, when appropriate developmental differences (age) are controlled. Because of the high costs to the individuals and their environments of engaging in high levels of deliberate practice and the overlap in characteristics of deliberate practice and other known effective training situations, one can infer that high levels of deliberate practice arenecessary to attain expert level performance. Our theoretical framework can also provide a sufficient account of the major facts about the NATURE and scarcity of exceptional performance. [emphasis mine]

And:

We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs-novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice. Furthermore, we can account for stable individual differences in performance among individuals actively involved in deliberate practice with reference to the monotonic relation between accumulated amount of deliberate practice and current level of performance.

Although I've found great value in Ericsson's research, his skepticism about innate talent always struck me as crazy.  Yes, experts energetically hone their crafts.  But everywhere I look, I see Gladwell's "naturals" - people who are good despite relatively little time investment - and "grinds" - people who are mediocre despite massive time investment.  Only recently, though, did I discover a pile of researchthat confirms my big doubts about the 10,000 Hour Rule.  Highlights of the highlights:

More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular science writing--but is IT SUPPORTED by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.

The case of chess:

On average, deliberate practice explained 34% of the reliable variance in chess performance, leaving 66% unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors. We conclude that deliberate practice is not sufficient to account for individual differences in chess performance. The implication of this conclusion is that some people require much less deliberate practice than other people to reach an elite level of performance in chess. We illustrate this point in Fig. 2 using Gobet and Campitelli's (2007) chess SAMPLE, with the 90 players classified based on their chess ratings as "master" (≥2200, n = 16), "expert" (≥2000, n = 31), or "intermediate" (<2000, n = 43). There were large differences in mean amount of deliberate practice across the skill groups: master M = 10,530 h (SD = 7414), expert M = 5673 h (SD = 4654), and intermediate M = 3179 h (SD = 4615). However, as the SDs suggest, there were very large ranges of deliberate practice within skill groups. For example, the range for the masters was 832 to 24,284 h--a difference of nearly three orders of magnitude. Furthermore, there was overlap in distributions between skill groups. For example, of the 16 masters, 31.3% (n = 5) had less deliberate practice than the mean of the expert group, one skill level down, and 12.5% (n = 2) had less deliberate practice than the mean of the intermediate group, two skill levels down. In the other direction, of the 31 intermediates, 25.8% (n = 8) had more deliberate practice than the mean of the expert group, one skill level up, and 12.9% (n = 4) had more deliberate practice than the mean of the master group, two skill levels up.

The figure:

The case of music:

On average across studies, deliberate practice explained about 30% of the reliable variance in music performance, leaving about 70% unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors. We conclude that deliberate practice is not sufficient to account for individual differences in music performance. Results of other studies provide further support for this conclusion. Simonton (1991) found a large amount of variability in the amount of time it took famous classical composers to have their first "hit," and that the interval between the first composition and the first hit correlated significantly and negatively with maximum annual output, lifetime productivity, and posthumous reputation. Composers who rose to fame quickly-the most "talented"-had the most successful careers. Furthermore, Sloboda, Davidson, Howe, and Moore (1996) noted that although students at a selective MUSIC SCHOOL ("high achievers") had accumulated more "formal practice" than students who were learning an instrument at a non-music school ("pleasure players"), there were some individuals at each skill level (grade) who did "less than 20 per cent of the mean amount of practice for that grade" and others who did "over four times as much practice than average to attain a given grade" (p. 301).

If deliberate practice doesn't explain everything, what does?  Lots of stuff.  Starting age.  IQ. PERSONALITY.  Specific cognitive skills, too.  Consider working memory:

Ericsson and colleagues have argued that measures of working memory capacity themselves reflect acquired skills (Ericsson & Delaney, 1999; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), but working memory capacity and deliberate practice correlated near zero in this STUDY (r = .003). There was also no evidence for a Deliberate Practice × Working Memory Capacity interaction, indicating that working memory capacity was no less important a predictor of performance for pianists with thousands of hours of deliberate practice than it was for beginners.  

Fortunately, we can salvage most of the original RESEARCH behind the 10,000 Hour Rule.  Instead of thinking of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice as a mandatory minimum for expertise, take it as a rule of thumb: On average, a world-class expert has to practice for about 10,000 hours to reach the top.  Instead of thinking of 10,000 hours as a guarantee of expertise, adopt a pluralistic and probabilistic approach: 10,000 hours combined with lots of innate talent will usuallytake you to the top.

Most importantly, though, think of deliberate practice as a general THEORY ofimprovement, not a special THEORY of expertise!  Some people learn more much easily than others.  But almost anyone can improve in almost anything.  How?  By deliberately practicing the specific skills they wish to improve.  RESEARCH on deliberate practice doesn't undermine intelligence research by showing that genius is a myth.  Instead it reinforces Transfer of Learning research by showing that learning is highly specific.

HT: GMU econ prodigy Nathaniel Bechhofer

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Science aid: Nature versus Nurture

				Science aid: Nature versus Nurture Is intelligence caused by nature (genetics) or nurture (how you are raised/the environment)? Look at twin, adoption and selective breeding studies to com...
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Nature versus Nurture

In this article we will be exploring the age-old nature or nurture debate: which is more relevant; your genes or how you are bought up. This particular article will be concerned with inteligence.

Evolution and Genetics

Firstly, what is evolution? It is a process where the creatures that are best adapted to survive will live longer and therefore be able to reproduce more and have a greater number of offspring. Many of these offspring will have this characteristic and over the course of many generations all in that species will have this characteristic.

It can be defined briefly as: a gradual change in a species over time because of a natural selection of the best adapted to an environment.

Now we move on to a simple look at genetics. As you know, we have genes which give us different characteristics and these genes are inherited from our parents. The actualgenetic code is known as the genotype. However, you get one gene from each parent for everything, but obviously only one of these can be expressed; so how the genes actaully manifest themselves is called the phenotype.

Twin Studies

A twin study is one of the method used. There are two types of twin: dizygotic (DZ) who are regular fraternal twins; and then monozygotic (MZ) which are identical twins and so have exactly the same DNA as each other, i.e. the genotypes are identical. The table below summarizes what the various findings would mean.

In particular it is useful to look at MZ twins (since there genetics are the same) who have been raised together or apart. This was done by Shields (1962), and found the correlation between inteligences of MZ growing up together was 0.83 and growing up apart was 0.51. This would appear to show the environment is more important, however there are some methodological issues related to this study.

A correlation shows how two things are related, but don't give a definite reason. Also, it is only recently that we can prove two twins are identical, it could be that DZ twins that looked very similar were included because they thought they were identical. And finally there is the issue of what was counted as 'seperated' in the study, some twins were included who were raised but different family members but lived near to each other, regually saw each other and went to the same school.

............

Conclusion

Very sorry to dissappoint you, but the conclusion is that both nature and nurture play an important role, however perhaps that the environment is the deciding factor.

The idea used to describe it is the Rubber Band Hypothesis. It says that the potential (length of the band) is decided by genetics. However the environment stretches this band, so that someone with a low potential could be stretched beyond someone with a high because of environmental differences. However if someone with a high and someone with a lower genetic potential had the same environment, that person with the higher genetic potential would be able to 'stretch' their intelligence to a higher level.