SHOULD YOU SPECIALIZE OR GENERALIZE?
©Johannes Eisele (Afp), Jamie Squire (Getty Images)
We are living in a world, where people are losing sight of the process and the journey towards a goal, instead they are seeking its instant fulfillment and the gratification of such. It is contradictory to theory of the 10,000-hour rule, which says intense, dedicated practice makes perfect at that one thing.
The first story is about a boy’s father, who could tell something was different about his son at . At seven months, he gave his son a putter to fool around with. At 10 months, the son climbed down from his high chair, trundled over to a golf club that had been cut down to size for him, and imitated the swing he had been watching in the garage. Because the father was unable to yet talk with his son, he drew pictures to show the boy how to place his hands on the club. In the second story, the boy’s mother was a coach, but she never coached her son. As a child, he played squash with his father on Sundays. He dabbled in skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis and badminton, and soccer at school. His parents had no particular athletic aspirations for him. They encouraged him to try a wide array of sports. He did not much mind what sport he was playing, as long as it included a ball. In 2006, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer met for the first time, when both were at the apex of their powers. Woods flew in on his private jet to watch the final of the US Open tennis tournament. It made Federer especially nervous, but he still won, for the third year in a row. Woods joined him in the locker room for a champagne celebration.
It seems pretty unusual for a child with parents, who first took his sport lightly, to grow into a man who dominates it like no one before him. Unlike Tiger, thousands of kids, at least, had a head start on Roger. Tiger’s upbringing has been at the heart of theories on the development of expertise. Tiger was not merely playing golf. He was engaging in what is often described as “deliberate practice”, applying the “10,000 hours rule” of expertise. It states that the number of accumulated hours of highly specialized training is the sole factor in skill development, no matter the domain. Deliberate practice occurs when learners are given explicit training instructions and they are individually being supervised by an instructor or use digital tracking tool. The results offer immediate feedback, knowledge of the performance and are then being repeatedly performed over time. Reams of work on expertise-development shows that elite athletes spend more time in highly technical, deliberate practice each week than those who plateau at lower levels.
Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success, as well as that practice ideally start as early as possible. But the push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become. Elite athletes at the peak of their abilities do spend more time on deliberate practice than their near-elite peers. But scientists have found that, at a younger age, those who go on to become elite athletes typically devote less time to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period”. They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiency from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in on one area.
It is no new news that it takes time to develop personal and professional range, in fact, it is a continuous journey of experiences and growth. Cognitive psychologists demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even including poor performances or failures, to learn and progress. In fact, this concept applies to every stage of life, from the development of children in math, music and sports, to students fresh out of college trying to find their way, to mid-career professionals in need of a change and would-be retirees looking for a new vocation after moving on from their previous one.
The challenge we face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly offers incentives or even demands hyper-specialization. While it is true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose as complexity increases, on the other hand, we also need more Rogers, which are people with a diverse range, who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress.