#marginbetweengoodandgreat

by Adam George

October 15, 2014

David Epstein, author of The Sport Gene, presented his platform for excellence within sports on October 15, 2014 at the 15th annual World Knowledge Forum in Seoul.  Mr. Epstein’s research focused on the importance of sampling and the dangers of hyper-specialization in athletic practice. 

While athleticism may only apply to a small number of people, Mr. Epstein expressed hope that his work will eventually influence other areas.

“[My research focuses on] high performance in sports, because I think it relates to high performance everywhere,” he said. 

Mr. Epstein discussed stellar sports stars, including Barry Bonds, a prominent former American baseball player.  While Mr. Epstein noted his athletic excellence, he delved into a unique example involving one of Barry Bonds’ rarer moments: a sports failure.

He explained that Barry Bonds failed to hit a pitch from Jennie Fitcher, a renowned softball pitcher, causing many to gawk at such a spectacle. However, Mr. Epstein provided an explanation.

“When Barry Bonds was faced with unfamiliar movements of the rotation of torso and the shoulder, and an unfamiliar rotation of the ball, he was stripped of that learned expertise that allowed him to predict the future to not rely on his reflexes,” he said.

Mr. Epstein claimed that star athletes can’t depend on reflexes to perform, but rather they learn various sports skills unconsciously, which is then formed into a habit of sorts. This learning allows athletes to develop a signal that says, for example, “the ball is going here or there.”  Therefore, the athlete can appropriately and successfully respond based on such exposure to specific sports-related phenomena.

Understanding the process of skills acquisition fueled the next section of Mr. Epstein’s presentation.  Using the example of memory in a chess game, Mr. Epstein discerned that grandmaster chess players could easily replicate chess boards depicting a point of play after only viewing it for a short amount of time.

However, when given a board with an impossible formation of chess pieces, the grandmasters struggled.

“Grandmaster players were given board arrangements that almost looked like they were real, but they would never occur in a game.  In those scenarios, the grandmasters were no better than the novices at recreating the board,” he said. 

They failed at this because they had only learned to make order of the possible boards by finding chunks of likely scenarios; the impossible boards presented no such scenarios for them.  This epitomizes the underlying creed for Mr. Epstein’s research.

Mr. Epstein’s work has consequently clashed with that of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, which states that one needs an average of 10,000 hours to master a skill.  Mr. Epstein demurred the 10,000 hour theory because its credentials rest on an unrealistic sample.  One of the primary studies looked at 30 professional violinists and their periods of practice. 

“Ten thousand hours was an average of the ten best violinists…in fact, almost none of them had reached 10,000 hours…but one person went way beyond,” he said.  These violinists had already prominently established themselves at the time of the study, again adding to the improbable nature of the results. 

“It’s like doing a study on basketball players and only using those from the NBA…[and declaring that] it was practice that got them to where they are, not practice plus 215 centimeters in height.  It doesn’t tell you the reality of skill acquisition,” he added.

Mr. Epstein then focused on a part of his research that involves analyzing the mechanics of the sport.  He equated a learned skill, or sports mastery, to that of software, and the body to that of hardware.

“A computer is useless without software; once you have that software, your hardware starts to make a heck of a lot of difference with how good of a machine you have,” he said.

Mr. Epstein solidified this point by examining two decorated high jumpers, one that trained for 20 years and another that simply started jumping after a dare.  He looked at their background and noted that the untrained jumper was born with a very long Achilles tendon, which Mr. Epstein claimed was his gift.  The trained athlete’s tendon had become hard over time, however.  Both instances, he said, exemplify contrasting paths to success but object the 10,000 hour rule.