There have always been mediocrities who desperately want to believe that one can become great if only one applies oneself. Even more partial to the idea are totalitarians, who–if training is shown to be everything–will have a good chance of being allowed to totalitarianly force training on unfortunate children. Malcolm Gladwell is no doubt one of them. In his recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success
By the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totalled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totalled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totalled just over four thousand hours.
Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty they had totalled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours.
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 harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
My response:
I’ll have to read his book in order to pin down Gladwell’s errors. I probably won’t bother because my life experience refutes him. Good grief, any reasonably academically clever child finds himself surrounded throughout his school years with kids who actually have to study to get B’s when he can sleep through classes and get A’s. I don’t find it surprising that Ericsson found no grind who got in his ten thousand hours of practice and was still lousy. That’s obviously because lack of talent for playing the violin is so obvious that even a grind will soon find that there are things he simply can’t do, and give up. It’s easier for a grind to find ways to fake it in intellectual fields and put in his ten thousand hours, and become certified, and rise in his field thanks to the aid of fellow mediocrities. Good grief, just look around at the academic authors of dozens of books apiece all of whom are third-rate at best.
That Ericsson found no one who equaled the grinds without putting in ten thousand hours does surprise me. I suspect his sample was too small to include any naturals, who would no doubt be very rare.
As usual, anti-Stratfordians have no idea how Shakespeare could have gotten his ten thousand hours because they don’t know anything about epistemology, or the creative process, or what specifically is needed by a would-be dramatist. The believe ten thousand hours of formal study is needed, for they have no idea what informal study is. I do tend to think there might be something to the idea that excellence in any field requires a lot of practice, but that–one–the ability to devote massive amounts of time to a field is genetic, and–two–there are many ways to devote oneself to a field.
When I was the only one in my high school class (400 or so, some of whom ended up in Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Yale, etc.) to reach the semi-finals of the Merit Scholarship competition, those in my class who didn’t know me well but knew I paid little attention to my teachers in class, got almost all my homework done during class or in study hall, and thought there was something wrong with anyone who had to study. Ergo, I must have photographic memory.
The truth, though, is that I had been diligent in an informal way: I’d gotten in thousand of hours of random reading outside school, some of it of mildly advanced texts, and done something else that should count but would not likely be counted by someone like Gladwell, I THOUGHT about things. I wrote my first full-length play at 19–but by that time I’d probably written hundreds of scenes in my head starring me–and, at the beginning, Donald Duck and his three nephews. The play wasn’t very good, but I wrote two more plays before I was twenty, and the second of these was, I believe, promising. But not good, though certainly as good in many ways as Titus Andronicus.
One can certainly argue that I was not a great dramatist, and the reason for this was that I didn’t have enough proper training to be one, but the question is still how I’d gotten to where I could write literate full-length plays at the age of 19.
My only serious point here is to suggest how easily Shakespeare could have reached the level he did in his twenties. Lots of reading, and lots of THINKING. He also had, apparently, one huge advantage over me: he probably acting as an amateur of became an actor, then play doctor, the playwright, for an acting company while still young.
I’m with Felix (a Stratfordian who posted on the subject), by the way, in claiming that every reasonably intelligent twenty-year-old will have had ten thousand hours training in language, and that that is sufficient for any kind of literary vocation. All artists by twenty will have put in ten thousand hours or more in the study of human beings, too, so will be able write about them or depict them in paint.