I dropped everything and went to a tennis academy for high school when I realized I was lucky enough to live have the family to support me financially, and where I lived wasn't a great place to achieve whatever potential I had.<p>After going to the academy for two years and getting consistently better, I started hearing more and more from people about my "potential", although I wasn't one of the "stars" who would go on to make great money playing professional tennis.<p>I had finished high school that year, and instead of going to college I decided to take a year off and continue playing international tournaments on the junior circuit. I had done decent and was in the top 1000 worldwide, but wanted to really see how I could do. I had the rest of the year in eligibility (it was June when I graduated, and you can play until the year you turned 19, which started the next January), so I packed my bags and played something like 25 tournaments that fall in a number of different countries.<p>I did poorly. I made it inside the top 650 or so, far from my goal or realizing any potential I thought I had. It seemed that I just didn't have quite the talent necessary to make it, nor do anything noteworthy with my tennis.<p>This was disheartening, but I had six more months before I would have to go off to college while keeping full eligibility, so it seemed like my best bet was to practice- with a new perspective that I didn't quite have years earlier.<p>So this time I got a private coach along with the normal academy practices. Every afternoon when everyone else was in school, we'd keep working. I figured that even though I wasn't a natural talent like some of those guys, a few hours' edge on them every day would help my case. My coach was great, super intense and helped push me when I was tired. I hit my physical capacity a few times and had to take a day or afternoon off every once in a while, but the fact that I was doing more than those supposedly untouchable <i>natural talents</i> was ACTUALLY working. I was noticeably better, a "friggin' moose on the court" as my coach would say, and I started really competing with and even beating some of the guys ranked in the top 100.<p>I think too few people really work very, very hard, which is what's required to make up for natural talent. This causes the huge amount of naysayers, who never see anyone with little talent exceed expectation. Because of that, too few of the untalented work hard. It's a vicious cycle.
Getting to the bottom, he describes how he no longer beats himself up about not being better at tennis since he knows he could be better if he was willing to invest the time in it.<p>The same realization about foreign languages is what caused me to gradually stop studying them. The value in being near-fluent in something is pretty clear, but the value of being sub-conversational is usually not. Once I realized I was unlikely to travel and live in the countries whose languages I was studying, it made more sense to give them up.<p>The whole 10000 hour thing is both exciting and depressing. Exciting because it means you can do anything ("any (one) thing") you dedicate yourself to. Depressing because it suggests limits to how many areas you can reasonably excel at.
Steps 1-3 and 5-6 are "easy", but how do you step 4?<p><i>4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses</i><p>It would be great if my company did code reviews on everything a la Google, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. I code in my spare time, but what expert is going to want to check out my spare time projects, project euler solutions, or what have you, and give feedback? So, how do I go about getting expert feedback?
This is true, but no matter how much he wants to a 5'5 guy is not going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. Hard work can certainly get people beyond their limits, but people born with a special talent in one area can push that boundary even farther just by working as hard as everyone else.
This is a motivational article. And a good one with great specific tips on how to optimize your workload. But obviously wrong in that natural talent has little to no effect on skill. But of course you have to say that in a motivational "working hard gets results" gist type article.
Once can combine numbers 2 (hard work first), 3 (intense practice), and 6 (regular/ritualized practice) by doing some "deliberate" and challenging study first thing every morning. For example, find a true classic in the field of interest, and consume it for 1-2 hours immediately after waking up.<p>I've been doing that with SICP and it's been an immensely rewarding experience.
Relevant:<p>The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance<p>-Psychological Review<p><a href="http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...</a>