Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

Here's an alternate view. Practice methods matter a great deal because our biology allows us to be extremely adaptive. However, not everybody's biology is identical and those differences will dominate in competitions between groups of highly motivated and well coached individuals. Phelps is a particularly clear example:<p><i>Phelps, the six-times Olympic swimming champion, has size 14 feet, which act like flippers to propel him through water. He is 6ft 4in tall but has arms that span 6ft 7in from fingertip to fingertip. “If you’re putting a human being together from science this is what you want,” said Rowdy Gaines, the winner of three Olympic swimming gold medals in 1984.<p>Phelps is also faster at processing lactic acid, the fluid which makes muscles ache, than any other known human.<p>After a race, most swimmers measure a lacticity of between 10 and 15 millimoles per litre of blood. Phelps’s count after breaking a world record last year was 5.6. Genadijus Sokolovas, the Team USA physiologist, has measured 5,000 international swimmers and failed to find another with a post-race lacticity count of less than 10.</i><p><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-michael-phelps-so-good" rel="nofollow">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-...</a> <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece" rel="nofollow">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece</a>

I'm skeptical of this. I see no evidence that the statement <i>"10,000 hours of practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise"</i> is anything but a tautology.<p>Excellence is vaguely defined at best. Perhaps the people that dedicated 10,000 hours to developing a skill are sufficiently rare that we recognise them as experts simply because few other people have put in so much effort.<p><i>xiaoma</i> mentions Phelps as an example of someone who has a biological advantage over other swimmers, even though they must put in comparable effort/hours of practice. I imagine that if Phelps had been an amateur swimmer, racking up only 1000 hours of practice, his biology would put him at a considerable advantage over similar amateurs. If an objective definition of an "expert swimmer" existed, I imagine Phelps would have obtained that level with significantly fewer hours of practice that any others. I think the biological/mental differences will dominate at every stage, not just at the top level.<p>The article mentions "scientific research", but does not cite any.

The Talent Code is an incredibly good book - I recommend anyone interested in excellence read it. Another thing that's brought up in the book is the idea of commitment. The people who are most committed to the long term improve the most at whatever they do. Wrote more about this here: <a href="http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-you-400-percent-better/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/how-commitment-can-make-you-40...</a>

I'm looking for the one key to being excellent at everything.

I'm especially interested in the statistic that great performers rarely spend more than 4.5 hours/day on their craft. I believe it, but I wonder where he pulls that number from.<p>Any ideas?<p>It's the sort of thing that seems especially important to my goal of doing great science without neglecting my family and other interests (<a href="http://wayofthescholar.com" rel="nofollow">http://wayofthescholar.com</a>).<p>The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?