The New York Times today includes a study about the difference between skills that can be acquired simply by practice or repetition and skills that seem to rely on native intelligence. In some things practice really does make perfect but in others having the best memory capacity and cognitive skills just can’t be beat.
This is of course not a popular subject outside of athletics where the inborn gifts of speed and size clearly provide advantages but it correlates with performance none the less.
Excerpts and Link:
“By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best†players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good†players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.”
“Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability.”
“But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.”
“he remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only†in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.”
“In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.”
“It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.”
“None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.”
