Talent Is Overrated (26 page)

Eventually, of course, everyone's performance declines. Even the most diligent deliberate practice cannot fend off the advancing years forever. When Arthur Rubinstein gave up performing publicly at eighty-nine, it was because he was becoming blind and deaf. He couldn't practice his way past that. And then there's the ultimate slowing down, which even the greatest performers must confront. Warren Buffett told his shareholders in his 2008 letter, “I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death—abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term ‘thinking outside the box.'”

 
The perspectives of both youth and age raise a profound question about great performance, one we've touched on before but now must face directly. If it's all about the punishing demands of deliberate practice, the continual, painful pushing beyond what's comfortable, for hours a day and years on end, then why does anyone do it? A parent can make a child practice, but not with the focus and intensity needed to become great. Something else must make the child do that. At life's other extreme, Stanley Drucker doesn't need to work, and he certainly doesn't need to put in the hours required to remain the top clarinetist in one of the world's greatest orchestras. Warren Buffett doesn't need to work. Why do they push themselves? Why does a chess player study four or five hours a day when becoming even one of the world's top-ranked grand masters does not necessarily bring wealth? Why do some young businesspeople push themselves beyond their jobs' considerable daily demands to acquire more knowledge and skills when the payoff is uncertain and may be years away?

We know that great performance comes from deliberate practice, but deliberate practice is hard. It's so hard that no one can do it without the benefit of passion, a truly extraordinary drive. So we need to know where that originates.

Chapter Eleven

Where Does the Passion Come From?

 
 
Consider what Shizuka Arakawa had been through by the time she won the gold medal in figure skating at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. She was twenty-four and had been training as a skater since age five. Winning the gold requires flawless performance of moves that the rest of us would consider simply impossible; Arakawa's specialty was something called a layback Ina Bauer—bending backward almost double with the feet pointing in opposite directions—leading into a three-jump combination. Perfecting such moves requires huge quantities of practice, and falling down during much of it. For Arakawa it took nineteen years. A study of figure skaters found that sub-elite skaters spent lots of time working on the jumps they could already do, while skaters at the highest levels spent more time on the jumps they couldn't do, the kind that ultimately win Olympic medals and that involve lots of falling down before they're mastered.

Falling down in figure skating means landing on your behind, protected only by a thin costume, on hard, cold ice. A few moments with a calculator tell us that by an extremely conservative estimate, Arakawa's road to the gold medal involved at least twenty thousand derriere impacts on an unforgiving surface. But they paid off. The results included Olympic glory, national adoration, and the suddenly fashionable use of “Ina Bauer” as a vogue word throughout Japan.

Arakawa's story is not just impressive in itself but also valuable as a metaphor. Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from. That fact raises the question of why anyone would go through it for a reward that is many years away. This is the deepest question in the study of exceptional performance. In a sense, it is infinitely deep. It's a question about what people decide to do with their lives and what kind of passion drives them. The answer may extend so far into a person's psyche that no one can get all the way there. It sometimes takes us beyond psychology and into psychiatry. But that doesn't mean the question is a black hole or that pursuing it is hopeless. On the contrary, many findings provide intriguing hints as to why great performers pay the price they must pay. The research also sheds light on how we can answer the question as it applies to ourselves.

The central question about motivation to achieve great performance is whether it's intrinsic or extrinsic. Do people do it because they feel driven, or is it possible to induce them to do what it takes? Most of us believe the drive must be ultimately intrinsic, because we feel nothing could make someone endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless that person carried his or her own compulsion to do it. Much of the research supports this view. In particular, research on motivation in creativity has focused on the question of intrinsic versus extrinsic, and it's helpful and relevant for two reasons: In many fields creativity represents the highest level of excellent performance, where people go beyond anything already achieved and make new contributions; and creativity, like effective practice in any domain, requires intense focus and concentration, which is the element that's most demanding and difficult to sustain.

The consistent finding reported by many researchers examining many domains is that high creative achievement and intrinsic motivation go together. Creative people are focused on the task (How can I solve this problem?) and not on themselves (What will solving this problem do for me?). Young people who excel in science and math are more intrinsically motivated than their lower-performing peers. Scientists who make important discoveries are found to be passionately involved in their field. A wide range of creative achievers seem to be devoted to great questions or problems in their field—scientific, commercial, artistic—and feel driven to pursue them for decades.

Look at the issue from any perspective and the results seem to be the same. People who rank high for intrinsic motivation on various psychological tests consistently produce work that is judged more creative in studies. Conversely, people who work in professions demanding creativity (artists, research scientists) reliably rank higher on tests of intrinsic motivation.

The work of University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests one specific mechanism (of many that might exist) that could link intrinsic motivation with the demands of deliberate practice. His famous work on “flow” describes a state in which a person is so totally involved in a task that time slows down, enjoyment is heightened, and the task seems almost effortless. This “high” is achieved when the challenge just matches the person's skills; if it's too easy the experience is boring, too hard and it's frustrating. As people master tasks, they must seek greater challenges and match them with higher-level skills in order to keep experiencing flow. Csikszentmihalyi has argued that this is exactly what many people in creative pursuits do, a process that parallels the deliberate practice routine of continually pushing past one's current abilities.

The concept of flow might even help explain one of the particular puzzles of motivation to practice. It's a considerable “might” because the research has not been done. But the theory of deliberate practice keeps running up against a minor real-world contradiction. In the theory, practice is “not inherently enjoyable.” Since it requires constantly trying to do things one can't quite do, and thus failing repeatedly, that makes sense. But in the research, top-level performers, at least in sports, often report the opposite. In studies of wrestlers, skaters, soccer players, field hockey players, and martial artists, practice activities rated fairly high on a scale of enjoyableness. As the tennis champion Monica Seles told the
New York Times
in 1999, “I just love to practice and drill and that stuff.”

These reports contrast sharply with the feelings of Ericsson's violinists, who rated practice a pretty miserable way to spend their time. It may well be that athletes enjoy practice because for them it's a social activity, while for violinists it isn't. But at a deeper level one has to suspect that practice is somehow meeting an inner need for anyone who can maintain it at an intense level for years. It seems plausible that the role of practice in producing the highly enjoyable flow state could be part of it.

It certainly seems plausible as well that something more profound could also be going on. In some fields, such as science and math, fascination with the available problems seems to drive excellent performers. Benjamin Bloom, in his study of top-ranked young performers in several fields, found this motivation in some of them from their early years: “For most of the mathematicians, the joy of discovering a new way of solving a problem was more important than a high test score, receiving a good grade, or getting the teacher's approval for their work.” Many studies of scientists have reported a similar finding; they get excited by new problems and find rewards not just in the solution but also in the process of seeking solutions.

In business, motivation has been the subject of endless research studies, books, articles, and consulting assignments. The all-time number 2 best-selling reprint from the
Harvard Business Review
is a 1968 article on motivation (the number 1 best seller is about time management). But the great majority of the research has focused on what motivates employees generally, not on what drives the top performers. Studies on that small subset have uncovered a wide range of driving forces, practically all of which are intrinsic. They may include a need for achievement, a need for power over others, even a need to do good in the world. But the drivers are almost never extrinsic, which makes sense when we observe the most eminent executives and entrepreneurs; long after they've accumulated more money than they could ever use and more fame than anyone could hope for, they keep working and trying to get better. It all fits with the big-picture idea that intrinsic drive is by far the most powerful.

Yet that can't be the whole story. Intrinsic motivation may dominate the big picture, but everyone, even the greatest achievers, has responded to extrinsic forces at critical moments. When Watson and Crick were struggling to find the structure of DNA, they worked almost nonstop because they knew they were in a race with other research teams. Alexander Graham Bell worked similarly on the telephone, knowing he was in competition with Elisha Gray, whom he beat to the patent office by just hours. Such people are driven by much more than fascination or joy.

In extensive research on what drives creative achievement, Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School at first proposed a simple hypothesis: “The intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.” It's easy to see why she considered extrinsic motivation bad news; many studies showed exactly that. In one of Amabile's own projects, for example, college women were asked to make paper collages. Half the subjects were told their collages would be judged by graduate art students; the others were told that researchers were studying their mood and had no interest in the collages themselves. When the collages were then evaluated by a panel of artists, those produced by the subjects who expected to be judged were significantly less creative. Other studies showed that virtually any external attempt to constrain or control the work results in less creativity. Just being watched is detrimental. Even being offered a reward for doing the work results in less creative output than being offered nothing.

All these results were replicated many times. But other studies, going in other directions, were finding something else. Extrinsic motivators were of many types, not all of them controlling, and some of them seemed to enhance creativity. Specifically, extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic motivation could work quite effectively. Like what? Recognition that confirms competence turned out to be effective. While the mere expectation of being judged tended to reduce creativity, personal feedback could actually enhance creativity if it was the right kind—“constructive, nonthreatening, and work-focused rather than person-focused,” in Amabile's words. That is, feedback that helped a person do what he or she felt compelled to do was effective. Even the prospect of direct rewards, normally suffocating to creativity, could be helpful if they were the right kinds of rewards—those “that involve more time, freedom, or resources to pursue exciting ideas.” These findings prompted Amabile to revise her hypothesis: Intrinsic motivation is still best, and extrinsic motivation that's controlling is still detrimental to creativity, but extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic drives can be highly effective.

We've looked closely at motivation in creativity because, as noted, it has much to teach about the larger issue of what makes people persist through the demands of high achievement. Looking more broadly reveals further evidence that extrinsic motivators can, in certain circumstances, be helpful. For example, large parts of what we call creative work aren't very creative. Once a problem has been identified and solved—the creative part—it's necessary to evaluate the solution, write accounts of what was done, and communicate with others about it. All those jobs can be hard slogging, and the types of extrinsic motivators described above can be helpful in moving the work along.

More fundamentally, learning the skills of a particular field, one of the main objectives of deliberate practice, sometimes benefits from extrinsic motivators, especially in the early stages. Even the elite performers studied by Bloom required plenty of extrinsic motivation when they were starting out in their field. Their parents made them practice, as parents have always done, though it's interesting to note that in these cases, when push came to shove and parents had to make a direct threat, it frequently played off the student's intrinsic motivators. So it wasn't “If you don't do your piano practice we'll cancel your allowance,” but rather “we'll sell the piano.” Not “If you don't go to swimming practice you'll be grounded Saturday night,” but rather “we'll take you off the team.” If the child truly didn't care about the piano or swimming, the threats wouldn't have worked.