Talent Is Overrated (8 page)

Psychologists might argue that people who do what Rubin did aren't changing their personalities, they're changing their behavior in order to override some part of their personalities. Fine; there's no need to quibble. What matters is that they were not constrained by particular traits.

 
At this point you can't help but wonder if there's anything at all (a) that makes a significant difference to whether you achieve extraordinary performance, and (b) that you can't do anything about. The answer is yes, of course there is. Most obvious are congenital physical and mental health problems, plus other diseases and disorders that may visit any of us at any time for reasons we still don't fully understand. Those constraints aside, and considering only people in general good health, the clearly innate limitations seem to be physical. Once you've matured physically, you can't do much about your height, and if you're five feet tall you're just never going to be an NFL lineman, while if you're seven feet tall you will not be an Olympic gymnast. Overall body size is also partly innate, so champion sumo wrestlers can probably never make themselves into elite marathoners. While you can develop your voice in all kinds of ways, the dimensions of your vocal cords impose limits; a tenor cannot make himself into a basso profundo.

That is all widely agreed upon. What's surprising is that when it comes to innate, unalterable limits on what healthy adults can achieve, anything beyond those physical constraints is in dispute. Clear evidence that such nonphysical constraints exist has not been found so far.

That fact is profoundly opposed to what most of us believe. We tend to think we are forever barred from all manner of successes because of what we were or were not born with. The range of cases in which that belief is true turns out to be a great deal narrower than most of us think. The roadblocks we face seem to be mostly imaginary.

This finding alone, however, is frustrating. We may have determined that there are hardly any immutable factors that prevent us from ever playing a work more difficult than “Chopsticks” on the piano, or from doing word problems in math, or from leading an organization larger than a softball team. But what we'd really like to know is not what does or doesn't stop us, but what makes some people go so much further than others. And what we have discovered so far is not what makes some people excel but rather what doesn't. Specifically:

 
In short, we've nailed down what doesn't drive great performance. So what does?

Chapter Four

A Better Idea

 
 
Growing up in Crawford, Mississippi (population: 636), Jerry Rice had to be talked into joining his high school's football team. The coach had reportedly heard that the young man was fast and persuaded him to try out. Rice played well and was named to the All-State team, but not so well that any big-name college would offer him a scholarship. Eventually Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, Mississippi (population: 1,946), did offer him a football scholarship, and that's where he spent the next four years.

Rice was a big star at the little school, setting many NCAA records as a receiver. In his senior season he was named to every All-America team and was even a long-shot candidate for the Heisman Trophy (he didn't win). Again, however, he was not so extraordinary that NFL teams were fighting one another to get him. The problem was his speed; while he was fast by the standards of Crawford, and he was fast enough to be a college star, in the NFL his speed was nothing special. In the 1985 draft, fifteen teams passed him over before the San Francisco 49ers finally signed him.

As every football fan knows, Jerry Rice was the greatest receiver in NFL history, and some football authorities believe he may have been the greatest player at any position. His utter dominance is hard to believe in a league where the competition is so intense and conducted at such a high level. For example, the records he holds for total receptions, total touchdown receptions, and total receiving yards are greater than the second-place totals not by 5 percent or 10 percent, which would be impressive, but by about 50 percent.

It's always dangerous to suggest that any record will never be broken, but breaking Rice's records will be a particular challenge because he was an iron man. He played twenty seasons at a position that is notoriously perilous, and he played in almost every game of every season except one, 1997, when he was out for fourteen weeks because of an injury and returned sooner than his doctors advised. For some future player to perform at such an extremely high standard for so many years in a physically brutal game is obviously not impossible, but history suggests that it is unlikely.

With regard to most players, that kind of question usually guarantees an argument among sports fans, but in Rice's case the answer is completely noncontroversial. Everyone in the football world seems to agree that Rice was the greatest because he worked harder in practice and in the off-season than anyone else.

In team workouts he was famous for his hustle; while many receivers will trot back to the quarterback after catching a pass, Rice would
sprint
to the end zone after each reception. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own. Mornings were devoted to cardiovascular work, running a hilly five-mile trail; he would reportedly run ten forty-meter wind sprints up the steepest part. In the afternoons he did equally strenuous weight training. These workouts became legendary as the most demanding in the league, and other players would sometimes join Rice just to see what it was like. Some of them got sick before the day was over.

Occasionally someone would write to the 49ers' trainer asking for the details of Rice's workout, but the trainer never released the information out of fear that people would hurt themselves trying to duplicate it.

The lesson that's easiest to draw from Jerry Rice's story is that hard work makes all the difference. Yet we know—from research and from just looking around us—that hard work often doesn't lead to extraordinary performance. We also know that even after an excellent college career, Rice did not possess outstanding speed, a quality that coaches generally consider mandatory in a great receiver. So there must be something else lurking in Rice's story.

There is. Note several relevant points:

 
He spent very little time playing football.

 
Of all the work Rice did to make himself a great player, practically none of it was playing football games. His independent off-season workouts consisted of conditioning, and his team workouts were classroom study, reviewing of game films, conditioning, and lots of work with other players on specific plays. But the 49ers and eventually the other teams for which Rice played almost never ran full-contact scrimmages because they didn't want to risk injuring players. That means that of the total time Rice spent actually playing the game for which he became famous, nearly all of it was in the weekly games themselves.

How large a part of his football-related work was that? Let's estimate very conservatively that over the course of a year, Rice averaged 20 hours a week working on football; the work is demanding and even the most dedicated player can sustain only a limited amount. There is evidence that Rice probably averaged much more than that, but let's play it safe. That's about 1,000 hours a year, or 20,000 hours over his pro career. He played 303 career NFL games—the most ever by a wide receiver—and if we assume the offense had the ball half the time on average, that's about 150 hours of playing time as measured by the game clock; this may be overstated, since Rice wasn't on the field for every play. The conclusion we reach is that one of the greatest-ever football players devoted less than 1 percent of his football-related work to playing games.

Of course it's true that all NFL players devote most of their work-related time to nongame activities, and that fact is significant. These people, doing their work at its highest level and subject to continuous, unsparing evaluation, don't set up weekday football games for practice; they spend almost all their time on other activities, a fact that we should remember. In the case of Rice, one of the greatest players, the ratio was even more extreme.

 
He designed his practice to work on his specific needs.

 
Rice didn't need to do everything well, just certain things. He had to run precise patterns; he had to evade the defenders, sometimes two or three, who were assigned to cover him; he had to outjump them to catch the ball and outmuscle them when they tried to strip it away; then he had to outrun tacklers. So he focused his practice work on exactly those requirements. Not being the fastest receiver in the league turned out not to matter. He became famous for the precision of his patterns. His weight training gave him tremendous strength. His trail running gave him control so he could change directions suddenly without signaling his move. The uphill wind sprints game him explosive acceleration. Most of all, his endurance training—not something that a speed-focused athlete would normally concentrate on—gave him a giant advantage in the fourth quarter, when his opponents were tired and weak, and he seemed as fresh as he was in the first minute. Time and again, that's when he put the game away.

Rice and his coaches understood exactly what he needed in order to be dominant. They focused on those things and not on other goals that might have seemed generally desirable, like speed.

 
The football season lasts less than half the year. A team sport obviously requires that the players work together a great deal, yet most of Rice's work was in the off-season. He had the important advice of coaches and trainers, but he did most of his football-related work by himself.

 
It wasn't fun.

 
There's nothing enjoyable about running to the point of exhaustion or lifting weights to the point of muscle failure. But these were centrally important activities.

 
He defied the conventional limits of age.

 
The average NFL player leaves the league in his twenties; playing at age thirty-five is an unusual achievement. The widely accepted view is that even if a player avoids injury, deterioration of the body is inevitable, and a player in his late thirties can no longer prevail when facing an opponent fifteen years younger. The few players who have remained starters into their forties have overwhelmingly been quarterbacks, who don't block and don't run much on most plays, or kickers and punters, who are in for only a few plays per game and are rarely even touched by the opponents. Wide receivers, who run like hell on most plays and frequently get crushed by tacklers, aren't supposed to last twenty seasons or play until age forty-two. None but Rice has ever done so.

It's natural to question how much relevance a football star's career might have for the rest of us, and besides, it's just one person's story. From a scientific perspective it's an anecdote, not data. To see whether the apparent lessons of Rice's career might apply more broadly, consider a critically important and highly rigorous scientific study conducted in the early nineties in a very different place, Berlin, and examining a very different realm, music.

The object of the study was to figure out why some violinists are better than others. The researchers went to the Music Academy of West Berlin, as it was then known, a postsecondary school that turns out extremely good musicians, many of whom go on to careers with major symphony orchestras or as solo performers. Professors were asked to nominate the very best violinists, those with the potential for careers as international soloists. The professors also nominated violinists who were very good but not as good as the top group. In addition, the academy had a separate department with lower admission standards, the students of which generally go on to become music teachers, and the researchers recruited a group from this department as well. That made three groups of test subjects—we'll call them good, better, and best—which the researchers chose to be as similar as possible in age (all students were in their early twenties) and sex.

The researchers then collected lots of biographical data about all the subjects—the age at which they started studying music, the teachers they had, the competitions they had entered, and much else. The data confirmed the judgments of the music professors: The best violinists had been more successful in competitions than the better ones, who had been more successful than the good ones. The subjects were asked to estimate how many hours a week they practiced for each year since they started. They were given a long list of activities, music-related and non-music-related, and asked how much time they had spent on each one in the most recent typical week; they were also asked to rate how relevant each activity was to making them better violinists, how effortful it was, and how enjoyable it was. They were asked a great deal more, including how they had spent the previous day, minute by minute, and they were asked to fill out a detailed diary for a week. Because diary reports aren't always accurate, the researchers cross-checked them in various ways and conducted extensive interviews with the subjects afterward to confirm the validity of the numbers.