Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

Quantity Leads to Quality

11 Written by Keith on November 26, 2009 – 12:42 pm

When it comes to teaching my boys how to do something or them teaching themselves, I have always directed them to slow down, take their time and think everything out before doing anything.  That seems like a pretty reasonable course of action.  It’s what I was taught, and I think most parents feel the same way, that success breeds success.  Of all my parenting techniques that work I am glad that I’ve recently discovered that the quality over quantity theory seems now to be wrong.  I got the following quote from the book Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton.  His theory, not without research, is that the actual formula for success is nothing more than repetition, not great attention to detail.  This revelation is going to make my teaching with the boys much more pleasant as the short term goal is simple action rather than perfection. 

“A ceramics professor comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece.

 

At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.”

 It turns out that, while some people do have a natural inclination toward certain pursuits, the gap in expertise between them and the rest of us comes from their dedication much more than it does any natural ability.  For anybody who has read Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Outliers: The Story of Success you will be familiar with the 10,000 hour rule.  Very simply it says this: You can be a master at any complex task as long as you spend 10,000 hours practicing it.  It applies to Music, Sports, Writing, Science or anything else you’d fancy learning.  The point is that the people who are masters are not necessarily gifted people.  They aren’t just born with massive talent, rather they achieve it through hard work.  Even people like Motzart, who we assume was simply a freak of nature, are trapped by the 10,000 hour rule.  They practice and therefore they are geniuses, not they are geniuses who happen to practice. 

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals… this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Does the 10,000 hour rule guarantee success?  No, it doesn’t, but not because mastery won’t be achieved.  There are plenty of factors that go into what we consider success.  It’s a little luck mixed with a bit of brains.  There are plenty of masters in the world who never reach the top of their field.  My martial arts master is a good example.  The man spent his whole life studying martial arts.  His precision was better than anybody I’ve ever seen.  I might go so far as to say that he had a Bruce Lee level of focus on martial arts. That being said though, he never found success.  He’s still running a cruddy little academy and making barely enough money to support his family.  Obviously success requires more than mastery.  Still, mastery is a prerequisite.

My boys probably don’t have extreme intelligence, but that doesn’t matter.  An interesting fact about intelligence is that it does not influence success as much as we think it does.  Simply above average smarts is all that’s needed for any level of success.  Geniuses are often handicapped by their inability to relate and, unless they find constructive outlets like astrophysics, are doomed to obscurity.  It’s somewhat comforting to know that success really is derived from hard work.  We all love Larry Bird because he seems a lot like us except much more talented.  Now we know why.  The guy just practiced like crazy.  10,000 hours of practice is equivalent to 20 hours a week for roughly 10 years.  I’m not even too old to start mastering something.  My kids truly can be anything they want to be.