I’ve never been a big fan of either grit or deliberate practice. Of course, they make intuitive sense and have a lot of appeal because they send the message that if we do the right things, anyone can be a champion. Unfortunately, as I describe in my Prime Performance System (and those are just the psychological contributors), athletic performance is far too complex to be reduced to a few simple influences.
In a recent post, I shared a study that basically blew the idea of grit out of the water. Another study that was just published largely discredits the widely worshiped idea that ‘deliberate practice’ (studied by Dr. Anders Erisson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) can turn anyone into a champion.
Here’s a summary of the research:
The Relationship Between Deliberate Practice and Performance in Sports: A Meta-Analysis
Who becomes a success in music, sports, games, business, and other domains? This is a question that parents, teachers, coaches, talent scouts, and search committees all seek to answer–and one that psychologists have debated for as long as psychology has been a field. Galton (1869) argued that eminence in science, music, art, and other fields reflects a “natural ability.” Thorndike (1912) countered that “we stay far below our own possibilities in almost everything that we do . . . not because proper practice would not improve us further, but because we do not take the training or because we take it with too little zeal” (p. 108). Watson (1930), in turn, famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and rage starting ages of higher and less-skilled athletes. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean. “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select . . . regardless of his talents” (p. 104).
More recently, scientists interested in expertise have focused on identifying sources of individual differences in performance using psychometric, experimental, behavioral, genetic, and other research approaches. Here, using meta-analysis, we investigate how various task, participant, and methodological factors affect the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in a domain that has been of particular interest to expertise researchers–sports.
Overall, deliberate practice accounted for 18% of the variance in sports performance. However, the contribution differed depending on skill level. Most important, deliberate practice accounted for only 1% of the variance in performance among elite-level performers. This finding is inconsistent with the claim that deliberate practice accounts for performance differences even among elite performers. Another major finding was that athletes who reached a high level of skill did not begin their sport earlier in childhood than lower skill athletes. This finding challenges the notion that higher skill performers tend to start in a sport at a younger age than lower skill performers. We conclude that to understand the underpinnings of expertise, researchers must investigate contributions of a broad range of factors, taking into account findings from diverse subdisciplines of psychology (e.g., cognitive psychology, personality psychology) and interdisciplinary areas of research (e.g., sports science).”
REPRINTS: Brooke N. Macnamara, Case Western Reserve University, Department of Psychological Sciences, 10900 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106-7123 E-mail: brooke.macnamara@case.edu
If you want a complete copy of the article, you can email me.
