Of course, not all expert decision-making is rapid and intuitive. In some situations, chess players are required to conduct deep searches of possible moves, and firefighters are required to think logically about the consequences of actions. So are top sportsmen and military commanders.
But even in the most abstract decisions, experience and knowledge play a central role. In an experiment carried out by David Rumelhart, a psychologist at Stanford University, five times as many participants were able to figure out the implications of a logical expression when it was stated in a real setting (‘Every purchase over thirty dollars must be approved by the manager’) than when stated in a less meaningful way (‘Every card with a vowel on the front must have an integer on the back’).
Earlier in this chapter we saw that the talent myth is disempowering because it causes individuals to give up if they fail to make rapid early progress. But we can now see that it is also damaging to institutions that insist on placing inexperienced individuals – albeit with strong reasoning skills – in positions of power.
Think, for example, of the damage done to the governance of Britain by the tradition of moving ministers – the most powerful men and women in the country – from department to department without giving them the opportunity to develop an adequate knowledge base in any of them. It is estimated that the average tenure of a ministerial post in recent years in Britain has been 1.7 years. John Reid, the long-serving member of Tony Blair’s government, was moved from department to department no less than seven times in seven years. This is no less absurd than rotating Tiger Woods from golf to football to ice hockey to baseball and expecting him to perform expertly in every arena.
What we decide about the relative importance of practice and knowledge on the one hand and talent on the other has major implications not just for ourselves and our families, but for corporations, sports, governments, and, indeed, the future of artificial intelligence.*
On 3 May 1997, Kasparov and Deep Blue went head-to-head for a second time. The hype was no less intense and the stakes no less high. IBM put up over a million dollars in prize money, and the world’s media descended upon the venue – this time the thirty-fifth floor of the Equitable Center on Seventh Avenue in New York – in even greater numbers (IBM would later estimate that the company gained more than $500 million in free publicity).
But this time, Deep Blue was triumphant, defeating the world champion by two games to one, with three draws. It was a crushing blow for Kasparov, who stormed out of the venue. He would later allege that IBM had created playing conditions advantageous to Deep Blue and that they had refused to provide computer printouts which would have helped his preparation. He also made entirely unsubstantiated claims that IBM had cheated. He was not a good loser.
What had happened over the course of the preceding fifteen months? How had Deep Blue managed to convert defeat into a famous victory? Firstly, the machine had been provided with double the processing power (it was now able to compute more than 200 million moves per second). But its victory would have been impossible without another key innovation.
As the American Physical Society put it, ‘Deep Blue’s general knowledge of chess was significantly enhanced through the efforts of IBM consultant and international grandmaster Joel Benjamin, so that it could draw on vast resources of stored information, such as a database of opening games played by grandmasters over the last 100 years.’
Deep Blue’s programmers – like Gary Klein, Jim Immelt, and Wayne Gretzky – had realized that knowledge is power.
The Myth of the Child Prodigy
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a sensation in the courts of eighteenth-century Europe. At the age of just six, he was enchanting members of the aristocracy with his skills on the piano, often with his sister Maria Anna playing alongside him. He began composing pieces for the violin and piano at the age of five, going on to produce many works before his tenth birthday. Pretty impressive stuff for a boy in short trousers.
How do you solve a conundrum like Mozart? Even those sympathetic to the idea that excellence emerges over the course of ten thousand hours of practice are stumped when attempting to explain the timeless genius of one of history’s greatest composers, a man who has changed lives with his artistic insight and intricate creativity.
Surely this is an example of a man who was born with his sublime abilities intact, a man who came into the world stamped with the mark of genius? After all, Mozart had scarcely even lived ten thousand hours by the time he was getting to grips with the piano and his early compositions.
But is that the whole story? Here is Mozart’s early life, told in a little more detail by the journalist and author Geoff Colvin:
Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a programme of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Wolfgang’s teacher by more than just his own eminence; he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children.
While Leopold was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year Wolfgang was born, remained influential for decades. So, from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him…
Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.
The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.
Seen in this context, Mozart’s achievements suddenly seem rather different. He no longer looks like a musician zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice; rather, he looks like somebody who embodies the rigours of practice. He set out on the road to excellence very early in life, but now we can see why.
It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practising with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.
Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practised for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted – and their knowledge deepened – by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.
What about Mozart the child composer rather than Mozart the child performer? The facts follow the same logic. Sure, he wrote compositions as a young boy, but they had nothing in common with the sublime creations of his later years. His first four piano concertos, written at the age of eleven, and his next three, written at sixteen, contain no original music: they are simply rearrangements of the music of other composers.
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