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Monday, November 23, 2009
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volume 1
issue 1
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“a-connect guided us skillfully on the project, the back office team gave us the support we needed and I especially appreciated the feedback after completion of the project.” —R.B., IP since 2003
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Championship Talent: Are Stars Born or Made?
The curious case of the soccer birth-month anomaly
by Perry Fagan
The World Cup is a showcase of soccer’s elite performers on a German stage. But just what makes someone really good at a given thing, whether it’s soccer, piano, stock picking, teaching, or software coding? Throughout human history the origins of elite performance have been the subject of intense speculation and debate. Most often, innate talent is cited as the principal factor in distinguishing elite performers—talent that no amount of hard work or desire from less fortunate players can overcome. Stars are born, not made, or so conventional wisdom teaches us.
But it turns out that conventional wisdom is wrong.
In their May 7, 2006 column in The New York Times Magazine, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, economists widely known for their bestselling book “Freakonomics”, join the debate by presenting a statistical anomaly that upon investigation points to a new explanation of elite performance.
It turns out that an examination of the birth certificates of every soccer player in this month’s World Cup tournament reveals a puzzling fact: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. An examination of the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional levels yields results that are even more pronounced. Dubner and Levitt cite that on recent English teams, for example, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.
What’s going on here? The authors half-jokingly consider several explanations, including the likelihood that certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills, that winter-born babies have higher oxygen capacity and thus higher physical stamina levels, and that soccer-crazy parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime at the annual peak of soccer mania.
Is Talent Overrated?
For a rigorous explanation they turn to Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and a leading proponent of the Expert Performance Movement. Ericsson, 58, and his colleagues have spent years trying to figure out how the best pianists, golfers, soccer players, surgeons, writers, stockbrokers, and chess players in the world got so good. How far can talent take you? What role does selection play—and how about practice?
Ericsson and his colleagues argue that many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of deliberate practice occurring over a minimum of 10 years. They conclude that expert performance is “the end result of individuals’ prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints.” They contend that in most areas of expertise individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of deliberate practice, which involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. Individual differences in performance evident later in life, they believe, are closely related to the amount of deliberate practice an individual engages in.
Using their theory of deliberate practice as a lens, Ericsson and his colleagues believe they can explain the soccer birth-month anomaly. They reason that since youth sports are organized by age bracket teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to be born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick? He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the one who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback—and the accompanying self-esteem—that will turn them into elites.
What we typically think of as innate talent, therefore, is highly overrated. In other words, expert performers are nearly always made, not born. It turns out that practice does indeed make perfect.
Moreover, if practice makes perfect then it stands to reason that when considering a career you should choose to do what you love. Otherwise, you simply won’t have the interest to engage in sufficient deliberate practice to succeed in your chosen field. Given that there are few inherent limits we are born with, your success is limited primarily by the degree of your desire to be good and your willingness to undertake the deliberate practice required to improve.
The research of Ericsson and his colleagues is collected in a forthcoming reference work called The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, to be published this month. The freakonomics.com website also features interesting commentary on these issues, and links to further reading on the Expert Performance movement. We commend their work to you for further study as we continue to work with our clients to redefine the way that corporations think about talent.
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