More important than talent II: lessons applied to tennis and terror

http://tinyurl.com/dzjmkbOp-Ed Columnist Genius: The Modern ViewBy DAVID BROOKS...tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark... believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth...modern research pierces hocus-pocus. ...even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers...Mozart had, we now believe,...the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.****The music historian and composer, Robert Greenberg, states unequivocally that it takes 15 years of guided practice to become a composer; it's just that Mozart started at age four.**** The latest research suggests... prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view...separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.****Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics and followed up on experiments done in Holland which demonstrated that the lowest-level chess masters can't just "think more moves ahead": they have committed to memory a minimum of 40,000 actual game positions. Even imagination appears to benefit overwhelmingly from manipulation of memorized patterns, applicable to medical specialties like radiology and pathology and likely even to interactive activities like stock market trading and poker. *****recent research...by people like K. Anders Ericsson, the late Benjamin Bloom and other....been summarized in two...new books: “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle; and “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. (Creating a writer):...take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability...enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction... want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits...to create a sense of affinity...give the girl a vision of her future self. It would, Coyle emphasizes, give her a glimpse...It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success....would read novels and literary biographies without end. This would give her a core knowledge of her field....ability to place information into patterns, or chunks, vastly improves memory skills....Then she would practice writing....According to Colvin, Ben Franklin would take essays from The Spectator magazine and translate them into verse. Then he’d translate his verse back into prose and examine, sentence by sentence, where his essay was inferior to The Spectator’s original.Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a ball. The aim is to focus meticulously on technique. (Try to slow down your golf swing so it takes 90 seconds to finish. See how many errors you detect.)By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. ****That is, avoid developing bad habits before they become ingrained and would later have to be unlearned. ****The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough....forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance...our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges....The primary trait she possesses is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine....This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.. ..
Recall our previous discussion: effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged.http://tinyurl.com/r5jppjMay 18, 2009 The TakedownHow did Rafael Nadal humble the great Roger Federer and take his No. 1 ranking? It wasn't a simple triumph of will or youth or brute strength. It was the tennis, stupid by S.L. PRICE Sports Illustrated
...echoing the tributes of John McEnroe and Rod Laver, who hailed him as the game's new gold standard...Everyone agreed: Federer would end up the best male player ever. His talent was indeed extraordinary....feel of classical myth. Twenty-eight years ago the gods decided to create the perfect tennis player, tall and lean and as light on his feet as a blown feather. They gave him everything: great hands, a stiletto serve, ground strokes that the sport's hero, Sampras, called better than his own. ...
They had left one small flaw in the perfect tennis player's game. Few could expose it. Indeed, years would pass before anyone realized it existed. The pro tour is dominated by righthanders, whose crosscourt backhands are incapable of generating the speed, spin and high bounce necessary to make the weakness plain; only a lefty's forehand could probe it consistently enough. But it was there, a place high on the backhand side where the perfect tennis player's normally impeccable one-hander, which could absorb the heaviest strokes and counter them with pinpoint accuracy, faltered enough to make him human.... the gods just needed a tool. And in Rafael Nadal, they found it. As a 10-year-old in ... the naturally righthanded Rafa had played two-handed off both wings. But his uncle Toni,...suggested that he drop a hand while hitting off his left side and, while he was at it, why not just play lefthanded? ...Toni persuaded Rafa to develop what some players call a reverse forehand—in which, instead of swinging the racket across his body and finishing above his right shoulder, he jerks the racket back after striking the ball and finishes above his left—to impart extreme topspin.... Rafa was eventually able to hit shots that rotated at an unprecedented 3,200 revolutions per minute (compared with Federer's 2,500), fell inside the lines and, most important, bounced like a frightened jackrabbit, high and away from the perfect player's backhand. The stroke's impact? Eric Hechtman, a hitting partner for both players, says returning Nadal's forehand feels "like you're breaking off your arm." In 2004 Federer had just risen to No. 1 when he faced the 17-year-old Nadal for the first time, ... Nadal won 6--3, 6--3,... Federer walked off the court puzzled. "I couldn't quite play the way I wanted to," ...Nadal,...made the tour's most elegant player...feel awkward....(It wasn't enough for a quite a while because...)"I had to improve," Rafa says. ... I can improve a lot of things. Without that, I am Number 2, so if I improve I have a chance to be in the top position."
...The first rung: consistently staking out an offensive position...The second rung: a better serve.... Nadal finished last year ranked No. 1 in the world—and fourth in serving, winning 88% of his service games.Nadal also greatly improved his backhand. ...commentators still portray Federer-Nadal matches as beauty versus beast, matador versus bull...No one can match Federer for artistry, but Nadal has two attributes just as valuable: imagination and the audacity to use it. "He's by far the smartest player of all," says seven-time Grand Slam champ Mats Wilander. "He's not afraid of changing...."... Federer seemed out of sorts. Worse, unlike Nadal when he was No. 2, Federer didn't commit himself to attacking his rival, to shaking him out of his comfort zone. Twice Federer ran around his backhand and staggered Nadal with forehand winners, but he never did that again. "Twice in 4½ hours?" Wilander asks. "Why not show Nadal something different?"
...They all accept that his talent is, as Wilander says, "crazy," but his passive response to Nadal goes against what they've been taught a superstar does when he's down. Muhammad Ali came up with rope-a-dope, an aging Michael Jordan perfected the fadeaway jumper: The great ones adjust, sending a signal not only to their rivals but also to all the newly emboldened...
****A challenger can come up with something to attack Goliath but, if Goliath has both the chance, time and WILL, he can adjust. If he fails to adjust, he is doomed. The British adopted the yew longbow, developed tactics appropriate to it, and beat the French at Crecy in 1346. Both the English and French repeated their tactics in 1415 and the result was the same at the Battle of Agincourt . When Joan of Arc started the Loire campaign of 1429, gunpowder and artillery had entered the picture and the English longbowmen were decimated in the first of the five battles of this campaign and the success of French and English tactics was finally reversed at the Battle of Patay. *****...
Jihadist terrorism: This is characterized by two salient features: It is directed against civilians and the perpetrators are willing to die for the operation. It has all the features of a new paradigm: effort, socially inappropriate according to the tenets of the defenders and hard to react to with conventional military and conventional legal actions. Inability or UNWILLINGNESS to adapt and adjust one's previous practices is a prescription of inevitable defeat. Conventions need to be challenged. How to get information from captives? Certainly going to the limits of morality would seem to be expedient and a blanket "niceness" an inevitable folly. How to react to suicide killers ( "We love death more than you love life")? Find something that even suicidal killers fear to lose and threaten it. Three possibilities come to mind, each of which will bring down the hypocritical wrath of the squeamish ( or defeatist ) Left: waterboarding or Extended Interrogation Techniques, retaliation against friends and family, retaliation against the symbols of the religion that motivates the whole jihad: Mecca and Medina while inspecting mosques that are used for weapon storage and attack. ****