Specialists & generalists: achieve goals through focus?

The bigger the competition, the more we would have to specialize in order to be successful - at least that's the common practice Opinions. But that creates unnecessary pressure and is also wrong.

The pressure to specialize

The pressure for early, laser-like focus affects all areas of the Society. It is often said that the more competitive and complicated the Welt become, the more we would have to specialize (and the sooner we would have to start specializing) in order to be successful in life. The most prominent protagonists of success are celebrated for their precocity and child prodigy traits - Mozart at the piano, Mark Zuckerberg at a keyboard of a very different kind. Whatever the field, always found in response to the ever-expanding human Background and the increasingly interconnected world, there is an overemphasis on focus.

However, this syndrome is most evident in sport and there are many myths. Tiger Woods has become the embodiment of the dogma that success is determined by the number of hours spent on reflective practice and, with it, the idea that young talents should start reflective practice as early as possible.

Are there exceptional talents recognized early on?

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His father knew that his son was somehow different from other children. At just six months old, the boy could already balance on his father's palm as he walked around the house. When he was seven months old his father gave him a putter to play with and the boy dragged it around in his little round playpen. At ten months, he climbed off his high chair, trotted toward the golf club that had been sawed down to his size, and mimicked his father's golf swing he'd seen in the garage. Because the father was not yet able to talk to his son, he drew pictures to show him how to play the bat in the Hand had to hold. "It's very difficult to teach putting to a child who can't speak," he later remarked.

With two years, a Age, in which a child, according to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prävention After achieving important physical development milestones such as "kicks a ball" and "stands on tiptoe," he has been featured on national television hitting a golf club so large it could reach his feet Shoulder passed a golf ball past bass-stunned comedian Bob Hope.

In the same year he took part in his first tournament and won in the league for under tens. There was no time to waste. At three, the boy learned how to hit a ball out of a sand hazard, and his father began to think about his calling in life. He knew that golf was his son's choice and his father's mandatory was to guide him and him Orientation to offer.

The chosen one? Child prodigies are made

Think about it: if you were absolutely certain of your child's future path, you might also be preparing your three-year-old to properly handle the inevitable and insatiable media attention. He questioned his young son, played the reporter and taught him to give short, concise answers and to limit himself precisely to answering the question. That year he played a nine-hole course in California with 9 strokes, eleven over par.

When he was four, his father would drop him off at the golf course at nine in the morning and pick him up eight hours later, occasionally with the Money, which he won betting against people who doubted his son's exceptional ability. The son hit his father for the first time when he was eight. He didn't mind because he believed that his son had a unique gift and that as a father he had a unique ability to support him. He had been an excellent athlete himself, despite extremely adverse conditions circumstances. In college, he'd been the only black baseball player in the league. As a sociologist who had fought in the Vietnam War as a member of the elite Green Berets military unit, he had a good knowledge of human nature and knew what Discipline meant. He later instructed prospective officers in psychological warfare. He knew he hadn't been a particularly good father to his three children from his first marriage, but now he felt he had been given a second chance to do better with his fourth child. And indeed everything went according to plan. By the time his son went to Stanford University, he was already famous, and his father predicted a great one for him Future. His son will gain more influence than Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and Buddha, he assured. "He has a bigger forum than any of them individually," he said. 'He is the bridge between East and West. Everything is possible because he is ruled by fate. I don't know exactly what form his future will take, but I do know that he is chosen."

The main thing is some kind of sport

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You probably know the second story too, although you may not recognize it at first glance. His Mother was a tennis coach herself, but she never coached him. When he was learning to walk, he was kicking balls with his mother. As a boy he played squash with his father on Sundays. He tried his hand at skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He also played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, badminton over the neighboring fence and soccer at school.

He later said that the many different sports he played in his youth helped him in his athletic development and Eye-Hand coordination helped. He didn't care what sport he played as long as it involved a ball. "I was always much more interested in a sport when it involved a ball," he recalled. As a child he was very playful. His parents had no particular sporting ambitions for their son. "We had neither a plan A nor a plan B," his mother later said. She and the child's father encouraged him to try many different sports. Sport was indispensable for him. If he had to sit still for any length of time, he became "intolerable," according to his mother.

Learning has to be fun

Although she worked as a tennis coach, she didn't want to work with him. "He would have pissed me off," she said. “He tried every odd stroke; in any case, he never returned the ball normally. It's just not for a mother Fun.' As a reporter from Sports Illustrated noted, his parents were anything but demanding and didn't push him, they just let him do it. As the boy hit puberty, he became more inclined towards tennis and "if they admonished him at all, it was only to remind him that he stop should take tennis so seriously." When he was playing a match, his mother often went off to chat with girlfriends, and his father gave him only one rule: "Don't cheat." The boy stuck to that and was getting really good at it.

As a teenager, he played so well that a local newspaper interviewed him. His mother was dismayed when she got into that Article read his answer to the question what he thought of with his hypothetical first Income from tennis: »Mercedes.« And she was relieved when the reporter played her the recording of the interview and they realized that he had misheard her son had answered in Swiss German: »More CDs.« No doubt it was the boy ambitious. But when his tennis coaches decided to put him in a group with older players, he asked if they could go back to his old group because he wanted to stay with his friends. After all, part of the fun was the time they spent together after coaching sessions and their talks about music, wrestling, and soccer.

When he finally gave up other sports - especially soccer - in order to concentrate entirely on tennis, the other young players had long been working with strength trainers, sports psychologists and nutritionists. In the long term, however, that didn't seem to be a handicap for his athletic development. In his mid-thirties, an age when even legendary tennis aces usually retire from active sport, he was still best in the world.

The best athlete in the world

In 2006, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer met for the first time. Both were at the peak of their sporting careers. Tiger flew on his private jet to watch the US Open final. That made Federer particularly nervous, but he won, for the third time in a row. Woods met him in the locker room to toast the victory with champagne. They immediately had a connection with each other. “I have never spoken to someone who could relate so well to the feeling of being unbeatable,” Federer later described their encounter. They weren't just fast Friends, but also at the center of the public debate about who is the best athlete in the world.

However, Federer did not miss the antagonism between himself and Tiger. “His story is completely different from mine,” he told his biographer in 2006. “Even as a child, it was his Objectiveto break the record of major wins. I only dreamed of meeting Boris Becker one day or one day being able to play at Wimbledon. «For a child whose parents were not very interested in his or her athletic development and who initially did not take the sport very seriously, it is very unusual to that it became one of the world's most successful athletes.

Targeted promotion or laissez-faire?

Unlike Tiger Woods, there were thousands of kids who were far better off than Roger. The incredible Education and nurturing Tiger received as a child is the central theme of numerous best-selling books on developing and nurturing excellence, including a parenting guide written by Tiger's father, Earl. Tiger didn't just play golf, he practiced the "reflective practice" - the only one Method, which applies the now-ubiquitous ten-thousand-hour rule for peak performance. This "rule" represents the notion that the all-important characteristic of skill development, regardless of field, is the number of hours of focused practice.

According to a study of thirty violinists from which this rule emerged, reflected practice is that learners "receive explicit instructions on the best method", are individually supervised by a teacher or trainer, "immediately informative Feedback and information about the results of their Performance get' and 'repeat the same or similar Tasks carry out". A number of books on the subject of peak performance show that elite athletes spend more time per week on technically advanced reflective practice than athletes who have already peaked at a lower level.

Are generalists less successful?

Oncologists no longer specialize in tumors, but rather in a particular form that affects a particular organ, and this trend is increasing every year. The American surgeon Atul Gawande noted that doctors joke about “otologists for the left ear” with the caveat that “we have to be careful what we say. In the end, they may really exist «. In the bestseller Bounce, which is based on the ten thousand hour rule, British journalist Matthew Syed argues that the British government is so bad because, unlike Tiger Woods, its members do not specialize in certain subjects. The rotation of ministers between different departments is "no less absurd than if Tiger Woods would switch from golf to baseball, football and hockey one after the other."

However, after decades in the sporting midfield, through programs to develop adult athletes who are first introduced to different sports, and the creation of a pool of athletic late bloomers – so-called slow bakers, as one of the key managers of the program called them to me – Britain achieved great successes at the recent Summer Olympics. Apparently the Idea, to develop athletes into top athletes by starting as generalists like Roger and trying out different sports first, is not all that wrong.

Many top athletes specialize late

Top athletes who are at the peak of their performance spend more time in focused, reflective practice than their near-top athlete colleagues. However, a scientific study of the development path of athletes, from early childhood to peak performance, revealed the following picture:

Subsequent elite athletes tend to have spent less time in reflective practice when they were young in the discipline in which they eventually excel; rather, they initially went through a “phase of trying out”. At a young age, they practice various sports, usually in an unstructured or unstructured environment. In doing so, they acquire a variety of physical skills that they can later rely on. They also learn about their own abilities and inclinations. Only at a later age do they begin to focus on one discipline and intensify technical practice. In the title of a study of individual athletes, »late specialization« was described as »the key to Success" designated; another study headlined: "How to become a top athlete in team sports: start late, train hard and be goal-oriented."

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