Why Sampling Skills Beats Early Specialization In Most Fields

Most people have heard about the 10,000 hours concept: If you want to become a master, the rule of thumb is to practice that skill for about 10,000 hours which means starting early gives you a higher chance of becoming a master. The archetype is Tiger Woods, who was putting at seven months and named the world's number one golfer at 21. The story of the Polgar sisters is similar: They were taught the fundamentals of the game very early on by their father, and two of the three became chess grandmasters.

What Actually Happens When Elite Athletes Are Studied

In reality, if the 10,000 hours model were the whole story, then elite athletes should consistently demonstrate having an early lead in deliberate, focused practice. That shouldn't be surprising, and studies of elite athletes do indicate that these players spend additional time practicing and rehearsing in deliberate practice. However, if the development is actually plotted over time and not just the number of hours, a different pattern emerges. Future superstars typically experience what is referred to as "a sampling period," in which they experiment with various forms of physical activity and develop general athletic abilities, and only specialize at a later stage, late relative to other kids who specialize early and then stagnate at a less successful level. This isn't a model of early specialization at all.

The Same Pattern Shows Up In Music

This trend isn't confined to sports. The same pattern has been demonstrated in research on musicians, in that exceptional musicians were not necessarily spending more time on deliberate practice than average musicians until about the 3rd instrument. Like elite athletes, they usually started with a sampling period and didn't begin intensive focused practice until later, even for musicians commonly considered child prodigies, like Yo-Yo Ma.

The same principle applies to studying, as shown in 7 Study Habits That Actually Raised A College GPA From 2.9 To 4.0.

Looking At The Backgrounds Of Well-Known Innovators

Once this pattern is discernible, it is observed again and again in people who are highly respected for their work. As a youngster, Duke Ellington preferred playing baseball and drawing to taking lessons from a music teacher. As a child, Maryam Mirzakhani had no interest in math and initially wanted to become a novelist before eventually winning the Fields Medal, the world's highest award for mathematics. Vincent van Gogh went through five careers before finally turning to a first-time drawing guide when he was in his late 20s. An electrical engineering student took a philosophy course for the sole purpose of meeting a requirement, and he came across a centuries-old system of logic that directly led to the development of binary code, which underlies computer science today. At the age of 54, Frances Hesselbein began her first professional role and went on to become CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Roger Federer's Overlooked Developmental Story

This is a very good example of the same pattern, although much less well known than Tiger Woods' story. This kid gave tennis, skiing, wrestling, handball, volleyball, soccer, badminton, and skateboarding a try growing up. His mother, also a tennis coach, refused to coach him because he wasn't interested in returning the ball in the proper fashion. That's Roger Federer, who's as famous as an adult as Tiger Woods, but whose player development story even the most avid tennis fans know little about. One reason could be that the Tiger Woods story is more gripping, and a simple, universal lesson can be taken from it.

Why Golf Is A Poor Model For Most Skills

Golf, however, proves to be a rather poor example of how most human learning actually takes place. It's helpful to differentiate between a "kind learning environment," where the rules are clear and consistent, goals are well defined, and feedback after taking action is prompt and accurate, and a "wicked learning environment," where the rules aren't always clear and consistent, goals aren't always well defined, and feedback after acting is often delayed, inaccurate, or nonexistent. Golf comes pretty close to the kind category, and so does chess. The environments people encounter in their careers and in real-world problem solving are far more wicked than golf or chess.

What Works Better In Complex, Unclear Environments

In truly complex and unpredictable areas, hyper-specialization isn't a reliable method, and studies of technological innovation suggest another approach. What's becoming an increasing trend is patents created by groups of people with cross-disciplinary expertise, spanning a broad range of technical fields and fusing ideas from seemingly unrelated domains, rather than people operating in narrow specialization.

Junpei Yokoi is a good example of this in action. He wasn't very successful in his electronics exams at school, and he ended up in a relatively low-level job maintaining machinery for a Kyoto-based playing card company. He merged calculator technology with credit card technology to create early handheld electronic games, helping transform that playing card company, founded as a small wooden storefront in the 19th century, into what eventually became known as Nintendo. He's most notable for the Game Boy.

Why This Kind of Path Gets Overlooked

People who follow a wider developmental process before honing in on a specific domain don't seem to be recognized and incentivized as much as those who follow a clear and concentrated development trajectory, since a broader process can look like indecision, meandering, or simply lagging behind, even when it's building exactly the kind of cross-domain flexibility that complex problems require.

Here's a helpful way of thinking about this tradeoff: healthy intellectual ecosystems require both birds and frogs. Frogs operate at a relatively low level, getting down into the granular detail of a small area within a domain. Birds fly above with an overview, missing that fine detail. Both roles matter, but most systems push everyone toward becoming a frog. In an unpredictable, complicated world, that focus can become increasingly shortsighted.