The Impact Of Notifications On Your Brain
if I want him to become a Manchester
star maybe I shouldn't do that you know I'm I'm not convinced that you are
going to be like a vicarious living kind of
dad maybe you'll turn out to be but
I'm not convinced um but let me tell you this you just reminded me of an
interesting story where I was once
giving a talk about some of this
research in sports that shows that the people who go on to the highest levels
again there are a ton of different uh
paths but they tend to follow the
Roger path not the tiger path so Tiger Woods we know are very early
specialization
famously Roger feder played whole
bunch of different sports uh didn't specialize until later than some of his
peers so
tiger was playing golf since he was
he was um at his father gave him a putter
when he was 10 months old uh when he
was two just as a toy he wasn't trying to teach him to be a golfer he gave him
a
toy as tiger himself said my father
never once to ask me to Play It Was Always me asking him to to let me play
but that's ignored but at at two he
was on National Television you know you can go on YouTube see him on national
TV
showing off his swing and then by
three he's saying I'm going to be the world's next great golfer uh he's world
famous as a
teenager by the age of 21 he's the
greatest golfer in the world right on the other hand Roger played a variety of
different Sports basketball uh rugby
skateboarding soccer mother was a tennis
coach but declined to coach him
because he wouldn't return balls normally I guess didn't like deliberate
practice kept doing let's let's see he did
handball uh he did some rugby uh SK
swimming wrestling when his
coaches wanted to move him up to
play with older boys he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro
wrestling with his friends after practice and he
was not focused on being the next
great from an early age like tiger was in fact when he became good enough to
Warrant an
interview with his local newspaper
the reporter asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck if he
ever became a pro and he said a Mercedes
his mom was a gas right didn't she
thought this was like go sure and so she asks the reporter to hear the
interview
recording turns out he just said M
CDs in Swiss German he just wanted more CDs not a Mercedes right she was fine
with
that so he went on to be every bit
as famous as Tiger Woods but even tennis
enthusiasts don't usually know
anything about his developmental story even though it's the norm according to
the science we only tell we only tell the
tiger stories even though that that
one's the exception right and this is why do we only tell the tiger story this
is part of the debate I've had with
with Malcolm Gladwell when we're running together and he said well he told me
it's a human cat video you know you go
YouTube and see them at two years
old and you can't you got to share it I think that's true but I think it's also
because it feels like this tidy
narrative that we can extrapolate to
anything we want to be good at in our own lives the problem is as we talked
about golf is almost a uniquely
horrible model of almost everything else that humans want to learn it's like
the epitome of a Kind learning environment
where the situation isn't isn't
changing you're not having to react so I think it's a bad model and we we
underplay
even for famous people the normal
developmental trajectory like I once gave a talk to a small group of people
about some of this research in
sports showing that the typical path to becoming Elite is with a sampling
period
you learn a broad range of skills
learn about your own interests and abilities delay specializing till later than
peers
and Serena Williams sat in the
second row and I'm freaking out because you can
present all the data you want but if
the goat stands up and says you're an idiot it's going to be a bad day right
and I'm
like please don't let her ask a
question of course she raises her hand for the
first thing and she goes I think my
father was ahead of his time he had me do uh ballet track and
field gymnastics Taekwondo uh learn
to throw a football for the overhand snapping motion of a serve when there
was too much travel on like the you
know a youth tour he took me off so I could focus on school I'd been a senior
writer at
Sports Illustrated and I had never
heard that like I assumed that she was this kind of quintessential tiger story
so I think even those stories
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