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A Star Is Made - New York Times
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May 7, 2006
FREAKONOMICS
A Star Is Made
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly
If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup
tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have
been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the
European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this
quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, 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 might account for this anomaly? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer
superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer
stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of
soccer mania; d) none of the above.
Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes
strongly in "none of the above." He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance
Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial
question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?
Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more
opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30
years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers.
"With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson
recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."
This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led
Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In
other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those
differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn
how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate
practice.
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A Star Is Made - New York Times
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practice.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for
instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting
specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits,
including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and
darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also
the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.
Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page
academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we
commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory
or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does
make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But
these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do
what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.
Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling
themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack
is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.
"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are
some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone
could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." This is
not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours
in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in
the gym, he would never have become the player he was.
Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to
follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful
feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require
"talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.
And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most
doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an
exception. That's because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice:
immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.
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The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a mammogram, she doesn't know
for certain if there is breast cancer or not. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or
years later, when no cancer develops. Without meaningful feedback, a doctor's ability actually
deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of training. "Imagine a situation where a doctor
could diagnose mammograms from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for
each case," he says. "Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers
in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice."
If nothing else, the insights of Ericsson and his Expert Performance compatriots can explain the riddle
of why so many elite soccer players are born early in the year.
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 have been 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 ones who, year after year, receive the
training, the deliberate practice and the feedback — to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem —
that will turn them into elites.
This may be bad news if you are a rabid soccer mom or dad whose child was born in the wrong month.
But keep practicing: a child conceived on this Sunday in early May would probably be born by next
February, giving you a considerably better chance of watching the 2030 World Cup from the family
section.
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist
Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." More information on the research behind this column is at
www.freakonomics.com.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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