Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

I found Ericsson and co's ideas to be completely counter to their data. A lot of the articles were based on case studies. They studied wrestlers and wrestling coaches, for instance. The wrestling coaches were adamant that their selection process of weeding out less talented athletes and spending their effort grooming the ones who showed lots of promise was one of the keys to success. Somehow the authors completely ignored or glossed over lots of bits like that, strongly emphasized the obvious fact that successful wrestlers practiced a lot, and came to the ridiculous conclusion that practice is the only thing that matters.

On a related note, here is a quote from Ericsson that appears in the article:

“Differences between expert and less accomplished performers reflect acquired knowledge and skills or physiological adaptations effected by training, with the only confirmed exception being height.”

This is so disingenuous it's hard to know where to start. Consider powerlifting champion Andy Bolton. He deadlifted 600 lbs at 18 years old the first time he ever lifted weights. I have been lifting weights for 20 years and have never deadlifted 600 lbs. Bill Kazmaier is another one: he benched 300 lbs the first time he ever tried, and benched 400 a month later. These guys were in a position to win local and regional powerlifting competitions with basically no training at all. And here's Ericsson saying there's no such thing as talent.

No sane person, who have enough intelligence to realize that music, sports, arts and craftsmanship are 95% based on practice would doubt it. Any good music teacher or Olympic coach will tell you this. The 5% of talent determines where most likely would end up on the spectrum, but talent without practice is nothing, like knowledge unapplyed.

Even in programming actually writing code on the daily basis is what distinguish top performers from mere mediocrity and talking heads and bloggers at the bottom.

For the hipster narcissistic sub-culture it is perfectly OK to "challenge" (they think it is a challenge, not a display of stupidity and lack of even basic understanding) the nature of reality with sophisticated (which does not imply intelligent) nonsensical blah-blah-blah in order to gain public attention to their acting according to the role.

Hipsterism as a social phenomena is an insult to intelligence the way commercialized empty yoga of cosplay and asanas is an insult to spirituality (which is seeking for the truth).

basically he was going to reach his 10k hour goal next month (Oct 2016) but back in Nov 2015 he had to take a hiatus due to a back injury. Not sure what has happened since he hasn't posted since Nov 2015.