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How to Become the Best in the World at Something

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Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#11

Post by Ididntdothis »

hanniabu wrote: post #5
swader999 wrote: post #4

Sport is going this way. There's a growing body of evidence that early specialization produces less champions. Kids are encouraged to participate in other sports well into their teen years. Less burn out, lower injuries and this approach creates more athletes that can be described as "naturals". They have skills and abilities that seem magical and unexpected.

Some people are actually legit naturals though. There was this one kid I knew that didn't play sports growing up, but if you gave him a basketball in gym class you could nail every 3 pointer. He was asked to come out to compete in an important track meet because he was known to be fast and he ran a 400m hurdles race in 53 seconds with the worst possible form. For reference, in the men's World Championships earlier in…

At my boxing gym every few months some kid would show up and after a week he would be much better than everybody else. These guys just understood the sport immediately and also had physical ability. A lot of these guys dropped out but if this level of talent meets with interest and work ethic then you get super athletes like Michael Jordan or Michael Schumacher in F1.

My ex coach knew sugar ray Leonard pretty well in his youth and he said that Ray started beating up people already in his first day at the gym without having learned boxing technique. He just watched once and knew what to do.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#13

Post by spiderfarmer »

codingslave wrote: post #9

I think this is a fallacy, its true that becoming 90th% in a few different fields would render you quite the unicorn. The issue is that its common for there to be very low demand for such an overlap of skill sets. Also, how would you leverage such an overlap? These positions and opportunities do not just appear as you are qualified, the job market is extremely inefficient, and not very good at correctly pricing abili…

I’m a generalist and it works for me in my one man company. In my previous company I hired specialists, not generalists, because the specialists did not suffer from distractions as much as generalists did. They also didn’t question everything a specialist in another area did. It’s also easier to build teams that way.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#14

Post by AWildC182 »

qubex wrote: post #8

And here I was, expecting to read a ‘hypothetical’ plan to assassinate all one’s competition... maybe it’s time to put The Prince down.

That's how masters (old timers) rowing seems to work. You just wait for whoever is faster to die of old age and if you die first it's not your problem anymore.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#17

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

I think there is yet another path: hyper specialization in one ludicrously specific niche no one else cares about or has good reason for not getting into.

If you spend 10k hours perfecting something no one else even thought of trying, chances are you'll be the best in the world at it.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#18

Post by markus_zhang »

Although I agree with the idea, getting good at a jack of trades might be equally difficult (e.g. depending on childhood influences or genetics). If A complements B and someone gets good at A, he/she probably HATES B to the point to avoid it as much as possible.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#19

Post by nostrademons »

crdrost wrote: post #2

One nice thing to share here is that a statistical model for success under such conditions is for there to be a collection of independent random variables that multiply to form your overall success: people who lack any particular one of them, x_1 and x_2 = 1000 but x_3 = 0, see the product x_1 x_2 x_3 = 0, below people who have x_1 = 10, x_2 = 10, x_3 = 10. Taking a logarithm, one gets a sum of independent identicall…

This changes with the size of the firm you're part of. It's true for individual pursuits like basketball, drawing comics, or entrepreneurship.

But a big corporation gets around a lack of any one critical variable by hiring someone for that variable. So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork. Effectively the corporation becomes the organism and you become one specialized organelle in them. You're better off increasing your expertise within that specialty than learning other ones - say by firsthand experience with all the ways distributed systems can fail.

The returns to being a top individual producer beat the top returns to being a corporate drones, but the average returns are significantly worse (because the big corporation benefits from being able to swap out individual motivated actors to plug deficiencies rather than having to develop skills itself), so depending on your risk tolerance, this may or may not be a good strategy.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#20

Post by markus_zhang »

coldtea wrote: post #16

That sounds like a common idea the Dilbert author mentions from time to time. He could draw a little, and he knew about the business world a little, but not many people could combine those things -- and be a business cartoonist.

He also started kind of early and managed to keep it going. Starting early is extremely important for...pretty much everything.
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