Hunger & Hard Work: Is that Enough?
What Makes the Difference Between Good and Outstanding? In nearly 20 years within the recruitment industry and closer to 30 years in sales, I’ve looked for answers to that question many times.
A fascinating piece of research carried out by a psychologist (Anders Ericsson) uncovered some answers to that very question.
With the help of violin students and tutors at Berlin’s Elite Academy of Music, he set about his experiment. The students were split into three groups based on the opinions of their tutors.
· The first group were students that it was judged would never be good enough to play professionally and were therefore destined to have careers as music teachers.
· The second group were considered to be good, those who WOULD make it professionally as musicians.
· The third group were the stars, those the tutors thought had the potential to be world-class musicians.
Staggeringly, a single key factor correlated with how good the students were. Perhaps surprisingly, this was nothing more than the number of hours of practice that had been done over their lifetimes.
On average, those students in the lowest calibre group totalled 4,000 hours of practice; students in the ‘good’ group totalled 8,000 hours whereas students in the top group totalled an average of 10,000 hours of practice. The fascinating thing was that Ericsson could not find any ‘NATURAL’ talents – people in the top group who had not put in the hours. Practice was the key to everyone’s success. Those that had practiced more, were destined to reap the benefits in the future.
This research shows that people do not pick up a violin and become instant geniuses – far from it. Instead, 2,000 extra hours of practice (that’s the equivalent of 250 extra solid, eight-hour working days) was the difference between being good and outstanding. That gives hope to many who may feel they are ‘just not talented enough’.
The gap in effort between the ‘not so good’ group and the ‘stars’ is immense in this example. Why?
‘want, hunger, desire, determination’.
USA Olympic multi medal winner Michael Phelps was once asked what got him up at the crack of dawn every day for years and years to train…
“It was wanting to do something that no one had ever done before. That got me out of bed every day”.
Psychologists call this the ‘Effort Heuristic’. It generally means the amount of effort a person will put into trying to achieve something, as determined by the value they place on that goal. If the goal is of little importance to them, the amount of effort a person is willing to put into it is going to be lower. So the effort we put in equals the reward that we expect to get as a result of our effort.
Put simply, you’ve got to really want to achieve something to give yourself the motivation to work as hard as the top violin group or as hard as Phelps. If it’s just not that important to you, you won’t!
It’s easy to say that the successful person ‘WANTED IT MORE’, but actually, the science backs it up in many cases.