A star is made

I ran across this article again, and it reminded me of the basic argument by the experts in this field that regarding performance that talent is vastly overrated. Most high level performance is developed over years of targeted training (with specific goals and frequent feedback). I believe the 10,000 hour rule is how it’s typically stated (you must spend 10,000 hours, roughly 5 years of 40 hour weeks, in concentrated practice with those specific goals and feedback in order to reach true mastery).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Personally, I think this argument is a bit overdone. People tend to give this much focus to an area of their life because everyone around them sees such natural talent in them that it’s clear that they should devote this kind of time to becoming really, really good. But for the bulk of humanity, we’re just not that genetically predisposed toward any one particular thing that will prompt us to try to perform at this level.

The basic method for excellent performance, however, still seems to be correct. You find an area that you love and appear to have some natural talent in, then spend lots of time and effort in that area via concentrated practice with specific goals and constant feedback. What might we learn from such an approach to how we operate in our education world?

1) When it comes to our organizational groups, we perhaps need to do a better job in setting those specific goals and developing systems for constant feedback. That is why Rob’s doing the assessment work he is, and we’ve been developing the dashboard system and other information tools that we have.

2) When it comes to faculty development, we might conclude that we need to do more with the 3 year plans that faculty put together as part of the goal-setting aspect of our work. We increasingly have the feedback systems in place, but are people really working through the goal-setting phase? I know that that’s always the most difficult part of the process for me.

3) With our innovation fund proposals, we may need to focus on what it is that JBU has some clear passion and ability to carry out and to try to leverage those strengths into national-level performance instead of trying to be pretty good in all of our various areas.

Just some thoughts as I’m in the middle of working on evaluation and planning documents that are obviously trying to get at how well we’re performing and how we can do even better.