The Wisdom of Cal Ripken, Sr. (reprise)

Because the Washington Academic Internship Program emphasizes the importance of public service, and because our students—Ohio State juniors and seniors all—will soon be venturing out on the job market, we devote a fair amount of attention to career planning.  We have found that our alumni are a valuable resource on this front, both as mentors and as guest speakers or presenters.  And we are very proud that a fair number of former Glenn Fellows find their way into public service jobs in the nation’s capital.  I have heard Senator Glenn estimate that about 20% of WAIP students end up in D.C.  I would guess that the percentage these days—perhaps because the Washington-area job market is not as distressed as that of Ohio—is actually closer to 25%.  Placement is an important enough part of our mission that it is one of the metrics by which we would want to be judged.

That is why we schedule a presentation early each semester by someone knowledgeable about the size and shape of the federal workforce.  It’s also the reason we like to introduce the Glenn Fellows to Presidential Management Fellows and OSU alumni who work in Congressional offices.  We invite civil servants with hiring authority to critique the fellows’ résumés, and we pay attention to employment patterns, hiring practices, and training opportunities.

And that’s why I picked up a book that a former Glenn School colleague, Ryan Meadows, had on his reading list for M.P.A. students a few years ago.  The book, written by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune, is called Talent Is Overrated:  What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (New York:  Vintage, 2008).  A central tenet is that nurture is more important than nature, which is why Colvin’s book would be more accurately entitled Innate Talent is Overrated.  But never mind…. 

Colvin’s is a positive message, in that being a great performer does not in any serious sense depend on having a special “gift” for one’s chosen profession.  People aren’t born with the innate ability to hit a three-iron like Tiger Woods, plot chessboard moves like Gary Kasparov, play the guitar like Eric Clapton, or belt out a tune like Luciano Pavarotti.  And being a first-rate scholar is not all about IQ.  The skills required to excel in any line of work have to be acquired—through practice.  But Colvin—and this is the “bad news” part of his message—argues that people in general and business corporations in particular have very little understanding of what one has to do to acquire the skills necessary to work at world-class levels.  And that means that while some people might be willing to put in long hours of arduous effort, they don’t know how to practice the right way. 

Colvin develops his thesis with great care, and he relies on a number of case studies that are fairly compelling.  Colvin’s portrait of Tiger Woods, which was written prior to Woods’s mortification, focuses on Earl Woods’s fanatical devotion to his son’s training; they were out on the course together by the time Tiger was two years old.  Judging from Colvin’s account, one wonders whether Earl Woods was more obsessed with nurturing genius than any man since Leopold Mozart.

Or consider the case of the Polgar sisters of Budapest.  Their father was a psychologist committed to the proposition that geniuses are made, not born.  He purposefully set out to prove it by turning his children into chess prodigies, which he did to prove a point:  neither he nor his wife were accomplished chess players.  His efforts at home-schooling proved to be completely successful, largely because he devised the right kinds of drills to structure his daughters’ practice.

Being a genius, in other words, is all about being willing to endure the regimen of what Colvin calls “deliberate practice,” which is not just going through the motions over and over again, but an entirely self-conscious process of constantly pressing the envelope of one’s competence.  In order to become an Olympic champion ice skater, for example, Shizuka Arakawa had to endure at least 20,000 episodes of failure, because that’s what deliberate practice is all about:  “Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.”

I’m betting that Geoff Colvin is not a baseball fan, for if he were, he would have known to invoke Cal Ripken, Jr., as the epitome of the idea of deliberate practice.  Ripken was the product of a training regimen devised by his father, Cal Ripken, Sr. (see photo above).  Much like Colvin, Ripken père rejected the idea that “practice makes perfect”; in fact, he insisted that “It’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.”  For Ripken fils this meant self-consciously repeating drills designed to address whatever his inadequacies were at a given point in his development as a shortstop and hitter—the baseball equivalent of falling on his butt twenty thousand times.  It made the legendary “iron man” a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

There is another world class innovator missing from Talent Is Overrated, and his story is dramatically conveyed by Dava Sobel in her Longitude:  The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York:  Penguin, 1996).  The genius is John Harrison, an eighteenth-century clockmaker whose innovations resulted in the perfection of a timekeeping instrument that was accurate and reliable enough to determine longitude at sea.  Harrison’s is an unforgettable story of sheer, mind-boggling tenacity over four decades during which the British parliament kept raising the bar, sending Harrison back to his workshop over and over again to improve his marine chronometer.  It’s a case study that Colvin should have cited because it demonstrates—conclusively, to my mind—that innovation is based on knowledge and the mastery of sharply focused technique (deliberative practice), and that it is foolish to think, as do some admirers of the cult of amateurism, that “too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement.”

There is another lesson in Talent is Overrated to which Glenn Fellows ought to pay heed.  It is the idea that career planning isn’t just about landing a desirable entry-level job in one’s chosen profession.  It’s about maintaining and adding to the skills associated with high performance on the job.  And one should be encouraged by what Colvin has to say about the inexorable effects of aging.  It turns out that outstanding performers “suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise” [emphasis added].  In short, on-going professional development and career planning are life-long enterprises, to be sustained up to and even into retirement.