What a wonderful notion that great possibilities or achievements lie dormant in all of us? For some people the dream becomes a reality but unfortunately for others, the dream or aspiration is never realised. Why? Hundreds of books have been written about achieving success and back-stories and histories of successful people and not surprisingly, there is no one single factor that brings about their ultimate success or why others fail.
Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his 2008 book “Outliers: The Story of Success” that it has more to do with good luck and circumstance than anything else. Success is a serendipitous event where a person is born in the right place at the right time with the right resources. Think, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs living in Silicon Valley, California in the early sixties. Gladwell does note though, that practice in a skill is all important to later success.
Other authors like Sir Ken Robinson argue that some people have innate talents that are unleashed by their passion and ‘being in the flow’ amongst similarly talented and creative people. In his 2009 book, ”The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything”, Robinson shares many stories of famous people who only started on the path of great achievement through finding their ‘element’ which he describes as ‘the point at which natural talent meets personal passion’.
Dr. Kerry Spackman,(2009), author of “The Winner’s Bible: Rewire Your Brain for Permanent Change”, discusses how ‘rewiring your brain’ for success can ultimately bring about a powerful belief – an unshakeable self belief - that results in a person having the confidence and unshakeable certainty about his or her ultimate success. Familiarising yourself with a daily review of your goals, aspirations and plan of attack, accompanied by a self-made subliminal cd has worked on many a famous and elite Olympic sportspersons, coaches, or musicians that Spackman has worked with over the years.
In many scientific and educational research projects, success has been measured in lots of different ways. The great performers or sportspeople of our time have often claimed that they are not geniuses or people of superior talent but are simply hard workers. Doesn’t sound very romantic does it? The truth of the matter is that great artists, sportspeople, musicians, chess players, and academics put in thousands of regular and specific hours of practice. “What is the secret number of hours?” I hear you ask. Ten thousand hours. Yes, ten thousand hours.
Dr. Anders Ericsson’s research (2000), “Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice” underlines the point that successful people are often experts in their field who have through their relentless training and practice achieved this expertise. However, when scientists began measuring the experts' supposedly superior powers of speed, memory and intelligence with psychometric tests, no general superiority was found, in fact, the demonstrated superiority was domain specific.
For example, the superiority of the chess experts' memory was constrained to regular chess positions and did not generalize to other types of materials (Djakow, Petrowski & Rudik, 1927). Not even IQ could distinguish the best among chess players (Doll & Mayr, 1987) nor the most successful and creative among artists and scientists (Taylor, 1975).
In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.
So given this extensive research on expertise and successful people, how does this information help our students and teachers better understand what they need to do to learn at a superior level, achieve better and ultimately achieve success? Eminent educator and researcher, John Hattie who is Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, notes in his book, “Visible Learning for Teachers”,(2012, p14) notes:
“Visible teaching and learning occurs when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when there is feedback given and sought, and when there are active, passionate, and engaging people (teacher, students, peers) participating in the act of learning.”
What can we glean from the research about how to achieve and succeed? It doesn’t really matter if your desire is to be a great musician, artist, singer, sportsperson, business person, academic, teacher, student or parent, these are the ‘take-outs’ for great achievement and future success:
• Passion – we must believe ardently in what we do or what we want to achieve in this life
• Belief in yourself – your skills, your talents, your knowledge, you are unique
• Plan of action – building success requires a plan of action, not just goals
• Practice – 10,000 hours - there is no success without practice, think ‘no pain, no gain’
• Learn from your mistakes – mistakes are powerful lessons on what not to do next time you try
• Seek specific feedback on how to improve on your knowledge, skills and performance; and
• Remind yourself daily of your goals, plan of action and dreams – write them down and read them every single day.
Anything is possible. Remember we all have to start somewhere. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:
"Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was."
Karon Graham
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