While he harps on the importance of practice, too, he points to research that shows that music students who simply pass a proficiency test and students who go on to major in music put in about the same amount of practice early on. The students who become advanced simply learn how to work differently and think differently.
I think of some of my students who just have poor study skills. They don't need to spend hours memorizing; they need to spend 20 minutes concentrating. Many of them don't know how to do that.
Good stuff--I'll check into those, too. Truth be told, I don't like to read non-fiction that much, but learning theories are part of my ongoing research. Fascinates me.
(no...but I hope you'll tell me!)He uses Jerry Rice as an example, too. According to Colvin, "Rice was considered to be the greatest receiver in NFL history, and some football authorities believe he may have been the greatest player at any position." However, Rice was not even close to being one of the fastest players in the NFL, and he was not drafted early on.
He broke down Rice's rigorous work ethic, and the crazy part is that he actually spent very little time playing football. If one conservatively estimated that he spent 20 hours per week working on football, that's 1,000 hours per year and 20,000 hours over his career. He played 303 games as a wide receiver, and if it's assumed that the offense had the ball half of the time on average and that he was on the field for all of those plays, that's 150 hours of playing time. That means he spent less than 1% of his work time to playing. Colvin points out that Rice spent a lot of dedicated time doing things that were not fun to make up for the fact that he was not fast--not "talented."
Great food for thought.
