The Freakonomics
column in yesterday's New York Times was like a great mystery
novel. It starts with a conundrum: top soccer players are overwhelmingly
born in the first few months of the year. Almost none of them are born at
the end of the year.
There are a million theories. Astrology babies born in winter have higher
oxygen capacity, soccer fans procreate in the spring at the peak of the
season--and have great players in the early winter as a result.
But the work of Anders Ericsson, a Florida
State professor,
and his colleageues suggests otherwise. As
described by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt:
Their work, compiled in the
"Cambridge
Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic
book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion:
the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way,
expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer
programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make
perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of
whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to
be true.
Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to
choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't
love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people
naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they
often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for
math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be
good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.
"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work,
"is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they
were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone
could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of
time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal
potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the
gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But
without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he
was.
So, what does that have to do with soccer players
being born early in the year? Simple: In European youth soccer leagues, the
cutoff date for the various age brackets is December 31. The players born
in the beginning of the year are, throughout their childhood, older (and
presumably bigger, stronger, and more experienced) than their competition.
Their age advantage would reward them with subtle ,
career-changing advantages like selection for elite teams, better coaching,
more confidence, perhaps even more desire practice as they get great
results and feedback.
What does this have to do with basketball? I think the big lesson is that
loving the game is the top priority in becoming a star. And coaches at all
levels might want to look one more time at the kids they reject from elite
teams: there might be some diamonds in that rough who are simply younger
than their peers.