Edge / Comparative Advantage

Definitions

I would define a personal edge as ”A possibility to achieve, produce or offer something with less amount of time and better than others.” Comparative advantage can be defined as ”A country should specialize in the goods or services it can produce at the lowest opportunity cost, and then trade with another country. I will concentrate on the personal edge.

Talent+Motivation+Deliberate Practice = Personal Edge

Personal edge is best achieved in the field of competitive expertise, when all the three components are combined. Depending on the competitive field, it is possible to have an edge with two of the three components in place. If you think about professional athletes in sports like tennis, basketball and golf, they need all of them. There are some exceptions, but they are extremely rare. In the less competitive fields of expertise, you can live without one component. It usually is talent or motivation. 

Your brain has almost hundred billion neurons. Each of them have from one thousand to ten thousand connections with other neurons. The amount of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. The idea that talent do not matter is insane. It is not the only thing that matters when you are trying to gain a personal edge. People relying only on their talent, will have a faster development, when they are young. When time goes by, the edge is gone without practicing enough. When people with talent do the same things as people without talent with the same amount of time, the people with talent get better. When you talk about highly competitive fields of expertise, margins with winners and losers can be small. In these situations, talent makes the difference. You should concentrate on the fields of expertise where you are talented. This may be the only way of competing against billions of people.

Motivation is the second component. To be honest, I am having a hard time to answer the question: ”Is motivation to practice hard a talent or a learned skill?” Some people say it is a form of talent, others say you can learn it. I still haven´t made any conclusions about it. I quess it is a combination of both. Being interested in some field of expertise helps you to gain an edge. All people are not interested in the same things. Some people like sports, others music. In a highly competitive field of expertise, you need a desire to practice. Especially, deliberate practice is almost impossible without intrinsic motivation. The question is how to find a field of expertise, in which we have intrinsic motivation? One way of doing it is think about our childhood and what we liked to do then. All of us do not need intinsic motivation. Outer sources work for them better.

Some people can have a bigger need to please others. They can get motivated by an authority figure like a coach or father. Sometimes you get impulses from around you which can increase or decrease your motivation towards something. The right kind of environment and people around you is important in motivating you. It is even better to have these external factors with intrinsic factors to have a motivation to get better at something. Everything is easier with better motivation. 

Deliberate practice is a last component of the edge. It is probably the most important one. It can be also the most complicated one. In many areas of expertise, there are no established practices for getting an edge or being great at it. Developing skills have the same neurological effects in whatever you are practicing. Therefore, practice is the only obligatory components for gaining an edge. And deliberate practice is the best way of developing skills. 

You are in trouble in the information age without an edge

You live in a highly competitive world. Information age gives more equal opportunities for people around the world. Millions of people get better chances to show how good they are in something. Competition gets tougher every year, especially, in intellectual and creative fields of expertise. Record companies had all the power to decide who could succeed before. Now every singer, for example, can download her performances to youtube. It is a platform in which millions of people compete against each other for viewers. The best singers can reach millions of people. This wasn´t possible about twenty years ago. At least, not in this scale. This doesn´t only mean tougher competition. It also means winners take it all effects. A few people get most of the profits and glory around the world.

Having an edge is necessary in a modern world. You should ask yourself ”When competition gets tougher, what can I do to have an edge? You have to remember that edges are always relative. You compare yourself with others. You do not have to compete with millions of people. You have to remember it is easier to be the best in a niche. Being the best singer using, for example, Dutch is lot easier than being the best singer using English. Being the best Dutch Jazz singer is easier than being the best Dutch R&B singer. You can also have a combination of micro skills to have an edge. When you have a combination of skills which is unique, you do not need to be best at anything. You cannot forget a need for demand. If there is not enough people or companies to pay for the edge, it is not useful.

I am not saying we should all leave our current jobs to get an edge in other. But you should definitely try to get one before it is too late. Without an edge you may get into trouble. My advice to all the younger people is to start developing and edge and think about in which field of expertise they have intrinsic motivation and talent. Then find out what are the characteristics of deliberate practice and design your own ways of doing it if necessary.

Sources:

Poor Charlie´s Almanack, Peter Kaufman, Charles T. Munger
Peak, Anders Ericsson
Drive, Daniel H. Pink

-TT

Deliberate practice

You live in a global, interconnected economy. Anyone can sell anything to anyone anywhere in the world. The average performance is not good enough. Unless you have world-class skills in highly competitive fields or some unique and needed expertise, you are in trouble. When you are truly masterclass, the rewards are magnificent. You need to acquire skills through practice and the general principles of the best way to do it are the same in almost every field. This is called the deliberate practice.

Definition of deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is a highly structured act of rehearsing a behavior or engaging in an activity over and over consciously and intentionally, for the specific goal of improving or mastering it. Deliberate practice has four components:

1. The person practicing has a strong motivation and is focused on getting better in every action.
2. The task is designed to take person´s existing skills into account and be understood by her.
3. There should be immediate informative feedback.
4. There should be a possibility to repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

Examples

Figure skater is learning a new jump with the help of her coach. The jump should be a little bit harder than skater has ever succeeded in. Coach should give feedback after every jump about how the skater did and what she can improve when she repeats the jumping action. A professional chess player is studying a certain position that he played wrong in the last game with his coach. The study could be consisted of the games played before by the best chess players in history.

Some of the fields of expertise are better for applying deliberate practice

Many fields of expertise have already developed broadly accepted training principles and these can be called deliberate practice. Most of the professional sports, classical music, and mathematics use the principles of deliberate practice. These fields have some common characteristics. First, there are at least semiobjective ways of measuring performance such as evaluation of expert judges. It is impossible to improve performance, unless you are not aware of what constitutes improvement. Second, fields typically have to be competitive enough to have enough motivation to practice for the goal of improvement. Third, the relevant skills of these fields have been developed for a long time, normally for decades. Fourth, these fields have professional coaches who are improving training methods used by the experts. Otherwise it is not possible to increase the skill level of the top performers in the fields.

The four components

It is hard to have an intense focus and a superb motivation, while you practice things you have not yet managed to do well enough. You need to push outside of our comfort zone and stay focused, when you experience the pain of failure or disappointing result. You can do two things to have a better focus. First, you need general maintenance like enough sleep and good nutrition. The second, is to limit the length of the practice sessions for not more than an hour. Humans have a basic rest-activity cycle which lasts about 80-120 minutes. When you are awake, your brainwaves are faster during the first half of the BRAC cycle and you feel alert and focused. Then your brainwaves slow and we start feeling dreamy and little tired and your focus gets lost. You must also have a motivation to get better. Practicing years and thousands of hours and constantly failing is nearly impossible without high intrinsic motivation.

The practice needs to push the person outside of his/her comfort zone. The path of least resistance is not enough. Specific practicing activities, and exercises should be designed to exceed the person´s current skills, adapt to the person´s ways of doing things and get him/her to the next level. A figure skater needs to learn a jump that is harder than the previously learned jump. She should also understand what is the purpose of everything. What are the reasons to do something in a particular way. And what will the results be by doing things that way. For example, in which part of the feet should touch a certain part of the football while practicing a certain kick. And what kind of spin will the ball have after the kicking action is done right. All the practice should have concrete clear goals. What to do, how to do it and why it should be done that way.

You need feedback to improve. In many cases, it is not possible to know what you have done wrong. It is hard to improve in many activities without somebody watching you while practicing. You should get this feedback immediately. It should be delivered in a way it is understood by the person. Most people need some advice after failure. For example, skater needs to know why her new jump failed. Was it because of not enough speed, or was the position of a skate´s blade wrong. Why did it happen? What should she do differently? Practicing without feedback may lead to the strengthening the wrong chains of nerve fibers. Too many repetitions in a wrong way will lead to wrong ways of doing things and practice won´t be useful. The better you are the more you can understand what you did well and what you did wrong. Watching the performance from the videos may be enough for many experts.

All the practice should be repeatable. It is not possible to strengthen the right nerve fiber chains without repetition. These nerve chains won´t get strong without it. If this is not possible, deliberate practice cannot be done. There are many situations where conditions are not always the same. In these cases, the practice can be done through simulations. For example, practicing about flying an airplane in a storm needs to be practiced in a simulator, or practicing the emergency landing is not possible in natural conditions. Repeating things over and over again will achieve unconscious competence. Things become automatic and repetitions need less thinking. When the critical mass of repetition has been done, the unconscious action becomes the new norm.

Deliberate practice creates better mental models

Every skill has its own mental models. To achieve an expertise through deliberate practice happens by developing latticework of mental models in the field. Experts have more developed and accurate latticework than ordinary people. This is true in physical skills too. Most of the practice is done to form a clear mental model of what the action should feel and look like at every moment in terms of moving your body and it´s position. These models are held in a long-term memory and can be used to have a fast and effective response to certain types of situations. Better models make it possible to process larger amounts of information despite the limitations of short-term memory. Complicated activities require more information than your short-term memory is capable of processing, therefore, you are always building mental models. Everyone has their own models. What really makes the difference between experts and novices is the quality and quantity of the models.

Sources:

Peak, Anders Ericsson
Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin
The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin

-TT