Written by: Andy Murdoch, Deputy Headteacher
I’ve always been fascinated by extraordinary human performance. I was lucky enough to be in the Olympic stadium on ‘Super Saturday’ in 2012 where I watched Mo Farah sprint the last lap to win gold in the 10,000m. I thought to myself ‘I could never do that’. This was not the first time I had said something similar. In my school days I applied the same logic to explain why some of my peers could speak more fluently in other languages or produce pieces of music that didn’t make people want to cover their ears. ‘I’m just not good at languages…music…insert other subject here’. It was only when I was a little older that I reflected on how absurd this thinking was. Did I think that others were born with a special strand of DNA that enabled them to do the things I couldn’t?
It was in my pursuit of understanding expert performance in sport that caused the penny to drop. I wanted to know why the athletes I watched on TV ran faster, shot harder, bowled quicker and could hit a golf ball 300 yards down the middle of the fairway every time. My curiosity here led me to the work of Malcolm Gladwell, Mathew Syed, Geoff Colvin and Rasmus Ankersen.
Ankersen’s book, Gold Mine Effect, shone a light on why certain places in the world produced world class performers in certain sports: Kenyan distance runners, Brazilian footballers, and South Korean female golfers. It could not be a coincidence that these small geographical areas produced a disproportionately high number of elite performers. It was his chapter on Jamaican sprinters that really stood out to me. The fastest man on the planet and numerous other medal-winning sprinters learnt their trade in the same small athletics club in the city of Kingston. Did these sprinters have access to the state-of-the-art training facilities, sports scientists, psychologists, and nutritionists that gave them the advantage over sprinters across the world? Quite the opposite. The Jamaican sprinters practised on a part grass, part dirt track where the lines had been burnt in, not even painted!
Sport provides numerous other examples of where the seeds of exceptional performance grew from humble beginnings. Major winning sisters, Venus and Serena Williams, learnt the game of tennis hitting thousands of tennis balls served to them by their father from an old shopping trolley in Compton, Los Angeles. The key to success was becoming clearer. The difference between athletes such as these and those they surpassed was a mindset based on a thirst for learning, skillfully cultivated by those that supported them. This was Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule in action – the belief that anyone can be an expert in anything after 10,000 hours. He and Syed point to stories of grandmaster chess players, violinists, composers, and writers who all became experts in their fields because of hours and hours of practice. They also dispelled the myth of the child prodigy. Yes, there are experts at an incredibly young age but it’s just because they accumulated more hours early in their lives.
However, 10,000 hours of practice is a little too simplistic. It’s not merely the quantity of the time we spend on something. It’s the quality. The time we spend deliberately practising. Think of three concentric circles, each one bigger than the other. Let us call the smallest circle our comfort zone. We tend to spend a lot of time here because it is comfortable, we get things right, and that feels good. Let’s skip the next ring for a moment and go to the outer ring. Let’s call this the ‘out of reach zone’. We may spend time here but not much because we don’t make much progress, it’s hugely frustrating and we get lots and lots of things wrong. The abrupt ending of my guitar career when I couldn’t play Oasis songs in week one is a good example here. Then there is the middle ring, let’s call it the ‘learning zone’. This is where real progress takes place. What we do in this zone is a challenge and we experience some success and some failures. The more time we spend here, the more we learn, the more we grow. What was once just out of reach becomes easy. The comfort zone grows bigger as more things we can do with minimal error fill it. The ‘learning zone’ grows with it and the cycle continues again and again and actually never stops for even the most expert performers.
What elite performers have in common is the time they spend in this ‘learning zone’ and it’s our aim to facilitate the same for the children in our schools. There is undoubtedly a role to play for carefully designed subject curricula which sequentially and incrementally builds knowledge and skills. However, academic progress is not the sole purpose of education and we must provide the same opportunities for growth in social, emotional and leadership skills if children are to leave our schools with the tools to flourish in the future. Even if all these opportunities are in place, it’s the mindset of the Jamaican sprinters and their coaches we need to cultivate – a belief that regardless of start point and perceived barriers, we all have the potential to learn and grow.