If You Meet the Montage on the Road, Kill It
Doctor (Pending) David Wong of cracked.com blames The Karate Kid for everything:
It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious; every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.
. . .
In the real world, the winners of that Karate tournament in Karate Kid would be the kids who had been at it since they were in elementary school. Skipping video games and days out with their friends and birthday parties so they can practice, practice, practice. And that’s just what it takes to get “pretty good” at it. Want to know how long it takes to become an expert at something? About 10,000 hours, according to research.
That’s practicing two hours a day, every day, for almost 14 years.
Plenty more where that came from.
Comment by unqualified neighbor —
February 21, 2010 @ 9:36 am
or you could slack off/party hardy until your 40’s then go for the presidency…
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 21, 2010 @ 9:45 am
That would only work if for some reason you were connected to a lot of rich and powerful people. Doesn’t seem like a good way to play the odds.
Besides, what if you pulled it off? You’d probably suck at presidenting. Would you want that on your conscience?
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
February 21, 2010 @ 10:05 am
That’s a half truth, at best. It’s not 10,000 hours of work, it’s 10,000 hours of directed practice. In other words, you can’t just put in the hours, you have to think about what you’re doing. And do things you’re bad at (rather than the things which are comfortable because you’re good at them), and set sub-goals, and figure out what you need to do to achieve them.
You can probably offload some of the thinking onto teachers, but you still need to have the humility and dedication and willingness to think to apply.
Talent Is Overrated has quite a bit about what it really takes to master something.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 21, 2010 @ 10:15 am
I don’t disagree about directed practice, Nancy, and I’m not sure any of the authors up the link chain would agree, either. I find, for instance, when studying improv, that it’s useful to constantly remind myself that my director knows a lot more than I do and the more experienced improvisors I study with are a lot better than I. I am, generously, 200 hours into my 10,000 so far, so I have to make sure I don’t assume that what I can do now defines what’s possible with the form.
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
February 21, 2010 @ 11:08 am
The thing is, I find the 10,000 hours of directed practice sometimes cited 10,000 hours of work–I’m pretty sure the author at the Cracked link made that mistake.
I think it’s a mistake to just talk about effort (perhaps especially so to Americans) without specifying what kind of effort.
Comment by Glaivester —
February 21, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
Talent Is Overrated has quite a bit about what it really takes to master something.
In a lot of endeavors, both talent and hard work are (separately) overrated.
Often you need both. Talent is necessary, so is training. Neither is sufficient on its own.
Comment by radish —
February 21, 2010 @ 1:37 pm
Well there’s a benefit of Montage right there.
While I agree with the Dr. (Pending) Wong’s basic premise, the flip side of killing Buddha is that meeting Buddha, like seeing The Montage, lets you see what “expertise” (and the process of acquiring it) looks like.
The Montage isn’t a creation of modern cinema. It’s a venerable human tradition as old as language itself. Anything you say about The Montage might as easily be said about all those barely-plausible narratives our ancestors built up around their own expert-heroes. Those stories are wrong, but not useless. They make it easier, while you’re practicing, to imagine yourself executing competently.
Of course we taoists are ambivalent about the notion of expertise to begin with, and regard the tradition of Bodhicide as barbaric and unnecessary…
Comment by Thoreau —
February 21, 2010 @ 2:37 pm
yeah it’s definitely 10,000 hours of doing combined with thought on how to do better. At the risk of sounding apologist, in what I do I think that the training path is long and uncertain by necessity. Long because not all hours are created equal, and a person who uses 40 hours efficiently is probably spending a lot of that time juggling, which is admirable but not always conducive to deep thought. time spent messing around (sometimes relaxed, sometimes with a not of pressure to find something) is better but not efficient.
And it will be uncertain because the task is to find things that nobody knew about.
He ce I am skeptical of calls to make science training less time intensive and more relaxed.>
Comment by radish —
February 21, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
Update: Ha. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this until I started thinking about work, but it’s worth mentioning that the enlightenment narrative of Ch’an Buddhism is often expressed in a way that practically defines the word “montage”.
Comment by mph —
February 21, 2010 @ 2:56 pm
I’m going to continue work on my role as the occasional minutiae overfocuser and cite BJ Penn:
He began training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at age 17 and was the first non-Brazilian to win the black-belt division of the World Jiu Jitsu Championship at age 20. As near as I can tell, he didn’t have any martial arts background prior to getting into BJJ. I don’t think there’s any way you can “fluke” your way through the competition in that field. He truly got that good, that quick.
That’s one of the interesting things about mixed martial arts: lots of biographical data and recorded outcomes on all sorts of stylistic combinations. Sometimes real experts happen to get caught and take a loss from a lesser opponent, but the balance of their careers will tell the whole story.
On the other hand, BJ’s probably an outlier. Most of the people in MMA have been at one discipline or another for many, many years, and it might be useful to consider the recent rise of fighters coming out of collegiate wrestling backgrounds as proof that the years put in matter. They’re not the most exciting fighters in the world the first few times they fight, but their core strength and conditioning keep them in contention until they can scramble to pick up other things they need, like rudimentary standup and decent submission defense. Then they become viable contenders.
A quick scan of the current UFC divisional champions:
* Lightweight: BJ Penn, started training *at all* at age 17.
* Welterweight: Georges St. Pierre, started training karate at age 7
* Middleweight: Anderson Silva, started training Tae Kwon Do at age 14, blackbelt in TKD at 18 (with a bunch of other black belts in other disciplines since)
* Light heavyweight: Lyoto Machida began training karate from his father at age three, blackbelt at age 13. I think he actually lost his last title defense (and will lose his next one) to Shogun Rua, who says he started training Muay Thai at age 15 and BJJ at age 17, winning championships early in his career in BJJ.
* Heavyweight: I guess it’s Brock Lesnar (though he’s recovering from an illness and there’s a pending heavyweight tourney), who came out of a standard American wrestling background. No idea when he started wrestling. Depending on the community, kids can get going early. I lived in the middle of wrestling country in Pennsylvania and never had a chance to go to camp or take a class in it until sixth grade.
Out of that list, Silva and Penn (who I’d argue are the two most *convincing* champions in the UFC), “got great” the quickest. Machida is looking to get knocked off by someone who probably got started later than people he was beating before he went into MMA.
As far as the Karate Kid goes, it’s not like he picked off some monster. The whole Cobra Kai clan was a bunch of pack predators and the kid got lucky anyhow: he exploited a hole in his opponent’s game and was getting the snot knocked out of him right up until then. It happens. Matt Serra got lucky against Georges St. Pierre once, too, and the rematch told the tale. Matt Serra’s a great fighter, but St. Pierre dismantled him the next time around.
The next time Daniel LaRusso tried to pull a crane technique against a Cobra Kai kid, he’d lose the other knee for his troubles.
Sorry … it was a UFC weekend.
Comment by mph —
February 21, 2010 @ 2:58 pm
And to backtrack to my point about wrestlers and their initial survival in MMA, which I think I dropped: They come off a lot more pedestrian than the guys who’ve been training across disciplines for much longer, but they can almost always be characterized by freakish work ethics. Their gifts never seem to be about fighting skill as much as brute persistence.
Comment by Sherri —
February 21, 2010 @ 3:23 pm
MMA is a relatively new sport; if it hangs around and the money persists, it will probably be dominated by people who have trained for MMA from the beginning. Sports are a little different than other pursuits, too, in that training for one sport can be directly transferable to another sport. Not always, though: see Michael Jordan try to hit minor league pitching. There’s an interesting book from a while back called “Why Michael Jordan Can’t Hit” that talks about cognitive windows in addition to just time spent training, the idea that if you haven’t spent time doing some tasks before a certain age, you’ll never be world-class.
Re: The Karate Kid, when my daughter began karate, her instructor used “wax on, wax off” to explain the beginning blocks to her. She didn’t get it, having never seen nor heard of The Karate Kid.
Comment by Walt —
February 21, 2010 @ 4:06 pm
Hakeem Olajuwon didn’t start playing basketball until he was 15.
Comment by EscapedWestOfTheBigMuddy —
February 21, 2010 @ 5:53 pm
An observation about the fighting arts: great fighters are not necessarily the same as the people who are “very skilled” on the training floor. And this seems to be increasingly true as you relax the rules.
That is because fighting takes some special elements of attitude, timing, and aggression that are hard to integrate into a training program that doesn’t main its participants.
One of the advantages that come with groundwork is that ordinary people (as opposed to genetic freaks with more repair factor than any ten normal people) can regularly practice much closer to full bore then they can at striking.
I’ve met (even help to train) people who went from a standing start to better than average fighters in about a year.
[more than ten year experience and almost up to mediocre...]
Comment by HyperIon —
February 22, 2010 @ 1:07 pm
Ha…you forgot the effect of multi-tasking.
The 10,000 hours number is cut to 1000 hours by doing 10 things at the same time, which these smart young folks claim to do. So there!
Plus playing video karate counts toward the 1000 hours.
Comment by dave anderson —
February 22, 2010 @ 3:41 pm
@#10 — I just got back from refereeing a 7-8 year old wrestling tournament in SW-PA, and they are not even the youngest kids out there; I have had “bouts” this season with 5 year olds where they spend most of the “bout” chasing each other and laughing as they run around the mat.
Comment by mph —
February 22, 2010 @ 4:54 pm
Wow, Dave … Where in SW PA, if you don’t mind me asking? I went to a pretty small school in Somerset Co. (Berlin-Brothersvalley).
Everyone was bananas about wrestling, but sixth grade was the earliest my school had anything official. On the other hand, I got pulled into wrestling more because all my friends started walking over to the junior high/high school gym one morning and I didn’t realize we were all going to sign up for the summer wrestling camp. Maybe there were opportunities I missed.
Comment by piddle poo —
February 25, 2010 @ 8:34 am
I have played golf for 50 years, and the results decisively refute this rule.