How falling behind can get you ahead
There is a concept that it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and material. This theory advocates focused learning started at an early age. There are already many articles on google debunking this rule, and this article is inspired by David Epstein's TEDx, Manchester, 2020.
There are numerous stories that are in favor of this theory, such as the headliner story of Tiger Woods, but looking at variety of data we found that elite experts spent less time at early age on deliberate practice. Early specializers jump out to an income lead. The people who spent time exploring a wider variety of subjects and only later in life did they choose specializations were found to be better fit of match-quality. Their growth is faster and by 6 years they even erase the income gap meanwhile the early specializers start quitting their career because they chose so early, they often made poor choices. From the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh to founder of binary system Claude Shanon there are many late specializers success stories.
Some fields such as golf or chess can be classified as kind learning environments. The rules here are consistent over the years and feedback is efficient, so learning by recurring patterns is ideal. The world we live in is becoming more like a wicked learning environment where rules may change, feedback is delayed or inaccurate, and next year is not same as last year.
Another success story of a late specializer is of Gunpei Yokoi, founder of Nintendo games, about Lateral thinking with withered technology. His magnum opus "Game Boy" was a technological joke and came out when competitors from Atari and Sega had colored displays, but still blew them away because he understood his customers better.
In conclusion, Freeman Dyson says "for a healthy ecosystem we need both birds and frogs." Frogs are down in the mud seeing all the granular detail, while birds soaring above not seeing those details but integrating the knowledge of frogs. The problem, Dyson said, is that we are telling everyone to become frogs - the specialist - the early starters. In a wicked world, that's increasingly short-sighted.
