Word: expert
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...making the case that she would be a better President than Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton never forgets to summon the argument that she has more experience. But as the Florida State simulations show, experience doesn't always help. In fact, three decades of research into expert performance has shown that experience itself - the raw amount of time you spend pursuing any particular activity, from brain surgery to skiing - can actually hinder your ability to deliver reproducibly superior performance...
...that be? It is widely accepted that mastering most complex human endeavors requires a minimum of 10 years' experience. The 10-year rule was posited as long ago as 1899, when Psychological Review ran a paper saying it takes at least that long to become expert in telegraphy. The modern study of expert performance began in 1973, when American Scientist published an influential article by researchers Herbert Simon and William Chase saying chess enthusiasts had to play for at least 10 years before they could win international tournaments. (Bobby Fischer was an exception; he played for nine years before becoming...
...While 10 years is a necessary minimum to achieve expertise in most fields, it doesn't guarantee success. As Anders Ericsson writes in the introduction to the 901-page Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), "The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance." Ericsson, 60, is a professor at Florida State who moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in 1976 to study with Simon, co-author of the seminal chess paper. (Simon went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making.) Today...
...Ericsson, a large, gentle man with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair and a button on his jacket missing, has become the world's leading expert on experts, a term he distinguishes from "expert performers" - those individuals, possessing both experience and superior skill, who tend to win Nobel Prizes or international chess competitions or Olympic medals. Ericsson notes that some entire classes of experts - for instance, those who pick stocks for a living - are barely better than novices. (Experienced investors do perform a little ahead of chance, his studies show, but not enough to outweigh transaction costs...
...Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that élite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps - one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook...