Effort is the Key to Excellence (2): further implications

No matter how strong the measure of Divine grace, unless supplemented by personal, sustained and intelligent effort it cannot become fully effective and be of any real and abiding advantage.

(Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, 27 February 1928)

The previous post ended by saying that Matthew Syed makes a point of fundamental importance that I would return to again later (Bounce: pages 103-104):

It is only in sport that the benefits of purposeful practice are accrued by individuals at the expense of other individuals, and never by society as a whole. But this is precisely the area in which purposeful practice is pursued with a vengeance, while it is all but neglected in the areas where we all stand to benefit. . . . The talent theory of expertise is not merely flawed in theory; it is insidious in practice, robbing individuals and institutions of the motivation to change themselves and society.

Before giving that the attention it deserves there’s a bit more ground to cover.

Even when we understand all that he explains about excellence and effort up to this point, there is something else left over. After all, as he points out, there are many people who have their interest sparked and embark upon a course of practice only to give up on it well before they shine.

He looks at the work of Carol Dweck for clues (pages 114-129). He begins by describing a study in which she divides children into two groups: those who thought intelligence was genetic and those who thought it could be improved by effort. She felt these were two different mindsets. Basically, although equally able on initial testing, the first group gave up quickly as questions in a test got harder, whereas members of the other group persisted and some even solved problems that were theoretically beyond them.  Syed describes her conclusion (page 117):

. . .the gap in performance was opened up by something completely different: their respective beliefs or mindsets.

If you believe talent is innate, mistakes prove you haven’t got it so you give up. If you believe talent is the result of effort, mistakes tend to spur you on. These mindsets become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Further studies introduced praise for effort rather than ‘talent’ with predictable results. In fact, feedback of many kinds is essential if we are to enhance our performance at any complex skill. He uses the expression growth mindset (page 128) to describe the attitude that is created when effort is seen as the pathway to excellence and is encouraged as such.

Before I move on to briefly consider how this maps onto spiritual growth and social change in the widest sense, I’d like to come back to his point, quoted earlier, that the talent ‘theory of expertise’ is ‘insidious in practice.’

Dweck located the reasons for Enron‘s spectacular failure in what Syed summarises as a ‘culture that exalted talent above the possibilities of personal development.’ This caused the company to promote people it viewed as talented to decision-making positions of high authority even when they had no prior experience in the area of finance of which they were put in charge.  She wrote (quoted on page 132):

. . . by putting complete faith in talent, Enron did a fatal thing: it created a culture that worshipped talent, thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented.

Basically, it forced them into the fixed mindset. And we know a lot about that. We know that people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.

Any one who has embarked seriously on a spiritual path will relate to much of this, I think. Practice is integral to spiritual progress. The Bahá’í Faith emphasises for example the strong link between the kind of efforts we make, the beliefs we have about the results of that effort and the achievement of eventual excellence for the betterment of society, something that Syed touched upon when he wrote ‘[purposeful practice] is all but neglected in the areas where we all stand to benefit.’

In a letter written on his behalf, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, stated (27 February 1928):

No matter how strong the measure of Divine grace, unless supplemented by personal, sustained and intelligent effort it cannot become fully effective and be of any real and abiding advantage.

That’s an example of the need to practice. What we believe also matters:

When the will and the desire are strong enough, the means will be found and the way opened . . .

(The Guardian to the National Assembly of the United States, 21 September 1957: quoted in Living the Life, page 38)

A belief in the power of Divine Assistance is also of critical importance here.  It is easy to scoff at this from a materialistic point of view, but, even if there were no God it could still be important and effective to believe in His power to help. This is what makes it unwise for evangelical atheists to do a demolition job on God and why they’d do better to target the myth of talent as the idol in need of destruction.

As Syed so clearly explains, certain kinds of belief are immensely beneficial regardless of their truth value. Having referred to the health benefits of religious belief (page 148), he moves onto consider the impact of strong belief upon performance (page 158):

Why should a sportsman convince himself he will win when he knows that there is every possibility he will lose? Because to win, one must proportion one’s belief, not to the evidence, but to whatever the mind can usefully get away with. To win, one must surgically remove doubt – rational and irrational – from the mind.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá puts it most powerfully when he says: ‘As ye have faith so shall your powers and blessings be.’ (Star of the West: Vol 12, No. 16. page 250).

So that’s the effort and the belief. The how is also critical. Just to practice any old how is not enough. When the central body of the Faith, the Universal House of Justice, discussed the essence of spiritual practice they did not just tell us what to do to make it count: they also made it very clear how we were to do it. If we take a look at the first three of what they regard as the Essential Requisites for Spiritual Growth the point is obvious:

1. The recital each day of one of the Obligatory Prayers with pure-hearted devotion.

2. The regular reading of the Sacred Scriptures, specifically at least each morning and evening, with reverence, attention and thought.

3. Prayerful meditation on the Teachings, so that we may understand them more deeply, fulfil them more faithfully, and convey them more accurately to others.

What goes with the actions? ‘Pure-hearted devotion’ goes with prayer, ‘reverence, attention and thought’ goes with reading, and meditation has to be ‘prayerful.’

The top of the column at the Guardian's Resting Place in London

And this is what is required, by implication, before we will be able to achieve the fourth thing: ‘Striving every day to bring our behaviour more into accordance with the high standards that are set forth in the Teachings.’ Not a big ask then. But everything in Syed’s book, and all the evidence that stands behind it, demonstrates that such sustained effort changes us and will change the social world within which we live, if enough of us make anything like this level of effort.

And if we are to rise to the needs of the times, as Bahá’ís believe we must, and lift our civilisation to a far higher level, nothing less is required of us than efforts on this scale, as other posts on this blog have attempted to explain (links to them all can be found at the 6th paragraph of this previous post‘s link).

I am grateful to Syed for the clarity with which he has shown that practice can shift us nearer to perfection – and not just in sport but in society as a whole.

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Effort is the Key to Excellence (1): a review of ‘Bounce’

. . . . man must strive that his reality may manifest virtues and perfections, the light whereof may shine upon everyone.

(Bahá’í Administration: page 9)

Do you think excellence at an activity is a gift or is it earned?

Sir Michael, a character played by James Fox in a recent recent episode of ‘Midsomer Murders,’ clearly thought it was a gift handed down in the genes and deranged his whole life around that creed (I won’t say more in case I spoil the plot, if such a plot can be spoiled at all). Apparently most of us believe the same or something like it, much to our disadvantage. It’s the result of natural talent, we conclude, rather than hardwork so if I haven’t already got it it’s not worth trying to acquire it.

Over the last few decades it has been slowly becoming apparent that this is nonsense. Previous posts have referred, for example, to Jeffrey Schwartz‘s hard-headed look at the issue in The Mind and the Brain. Practice may not make you perfect but it raises your capacity beyond your wildest dreams and changes your brain in the process. All you need to do is stick at it for long enough with the right attitude. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Towards of the close of his book Schwartz writes (page 371):

We have been blind to the power of the will to direct attention in ways that can alter the brain. Perhaps, as the discoveries about the power of directed mental effort systematically to alter brain structure and function attract public awareness, we will give greater weight, instead, to the role of volition.

Schwartz’s book, while written for the general reader, is not the most accessible text in the world, brilliant though it is.

When it comes to attracting public awareness to his basic thesis, there is a much better candidate. It’s called Bounce. I nearly didn’t buy Matthew Syed‘s book because I thought it would just be a rather predictable rehash of what I had already learned from sources such as Schwartz. I only got it in the end because I needed to spend at least £10 in the book shop (I’m not saying which one – they’ve already got far too many branches) to get Eat Pray Love extremely cheap.

It was definitely a smart move – buying the book I mean, not devising the special offer.

Syed pulls all the research and thinking together mostly around the subject of sport, though he does throw in other examples such as chess and music to enrich the mix.

From the point of view of this post his main points at the start of the book cut to the chase.

He quotes Anders Ericsson‘s study of violinists in which Anders attempts to determine what distinguishes the very best from all the others. The result was clear (page 12):

Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest.

(He doesn’t waste words, as you can see.) It takes at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to make an expert. He goes onto illustrate how, in any complex field whether it be firefighting, chess, violin playing or table tennis, expertise is entirely dependent upon long experience of a certain kind.

He explains what kind of practice he’s talking about (page 58):

It is only possible to clock up meaningful practice if an individual has made an independent decision to devote himself to whatever field of expertise. He has to care about what he is doing, not because a parent or a teacher says so, but for its own sake.

The fascination of his book is largely in the parts I am missing out. He gives examples from his own experience, from interviews with people that he’s met and from his reading, that bring the whole subject to life. His telling of the story of the Polgar family (pages 60-66) – Laszlo, Klara and their children – is a key and compelling illustration of his point. All their three children, from a background of zero chess expertise, became chess prodigies, and the father had predicted that they would right from the start provided he gave them the right opportunities to practice.  And they loved to practice, and practice, and practice. His eldest daughter became the first woman grandmaster ever, and his youngest daughter the youngest grandmaster, male or female, ever.

Some people think it was coincidence but I think the father proved his point. The many other examples Syed gives simply hammer more nails into the coffin of the myth of natural talent. This is a more suitable myth for the evolutionists to target than the idea of God as we will see very clearly later.

However, it isn’t enough to practice because you want to. There is more to it than that (page 72):

Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence.

Schwartz’s book constantly reinforces the same conclusion about the power of deliberate and sustained attention, while at the same time emphasising that anyone with a reasonably intact brain – and that’s almost all of us, even those of us with strokes and other brain injuries – is capable of learning to focus in this way if they want to.

When I shared some of Syed’s ideas with a friend of mine, she told me about her experience with knitting – yes, she definitely said knitting:

I find that most people don’t have much of a belief in excellence being earned and they do tend to assume that ability is mostly genetic.  I don’t know where that belief comes from, but it is not in the least bit empowering and is actually wrong.  I think I sub-consciously believed it myself until recently, and then I changed my belief only because of my own direct experience.  I decided to start knitting about two years ago and at first I was actually quite bad at it, worse than some of my friends.  However, I have knitted in every spare moment I’ve had since then.  Now, I have knitted garments that are so good that people can’t believe I hand-knitted them myself.  . . . . . I am definitely not gifted.  I have just had a heck of a lot of practice over the past two years.   Also, some bits of my knitting were so difficult to get right that I unravelled and re-started it eight or ten times until I managed it, focusing very hard on it and learning an awful lot as a result.

Before he moves on to consider another aspect of practice that is of critical importance, Syed makes a point of fundamental importance that I will return to again later (page 103-104):

It is only in sport that the benefits of purposeful practice are accrued by individuals at the expense of other individuals, and never by society as a whole. But this is precisely the area in which purposeful practice is pursued with a vengeance, while it is all but neglected in the areas where we all stand to benefit. . . . The talent theory of expertise is not merely flawed in theory; it is insidious in practice, robbing individuals and institutions of the motivation to change themselves and society.

It will take another post to begin to unpack this at greater length and to show how the ideas he is conveying here extend far beyond sport, not only to finance but to spirituality as well.

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