3/ He says there's a lot of evidence for this. Mike Tyson, Yasuhiro Yamashita (who is, incidentally, my personal Judo idol). Each of them reached mastery within 5 years.
Some of Danaher's students have done the same.
Lex then asks the obvious, interesting question ...
Conversation
4/ "What differentiates those who make it and those who don't?"
Danaher then goes through the factors.
- Luck
- Genetics
- The training program
- The attributes of the athlete, and if so what attributes?
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5/ Luck: "Luck is definitely a factor. Life is beautiful but also tragic (...) I've had students who've died, who could've gone on to become world champions. I've had students who — on a much lighter note — fell in love, and wanted to have kids and move away."
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6/ "I do believe that a truly resourceful mind can overcome of the majority of what fortune throws at us, provided you're sufficiently mentally robust."
But of course it's a factor — where you're born, what socio-economic status you're born into, all of this matters.
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7/ Genetics: It matters for many sports — "where power output, physical speed, ability to take physical damage" matters, genetics will play a role.
"I have a crippled leg (...) I can't imagine a world in which I can win the 100m Olympic sprinting."
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8/ "But the more a sport involves skill and tactics, the less you will see genetics playing a role. If you look at the medal podiums in jujitsu, for example, you will see that no one body type is superior to another. You will see a variety of body types on the medal platforms..."
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9/ Training programs: Danaher is biased, he's dedicated his life to create the best training program for jujitsu.
(Amongst other things, Danaher invented a system for performing leg locks that made leg locking acceptable in jujitsu; it was mostly ignored before).
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10/ "I believe that all of the students I've taught who became world champions would've been great athletes whether they met me or not, but I also do believe that it would have taken them much longer, and maybe not to the level that they got."
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11/ There's a lot of evidence for this — "Look at Russia; the number of people who wrestle in Russia is smaller than the number of people who wrestle in the United States."
"Ostensibly if it comes down to numbers, the US should dominate in the Olympics ..."
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12/ Danaher does say that there are confounding factors (e.g. the US does a different style of wrestling), but at some point "you have to ask what they're doing differently (in training)".
(The Judo equivalent, btw, is Kosovo. Tiny war-torn country. 3 Olympic gold medalists.)
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13/ They then get to, in my opinion, the most interesting part: "the majority of what creates success is the interaction between the athlete and the training program — the training program is one thing, the most important thing, but right behind that is the athlete."
Replying to
14/ "People always talk about the athletes I've trained successfully, they never talk about the athletes I've trained unsuccessfully.
"Always remember for every champion a coach produces, there's 100 people they coached that people've never heard of. And that's perfectly normal"
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15/ Lex asks the obvious question: "What makes the difference between those you've coached successfully, and those you didn't?"
"Persistence."
"What kind of persistence?"
"Persistence in THINKING."
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16/ And then the final bit, which illustrates what persistence in thinking looks like:
“Travis Stevens made this comment, at the end of a good training session, your mind should be exhausted, not your body.”
“That’s absolutely right.”
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17/ Apply that to your skill domain however you will.
My takeaway is that you really only grow when you're sensemaking — that is, when you're (heh) making sense of your experiences and coming up with new ideas to test.
Doing the same thing again and again isn't practice.
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18/ Now apply that to business, to sport, or to life.
The end.
Thanks for reading! Follow if you'd like more threads on expertise research, or business learning, or the limits of frameworks.
Related 😄:
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1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world.
No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that.
Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?
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