The Secret to Superior Performance? Not such a secret anymore

There’s a lot of interesting research out there on excellence and superior performance. What accounts for superior performance? Why are some people superstars at what they do, and others just average? The question is pretty interesting, not only for what it says about excellence, but more generally, what it says about learning and development. Gladwell’s book, Outliers, is only one of several books looking at this phenomenon. The authors behind The Heart and Soul of Change: What Works in Psychotherapy, Hubble, Duncan and Miller have also been looking at superior performance in psychotherapy in their article, Supershrinks: What is the secret of their success?

As these authors and others point out, trying to account for superior performance by looking at innate talent, genius, high IQ hasn’t yielded many results. The fact is, superior performance is, in the words of Thomas Edison, one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. Now thatâ??s either inspiring or depressing for us average folks. Inspiring because it means excellence is available to all those willing to put in the work. And depressing because, well, hard work. Gladwell puts a figure to that hard work: 10,000 hours. It’s at 10,000 hours that people achieve true mastery. Bill Gates had 10,000 hours on a computer before starting his software business with Paul Allen. Michael Jordan spent thousands of hours in the gym, improving his performance, after he was cut from his high school basketball team. 10,000 hours of practice in one activity accounts for a virtuosity that we see as natural born talent. Or is it?

One of the foremost researchers in the field of superior performance, K. Anders Ericcson says that 10,000 hours is not enough. The difference between super achievers and average achievers is what they do with those 10,000 hours. The highest achievers continually reflect on and take measures to improve their performance. In other words, they try to improve, continuously. High achievers think about what they could do differently next time to improve. Not about the conditions that led to their sub-par performance, not about external factors that inhibited them, whether competitors, clients’ resistance, lack of resources, team mates, or anything else. The only variable they care about it is their own performance, and the chief question they ask is, what could I do differently next time? As Miller, Hubble and Duncan write, “the best of the best simply work harder at improving their performance than others.”

Thomas Edison said:

During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.

It seems so simple, but if so, why are super performers the exception and not the rule? It appears, looking more closely at the data that it’s not about work ethic or effort, but that self-perception bias and accuracy play a role. 10,000 hours spent on any activity yields a degree of competence, but the more competency we develop, the more certain we become of our performance. Miller, Hubble and Duncan: “Most of us grow continually in confidence over the course of our careers, despite little or no improvement in our actual rates of success.” When performance becomes habitual, the work feels easier, we make fewer mistakes, or the ones we make are harder to detect. Added to that, our colleagues and clients reflect our seniority and experience back to us, affirming our sense of superiority.

Our sense of competency makes us feel more expert than we really are. But on top of that, there is the well known self-perception bias, the fact that people have a tendency to over rate their abilities. Add to these two facts that if you have 10,000 hours of experience in anything, chances are you occupy a senior or leadership role, and therefore, the less likely it is that you get corrective feedback. The higher up we are, the less access we have to those downstream from our decisions and actions. So, the sense of proficiency masquerading as excellence, the tendency to overrate ourselves, and our status creates the perfect storm of complacency.

The real difference between superior and average performers is that superior performers are in fact superior learners. If we want better performers, whether in work, at school, in sport, our focus should be on how to create a culture of learning, a drive and curiosity that overcomes the pitfall of self-perception bias.