Work

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. A very intriguing and rigorous discussion of what constitutes accomplishment, how do we measure it, and how do we explain it.

One of the most overlooked aspects of excellence is how much work it takes. Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload, pursued with single-minded intensity. Strenuous effort over long periods of time is a repetitive theme in the biographies of the giants, sometimes taking on mythic proportions (Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Even the most famous supposed exception, Mozart, illustrates the rule. He was one of the lighter spirits among the giants, but his reputation for composing effortlessly was overstated - Mozart himself complained on more than one occasion that it wasn't as easy as it looked - and his devotion to his work was as single-minded as Beethoven's, who struggled with his compositions more visibly. Consider the summer of 1788. Mozart was living in a city that experienced bread riots that summer and in a country that was mobilizing for war. He was financially desperate, forced to pawn his belongings to move to cheaper rooms. He even tried to sell the pawnbroker's tickets to get more loans. Most devastating of all, his beloved six-month old daughter died in June. And yet in June, July, and August, he completed two piano trios, a piano sonata, a violin sonata, and three symphonies, two of them among his most famous. It could not have been done except by someone who, as Mozart himself once put it, is "soaked in music, . . . immersed in it all day long."

Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 "chunks" of information about the subject over 10 years of experience - simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment. Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, labor. Nor is all of this work productive. What we see of significant figures' work is typically shadowed by an immense amount of wasted effort - most successful creators produce clunkers, sometimes far more clunkers than gems.

As one reviewer of the literature on creative people concluded, "Not only every sample, but every individual within each sample appears to be characterized by persistent dedication to work." The accounts that he surveyed reveal not a few hours a week beyond 40, or a somewhat more focused attitude at work than the average, but levels of effort and focus that are standard deviations above the mean. Whether Edison's estimate of the ratio of perspiration to inspiration (99:1) is correct is open to argument, but his words echo the anonymous poet from ancient Greece who wrote that "before the gates of excellence the high gods have placed sweat."

This correlation between work and achievement reminds me of some old adage that went something like "it's funny how all the good luck happens to the people that work the hardest." Actually there are several permutations out there:

The harder I work, the luckier I get. Sam Goldwyn

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. Thomas Jefferson

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. Ray A. Kroc

This passage is also consistent with the observation that most fields of expertise require some 5-10,000 hours of practice and reinforces the inequalities that are faced even at the earliest ages. If a child has been read to for an hour or so a day all their life, by the time they start kindergarten, they are already nearly 2,000 hours into their 5,000 hour apprenticeship of reading. Poor kid who starts from scratch in kindergarten.