Why bother

Achieving expertise, perhaps even mastery, in some area is rewarding in many ways, and the process of getting to the highest level is fascinating by itself. However, as Anders Ericsson, the author of “Peak”, points out, if our notion of what top-level expertise is becomes relative, i.e. we become competitive with other people, we quickly realize that becoming better than everyone else, or even better than, say, 90% of people, may not be possible to achieve in a lifetime under our specific circumstances.

The natural question is then, “Why bother trying to get to the top at all?” And this is an important question, because, as Ericsson argues, motivation is the grease that makes the mechanism of training working.

A possible answer that resonates with me personally is that we should continue to train in order to become better teachers for others, particularly, for our own children. Even if the student’s level of performance is objectively higher than that of the teacher (e.g. the student is a better golf player, because she is younger, stronger and more flexible), the teacher still plays a crucial role, because his/her experience in the field extends beyond the particular case of the given student. A good teacher has sufficient expertise in the subject and sufficient breadth of experience to be able to provide relevant feedback on the student’s training. And this feedback is what makes the difference between deliberate practice, in Ericsson’s terms, and mechanical repetition of already known patterns. Conversely, mindless repetition (not in the sense of the Japanese mushin, but opposite to deliberate practice) is what makes most people stagnate at a mediocre level.