While I have never listened to him in person, I suspect that P.J. Fleck, currently the Head Football Coach at the University of Minnesota would be a great motivational speaker. Coach Fleck has developed an entire philosophy around "elite performance" (see my previous posts, "Row the Boat" and "Golden Gopher Leadership 101" for more on his philosophy). He really likes to use the word "elite" A LOT! He suggests that when it comes to level of performance, there are five kinds of people in this world - Bad, Average, Good, Excellent, and Elite. He distinguishes between "excellent performance" and "elite performance" (he is clearly pushing his football players towards more of the latter than the former).
Can we really distinguish between "excellent" and "elite" performance in sports? I believe so. As an example, the Kenyan runner Lawrence Cherono won the 2019 Boston Marathon with a finishing time of 2:07:57. The second place finisher, Ethiopian runner Lelisa Desisa finished right behind him with a time of 2:07:59. In other words, just 2 seconds separated the top two finishers. Ok, great. What about the rest of the runners? Apparently, Cherono was approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes (almost a full two hours) faster than the average finishing time of the rest of runners in the field. That's even more impressive when you consider that runners have to qualify for the Boston Marathon, so the "average" runner in this highly selective field is still fairly fast.
What about other sporting events? Can we similarly distinguish between "excellent" and "elite" in other events as well? Someone determined that the odds of a master-level chess player (in other words, an excellent chess player) beating the currently #1 ranked chess player in the world, Magnus Carlsen, is about 1 in 1,000,000,000!
It's not as easy to quantify performance in other domains, such as music, art, writing, science, or even leadership. However, what is true for sports performance is likely true for these other domains as well - there is a clear separation between "excellent" and "elite." Assuming we can agree on this point, the more interesting question is how does someone become an "elite" performer versus simply just being an "excellent" one. The age-old "Nature versus Nurture" debate is certainly relevant here. Are elite performers born with incredible abilities or are these abilities developed over time? Similarly, we can ask (and many have), "Are leaders born or made?"
There have been a number of books that have attempted to answer this very question. See, for example, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code, Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated, David Epstein's The Sports Gene and Range, and Anders Ericsson's and Robert Pool's Peak. All of these are FANTASTIC books, and I would highly recommend each one.. I think that when it comes to sports performance, these authors would suggest that both "Nature" and "Nurture" are important to success in sports (and certainly some of the other domains too). At least when it comes to "elite" level performance in sports, having good genes (i.e. the "Nature" side of the debate) is definitely important. However, there is no question that having good genes is not sufficient - "elite" athletes achieve "elite-level" performance through training (i.e. the "Nurture" side of the debate).
Okay, so both nature and nurture are important. But how much nurture? If training is important, should athletes begin training in their chosen sport as early as possible? Everyone knows how successful athletes like Tiger Woods, Venus Williams, and Serena Williams were at an incredibly early age. Similarly, they focused on their chosen sports (golf and tennis, respectively) at an incredibly early age. Conversely, it's also well known that basketball superstar, Michael Jordan, was cut from his high school basketball team. He developed his superhuman basketball skills much later in life.
It is this latter question that Arne Gullich, Brooke Mcnamara, and David Hambrick addressed in their recently published meta-analysis, "What makes a champion? Early multidisciplinary practice, not early specialization, predicts world-class performance". Essentially, is it better to focus on just one sport early in an athlete's life, or should athletes spend time developing general athletic skills and abilities through participating in multiple sports? The meta-analysis analyzed the results of 51 different studies (this is a popular topic!) from 14 different countries and involving over 6,000 athletes published between 1998 and 2018. The outcome of interest was the ultimate performance level achieved (world class versus national class).
There's no argument from these investigators (or these studies) that the more time an athlete spends practicing in a specific sport, the greater the chance of elite-level performance (more time, more coaching, and more practice leads to improved performance). Aside from this point, there were three major findings of interest from the meta-analysis. First, the amount of multisport practice discriminated between athletes who achieved world-class levels of performance (world championships, Olympic medals, etc) compared to those who achieved national-class performance (e.g., U.S. championships). Elite, world-class athletes generally spent more time playing several different sports early in life, switched to a singular focus later on, and reached performance milestones at a slower rate than national-class athletes. In other words, world class superstars like Tiger Woods or Serena Williams who started early in life are the exception and not the rule.
Second, athletes who found success in early-stage competitions, such as the Junior Olympics typically started their singular focus on a specific sport early in life. That sort of makes sense, right? If you want to peak early in life (e.g. Junior Olympics), you should start focusing on a specific sport early in life. However, if you want to compete on an elite, world-class level in senior-level competition, you are better off playing multiple sports. The third finding, which is perhaps not as relevant to the present discussion, was that time spent in non-organized, general play (participating in a pick-up basketball game, for example) had negligible effects on both junior-level and senior-level elite performance.
Whether these findings can be universally applied to domains outside of sports is a reasonable question. If so, it seems logical to suggest that acquisition of generalized knowledge in a wide variety of domains should occur before the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge. By extension then, perhaps we should be training general leadership skills in the early career stages before focusing on more technical, domain-specific leadership skills. These questions will certainly require further study. As David Epstein writes in his book, Range, "Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines." He goes on, "In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous."
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