There’s a difference between becoming very good at something–becoming good enough to be a highly successful professional–and becoming Rooney- whose performance places him in the top.

Here are a couple, taken from a comment I posted on his blog. Reading it caused me to put together a few initial thoughts on some of the differences between seeking to be a teacher and seeking to be Wayne Rooney or Usain Bolt. (Aside to Alex: Sorry the football career didn’t pan out but I’m pretty happy you do what you do and am confident the world more needs insightful educators like you than it needs another goal scorer. My UK colleague Alex Quigley, whose blog I regularly read and enjoy, recently posted a thoughtful piece in which he did some reconciling of the practice/biology tension… and in which he tried to plumb the depths of his own failure to become another Wayne Rooney. And either way there’s a lot to reconcile in an argument as weighty and complex as his if you’re thinking about the roles of training and “natural” skill in people development. But I also understand why people might think so. I DON’T think Epstein’s book is an argument against the power of practice and I don’t think David would see it that way either.

Others who have read it often interpret it to be an argument against practice, however, and as that’s something I believe in very strongly, they sometimes ask how I reconcile David’s book with Practice Perfect and my arguments about developing teachers. It’s an amazing contribution the discourse about people development, genetics and athletics. It may be one of the best researched and most intellectually challenging books I’ve ever read- mostly in terms of how it forced me to challenge (and change) my assumptions about nature versus nurture. David Epstein’s The Sports Gene has to be one of the two or three best books I’ve read in the last year.

David epstein books