Practice All You Want, But It Won't Make You Perfect
So you make your son practice the violin for two hours every day after school. Your daughter takes tennis lessons four times a week. And you've done the Iron Man twice but still can't run a mile faster than nine minutes. A new study has found, alas, that you can practice all you want, but if you don't have it, you'll never be the next Nadal. Or even the next Djokovic. "Some people are really just naturals who have the capacity to make the leap from good to great," writes David Worthington at smartplanet.com. "The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice," Michigan State psychology professor Zach Hambrick said in a press release . Hambrick found, studying chess players and musicians, that rigorous practice only accounted for a third of skill level differences, while innate ability, age and intelligence helped people mak...