Scott Young

And you can only keep a very limited amount of information in it.

And so I think in a, you know, in an athletic context, that's clearly a case, you know, if you're swinging a golf club, you don't know exactly what the kinematics were of your golf stroke.

You need someone who has the like high speed camera who can like, you know, diagnose your movements and be like, okay, you need to be following through a little bit more.

You need to be going a little bit slower thinking about this.

And so a coach can,

You know, that's why they're so prevalent in these elite professions is because they can step outside and see what you're doing to provide feedback that would be impossible for you to get on your own.

I think there's probably some amount of ability that is in this kind of like basic intelligence.

There's a lot of research showing that, you know, there's this G factor of intelligence.

Some people's brains maybe just have a little bit more working memory capacity that makes them better at handling some things.

Maybe they have, you know, certain circuitry in their brain that makes it better for them to learn social skills or better for them to learn physical skills.

But I mean, it really is a mystery.

I don't think that we've figured out, oh, okay, this is why this person is better at this because, you know, it's this exact thing going on in their head.

Well, I think that's true.

I think that there's definitely some hypothetical ceiling to how good you get at things, but I think this problem that I was talking about with the 10,000-hour rule, which is that most people plateau well below their ultimate attainable ability because of this process of the brain to...

Take skills that you repeatedly do and try to make them automatic and low effort.

So, you know, taking the driving the car example, what my brain is doing as I'm repeatedly driving is not like just steadily getting better at driving at the maximum rate, but trying to automate the little things that I'm already doing so that they require less and less effort.

And again, that's adaptive.

But if I was trying to be the best driver in the world, that's maybe actually something I have to work against because, you know, the way that I started driving, the little sort of

processes that I'm using for driving are maybe not optimal so an example I think maybe makes more sense is typing on a keyboard so some people learn the touch typing method where you have your hands on the home row and you type that way and it is faster other people they do the hunt and peck now if you hunt and peck and you keep hunting and pecking you are going to get faster and it's going to become more automatic to hunt and peck but you're never going to type as fast as someone who learns to touch type properly

So in this way, the kind of continuing to hunt and pack doesn't actually make you this really great typist.