The limited appeal of 'raw-chaw' results

Francis Wade, Guest Columnist

We Jamaicans love nothing more than seeing a raw, untrained underdog use home-grown methods to defeat a famous, stuck-up sophisticate.  It's true in many competitive arenas such as football, music and business, to name a few.

The creative force that is generated from our passionate support of the 'likkle man' stands out in a world that generally worships big, powerful and moneyed interests.

By itself, there's nothing wrong with this, but it often turns into something bad when we fail to help the underdog grow.

This happens because we don't understand the true factors that produce results in life, regardless of the field of endeavour.

We fool ourselves into thinking that the hero who makes it after a humble start is all there is to the story. We ignore the larger truth that everyone who becomes good at something must pay very costly dues, and pay them repeatedly just to remain near the top of their game.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes a similar point based on research done with top musicians. Those who made it to the highest levels were the ones who put in the largest number of hours of quality practice. Their success is easy to predict.

Social scientists have agreed that expertise in any field is developed only after approximately 10,000 hours of focused, challenging practice.

VIRTUE IN REPETITION

For most of us, the idea of practising a single discipline for 10,000 hours is insurmountable. We wince at the idea of grinding away at one thing for that long, especially when there's no guarantee of success. To make matters worse, more recent research has shown that these hours don't represent the ordinary kind of 'fool around' practice that I remember from my Sunlight Cup cricket days. Instead, the research reveals that practice must:

1. Zone in on weaknesses

The best practice is all about working hard on the soft-spots in your performance. This effort might be heart-wrenching at first, simply because we often feel like failures when we engage in weak areas and see few results in the short term.

2. Use lots of feedback

Finding these weak spots can be difficult without quality feedback. It might come from a coach's criticism, our marks on a test or quiz or the score we get in an interactive game - anything that shows us where we need to improve based on actual performance. What makes video games compelling is the fact that they offer instant and constant feedback, allowing players to make immediate adjustments.

3. Maintain a commitment to excellence

Bob Marley was often one of the last to leave the studio each night as he fought for high standards in each recording. He also produced music that was accessible to a global audience in a deliberate (and successful) attempt to 'cross over'. It earned him few fans in Jamaica, and he became a mainstream hit at home only when his excellence was recognised overseas. It took a certain sophistication in his music (and marketing) to pull this off and that came only when he separated himself from the short-term, local success that local artistes were having at the time.

APPRECIATING TALENT

Too often, we cry down artistes like Marley as they fight to develop anything above the basic skills needed to produce raw-chaw results, and we unintentionally block them from fulfilling their potential.

We need to appreciate that the untrained underdog can only achieve so much, and that there comes a point in everyone's development when they must make a choice to commit themselves to mastery.

When they do, it sets them apart from others and this simply doesn't take place by dabbling and remaining at the level of a talented struggler.

There are many around us who fit that profile and we should encourage them to put in the hours required to grow up in their chosen discipline.

Let's get out of their way, especially in the workplace where we often make fun of those who work hard and long for fear that they'll make the rest of us look bad.

Instead, it only makes us all lose out on the material gain that could be all ours as families, companies and as a nation.

Francis Wade is a consultant with Framework Consulting. Send feedback to columns@fwconsulting.com