Make Your Mark Blog

The Harvard Business Review included an article this month arguing that experts are made, not born. It presents evidence from a variety of studies looking at elite performers who have won international competitions in fields ranging from music and the arts to mathematics and neurolology. A couple of findings I thought were interesting:

• None of the studies were able to identify indicators in young people that predict success later in life
• There is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports and medicine

What does seem to be common amongst all the highly successful people they studied is that they have all devoted thousands of hours developing their skills. Importantly, this involves “deliberate” practice - not just practicing the same things over and over again, but practice that constantly tests and expands skills and abilities. It’s the kind of practice where you force you to do things just outside of your competence.

It also involves seeking out teachers and mentors. The article says:

“The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated students who seek out such feedback. The elite performers we studied knew what they were doing right and concentrated on what they were doing wrong”

“The research also shows that even the most gifted performers require about 10 years (or about 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions. In some fields, apprenticeship takes longer: it now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years or steady practice, on average, before they succeed at the international level.”

The relevance to the MYM campaign? There have been news items like this arguing that entrepreneurial skill is innate, and that support agencies should screen clientele to identify the most promising candidates and turn away the less promising ones. From our campaign’s perspective, I think such reporting can easily discourage people from even bothering. Worse, it provides publicly-funded business support services with excuses for not providing adequate services to the range of clients that come through their doors (e.g., “sorry, I know we haven’t met our targets, but there weren’t enough natural entrepreneurs coming through this quarter”).

Rather than tell all but those who meet some set of criteria not to bother, shouldn’t we instead be informing young people about what it really takes to become a success and be realistic about the time and effort it will take to get there, so those who want to will get on to the path?

Here is an article that was in FT Magazine over the weekend. It’s about a rather “enterprising” approach to apportioning out kidneys to those in need of transplants. Rather than just depending on the health system to search out available kidneys from the recently deceased, or having people selling their own kidneys on the open market… the idea here is to set up a system where friends agree to swap their friends kidneys to people in need.

This comes from Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist), who would rather that the government stop regulating things and start applying costs and taxes to things that we would rather people not do. It is sometimes difficult to tell how serious he is with some of his propositions… but they almost always provide good food for thought.

An interesting article from Jakob Nielson on why you should write articles rather than blogs. He seems very dismissive of blogs (referring to them as “commodity content”), though he does admit that they have their place in selling cheap products.

Are blogs any more than that? Can businesses use them to generate a sense of community around their product or service?

I think there is a huge potential for small businesses to create communities around friendly blogs. Particularly with the rise of decent RSS aggregators and readers that help you to easily skip over content that you aren’t interested in.

Saul Klein who started Open Coffee Club is now involved in Seedcamp. It looks like some amazing people have got together to create Seedcamp - and they are now looking for “the brightest and the best young technology entrepreneurs across Europe, Middle East and Africa”.

Seedcamp will be like a hothouse - helping young entrepreneurs to secure seed capital, develop the right connections through a network of mentors and provide a catalyst for groundbreaking ‘game-changing’ business ideas.

You can find out more and apply here www.seedcamp.com. They are also looking for experienced entrepreneurs, investors, product designers, developers, lawyers, recruiters, marketing specialists etc to help support these young entrepreneurs. The community is already starting to build and there is an excellent blog on the Seedcamp website.