The 10000-hour rule is still good as far as becoming an expert. The people they have studied are world champions, which is very different from "simply" an expert.

So, a lot of sports isn't really about skill...but boils down to DNA...and possibly steroids...

So, a lot of sports isn't really about skill...but boils down to DNA...and possibly steroids...

They repeated the same study for superstar mathematicians and physicists and found that before they had any formal training they were 95% to 99% smarter than everyone else.

The first major finding was that every expert sprinter, male or female, was recognized as exceptionally fast prior to beginning formal training.


This is actually fairly obvious. You don't make the starting team unless you are already exceptional, therefore only exceptional people actually receive training, well mostly anyway.

Baseball coaches don't say, "Well, we're going to pick the worst batters, the worst fielders, the worst base runners,a nd the worst pitchers, and we're going to make them into a team and coach them."

Obviously.

They pick the best who show up to tryouts, and then they coach those people.

Where is the epiphany in this?

I don't understand why this is even a research topic, it's incredibly obvious.

Okay, okay, let's humor ourselves and repeatedly test the obvious observation, apparently nobody in "science" had been doing that. Start with a bad theory and you'll get a bad result, if you design a bad enough "experiment".

Obviously.


Obviously they don't pick pro-athletes as babies, so there is still the question of how much the people have trained on their own before being tried.

What is actually obvious is that there is a limit to human skill, and you can't train people beyond their physical limits.