Greebo's Gabble

The following are excerpts from “Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else,” by Geoffrey Colvin and from “Keys to Deliberate Practice,” by Jeff Cobb.  Comments in brackets are mine. ~greebo

Greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better.

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

Keys to deliberate practice:

1. Deliberate practice is highly demanding mentally, requiring high levels of focus and concentration.

2. It is designed specifically to improve performance—to strengthen it beyond its current levels.
This is the part that says you can’t just put in time and expect to get significantly better at anything – you have to consistently stretch yourself, and then stretch some more.

3. It must continue for long of periods of time. This is the 10,000 hours/10 years observation. “Basic research on expert performance suggests that the benefits it generates cannot usually be attained with less than 10 years of continued, vigorous effort.”

4. It must be repeated.
Even though repetition alone won’t get you to the level of excellence, you also won’t get there without out it. Perhaps this why the word “Practice” is repeated three times in the old joke.

5. It requires continuous feedback on results.
Sometimes you can tell on your own whether you are doing things right. I know when I hit a wrong note on the guitar, for example. But very often this is the area where having a great teacher, coach, or mentor can make all the difference.

6. Pre-performance preparation is essential.
This is where goal setting comes in – you have to know where you want to go if you expect to get there. And as the authors stress, goal-setting “should involve not merely outcomes, but also the processes involved in reaching predetermined goals.”

[With sports and in music, to name a few examples, people who engage in deliberate practice are as focused on technique as they are on results. In other words, how you place your finger on the fret and string are as important as producing the correct note. How you stand when you swing the golf club is as important as how far your ball goes when you hit it. This is part of what the author refers to here as "processes." It may or may not apply to poker, but certainly there are other processes in play in poker development. ]

7. It involves self-observation and self-reflection.
As you practice, you need to be continually aware of your own performance and be focused on correcting and adapting as appropriate.

8. It involves careful reflection on performance after practice sessions are completed.
In addition to being aware of your performance as you are practicing, you need to look back on it once you are done and determine where you stand with respect to your overall goals. What might you change the next time to ensure ongoing progress?

In an article from Poker News concerning the Barney Frank Bill and Commerce Casino’s opposition to it, Commerce representative Tom Malkasian compared operators like PokerStars and Full Tilt to a drug cartel, stating that if Congress were ever to decide to legalize marijuana, “certainly no one would suggest that the first federal permits to sell it should go to the Tijuana drug cartel since they have the most money and experience in marketing and distributing the product.”

Where do people come up with such lame brained metaphors? Firstly, there are several cartels operating out of Tijuana, all of whom kill people: their competitors, any opposition from local to federal level, along with families of same and innocent bystanders who happen to get in the way. Secondly, we, the U.S. government, created the Mexican drug cartels.

That’s a long story involving the Sinaloan opium trade, the need for morphine in WWIII, the postwar heroin problem, Bugsy Seigal going down to Mexico to buy as much opium as Sinaloa could produce, Richard Nixon creating the DEA and sending the CIA down to Mexico in 1975 (Operation Condor) to bomb, burn, and defoliate vast acerate, displacing thousands of peasants and wrecking the economy. And of course the Mexican cop, an evil genius named Miguel Angel Alvarado, running their side of the operation also happening to be the second largest opium producer in Sinaloa and using Condor to destroy his rivals.

The Mexican government tried to reenlist the U.S. government to put this thing down, but the DEA was busy in Miami and DC told them to keep their mouths shut because they’d already announced they’d won the drug war in Mexico.

Of course eventually it tore itself apart, Alvarado ended in prison, but not before one of his cartels, the Baja cartel emerged as the primary power. They moved to Tiajuana. The also came across into San Diego. From the mid to late 90s, the Baja cartel *was* the Mexican drug trade. The co-opted the president’s office, they had control over the Baja State Police and the local federales, they probably assassinated a Mexican presidential candidate and certainly gunned down a Catholic cardinal who publicly protested the drug trade. They got away with it.

They branched into cocaine and meth and, when the demand for those dwindled, they started co-opting the marijuana trade.. Eventually DC leaned on them a little, but now there are rival cartels operating on both sides of the border and a bloodbath is in progress.

Just like with Pokerstars and Full Tilt.

On the other hand, in today’s St Pete Times, Robert Mazur [Follow the dirty money] mentioned that Union Bank of California,American Express Bank International, BankAtlantic and Wachovia have all been caught moving huge sums of drug money, but no one went to jail. The banks just admitted to criminal conduct and paid the government a cut of their profits.

“Wachovia alone had moved more than $400 billion for account holders in Mexico, $14 billion in which was in bulk currency that had been driven in armored cars or flow to the United States. Just who in Mexico did anyone think had that kind of cash? Of course the government did a thorough investigation but could find no individuals responsible.”

So, put the cartels in charge of marijuana, legal or otherwise? Hey, it’s already being done by the good old U.S. of A.

Gawd, I think Malkasian has a future in politics if his job at Conmerce doesn’t work out.