People don't always tell the truth. I dance frequently with almost beginner followers and if I see they are dancing above their level, I ask for a dancing history. Many try to minimize their dancing history to avoid being criticized for not dancing that good they should be dancing in their opinion. Or tell me they didn't dance previously at all. Then I ask more specific did they dance something else previously. Some of them say yes. Some, after further questions, remember they danced some ballet or jazz when they were younger, but think it doesn't count. Or I find out later from other girls that they were attending some oriental dancing classes with them etc ... For other girls it turns out they indeed didn't dance, but are active in some sport activity and in many of them, good body control is needed. Etc
The Right Stuff?
- Thread starter toan-hoang
- Start date
People don't always tell the truth. I dance frequently with almost beginner followers and if I see they are dancing above their level, I ask for a dancing history. Many try to minimize their dancing history to avoid being criticized for not dancing that good they should be dancing in their opinion. Or tell me they didn't dance previously at all. Then I ask more specific did they dance something else previously. Some of them say yes. Some, after further questions, remember they danced some ballet or jazz when they were younger, but think it doesn't count. Or I find out later from other girls that they were attending some oriental dancing classes with them etc ... For other girls it turns out they indeed didn't dance, but are active in some sport activity and in many of them, good body control is needed. Etc
GroovyMambo
Changui
I read this book a couple of years ago. If I recall correctly, I learned about it while reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Talent Is Overrated is definitely a good read!
toan-hoang
Son
Interesting comments all...
But let me give you some food for thought... I go to congresses and events and see thousands of "motivated" people try to learn and master Salsa. These people take time off work, travel and invest so much capitol you cannot really say they are not motivated. Yet, such a small percentage of these people actually thrive... The truth hurts... but less than 5% of any congress will represent what I refer to as exceptional and most would have been dancing for years.
Motivation is always a good thing don't get me wrong, but I am sure that for most of us our motivation has gone up and down in the years. I have the same issue with the gym but the key to improvement here is points 3 - Knowing what you want (which gives focus) and point 4 - determination and discipline (which gives drive). I think that this is true for all learning activities. This could be why martial artist are generally good at Salsa because they have solid focus and discipline (it is almost a religion).
In the article you mention that you don't normally give privates, but made an exception in this case. I speculate that if you gave more privates you'd find that items 2, 3 and 4 are necessary and sufficient for having the "right stuff".
This actually depends on the type of dancers you want to teach and create. Plus 1) I have very little free time, 2) I get loads of request for privates, 3) I am not financially motivated... which means I can choose who I would like to work with. I like working with people with a passion and love of the music.
For me this creates a connection and understanding of the dance that those with just 2,3,4 will take years learning (if ever). I believe that the student in this article has a better connection to the music than I have, unlike me she has not studied or read books about it but she truly feels and connects with the music in almost an intuitive way. I think the best base for learning any new dance and thriving is to love the music that the dance is based on. Yes, you can grow to love this, but that takes time...
But let me give you some food for thought... I go to congresses and events and see thousands of "motivated" people try to learn and master Salsa. These people take time off work, travel and invest so much capitol you cannot really say they are not motivated. Yet, such a small percentage of these people actually thrive... The truth hurts... but less than 5% of any congress will represent what I refer to as exceptional and most would have been dancing for years.
Motivation is always a good thing don't get me wrong, but I am sure that for most of us our motivation has gone up and down in the years. I have the same issue with the gym but the key to improvement here is points 3 - Knowing what you want (which gives focus) and point 4 - determination and discipline (which gives drive). I think that this is true for all learning activities. This could be why martial artist are generally good at Salsa because they have solid focus and discipline (it is almost a religion).
In the article you mention that you don't normally give privates, but made an exception in this case. I speculate that if you gave more privates you'd find that items 2, 3 and 4 are necessary and sufficient for having the "right stuff".
This actually depends on the type of dancers you want to teach and create. Plus 1) I have very little free time, 2) I get loads of request for privates, 3) I am not financially motivated... which means I can choose who I would like to work with. I like working with people with a passion and love of the music.
For me this creates a connection and understanding of the dance that those with just 2,3,4 will take years learning (if ever). I believe that the student in this article has a better connection to the music than I have, unlike me she has not studied or read books about it but she truly feels and connects with the music in almost an intuitive way. I think the best base for learning any new dance and thriving is to love the music that the dance is based on. Yes, you can grow to love this, but that takes time...
Surely it is not only about motivation and hours of practising. It is a combination of various things. And one of them is "talent" or whatever you call it. Like some people are born more clever than another, some people are born with greater chances to become a dancer than another. And even with both things being equal, some of them are lucky to find good teachers and some not. Etc
My best ballroom standard teacher was claiming that his dance partner always needed about 1/5 time that he needed to learn any figure
Checked briefly the book btw.
My best ballroom standard teacher was claiming that his dance partner always needed about 1/5 time that he needed to learn any figure
Checked briefly the book btw.
Ciaran Hegarty
Son
“Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.” Neal Stephenson, from the novel Quicksilver.
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Ciaran Hegarty
Son
So, what's your thinking on this topic? You're probably one of the few people who don't think that either talent or hard work (or a combination) is the key to high levels of achievement.
No, I do believe that a combination of both is what is required (although given a choice between being lucky and good, I'm going for luck every single time). When I said that the blurb wasn't representative of the way I think, what I meant was that I don't fall into the asserted category of "most people" who believe the key to success is either talent or hard work (not both), so the selling point of the book appears to be the dispelling of a myth that I don't believe in anyway.
First.. congresses...Im pretty sure there is a high % of them that, go for the social activities, and the learning is a bye product. Most people in the world of dance ( pick any genre ) , are not as regular attendees to their own local scenes, IF they even have one. And, if they do, the standards of dance( and music ) may be at a very low level .
2nd.. many people are quite content with their level of accomplishment. Ive witnessed these types for many yrs ( states-side )for e.g. with pretty much most latinos. To them ,dance isnt all about whose the better dancer ( or the best ), but for most, purely a social gathering.
Europeans"infected " the world thru dance comps, and whilst it did raise more awareness , it also created a lot of false images , of what one should try to attain, to be accepted in the social dance strata.
Salsa, seems to be going down the same pathway that B/room pioneered, note the number of Comps, that are now taking place.. the" thin end of the wedge " ? .
A side note.. talent v dedication.. a lot of good teaching ,is steering the student down the correct pathway.
theres a famous quote by a re-knowned dance teacher, who said.. " I didnt realise until after one yrs teaching that, not ALL students wish to become world champions ". i never lost sight of that .
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My impression from those congresses I visited - actually many people are going to congresses seriously hoping they will learn much from 'big names' ... unfortunately, it usually doesn't happen because those big classes are not very good place to learn anything because there is just too many people and organization isn't always very good, so those classes are usually say 80% show and 20% learning, just that people are not aware of that, watching instructor dancing on the stage and thinking they are doing almost as good ... so the result is pretty much the same as if it were mostly because of social activities as you stated
Granted the elements required for dancing salsa are different, but I found this food for thought:
Sports stars win with the luck of the genes
PUBLISHED: 19 Sep 2013 11:07:38 | UPDATED: 21 Sep 2013 00:47:09
(The Australian Financial Review)
Donald Thomas proved that natural talent plays a major role in winning when he was crowned high jump world champion after only eight months of training. Photo: Getty
Ed Smith
Sport has done a swift U-turn on the idea of talent. To be called talented or a “natural” was once the highest praise. It tapped into the ideal of gentlemanly effortlessness. Many athletes went along with the lazy labels attached to them, and “naturals” – despite the casual image they presented to the world – worked a lot harder at their craft than they let on.
That situation has now reversed. Today’s sportsmen have to pretend that their success can be explained entirely by hard work and has nothing to do with innate ability. During the BBC’s coverage of the London Olympics, the athletics pundits accidentally stumbled into a conversation about genes and talent. Realising that they were veering too close to the truth, they quickly retreated to safety, talking about “hard yards” and “tireless effort”, presumably to avoid accusing a champion of being blessed with good genes and thus robbing him or her of the ultimate modern accolade: victory earned purely through exertion and suffering.
“Talent” has become a dirty word. How that happened tells us a great deal about the ways in which our preferred myths have changed. A plethora of self-help books has tried to eliminate the idea of talent altogether, replacing it with the speculative theory that greatness follows simply from 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. Talent, in this analysis, is an old wives’ tale designed to keep you in your place, a cruel hoax that crushes dreams and thwarts ambition.
Nature over nurture
The war on talent uses this language of humane optimism, promising to decode and commodify a blueprint that can turn everyone and anyone into Lionel Messi or, if you prefer, Richard Wagner. The idea conveniently dovetails with the “tiger mother” school of parenting (founded by the Chinese- American law professor Amy Chua), in which children are merely clay models that can be contorted into their parents’ preferred shape.
The chief beneficiaries of the war on talent will be not tomorrow’s athletes but tomorrow’s psychotherapists, who can look forward to a generation of future clients struggling to understand how, by some cruel quirk of mischance, they did not become Roger Federer, despite putting in the full 10,000 hours. So full credit to David Epstein, a Sports Illustrated journalist with a serious and deep knowledge of genetics and sports science, for his terrific and unblinking new book, The Sports Gene, a timely corrective to the talent denial industry.
Some athletes are clearly naturally gifted. In 2006, Donald Thomas, a basketball player from the Bahamas, was boasting about his slam-dunking prowess to fellow university students on the track team. They challenged him to jump six feet and six inches at the high jump. Without any technique, Thomas cleared seven feet. The previously unamused athletes rushed Thomas over to the athletics office. In 2007, after only eight months of training and despite finding high jump “kind of boring”, Thomas was crowned world champion. If he’d possessed even a rudimentary grasp of technique, he would have shattered the world record. Ten thousand hours? There wasn’t time. No, the key was Thomas’s remarkable Achilles tendons, 10 and a quarter inches long and unusually stiff – a little like a kangaroo’s.
There are also definable types of genetically inherited talents. Epstein was a middle-distance runner at college and trained with a close friend and rival. His friend began as by far the better athlete but Epstein gradually surpassed him. Initially Epstein congratulated himself on his own guts, presuming that he had pushed himself harder in training. Then, as he started to watch more closely, he realised that they were doing exactly the same things, suffering the same pain. The difference was not determination but how their bodies responded to training. His friend had a higher “baseline” of aerobic fitness (if they were both forbidden from exercising, his friend would emerge naturally fitter), whereas Epstein had greater “trainability”: his body improved more when it was pushed. The greatest sportsmen, Epstein argues, have both a high baseline and high trainability.
Mystery of success
That is what I witnessed at first hand as a professional sportsman. Success depends on a mysterious compound (not a mixture, as the elements interact to create an end product that is unrecognisable from its constituent parts) of several factors. First, there is baseline talent and trainability; second, those gifts need to be exposed to coaching, opportunity and competitive culture; and third, they must be marshalled and sustained by the personality of the athlete.
Epstein’s book made me revisit my ideas about talent and genes. In my book Luck, I predicted a paradoxical renaissance for pure talent. Professionalism, with its homogenisation of training principles, could one day lead to a situation in which it is almost impossible to gain an advantage through practice (an advantage that was clearly possible in the early decades of professional sport, when some teams were slow to embrace proper commitment). However, when everyone trains optimally, just as when no one trains at all, sport will be dominated by the most naturally talented.
Epstein makes a strong case for a more interesting future. Given that everyone has a different phenotype, everyone has a different optimal training regime – there can be no final and perfectly transferable optimal practice routine. So coaches and physiologists should abandon their tendency to believe that they know what’s best for everyone and instead encourage divergence, irreverence, tinkering and trial and error. Groupthink, as ever, has it all wrong.
More stories in Friday’s Review section: China sees an opportunity for itself in central asia, why The Clash’s Joe Strummer stood for a generation, the race is on for the 2016 US presidential election, the Plantagenets and the appearance of governance in the Middle Ages.
The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete, David Epstein, Yellow Jersey. Ed Smith writes the Left Field column in the New Statesman. As a cricketer he played for England in three test matches against South Africa in 2003. ©New Statesman, all rights reserved.
New Statesman
The Australian Financial Review
Source: http://www.afr.com/p/lifestyle/review/sports_stars_win_with_the_luck_of_ZzMnjBxPie5NySBNBt3i9N
Sports stars win with the luck of the genes
PUBLISHED: 19 Sep 2013 11:07:38 | UPDATED: 21 Sep 2013 00:47:09
(The Australian Financial Review)
Donald Thomas proved that natural talent plays a major role in winning when he was crowned high jump world champion after only eight months of training. Photo: Getty
Ed Smith
Sport has done a swift U-turn on the idea of talent. To be called talented or a “natural” was once the highest praise. It tapped into the ideal of gentlemanly effortlessness. Many athletes went along with the lazy labels attached to them, and “naturals” – despite the casual image they presented to the world – worked a lot harder at their craft than they let on.
That situation has now reversed. Today’s sportsmen have to pretend that their success can be explained entirely by hard work and has nothing to do with innate ability. During the BBC’s coverage of the London Olympics, the athletics pundits accidentally stumbled into a conversation about genes and talent. Realising that they were veering too close to the truth, they quickly retreated to safety, talking about “hard yards” and “tireless effort”, presumably to avoid accusing a champion of being blessed with good genes and thus robbing him or her of the ultimate modern accolade: victory earned purely through exertion and suffering.
“Talent” has become a dirty word. How that happened tells us a great deal about the ways in which our preferred myths have changed. A plethora of self-help books has tried to eliminate the idea of talent altogether, replacing it with the speculative theory that greatness follows simply from 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. Talent, in this analysis, is an old wives’ tale designed to keep you in your place, a cruel hoax that crushes dreams and thwarts ambition.
Nature over nurture
The war on talent uses this language of humane optimism, promising to decode and commodify a blueprint that can turn everyone and anyone into Lionel Messi or, if you prefer, Richard Wagner. The idea conveniently dovetails with the “tiger mother” school of parenting (founded by the Chinese- American law professor Amy Chua), in which children are merely clay models that can be contorted into their parents’ preferred shape.
The chief beneficiaries of the war on talent will be not tomorrow’s athletes but tomorrow’s psychotherapists, who can look forward to a generation of future clients struggling to understand how, by some cruel quirk of mischance, they did not become Roger Federer, despite putting in the full 10,000 hours. So full credit to David Epstein, a Sports Illustrated journalist with a serious and deep knowledge of genetics and sports science, for his terrific and unblinking new book, The Sports Gene, a timely corrective to the talent denial industry.
Some athletes are clearly naturally gifted. In 2006, Donald Thomas, a basketball player from the Bahamas, was boasting about his slam-dunking prowess to fellow university students on the track team. They challenged him to jump six feet and six inches at the high jump. Without any technique, Thomas cleared seven feet. The previously unamused athletes rushed Thomas over to the athletics office. In 2007, after only eight months of training and despite finding high jump “kind of boring”, Thomas was crowned world champion. If he’d possessed even a rudimentary grasp of technique, he would have shattered the world record. Ten thousand hours? There wasn’t time. No, the key was Thomas’s remarkable Achilles tendons, 10 and a quarter inches long and unusually stiff – a little like a kangaroo’s.
There are also definable types of genetically inherited talents. Epstein was a middle-distance runner at college and trained with a close friend and rival. His friend began as by far the better athlete but Epstein gradually surpassed him. Initially Epstein congratulated himself on his own guts, presuming that he had pushed himself harder in training. Then, as he started to watch more closely, he realised that they were doing exactly the same things, suffering the same pain. The difference was not determination but how their bodies responded to training. His friend had a higher “baseline” of aerobic fitness (if they were both forbidden from exercising, his friend would emerge naturally fitter), whereas Epstein had greater “trainability”: his body improved more when it was pushed. The greatest sportsmen, Epstein argues, have both a high baseline and high trainability.
Mystery of success
That is what I witnessed at first hand as a professional sportsman. Success depends on a mysterious compound (not a mixture, as the elements interact to create an end product that is unrecognisable from its constituent parts) of several factors. First, there is baseline talent and trainability; second, those gifts need to be exposed to coaching, opportunity and competitive culture; and third, they must be marshalled and sustained by the personality of the athlete.
Epstein’s book made me revisit my ideas about talent and genes. In my book Luck, I predicted a paradoxical renaissance for pure talent. Professionalism, with its homogenisation of training principles, could one day lead to a situation in which it is almost impossible to gain an advantage through practice (an advantage that was clearly possible in the early decades of professional sport, when some teams were slow to embrace proper commitment). However, when everyone trains optimally, just as when no one trains at all, sport will be dominated by the most naturally talented.
Epstein makes a strong case for a more interesting future. Given that everyone has a different phenotype, everyone has a different optimal training regime – there can be no final and perfectly transferable optimal practice routine. So coaches and physiologists should abandon their tendency to believe that they know what’s best for everyone and instead encourage divergence, irreverence, tinkering and trial and error. Groupthink, as ever, has it all wrong.
More stories in Friday’s Review section: China sees an opportunity for itself in central asia, why The Clash’s Joe Strummer stood for a generation, the race is on for the 2016 US presidential election, the Plantagenets and the appearance of governance in the Middle Ages.
The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete, David Epstein, Yellow Jersey. Ed Smith writes the Left Field column in the New Statesman. As a cricketer he played for England in three test matches against South Africa in 2003. ©New Statesman, all rights reserved.
New Statesman
The Australian Financial Review
Source: http://www.afr.com/p/lifestyle/review/sports_stars_win_with_the_luck_of_ZzMnjBxPie5NySBNBt3i9N
Ciaran Hegarty
Son
Why is that writer intent on setting up a false choice between either having talent or working hard? Why is it that "the ultimate modern accolade" is "victory earned purely through exertion and suffering"? Since when has talent been "a dirty word", and when in the name of God did this "war on talent" start? When exactly did it require proof that having natural ability greatly increases your chances of victory, when exactly did people ever believe that being talented was worthless, and for how long exactly has it been a revelation that different people respond differently to different training methods? People have known since there were stories to tell that it takes a mix of the two qualities to make one great, that talent is incomplete without effort and that effort on its own will never yield the same rewards as effort that is crowned by talent. Why this person seems determined to misrepresent historical and current truths so that he can make a point which is blatantly self evident and which has been made countless times before is utterly beyond me.
Because writing an original good story requires, depending how you look at it, talent, hard work, or a bit of both.
Ciaran Hegarty
Son
Because writing an original good story requires, depending how you look at it, talent, hard work, or a bit of both.
bailar y tocar
Son Montuno
"Intuitive" or "holistic" learning is not unusual. People who are good at it learn very fast.
bailar y tocar
Son Montuno
My impression from those congresses I visited - actually many people are going to congresses seriously hoping they will learn much from 'big names' ...
Most people (in the US) go to congresses for the social dancing with other people who go to congresses.
Based on my observation, the people who go to a lot of workshops are not the same people who dance all night.
So.. the congress attendee distribution by interest is bimodal.
That sounds like my (limited) experience in the UK and Ireland also.
Maybe you´ve read fewer self-help books than the writer in question, Ciaran?
(Which is most probably a good thing... but your point is taken!)
Sabrosura
Son Montuno
There is absolutely no evidence for this. All the evidence points to the contrary. Evidence shows that people who are "smarter", learn things easily, etc., do indeed have an advantage in the beginning. But after that beginning phase in which they will learn faster, the difference between them and "less talented" people greatly diminishes as they progress through the learning/practice process.
Not the point of this discussion. Hey, we are all very lucky to be alive. There are people in many parts of the world who would consider themselves very lucky if they had enough food to eat, forget about learning to dance salsa.
Yes, in the beginning, as explained above, she has an advantage. But that doesn't mean that if he puts in more practice time than her he will not eventually get better than her.
When it comes to external limits to human achievement, there really are very few.
It is a little surprising to me that so many SFers seem to subscribe to the "talent" / "luck" of high achievers mantra, as this belief tends to be a strong predictor (inversely proportional) of the level of proficiency/success likely to be achieved in many areas.
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