Is hard work overrated? I share my thoughts on this in today’s episode, which I was inspired to record after watching a TikTok video a friend sent me about the importance of working hard, never missing a day, and why cranking out 100 shots a day is the “simple formula” to help you get a full scholarship.
As you will hear, I strongly disagree with the premise, which has been firmly disproven with emerging science. If you are someone who struggles with balance or taking a day off, this is a great episode to listen to: you will learn how never taking a day off affects your physical and mental health, the science behind the importance of taking breaks and giving your brain the time it needs to rest, and the truth behind the effectiveness of the 10,000 theory Malcolm Gladwell adopted and described in his book Outliers.
I also talk about why rest is such a necessity for young athletes and reveal that even people like Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods have been guilty of embellishing facts and going to extremes for the sake of “hard work.”
TIMESTAMPS:
After playing an excerpt from a LaCrosse player about the importance of working hard on your chosen sport, Brad discusses the ramifications of overdoing it. [00:38]
Yes, practicing hard at your sport should get you away from having your face and body stuck in inactivity and video games. [02:24]
The notion of never taking a day off can easily harbor an unhealthy, obsessive mindset, physical exhaustion and overuse injuries, which are so predominant in competitive youth sports today. [04:27]
MRI studies show different areas of the brain light up depending on the activity like practice versus a tense competitive situation. [07:29]
Balance, rest and a strategic approach are going to be the main variables that will allow the young athlete to thrive and develop during their four years of high school career. {09:28]
What is your child’s natural destiny? The best will rise to the top, not necessarily because they shot 500 shots each day. [12:10]
Brad talks about two high jump competitors whose total experiences in the sport are so different. There’s talent and genetics that come into play. [22:15]
LINKS:
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- The Sports Gene
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TRANSCRIPT:
Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.
Brad (00:38):
The simplified idea that if you just put up the reps, you are going to reach your potential and reach your dreams. I’m going to strongly, so my friend recently sent me a TikTok video about working hard and putting in the hours and the work and getting better and reaching your dreams. One of many such videos. I’m gonna play a brief excerpt for you and show you if you’re watching on YouTube. And then I’m gonna talk about some of my thoughts. Here we go. It’s a lacrosse player sitting on a field. Here comes the dramatic music and his message,
LaCrosse Player (01:17):
The end of a morning session players to Jim for a talk from one of the all time coaching legends in
Brad (01:23):
Our sport legend
LaCrosse Player (01:27):
Who here wants to play at a division? Raise their hands. I’ll tell you how to do it. And on top of that, I’ll tell you how to get a full scholarship to play at a college of your choice. Now, who here wants that? I do every inch. It’s a simple form. He said, from this day forward through your senior year of high school, you have to shoot 100 shots a day. And that’s it. You do that. I guarantee you’ll get a scholarship to a division one college.
Brad (02:01):
That’s it?
LaCrosse Player (02:02):
Here’s the catch. I said, can’t miss a day at a holiday. You can’t miss when it’s pouring down. Rain can’t miss because you had a game the night before or the day of. You can’t miss a day because you’re on vacation. And if you can’t find a goal, make one up. You have to find a way.
Brad (02:24):
Yeah, yeah. Okay. I gotcha, man. Find a way to do it. You know what, uh, I got no problem with a coach springing that message to a bunch of earnest, novice high school athletes, especially in this day and age when we have the predominance of inactivity and video games and being stuck to the mobile device all the time. So yeah, get your butt out of the house and throw down, a sling a hundred shots every single day, and you’ll probably have a wonderful personal growth experience. If not, uh, help you, uh, transition beyond the, uh, pretenders in the lacrosse scene. You’ll, you’ll probably get pretty good. However,, the simplified idea that if you just put up the reps, you are going to reach your potential and reach your dreams. I’m going to strongly disagree with, and this has beenp0o99m/.≥≥≥≥≥≥≥erging science.
Brad (03:25):
I refer you to David Epstein’s great book called The Sports Gene, and Daniel Coyle’s great book called The Talent Code. And in that book, Coyle talks about this concept of deliberate practice. This is where you have to be precise and introduce what my speed golf mentor and former podcast guest Christopher Smith calls “context specificity.” So, Smith argues for context specific practice situations. This means putting yourself into simulated competitive circumstances in practice practices are intense and they have consequences. And that’s a huge distinction from mindlessly slinging up shots to get to your numbers. So you can write it down in your book and carry on thinking that you’re gonna get a full ride to a D one school for any sport, just from putting in the hours of work. Yes, you’re going to get a little bit better, perhaps a lot better, but this is not the true path to excellence in anything.
Brad (04:27):
And that includes in the workplace or in any other, uh, peak performance goal that you have. Similarly, the notion of never taking a day off can easily harbor an unhealthy, obsessive mindset, physical exhaustion and overuse injuries, which are so predominant in competitive youth sports today. It’s a terrible message to convey that you must never take a day off no matter what, not even if it’s snowing. As we saw the guy shooting the lacrosse ball and the video and, uh, all the other stuff, uh, there’s entire documentaries about the subject of the over pressurized-year-round single sport focus, youth sports disaster that it’s become and led to so many emotional and mental health and physical health problems in young athletes. The the notion is absolutely, uh, destructive to share, uh, with anybody at any level. Furthermore, there’s brain research that Christopher Smith references frequently, and this is functional MRI testing where they’re testing the brain in action and revealing that the brain requires rest in order to absorb and wire in the desired technique attributes.
Brad (05:41):
As Daniel Coyle talks about in the talent code, you are wiring, uh, the myelin sheath that surrounds the muscles so that the nervous system can tell the muscles to fire in a specific manner when you’re thinking about, uh, the golf swing or a basketball shot or a lacrosse shot. So the brain needs downtime. It needs time to absorb the lesson. And in fact, when you’re sleeping or when you’re sitting and taking a 10-minute break during a practice to reflect on what just happened, that’s when the brain kicks into gear and does the true learning and the true wiring of the nervous system. Ben Hogan, the legendary golfer, hopefully you’ve heard of one of the greatest, played back in the forties and fifties era. He was known as the most diligent practicer ever. He practiced for hours and hours. But when the experts observed his practice habits, he would take a break every 15 or 20 minutes.
Brad (06:35):
The reason was to smoke a cigarette, but little did Ben Hogan know that unhealthy <laugh> physical habit was actually ideal for the brain to process and absorb what had transpired during the previous 15 to 20 minutes of intense striking of the ball. And that’s how he became the greatest ball striker and one of the greatest players. So we need downtime for the brain. We don’t necessarily need to have a perfect calendar of going out there every day no matter what. It’s just a path to destruction even in the sports where there’s not a high risk of overuse injury. But if you tell a young high school runner who is aspiring to that very coveted division one scholarship or opportunity to run that, they must never take a day off that coach or that parent should get fired on the spot, that’s an absolutely disastrous idea to convey to a young athlete.
Brad (07:29):
Furthermore, with the functional MRI testing, um, we, we talk about how, um, we need that context specific practice. What that means is you need to put yourself under pressure, otherwise the brain is going to activate in a different manner than it does when you actually are under pressure. So with this FMRI test of golfers, they, uh, compare and contrast the difference to, for example, a golfer standing over a three-foot put on the 18th hole to win the match, versus a golfer trying to make twenty-seven 3-foot putts in a row on the practice screen so they can get really good at three-foot putts and build their confidence. Different areas of the brain are lighting up in those two disparate examples. And so when you’re practicing without consequences, and for example, you’re hitting 27 putts in a row, which you would never do in a competitive setting, similarly, you would not shoot 100 lacrosse shots in a row in a game or a competitive setting.
Brad (08:32):
So pretty soon the practice is not context specific and it’s not all qualifying for that, uh, deliberate practice moniker that Daniel Coyle uses in his book. Yeah. What about the, uh, the repetition for the muscle memory? As Christopher Smith talked about on our show in length, there is no such thing as muscle memory. The muscles, muscles do not have memory, they’re just muscles. This is a very simplified, so please, I don’t wanna hear, uh, challenges from the exercise physiologists picking apart my words. But the general concept is that it’s all about the central nervous system, learning how to fire the muscles. So the brain is the control tower, and in this simplified but very important takeaway, if you skimp on sleep, for example, watch what happens to the destruction of your so-called muscle memory because you practice golf for 500 shots the previous day, or 100 lacrosse shots.
Brad (09:28):
It’s all about keeping the brain fresh and stimulated. And in that context, specific example where you’re lighting up the same areas of the brain because you’re putting yourself under pressure. If I, uh, uh, want to, um, uh, carry on with the, the idea of, of giving advice to the young athlete, really, um, some of the most important attributes for athletes to rise to the level of their potential and to achieve a coveted spot in very competitive settings is the key variables, in my opinion, are going to be rest and a balanced lifestyle and a healthy mental approach, which is the exact opposite, I would argue of obsessively trying to never miss a day. Balance, rest and a strategic approach are gonna be the main variables that will, uh, allow them to thrive and develop during their four years of high school career and hopefully four years of college career.
Brad (10:28):
Speaking of the over pressurized experience and the complete disregard for this need for a healthy, balanced approach, John Delony, the author, therapist, does great work on his podcast as well as his books. One’s called Own Your Past, Change Your Future, another one called Building a Non-Anxious Life. Uh, I just heard him talking about how this travel team dynamic and this highly pressurized, extremely expensive, youth sporting experience destroys families because of all the misallocated time, money, and energy, no family vacations because you can’t miss that important two-week block of summer practice on your year round athletic team. These are the things that are pulling apart the fabric of the family, putting in too much stress, too much pressure. We see all kinds of burnout. Again, I said, there’s, there’s so much commentary on this. It’s right in front of our faces.
Brad (11:19):
But it’s very difficult to extricate from that. I had my own challenges as a parent realizing that these were the dynamics in place. And so if you have a young, enthusiastic athlete that wants to progress and reach their potential, you’re kind of compelled to enter the most competitive setting possible with the best coaching and the highest level of competition. And of course, that’s the thing that can easily spin out of hand. And for parents, we have to sit back and sometimes reflect, to what end am I, you know, immersing my child into this extremely pressurized environment, in the hopes of, for example, opening doors for them, getting them opportunities, being fearful of missing out on opportunities because they haven’t joined up with the A team and instead they got put on the B team. All that kind of stuff.
Brad (12:10):
I think we really need to sit back and reflect on what your child’s natural destiny is and a person of any age. What your natural destiny is on, for example, your career path or your fitness goals, and, you know, put things into proper perspective rather than constantly getting caught up in the rat race ideals. Furthermore, I’m going to offer up the idea that the talent will find its way to the top no matter what. Let’s look at my little sister who was, very academic and, uh, achieved at a high level. She was valedictorian at an Ivy League school. I can promise you that that journey did not involve anyone forcing her, pushing her, incentivizing her, nor lingering over her shoulder and watching her as she pursued her natural destiny and her academic dreams. And try as my father, wanted all of his kids to he recommended the Ivy League to all of his kids.
Brad (13:11):
but the rest of us weren’t on that path, and it wasn’t our natural destiny. And so the more attempts to kind of orchestrate something in the sporting world, as well as in the academic world that’s not naturally meant to be, is gonna be met with frustration, you know, dysfunction and burnout. So, similarly, I’m reminded of this great quip from Wayne Gretzky, the greatest, greatest hockey player of all time. Whereas the story goes, a hockey parent approached him and said, Wayne, can you gimme some ideas about how I can get my kid to practice more? And Wayne answered, no one ever had to tell me to practice. So if you go back to the example from the video, and you talk about a really competitive environment where the, the spots are coveted. If you tell a young aspiring, uh, basketball player who’s, dreaming of an NCAA college opportunity to fire up a hundred shots a day, or 500 shots a day, let’s see how far that kid goes versus a kid who has the, the good fortune to have, extremely valuable, coaching and support, um, intense practice and competitive environments where they’re playing against, uh, similarly tough competition and rising and becoming more resilient through defeat and through success, versus someone who’s just, uh, putting in the hours.
Brad (14:34):
There’s absolutely no comparison. And that includes that kid going off and playing another competitive sport at a high level that’s not directly associated with their dreams, and their, their progress as a basketball player. So guys like Steve Nash, the legendary NBA point guard, now retired, and a huge fan of soccer his whole life. Uh, he strongly advocates for multiple sports playing even for the kids who have the highest level of talent and the most, um, opportunity to excel in their best sport. Oh, I can hear the, uh, the counter opinion, uh, from the peanut gallery. Now the hands are raising in the back, Brad, uh, but, but Steph Curry puts up 500 shots every single day. Yeah, he does. And if you examine his videos, you’ll see that he does a great job. He and the, the team staff, uh, to simulate game circumstances during these intense practice sessions.
Brad (15:30):
So he’s taking that single dribble, stepping back and launching a shot just as he would during the game. He’s not lazily throwing up the shots without proper focus and attention and mindfulness just to get to the number 500. You can watch his legendary pre-game warmup routine that he does on the floor if you’re wanna arrive early, an hour and a half early to the arena. And see, it’s phenomenal where he has all these agility, mobility, hand-eye coordination drills, and he goes through this deliberate sequence before every game, putting up shots from all over the floor. People are starting to cheer in the crowd at the end, ’cause he’s, you know, draining threes, and then he’s going back, back, back to the half court line and still draining him. Super amazing, but very deliberate, very deliberate, very precise, very intense. And after all, he’s also Steph Curry.
Brad (16:20):
So, you know, the volume of his shots is sort of incidental to all the other success factors that he has going around him. And as an aside, the guy is such an amazing golfer, and I just, am odd that he can, uh, compete at that level in the summer as a folly while he’s still going through his ar arduous NBA career. And it speaks to his level of athleticism. But I’m also going to contend that it speaks to his level of competitive intensity. So when he gets that bag out of the trunk, when the season’s over and heads over to the range or the golf course, he is applying those same extreme focus and mindfulness principles that he uses in basketball practice to excel at golf with a limited time for practicing and for hitting hundreds of shots every day. Uh, you know, the message on TikTok reminds me, as I said at the outset, there’s so many posturing videos out there about people driving into your head how this is how you need to be successful.
Brad (17:19):
You need to grind, you need to outwork the competition. You need to be relentless. You need to never give up all that stuff. And it’s a, uh, a, a baseline message that has, uh, merit and value and validity on the surface. But we’re talking about sort of a lowest common denominator concept. And I’m also calling out, uh, the videos from Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods because <laugh>, Kobe, you see this all the time where he, he’ll give his little spiel saying like, yeah, well, you know, I woke up at 4:00 AM every day to start training. ’cause I wanted to win that bad, and I was willing to outwork everybody else. And that’s why I came out on top. And guess what, if a competitor found out that I woke up at 4:00 AM and they started copying me, you know what I did? I woke up at 3:00 AM Okay.
Brad (18:09):
A lot of that stuff about Kobe’s extremism is true for better or for worse. And in the case of some teammates that he didn’t really gel with in a team sport, it was for worse, looked no further than the parting of ways of him and Shaquille O’Neal, even after they were at the very top of their sport, three competing for the Lakers, and they just couldn’t get along because they had sort of a varied, uh, philosophical approach to the game. Shaq was that fun loving, big guy that was making movies in Hollywood in the off season. And Kobe was waking up at 4:00 AM heading to the gym, couldn’t understand why all his teammates weren’t with him. So whatever works for an individual, I don’t wanna pull that into your life and say that you have to do it this way or you’re a a, sorry, weak loser.
Brad (18:52):
And I think sometimes that’s the vibe that gets floated out there. Similarly, I just saw a clip with Tiger Woods where he was talking about his daily practice routine. So Tiger says, I’d wake up, I run four miles, then I have some breakfast, uh, then I head over to the range, hit some balls, then I go to the gym, put in some work, then I have lunch, then I go out to the golf course, play some golf, then I come back, then I go run another four miles in the afternoon or evening and then, and this and that. And, I’m going to call royal screaming that the greatest golfer in the world routinely ran eight miles per day with four miles in the morning and four miles in the evening. And, and doing all that work and hitting those hundreds of balls or whatever number he’s talking about.
Brad (19:35):
Why should the greatest athlete of all time, in my opinion, have to embellish anything? I have no idea. Why don’t you just tell the truth? Because your practice routine was super intense and amazing anyway. But I guess it’s like the massive ego or some desire to kind of, you know, um, um, you know, intimidate his competition by seeing how amazingly crazy his daily routine was. So, I guess that that’s part of it. Um, you can see the, um, the unauthorized biography Hank Haney wrote called The Big Miss, my years of Coaching Tiger. And, um, Haney revealed that his morning, his daily routine was indeed truly amazing, and that he practice a lot harder than the other players. But you know, to embellish and sprinkle in that you routinely ran four miles twice a day, that’s BS <laugh>, okay?
Brad (20:28):
That’s a lot. But I really wanna make sure, um, when we’re especially talking about impressionable young athletes, that we are, um, keeping these messages in proper perspective. You’ve probably heard about the 10,000 hour rule, which has been widely dispersed into modern culture and romanticized. It was first popularized by the great storyteller Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling books. But unfortunately, Gladwell took the science and ran with it and misappropriated it and romanticized it in an inaccurate manner. Even the originator of the theory. A scientist named Kay Anders Erickson, uh, has spoken out saying, no, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s been misapplied and misappropriated, uh, to think that basically the, the, the cultural ideal that’s pushed about is that if you, uh, put in 10,000 hours of hard work, it’s something you will achieve excellence, you will achieve mastery.
Brad (21:22):
And the original study came from violin players, uh, virtuosos at the very top of their field that were at a retreat, and they studied all of ’em and, and, um, kind of, uh, analyzed their background and how they got to the mastery level in violin. And it was discovered that they put in an average of around 10,000 total hours. However, there was an extreme disparity. This was the stuff that was not conveyed in the soundbite, the 10,000 hour rule. Some of them put in vastly fewer hours and they were just gifted at violin, right? Mozart wrote his first, uh, grand Symphony, uh, at the age of five or seven or something like that. So there wasn’t any 10,000 hours before this guy just, you know, unleashed his genetic gifts onto the planet. And similarly, there were other people that, you know, worked multiples harder than their counterparts sitting next to them and the second chair that were just as talented.
Brad (22:15):
Another great, uh, disproving and, uh, reen enlightening about this, uh, the folly of the 10,000 hour rule came in, uh, David Epstein’s book, the Sports Gene. And my favorite chapter, wouldn’t you know it, um, it was called The Tail of Two High Jumpers. And what Epstein talked about was the disparate example of these two world-class high jumpers, two of the greatest of all time really. One was Stefan Holm from Sweden, and the other was Donald Thomas from The Bahamas. And Holm was 2004 Olympic gold medalist. He has the world record for the person who has jumped the highest height over his head. He’s five 10 in change, and his best high jump is 2.40 meters, that’s seven 10 and change. So he jumped two feet over his head, relatively small stature for an elite high jumper. Most of ’em are 6 2, 6 3, 6 4, 6 5, 6 7, uh, with that advantage of being higher off the ground to start with, right?
Brad (23:15):
So, Holm had a fantastic career, and this was a guy who was called to the HighJump as a young boy, I think in the book. They talk about how he started practicing in the great Swedish sports program when he was like five or something, <laugh>. And he jumped and jumped and jumped, and 20 years later he won the Olympic Gold medal in Athens and had a wonderful career. And then here’s this character, Donald Thomas, who at the ti, me was a, uh, a basketball player for community college, uh, in the Midwest, I think in Illinois. So he was, uh, sitting around, uh, having pizza and chewing the, chewing the fat with some guys on the track team. And, uh, the, the topic of high jump came up and I think he, uh, as the story goes, the legend goes, he was, uh, saying, oh geez, that’s easy.
Brad (24:00):
I can jump over a six foot bar. I got hops, I can dunk. And the guys on the track team are like, no, you don’t understand how difficult high jump is just ’cause you can get up off the ground on the gym floor. It’s really hard to clear the bar. So, uh, they start, uh, you know, posturing and they go over to the track and take this guy to the track in basketball, high tops. They put a bar up, he jumps over and clears six feet in his first time ever. And they proceed to, uh, get into it a little bit. And supposedly, uh, in his first exposure ever to the high jump, he cleared a seven foot bar, which is definitely national class for a collegiate athlete and, you know, Olympic trials level, uh, right outta the gate. So they marched him right into the track coach’s office and they said, coach, coach, this guy just cleared a, a seven-foot bar in the high jump.
Brad (24:47):
And it’s like, what the heck? So, uh, ask, of course, uh, Donald Thomas got involved in track and field and 18 months later, 18 months after his first exposure ever to a high jump crossbar, he became the world champion in the HighJump winning in the 2007 championships in Osaka, Japan, I believe. And here we are, 17 years later, this guy still competes on the world high jump circuit. He has a long, distinguished career with championship medals, and I believe, uh, probably the longest career at the elite level of any high jumper in history. Uh, so the point is Stefan Holm very likely put in his 10,000 hours to become Olympic gold medalists and champion of the world. And Donald Thomas probably put in, uh, a hundred somewhere on the, on the order of a hundred or 200 or whatever many hours prior to he too, winning a gold medal at the world level.
Brad (25:47):
So, um, there’s talent, there’s genetics, there’s all kinds of other factors, and especially today as you’re looking to optimize your own life and achieve your own personal goals, and if you have young ones that you’re able to motivate, inspire, and guide the same for them, it’s not about pure volume, hard work, and banging your head against the wall. My previous podcast guest, Ashley Merriman, a co-author of Top Dogs, she talked about this in detail during our show where she said, it’s not just about making the effort. You know, there’s the distinction between obsessing with results and focusing on the effort. And we all know it’s important to focus on the process and all that great, uh, talk, but just making the effort is not enough. And she has clarified her earlier writing to say that really what it’s all about is making effort that generates improvement.
Brad (26:40):
So if you’re banging your head against the wall right now with your training methods, or your career is stalled and you’re not getting promoted and you’re putting in all kinds of effort and putting in all kinds of hours, that’s when we have to go and reflect on context, specificity and practice, giving the brain rest and recovery, striving for a healthy, balanced approach, especially as a talented young athlete who’s being immersed into these highly competitive settings. Oh my goodness, we wanna have the correct approach and get as far run screaming far away from this obsessive approach where you’re never missing a day because you saw some video that said that was going to guarantee you a, <laugh> a scholarship to a division one school for lacrosse. And, uh, uh, speaking of that, look here’s my takeaway from watching the video.
Brad (27:33):
Yeah, if you wanna get a D one athletic scholarship to whatever school you want, I would say indeed your best chances are to participate in a lily white, highly affluent sport that has a huge barrier of entry, not a lot of opportunity for a lot of kids to play that. So already you are making a tilted playing field in your advantage just by picking some obscure sport that’s not heavily contested. And if you shoot a hundred shots a day, yeah, maybe so you’ll rise above the competition because the competition isn’t as refined or cutthroat as, for example, a youth distance running is where you tell that kid to never take a day off. They’re gonna be the ones that get injured and the other kids are gonna thrive and continue to ascend. So, um, you know, that’s my, um, that’s my 2 cents for the, the message from the lacrosse player.
Brad (28:24):
And I hope overall this will give us a lot of, um, uh, pause and reflection for doing things the right way, making effort toward improvement, reaching out and getting expert instruction so that you know that you’re putting, uh, you know, your effort into something that is productive and giving you the most value and the most return on investment as opposed to putting your head down and grinding. There you go. What do you think? I’d love to hear from you and continue to engage on this, uh, potentially controversial topic. I was trying to spice it up and light you up a little bit. Um, let’s see. Send me an email podcast@bradventures.com. Thank you so much for listening, watching. Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email, podcast@bradventures.com and visit bradkearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.
