有一个有趣的现象，就是那些参加世界杯的顶级足球运动员大多数是上半年出生的。如果把欧洲国家青年队算进去，这个现象就更明显了。就拿最新一届的英格兰队来说，有一半的青少年选手出生在 1 月、2 月和 3 月，另一半选手出生在其他 9 个月里。在德国青年队中，52 人出生在一年的前三个月中，而只有 4 人出生在后三个月中。

为什么会发生这种异常的事情呢？这里有四个猜测：a）某些星座的人具有特殊的足球天赋；b）冬季出生的孩子具有较高的氧容量，增强了足球运动员的耐力；c）足球狂热家长更可能在春天怀孕，那是一年中赛季最热闹的时候；d）以上答案都不对。

58 岁的 Florida 州立大学心理学教授 Anders Ericsson 强烈地认为应该选择 (d)。Ericsson 是专家表现运动（Expert Performance Movement）的领导者，参加该自由组织的一些学者试图回答一个重要的问题：当一个人对某件事情非常擅长时，是什么使他做的如此好？30 年前 Ericsson 进行的第一个实验是关于记忆力的：训练一个人去听然后重复一组随机数字。实验结果显示随着训练时间的增加，实验对象的记忆力明显增强。通过此次实验以及后续的一些实验表明记忆力本身并不是由遗传决定的。由此 Ericsson 得出结论：记忆力与其说是先天的天生（intuitive one）倒不如说是后天的练习（cognitive exercise）。

Ericsson 和他的同事通过对众多领域内的专家进行跟踪细致研究，得出一个令人吃惊的结论：人们过度高估了天赋的作用，任何领域内的专家都是后天培养的，而不是天生习得的。

具体说，专家所谓的才能很可能不是天生的，而是通过“刻意训练"（deliberate practice）逐步获得的。这种刻意训练并不是简单的重复，而是这样一种有机的过程：

（1） 设定特定的目标（setting specific goals）

（2） 能得到及时的反馈（obtaining immediate feedback ）

（3） 对方法和结果同样注重（concentrating as much on technique as on outcome ）

三者紧密联系，相辅相成，缺一不可。尤其对于第二条“及时反馈”至关重要，也是最容易被忽略的，如果不能得到及时而有效的反馈，只能原地踏步而无法进步。如果一个人长期的以这样方式进行训练，他一般就能成为该领域内的专家。

Ericsson 的研究也说明了一件事实，在选择人生道路的时候，要尽量选择自己喜欢的事情做，对于自己不太喜欢的事情，往往很难花费大量的时间进行训练，导致中途放弃，最终一事无成。

Ericsson 的观点也能解释足球运动员的例子：为什么大多数优秀的足球运动员出生在一年中的前几个月？欧洲的青少年足球运动员选拔制度，是按年龄段划分的，以 12 月 31 日为界；同一年中 1 月 1 日出生的孩子，和 12 月 31 日出生的孩子是分在一个年龄段里的；教练在选拔人才时，往往会选择那些看上去更成熟的孩子。于是，那些出生在年初的孩子会得到更多的机会，更专业的训练。长此以往，他们自然就会比同龄的其他孩子做得更出色。

附：原文连接

A Star Is Made，原载于 2006 年 5 月 7 日《New York Times Magazine》。

A Star Is Made

By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

Published: May 7, 2006

The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month’s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

What might account for this anomaly? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in “none of the above.” He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. “With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20,” Ericsson recalls. “He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers.”

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person “encodes” the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task – playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers – whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming – are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love – because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

“I think the most general claim here,” Ericsson says of his work, “is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn’t spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

Ericsson’s conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require “talents” they previously believed they didn’t possess.

And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an exception. That’s because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.

The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a mammogram, she doesn’t know for certain if there is breast cancer or not. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or years later, when no cancer develops. Without meaningful feedback, a doctor’s ability actually deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of training. “Imagine a situation where a doctor could diagnose mammograms from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for each case,” he says. “Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice.”

If nothing else, the insights of Ericsson and his Expert Performance compatriots can explain the riddle of why so many elite soccer players are born early in the year.

Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick? He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback – to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem – that will turn them into elites.

This may be bad news if you are a rabid soccer mom or dad whose child was born in the wrong month. But keep practicing: a child conceived on this Sunday in early May would probably be born by next February, giving you a considerably better chance of watching the 2030 World Cup from the family section.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” More information on the research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.

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