專欄足球

Adam Smith can teach us a lot about succeeding in sports

Adam Smith’s most profound insight was on the relationship between the division of labour and the extent of the market. The old sage would even have been able to explain this summer’s sporting results.

Germany’s crushing defeat of Brazil at the World Cup was an extraordinary event. And so was the metamorphosis of the Tour de France into the Tour de Yorkshire. Both the rout of the Brazilians by the Germans and British success on two wheels seem to reinforce the thesis touted by authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, Geoff Colvin, Daniel Coyle, David Brooks and Matthew Syed – that hard work trumps talent. In Mr Gladwell’s world, 10,000 hours of practice will make you a superstar.

Yet it is not just modesty that leads me to suspect that even after 10,000 hours I would not be ready to perform at Wembley Stadium. Academic research confirms this common sense. David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz are co-authors of a study in which they conclude that Messrs Gladwell and Brooks “are simply wrong . . . individual differences in performance on many complex tasks arise from both acquired characteristics and basic abilities”. If you want a Nobel Prize, you had better be very smart.

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約翰•凱

約翰•凱(John Kay)從1995年開始爲英國《金融時報》撰寫經濟和商業的專欄。他曾經任教於倫敦商學院和牛津大學。目前他在倫敦經濟學院擔任訪問學者。他有著非常輝煌的從商經歷,曾經創辦和壯大了一家諮詢公司,然後將其轉售。約翰•凱著述甚豐,其中包括《企業成功的基礎》(Foundations of Corporate Success, 1993)、《市場的真相》(The Truth about Markets, 2003)和近期的《金融投資指南》(The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry)。

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