We are talking about Stanford here. I don't know, but to me it feels like someone getting into the NBA or trying out for the Olympics having a problem with hard work.

If you can't do the work why take up a spot in one of the best schools in the land? Isn't that a valid question? Especially in the hypercompetitive world we live in?

From what I understand, successful professional athletes tend to train very hard during dedicated practice hours (something like 30 hours per week), but then have rich lives outside their training, get enough sleep every night, etc.

Trying to do more than 30 hours of intense creative work per week yields diminishing returns, while leading to worse and worse negative health effects as you increase hours. People working 60+ hours per week are wrecking themselves for bad results.

> From what I understand, successful professional athletes tend to train very hard during dedicated practice hours (something like 30 hours per week), but then have rich lives outside their training, get enough sleep every night, etc.

I train hundreds of professional athletes. The majority of them do not have rich lives outside of their training. Most of them have very unbalanced lives that center around their sport, training, and everything to do with it. Most relationships fail inside pro sports for several obvious reasons.

Most have some form of mental health issues.

We watch them on TV and we expect greatness, but as long as it is not us paying the cost to get there, we don't mind.

Thanks for the reply. How much do the athletes you train practice?

Do you think the exclusive focus helps their performance at their sport?

Do you think competition selects for people with mental health problems, or causes mental health problems?

Is there a noticeable difference between athletes who burn out in a few years vs. the ones who have long careers?

> Thanks for the reply. How much do the athletes you train practice?

Some 30 hours a week in the off-season. Additionally, many have off-season jobs to make ends meet. Pro sports isn't all what it's cracked up to be. Not all of them play on TV.

> Do you think the exclusive focus helps their performance at their sport?

Likely.

> Do you think competition selects for people with mental health problems, or causes mental health problems?

Yes.

> Is there a noticeable difference between athletes who burn out in a few years vs. the ones who have long careers?

Genetic ability first, preparation second. If you are an extremist, you might get preparation to exceed your genetic lottery ticket. But I've only seen that happen once.

There are anecdotes all over the place, but the nugget of truth is that the human body can only exert so much effort, which means elite athletes have fairly limited training hours. But that still leaves plenty of time for things like film study. And far from getting merely "enough sleep every night", most athletes have to get even more sleep, which takes time away from the rest of life. It's still a very focused existence--but then, you don't receive exceptional results from less-than-exceptional input.

I agree. But when you are talking about Stanford you are really talking about the best of the best. Their performance curves don't match the rest of the population to start with.

For example, I am just watching highlights of the Indian Wells Tennis Tourney thats going on, and a 38 year old Roger Federer has managed to get to the finals. And in every interview with the rest of the competition, they all say he is just working harder than the rest of the field.

Especially for creative work, work time doesn't correlate with output. Being a top physicist/mathematician/whatever is pretty unrelated with "working harder." It's related with having a somehow "better" connected brain. You can't work your way into being very smart.

I completely disagree with this. It's obvious that the top contributors to those realms are incredibly talented - Einstein, Newton, Euler, whatever. At the same time, they all put in an absurd amount of work, and their most well known contributions typically come from periods of almost exclusive focus on their chosen problem - Newton stuck inside working on gravitation because of a plague outbreak, Einstein's obsessive work in the years leading up to his Annus Mirabilis papers.

Innate talent may be a prerequisite for creative work, but it's seldom sufficient without putting the time and effort in.

Getting a better connected brain is often the outcome of just working harder at a problem.

You'd be surprised at how much creative progress is due to steady effort rather than some brilliant epiphany. Just because its intellectual work doesn't mean it can’t be solved by grinding it out.

You need both. From Hamming's You and your research:

``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

This isn’t true and there’s no evidence of it being true. Total productivity doesn’t drop as a function of hours worked until somewhere between 40 and 60 hours a week[1]. We know that creativity is more or less constant in individuals so those who produce more do more good work[2].

[1]http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

The Productivity of Working Hours, John Pencavel

[2]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abb5/02a8b01b50790a44cf5438...

Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks.

Dean Keith Simonton

For a popular audience

https://jamesclear.com/equal-odds

Nah, they are human too, they get overworked like everyone else with same consequences.

And like with everyone else, they are not at their best when overworked and depressed, but it does not matter for institution because there areally many students eager to apply so it does not matter how many if them pay the cost.