america’s athletic genius cluster

Interesting read by WaPo’s Sally Jenkins (who I normally don’t love) on the “genius cluster” around athletics and what it can teach us about developing these clusters in other areas:

Great athletes know something critical the rest of us don’t: how to acquire genius through work. “If you look very carefully at those who end up being the best you discover — by doing intensive tracking of them — that they do practice more, and better, than those in the class below them,” Shenk says. If we look at the quantitative and qualitative difference in the habits of great athletes we can then extend them to achievements in other fields. We might start with staging more science contests.

America’s ‘genius cluster’ in sports via The Washington Post.