After deciding that I didn’t like my 4th revision, I decided to sleep on it and write the following day instead. The mind goes into strange places too late at night (hence those TV infomericals do extremely well at night). I have been aware that I’m at critical levels in my workload, as addressed in my previous post, but that has been my own “fault”, as that can be easily exchanged with “opportunity”. It’s just perspective.

Today, I woke up and decided to check the quarterfinal results of the 2018 Hong Kong Open, where the #1 world ranked Men’s Doubles team from Indonesia was to face off against a recently-returned-from-retirement scratch team from Korea. There was a bit of buzz about the match up, and apparently I woke up right at the beginning of the match, so I was able to enjoy the match live on YouTube. Apparently it peaked at about 50,000 views online, and the match was fantastic.

Once again, it made me re-think of what I wanted to do with badminton, as I often wondered if I should have went in a different direction that I was considering, including notational analysis, or other elements from a Gold Medal Profile. However, the match today included everything, and it reminded me how dynamic badminton was, and also how much variation is involved in the game. For example, consider this rally from the match, voted as the Play Of the Day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oQosny0u0g

When trying to consider a Winning Style of Play, it’s difficult to determine the best way to play because it is impossible to max out in every single attribute. For example, the Indonesians have a very aggressive, flashy, style of play based heavily on tactics and unconventional methods. However, the Koreans are more structured, focusing on discipline, patience, and technique to add onto their physical conditioning. Due to the sequential nature of many racquet sports, both styles of play can be appropriate depending additional factors, such as venue conditions, speed of the shuttle, temperature in the venue, and even the psychological state of the player. It is essentially a race between the tortoise and the hare, but over many trials. Sometimes it’s better to be slow and steady, sometimes it’s not.

And luck, or chance, is always a factor that needs to be considered. Randomness. This includes issues such as service faults, net cord deflections, and broken strings in the middle of rallies. Draw placement and scheduling also can impact a player, so if seems like creating a GMP for badminton is as difficult as creating a comprehensive multidisciplinary model of Talent Identification.

I suppose the curse for some is “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know”, attributed to Aristotle. In contrast, the Dunning-Kreuger effect, when someone of low competence over-estimates their level of confidence, is the other side of the coin. I have constantly reflected on this dichotomy, trying to give myself some confidence when I feel that I’m clueless, but also the humility to know that I’m probably missing something whenever I am confident. My choice in topic for a literature often went through these two extremes.

In the end, I decided to look at deliberate practice and how it contributed to performance. Based on my beliefs that there are many different ways to win a badminton match, I would like to think that it is like a Strength/Weakness chart from Pokemon, where water-type has advantage over fire-type, fire-type has advantage over grass-type, and grass-type has advantage over water-type (for more examples: https://bit.ly/2DpI4u1). Despite the different styles and preferences of play, I would propose that techniques and tactics are not necessarily wrong, but only more/less effective in certain conditions. Context is important.

And deliberate practice is just that, more or less. In my review, I asked the question what “deliberate” means? On the one hand, it can mean “on purpose”, for example, “The shot he hit at his opponent’s face was deliberate”. On the other hand, it can mean “with reflection”, for example, “He had to deliberate where he wanted to place his shot at his opponent”. I personally did a lot of deliberating and deliberately decided that deliberate practice includes elements of both (yes, I just did that… deliberately).

The single greatest factor that leads me to side with deliberate practice comes from Stoic philosophy. Deliberate practice is well within the control of the athlete. To me, that is the most important thing because everything else is largely outside one’s control: talent identification, resources, opportunity, genetics, team selection, etc. Even the status of an expert is largely not agreed upon, not should it matter on the path toward mastery. Perhaps mastery is only a direction, not a destination.

That is why I stopped complaining. As much as I love problem solving, I don’t want to create a new problem that I need to solve. I just need to take things one day at a time, and progress on this project the same way. Whatever curve balls come my way, those things are outside of my control. Grit, growth mindset, and deliberate practice are all things within my control.

And after arriving at the end of the tunnel, I realize that I cannot go back. Might as well keep on moving forwards…

I still haven’t finished my literature review, but I’m almost done. Another 20% to write, then editing, then submission. It didn’t help that I went too far and reviewed too many papers (i.e. 43 papers). It didn’t help that I kept adding another paper to my list with every two papers that I read. It didn’t help that I wrote a section of the paper and realized that I needed better structuring and restarted the entire process. It didn’t help that I have 13,000 words worth of notes.

But that’s my fault. I have a problem of not being able to say “no”, and not being able to ask for help when I need to. And because of that, I’m busy all the time. Since my last tournament as a competitive athlete in August, I have been averaging 70 hour weeks. I know because I take data on it and I monitor what I do. I have no weekends or holidays. Maybe I’m a workaholic. No, maybe it’s because I feel like I’m so behind with the rest of the world because I spent so much time competing that I need to catch up. Yes, I’m still behind and I need to learn more.

And here I am. I’m still behind.

Looking back at the Powering Podiums presentation I went to last month where they discussed how to keep coaches happy and healthy, perhaps I should have made a better attempt to apply some of those lessons. However, I’m very practical. I’m happy because I’m not dead. These problems I have may be luxuries compared to other people in the world. I am definitely not complaining. I also recall asking about motivation, because my procrastination is often based on trying to find ways to motivate myself to do something, like finishing my paper.

However this situation has been very educational. I should have started my work earlier. Wait, why does that sound so familiar? It’s almost like it’s not the first time I’ve done this before…

I often wonder if this is the curse of a taste of expertise? Everything needs to be done better. Although there are similarities to being a perfectionist, I think it is worse. It’s a desire to learn more so that it can be even better the next time. I feel a perfectionist is focused on execution, whereas the drive I speak about is to do something even better than before. It probably doesn’t help that I am doing a literature review on deliberate practice.

But let’s stop for now. I haven’t acquired the motivation that I needed to continue my paper, but I will use a different solution: action first, then motivation will come.

I will report back in Part 2 after I finish.

Let me ask you a question, but first, pick something, perhaps something you might be good at:

“What does it take to be good at that?”

Okay, you probably have a good idea of what you need to do, but let me rephrase that question:

“What does it take to be the BEST at that?”

Is your answer the same? I think we very often have an idea of how to be successful at something, but that is not usually defined very well. Neither are certain things. “Happiness” comes to mind. We settle for being happy, but never to be the happiest. Wouldn’t that be an interesting concept?

So this takes us to my next dilemma: to find the best, do we take a top down approach, or a bottom up approach? This question haunts me as well. I often consider the problem with deliberate practice is that there needs to be somewhat of a direction to know what you want to achieve. For example, I can deliberate practice certain skills to master, but if I only need to use those skills 5% of the time, I would be an expert at something required only 5% of the time. Not knowing what is needed can be very difficult. Knowing where you are is one thing, but knowing where you need to go is often the hard part. Again, being successful gives an idea of where to go, but being the best at something also needs precision.

This takes us back to the problem. I originally wanted to look at talent identification and talent development to inform the base of a podium pathway for my sport, but that would be a bottom up approach. The reverse would be to create the podium pathway first, but from the top down approach. This would likely refer to figuring out what is needed to succeed at the highest levels, which would then create a pathway.

Is this the same in different industries? For example, if we followed the educational pathway where we did our 12-13 years of primary & secondary school, then our post-secondary studies, then graduate studies, is that the fastest way? The system exists, but the best people often find a way to accelerate through the system. Following the system will produce people that are successful, but what about those who are the best? Do the best musicians end up skipping grades in music and do their own projects? If we studied the outliers, wouldn’t that be a better indication of what kind of pathway is required to be the best? Isn’t the best often an outlier?

Unfortunately, it will always need to be updated, because once enough people follow a similar process, it becomes common, and therefore there are no competitive advantages. Being different should be celebrated because when you are the best, you are different from the rest. Arguably, the easiest thing to do is to be in the middle; it would take incredible effort (or bad luck) to be the worst.

So now my mind is spinning again: what does it take to be the best? Using Gold Medal Profile attributes, I have to start thinking again:

• Is there a maximum on physiological abilities for your sport where returns would be diminishing? For badminton, I think there is.
• Is there a maximum on technical abilities for your sport where returns would be diminishing? For badminton, I also think there is.
• How about psychological and tactical attributes?

The problem is that when we want to be the best at something, it is largely unique to a particular sport, and even an event perhaps in that sport. I would be similar to that in education, where it would be different levels of expertise required for math vs. music.

Maybe the best way to do it is if I was programming a robot to compete in badminton, what attributes would I give it?

• Physiological: I would give my robot enough fuel to last the longest recorded match based on the event, with maybe an additional 10-20% gap. Sometimes players may be so fit that they lose before they get tired.
• Technical: I would give my robot the ability to return any shot they can reach. The concept is that if you can touch the shuttle with your racquet, it should be able to be returned.
• Psychological: Based on robots generally not understanding emotion, my robot would not have any either. Booing the robot or any bad calls would not influence the robot at all. There is no way of getting the robot angry.
• Tactical: I would program the robot with up to three shot sequencing, based on the general patterns found in badminton. This gets technical, but I’ll do my best to explain. As badminton is a sport that is turn based (i.e. I hit, then you hit, then repeat until someone wins or makes a mistake), there should be sequences of probabilities of where to hit, which is closely tied to technical skills. Basically, tactics is where you want to hit, and technical is the probability that you will hit the shot you want to hit. Good technical skills (i.e. 99%) of the time, with good tactics (hitting the right shot, at the right time), often leads to winning a rally when on offense, or the ability to neutralize your opponent’s attacking rally. There is a good chance of being able to mathematically calculating the odds, and though a lot is based on experience for most players, if it can be programmed into a robot that never forgets, or has the ability to update the model over time with the input of more information (literally, machine learning), then the robot knows exactly what to do in all situations.

But there’s always that chance factor, so my robot would be extremely good at badminton, but not invincible.

So now, if we need to teach a human instead, there is a lot to learn, but if they could do exactly as the robot, we would more or less have our Gold Medal Profile. The rest of the work would be extrapolating the pathway that leads to this ability, and estimating where the athlete would be on a Performance Results Track. Then for Talent Identification/Development, we would identify the attributes that would need to be maximized. Too often, talent identification and development seems to be based on physical abilities. Given an equal weighting to all the components of a GMP, that would only amount to 25%, which would be unlikely to indicate whether an athlete will be successful in the future or not.

Reflection Questions:

• What is the difference to you in “success” and being “the best”?
• If you could program a robot based on GMP parameters (technical, tactical, psychological, physiological) to be the best in the world, what would they look like?
• How much do you think chance/luck plays in your model?
• And most importantly, if you had to choose, would you choose bottom-up, or top-down?

Thank you for reading!

Talent Development (TD) or Talent Identification (TI)? I must confess that I am procrastinating from finding the answer to this question by writing in this blog post. Procrastination is usually a negative trait, but the ability to hyperfocus on a task and have it completed, while still doing a good job might actually be a very powerful skill. Heavy emphasis on doing a good job though. It’s easy to do a terrible job.

If we were to consider procrastination as an attribute in talent identification for school, would it generally be something we identify and select against? Do most people tend to lean towards procrastination and there are a talented few that do not? Is that talent, or is it just training and experience? Does the student learn techniques to manage procrastination, or are they naturally gifted with higher willpower. Do kids who do well on the “Marshmellow Test” naturally have more willpower, or do they find better coping methods to delay gratification?

Well, it depends (my favourite response). Shouldn’t it depend on the sport or whatever activity we are looking at? For example, really tall people may be good for basketball, but are they good for gymnastics? So, my question would have to take a look at my sport of interest: badminton. However, I will speak about (TI/TD) as a broad concept so you may reflect on your own sports and activities.

As I am still going to the research, I would like to share my initial beliefs. That way it will be good to see where it may differ from the literature. I personally don’t believe in talent in general, and I believe it is more general development based on deliberate practice. I am in the deliberate practice camp for sure, and I would be biased towards that. However, deliberate practice is also not for everyone and depends on growth vs. fixed mindsets. Can mindset also be discussed in a nature vs. nurture debate? Probably. And down the rabbit hole we continue to go.

Additional elements that may be part of it include grit (via Angela Duckworth) and flow (via Mihály Csíkszentmihályi). However, a key proponent to this discussion is that sport is often a zero sum game. We NEED a winner and loser. General success in music, business, and other activities aren’t necessarily a zero sum game. Grades in school are not either, but positions into a prestigious program may be. I think where we define expertise is often also relative to many things. How successful do we need to be? In sport, what is an appropriate level for expertise? Sometimes I ask myself if I would consider myself and expert in my sport? Maybe relatively in Canada, but against the rest of the world, I’m not very certain.

Based on those questions, would we need to have a Gold Medal Profile to know which attributes are the most important before talent identification? In other words, don’t you need to know what the best attributes are in high performers before looking for them in the upcoming potential?

So, for ease of commenting, here are a few questions:
1) In your sport/activity, would you lean more towards talent (nature) or hard work (i.e. deliberate practice; nurture)? Any thoughts on mindset (growth vs. fixed)? Flow? Grit? Anything else?

2) How good do you have to be at something to be considered an expert? Is this relative to actual demand, or is 10 000 hours good enough (according to Malcom Gladwell)? As a though experiment, if many people achieved 10 000 hours, then would an expert not need to have more hours than average then? We cannot all be experts, or can we?

3) Does it depend on the type of sport? For example, measuring a physical feat (e.g. stronger, faster, higher) in some sports, getting judged in other sports, versus winning a game, whether through sequential means or non-sequential means. For example, in badminton, it is more or less a sequential game where each side hits shots back and forth, one shot at a time only. For martial arts, it would be different because you can make your move despite whether your opponent moves or not.

Thanks for reading and commenting. Just for fun, here’s a video on “Marshmellow Test Magic”!

Once upon a time… there was a student enrolled in the M. HPCTL program at UBC. Every day… he worked a little bit on his course work. One day… he had to choose between two potential options for his thesis. Because of that… he had to consult some higher level experts, such as his peers and instructors, for clarity and direction. Because of that… he finally made a choice and continued to work progressively on his thesis. Until finally… he completed his thesis and Masters program and lived happily ever after.

This is how Pixar designs most of their stories for their movies, according to Daniel Pink in “To Sell is Human”. I suppose it is much nicer to create a narrative to follow, and I do wish everyone success with their upcoming assignments and course work!

I figure I will try to write a bit more casually to allow for easier commenting, and I will also describe my processes in hopes to give encouragement or ideas to anyone who needs it! If all goes well and everyone is in a good place, at least it can serve as a reminder for myself to get back to work!

I’m finally retired from international competition, but I ended up taking on multiple other roles and projects. I am still an active Athlete Representative for the Badminton Canada Players Association, as the vice president. I’ll need to go to Ottawa for a weekend to attend the AthletesCAN Forum in the 3rd week of September. I sure hope I can finish my Annotated Bibliography before that, otherwise, I’ll be working during a potential red-eye flight!

I’ve also volunteered to be on the Badminton Canada High Performance Committee. I’m also starting a Certificate in Business in September at Queen’s University. I’m also doing a 12 week crash course in a financial simulation program mid-September, and possibly starting a MOOC (massive open online course) on Blockchain next week. I think I have a problem saying “No”, but I also feel the need to “catch up” with the rest of life since I was competing for so long, so here I am now. Also, planning for a wedding next year, applying to coach the Canada Winter Games, and everything else in between is going to be a bit crazy.

But as the hero in my own story, I do hope it becomes an Epic (and not a Tragedy… LOL).

Anyway, back to business. The contract is due next week (September 7) so that becomes a priority. I will have to take a look this weekend and make sure I figure out how to proceed correctly. I have a local tournament this weekend (because I do love competing!), so I will most likely not get the chance to do any work until Monday, but I will probably read it over and think about it during the weekend.

I will also start researching and gathering articles. I’m planning on doing talent identification and high performance, so I will go through “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” by K. Anders Ericsson (great book!) for references, and probably download a few key papers and look through those references as well. Maybe I’ll scour “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell too.

I’ll probably search: “talent identification”, “high performance”, and “elite” for now on SportDISCUS, and then jot down a few more for later. I use Evernote Premium, so that has been very useful. I think there’s a deal for 40% off annual membership right now too.

When I work, I like to use The Pomodoro Technique. Basically you focus for only 25 minutes and set a timer, preferably a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (which is ‘pomodoro’ in Italian), and then you work non-stop for 25 minutes. After, you can take a 5 minute break and try not to think about your work. Every 4 pomodoros, you can take a longer break (I usually break for 30 minutes). It has worked reasonably well for me so far, but I also have other productivity methods I try to combine. I started going through David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, which I have on Audible, but that has been a bit complicated. I may not use that system for now.

To allow for easier commenting on my blog, here are a few questions to answer if you need content:

• How do you do your most productive work? Do you have a particular system?
• What would your story be, using: 1) Once upon a time… 2) Every day… 3) One day… 4) Because of that… 5) Because of that… 6) Until finally… ?
• Knowing that you probably also work crazy amounts of hours, what do you like doing to unwind?

Thanks for reading!

What have I done to move forward?
I’ve finally set a date for retirement as an athlete, after World Championships in early August this summer. I hope that retiring from competition can help me focus more on being an athlete, but I have other things to attend to with my new role with Badminton BC. I really hope to find something that can be more applied and useful, but to be honest, I’m still unsure what that can be. Some changes have made me re-think about the direction that I want to proceed in, and I do hope I can resolve things sooner than later.

Originally, I wanted to do notional analysis of historical matches in Mens Doubles, where I would look at the first four shots of every rally. Since there is great importance to the beginning of a rally, it would be interesting to see if that importance can be quantified because quantifying the significance of that part of the game may affect how much training should be dedicated to mastering that part of the game. The best analogy I can think of at the moment is a face off in hockey. Although it is generally preferred to win the face off, it may not be considered to be as important as other parts of the game. For example, there may not be a correlation between winning face offs and winning games. However, it would be interesting to see how the “opening sequences” of badminton correlates to the chances of winning a match in mens doubles. From my experience as a player, this is not really significant in the singles events, less so in womens doubles, and most important in mens and mixed doubles. Quantifying it would be an interesting task to take.

However, a new regulation has now created a significant drawback. As of March of this year, an experimental service regulation was implemented. Historically, service had to be including the striking of the shuttlecock below one’s waist (i.e. lowest rib), but it has recently changed to a standardized 1.15m height. Based on some personal observations, there has been some changes as serving positioning and stances have to be modified to fit the rule, which has also included some differences into the opening sequence of shots. As the rule looks like it is here to stay for a while, it may render previous data less useful and it would affect my overall conclusion if I were to proceed with my notional analysis. Additionally, a recent vote was overturned in changing the scoring system last week, with a proposed change of best to five games to 11 points. Although there won’t be any changes until after Tokyo 2020, I fear that a change in scoring system could also affect the relevance of my research project.

So now I need to shift gears again and I wonder if I can somehow create and validate a podium pathway for badminton in Canada? Or perhaps just BC? Can I create a scaled down pathway that can produce National level badminton players? Maybe I can just simplify it to doubles events? Worst case, maybe just mens doubles OR mixed doubles? I still want to analyze badminton footage and find a way to measure data in a meaningful way. I look at badminton in a way where rallies are constructed through sequences. There is a lot of cause and effect because each side takes turns hitting the shuttlecock over the net. There is no bouncing allowed (unlike tennis) or multiple touching (unlike volleyball). There is finite amount of space within the court on both sides. Because of this, there is a certain level of predictability in sequencing. For example, if you hit a shot down with angle and pace, your opponent’s return must come up. If they hit it hard, it will rise significantly. If they hit it soft to the net, it must be at a slower pace to prevent too much rising. Still, there is a bit of room to play with, but if you know the patterns, it’s fairly easy to predict what can happen. Then adding the statistics, math, computer science, data analysis, machine learning, etc. would be additional steps in finding some answers. However, there is a large possibility that I have no idea what I’m really talking about. Wouldn’t someone have done it already? I suppose that’s a good sign to consult the academic research.

But here is an example of what I am working on:

What relevant academic evidence is there to support my project / research question?
With a slight change in direction, I am going to have to go through more research again to see what is available on the subject. Ideally, if there was a way to load videos and have matches analyzed by a computer algorithm, that would be awesome! Unfortunately, I don’t think that exists, but there are people out there who have tried. Here is a link to a paper about badminton game analysis from video sequences from Belgium: https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/153/740/RUG01-002153740_2014_0001_AC.pdf

How does this relate to one of the four themes?
Having better answers on sequencing would help Coaching Effectiveness and Program Planning. It would help Coaching Effectiveness because it would direct a coach in maximize time in the right areas that can deliver the greatest impact for players, especially in our Canadian badminton system where we may not get as much coaching/training as we want to. It would help Program Planning in a similar way, by determining where time should be spent training the most.

Is there evidence that I can add to my portfolio that demonstrates a particular theme?
I think there is a lot of power with data and sports can generate tremendous amounts of data depending on how you look at a problem. Typically, people consider easier measures and general statistics, including win/loss percentage or score lines, but there is a lot of details missing. For example, if a score for a match was 21-9, 21-8, it may seem like an easy match. But if we find out it took 60 minutes to complete, it would make sense that the rallies were very long, as an average match should be about 20 minutes per game, but that is based also on my own estimates. However, it could also indicate a delay in the game somehow. Perhaps someone was injured, or some kind of other problem such as the court having problems and needs to be taped, etc.

Ultimately, I know I need a lot more work and I’m hoping I can find an effective way to combine my interests to find an appropriate project to pursue. I only hope I am going in the right direction this time.