Everything can be trained, almost nothing alone

A coach in the auditorium

On September 22, in Alfara del Patriarca, a university opened its academic year in a slightly unusual way. To inaugurate its Excellence Plan (the itinerary that CEU Cardenal Herrera offers to high-achieving students who want more than what fits into the subjects) it did not call upon a tech guru or a trendy founder. It called upon a tennis coach. Toni Nadal, the man who trained his nephew from childhood to the very top of world sports, gave the keynote lecture of the day in the auditorium: "Beyond success: self-demand, leadership, and purpose." Nearly five hundred students from three campuses attended, and the university arranged buses from Castellón and Elche.

The full lineup says quite a lot about the spirit of the institution. The day was opened by Juan Carlos Valderrama, director of the Excellence Plan; the rector, philosopher Higinio Marín, intervened; and the vice-rector of Students, Francisco Javier Montañez, closed the event. And in between, our co-founder, Javier Roca, conversed with the students; the program announced his talk under a title that is almost a life plan: ten rules for doing something worthwhile. To this journal, which has been writing for months about what a university can become, the scene is of interest for more than just proximity. It is of interest because beneath that lineup there is a thesis, and the thesis can be examined.

The coach's thesis

Toni Nadal has done something extremely rare in professional sports: dedicating decades of his life to a single student. And he summarized what he learned in the title of his book: "Everything can be trained." Said like that, it sounds like an airport manual, and that is exactly why it is worth taking seriously, because the phrases that sound like clichés are the ones that almost no one bothers to verify. Is it true? Can everything be trained (talent, character, excellence) or are some people born with it while others just watch?

Psychology had spent decades debating that question when the Swedish researcher K. Anders Ericsson studied violinists at the Berlin Music Academy and proposed the answer that gained fame: what separates the very best from the good is years of deliberate practice. Not just any repetition: the uncomfortable kind, designed to target exactly what you do not yet know how to do, with immediate correction and no mercy for the comfort zone. Popular science turned that into the ten-thousand-hour rule, a round number that Ericsson himself spent half his life refining. There was never a magic number. The key was not in the hours; it was in the adjective.

The fine print that seems to refute the book

In this house, data is told alongside its history and its counter-argument, so here is the counter-argument. In 2014, three researchers (Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald) published in Psychological Science the most cited meta-analysis on the matter: 88 studies and more than eleven thousand people measured. Their conclusion fits into one of their sentences: deliberate practice is important, but not as important as had been argued. On average, hours of practice explained around 14% of the differences in performance between individuals. In games, music, and sports, significantly more. But when it reached education and professions, that is, the lives of almost everyone, the figure plummeted to near zero.

Read quickly, the meta-analysis seems to ruin Toni Nadal's title: if practice explains so little, then everything cannot be trained. It is worth reading slowly, because what that 14% leaves out is not a genetic mystery. It is, to a large extent, a problem of measurement.

The variable that averages do not see

When a meta-analysis aggregates 88 studies, it lumps together practices that have nothing to do with one another. The person who repeats scales alone in their room and the one who has someone in front of them observing, correcting, and redesigning their plan every week count the same hours. Subsequent research has pointed to exactly that seam: by ignoring individualization (the custom-tailored suit), averages underestimate the return of well-accompanied practice. And there, Toni Nadal's biography ceases to be a sports anecdote and becomes the pure case study: a coach, a student, daily adjustments for decades, and no excuses. His work was never about ten thousand hours in bulk.

This journal has already recounted two findings that point in the same direction. Gallup found that barely 22% of graduates remember having a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals, and that those who also remember a professor who excited them and another who cared about them more than double their odds of being engaged at work. And the largest meta-analysis on character education, with over three hundred thousand participants, found better results in programs with mentoring. The underlying conclusion is less epic than the ten-thousand-hour rule and much more useful: everything may not be trainable, but far more can be trained than we usually attempt. And almost none of it alone.

When a university believes it

That is why the September 22 event matters, and not just as a social note. An excellence plan is a university saying out loud that excellence does not come pre-packaged from home with the admission score, but rather is a journey to be walked: research, culture, languages, leadership, personal development, over and above the subjects. We already wrote here that a mission statement is not what your website says; the mission statement is what can be pointed to on the calendar. A philosopher rector taking the floor before a tennis coach, in front of nearly five hundred students from three campuses, is, precisely, the mission statement on the calendar. It is not the only university working in that direction, and hopefully, it spreads. But the gesture of opening the academic year with that conversation (effort, purpose, self-demand) rather than a lecture on trends has something of a declaration of intent that does not escape the students.

Each person's cathedral

There is a stage in the first phase of the journey that explains why this conversation strikes so close to home: we have been trained from a very young age to be productive, never contemplative. The demand that the average student lacks is not that of producing faster; they bring that standard as default, and it does not always come free. They lack the other kind, the one that the third stage learns from Aristotle: habits shape you, and virtue lies in the middle: "sounds like a calendar quote. It isn't." A screen in the sixth stage leaves it in three sentences that a tennis coach would sign without changing a comma: integrity is trained in small ways. A gesture today. Another tomorrow. That is how character is built.

And then there is the question that the journey asks upon arriving at medieval cathedrals, perhaps the most serious question that can be asked of a university student: what is the cathedral of your life, that work which would justify an entire lifetime of patience, of effort, of meaning? Toni Nadal formulated it in his own way in the title of his lecture: beyond success. Javier Roca, in his: something worthwhile. It is the same question with two accents, and no tool is going to answer it for you on its own.

The journey of TheNomba is, in essence, our way of training that response: twelve stages, one virtue per stage, a mentor who adjusts the plan, and a community that does not leave you alone with your good intentions. "Everything can be trained," says Toni Nadal's book. Almost nothing alone, we say. Between the two phrases fits an entire university.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.