By TRISH CHOATE
Scripps Howard News Service
Click here for an interactive Spelling Bee quiz.
WASHINGTON - The winner of the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee, in spite of any braces or abbreviated stature, will have much in common with the Beatles, Tiger Woods and Michelangelo.
The competition among a record-setting 293 spellers begins Tuesday and continues through Thursday night in Washington. The champion wordsmith will probably have built his or her success through intense practice that actually boosts brainpower -- just like the greats of music, sports, art and pretty much any other field.
More than one recent book on success blasts the notion that a favorable fluke of genes bestows talent on a few lucky prodigies. It's more like 10,000 hours of practice.
Last year's king bee thinks that's a conservative estimate. "I think I studied for, like, a million or more hours," 2008 winner Sameer Mishra of Layfette, Ind., said.
Daniel Coyle, author of "The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How," said witnessing kids zero in on the correct spelling of a word is like watching really good musicians or soccer players in action.
"It's an immense amount of skill and data, but they've practiced working this circuit so much that they know where everything is in there," Coyle said in an interview.
By the time Sameer made it to the nationals the third time, he'd exhausted a consolidated word list with, he estimated, something like 26,000 entries. Feeling he had nothing much left to study, he decided to go through the entire dictionary to prepare for his final shot.
"I just had to bury myself at that point," Sameer, now 14, said. He studied spelling from 5 p.m. to midnight with time off for dinner. From midnight to 1 a.m., he did homework for classes beginning at 8 a.m.
Sameer's hours upon hours of practice wasn't so far removed from the Beatles' early experiences in Hamburg, Germany, described by Malcolm Gladwell in "Outliers: The Story of Success." During the "Hamburg crucible," the Beatles played 270 nights in about 18 months, doing gigs in less-than-ideal establishments and playing tons of songs nonstop from different types of music.
"By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed an estimated twelve hundred times," Gladwell wrote. Most bands don't play that much the entire time they're together, he wrote.
When Bee time arrived in 2008, Sameer had finished every letter in the dictionary -- except part of the C's.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, the official Bee dictionary, packs more than 472,000 word entries, according to the Bee Web site.
"I decided, what the heck, I would just leave part of C not done, and I would just study my other lists," he said.
Before digesting thousands of words, roots and spelling patterns, something inspired him and the more than 80 other winners of the Bee since 1925.
Paige P. Kimble, the 1981 champion and now the Bee director, can pinpoint the exact moment inspiration struck her.
Reading was emphasized in the El Paso, Texas, home Kimble grew up in, and she learned to read well before kindergarten. She devoured newspapers and played language games with her parents, who plucked "great words" from the newsprint. The first notion she could shine as a speller came by accident in 1977 when she was 9. Her family stumbled across a broadcast of the Bee on PBS.
"And I began to spell along with the broadcast and spelled some words correctly before some of the spellers," Kimble said. "It was at that point I became excited, and that's where the journey began."
Besides inspiration, passion and enjoyment, exceptional success in an activity also depends on a person seeing the skill as part of one's identity, according to Coyle. "It sort of unleashes all this energy, and that energy really is the furnace for building the skill circuits we see in the top, top spellers," he said.
Sameer found inspiration in the second grade when his sister, Shrutie Mishra, vied at the national competition. He didn't know spelling bees could be so fun.
Spelling champs will tell you there's more to winning the Bee than spitting out the letters correctly in front of the microphone. Coyle called it the "performance element." "You can't just know it. You have to be able to sort of do it under pressure," he said.
Indeed, the spellers don't just strut their stuff in front of an audience at a swank hotel. As before, ESPN will broadcast the semifinals live from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. EDT Thursday. And ABC viewers can watch the championship finals live, also on Thursday, beginning at 8 p.m.
That means lights, cameras and action right in the spellers' faces. But being able to perform under pressure can be practiced, Coyle said. He turned to a study of golfers to illustrate his point.
The study involved brain scans of pro and amateur golfers contemplating a shot, he said. The amateurs noticed the birds, the bees, the color of the grass and what have you. "The pro golfers had a lot less going on in their brain," he said.
But they weren't born that way. They developed the ability to focus on the shot -- or, in the case of the Bee, the spell.
That's what 2006 Bee champ Kerry Close did. "If I was up spelling a word, I just thought about the word and not about everybody else in the room or the cameras or the lights or anything like that," Kerry, 16, of Spring Lake, N.J., said.
Sameer imagined that he and the word pronouncer were hanging out in his living room. "I zoned everything out, kind of like I do sometimes in school," he said.
