The talent myth is what I wanted to discredit. What I do believe in is the domino effect of effort What I remember most about running 2.19 is the countless hours of endless miles I ran prior to doing it. The talent myth suggests that adding more high status individuals (stars) to your team can in fact disrupt team performance, for three reasons. First, these global stars suddenly find themselves. The Talent Myth Talent is a Myth When watching an elite athlete in any sport, it is tempting to conclude that the athlete was born with innate talent. How else can you explain the seemingly super-human abilities of players like Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, or Venus and Serena Williams? The talent who were so heavily rewarded with eye-watering bonuses were the same individuals who devised unintelligible financial products that lacked both financial and ethical integrity that brought the global banking system to its knees. The idea that natural talent comes to a rarefied few who are born gifted is a commonly held myth of our time.
From the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote the article The Talent Myth in 2002 and discussed how the “War for Talent” – the effort to find the most talented employees — was flawed and presents other factors that affect results. Gladwell recounts a fascinating story about the Americans and British efforts against German submarines. The British had a centralized operations system, shared information, and worked together to avoid German U-boats. The Americans had a decentralized system and tried to rely on technology. Only when the Americans organizational structure changed to more closely resemble the British system, were the Americans able to improve their results.
Gladwell also discusses Carol Dweck’s work. He writes:
“Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Columbia University, has found that people generally hold one of two fairly firm beliefs about their intelligence: they consider it either a fixed trait or something that is malleable and can be developed over time. Five years ago, Dweck did a study at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. She and her colleagues approached a large group of social-sciences students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked them if they wanted to take a course to improve their language skills. One would expect all those who scored poorly to sign up for the remedial course. The University of Hong Kong is a demanding institution, and it is hard to do well in the social sciences without strong English skills. Curiously, however, only the ones who believed in malleable intelligence expressed interest in the class. The students who believed that their intelligence was a fixed trait were so concerned about appearing to be deficient that they preferred to stay home. “Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb,” Dweck writes, “for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success?”
In a similar experiment, Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. They weren’t naturally deceptive people, and they weren’t any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate “talent.” They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie….”
Read the full story at The Talent Myth
While some artists and musicians might resist the idea that innate talent may be a myth, the growing evidence in scientific research is pointing in this direction. A few weeks ago in “Innate Talent?” I featured author David Shenk.
He flatly states that in genetic science, innate talent does not exist.
In a fascinating interview at MarketPlace, author and table tennis champion Matthew Syed echoes this sentiment. He asserts that diligent practice and solid mentoring determine higher standards of excellence. Expert training, according to Syed, is a greater determiner than speed, strength, intelligence or talent.
Current genetics and neuroscience research back this up, he claims. The success in his own career came from a rich combination of advantages.
From a Publisher’s Weekly excerpt at Amazon.com:
[Matthew] Syed, sportswriter and columnist for the London Times, takes a hard look at performance psychology, heavily influenced by his own ego-damaging but fruitful epiphany. At the age of 24, Syed became the #1 British table tennis player, an achievement he initially attributed to his superior speed and agility.
But in retrospect, he realizes that a combination of advantages—a mentor, good facilities nearby, and lots of time to hone his skills—set him up perfectly to become a star performer.
He admits his argument owes a debt to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” but he aims to move one step beyond it, drawing on cognitive neuroscience research to explain how the body and mind are transformed by specialized practice.
In the MarketPlaceinterview Syed’s commentary aligns with David Shenk’s analysis, that in genetics research –
SYED: I suspect that no matter how long we probe into the DNA of these master performers we won’t find anything implicated in that sequencing. What we will find is extraordinary upbringings.
Vigeland: If excellence is all about practice, and the number of hours you’re putting in, is it possible to say how many hours it’s going to take to become the best of the best whether you’re a musician, or an athlete, or even a CEO?
SYED: The earliest, really, paradigm experiment that took place in this field was by Herbert Simon and William Chase, two academics who looked at chess players. And they discovered that nobody had reached grandmaster quicker than 10 years. And Malcolm Gladwell in his wonderful book “Outliers,” he says look – 10,000 hours is the magic number in order to get to the top. However, it’s not 10,000 hours of any kind of practice. If you don’t approach it with a voracious appetite, if you don’t clock up what Anders Ericsson, a very famous psychologist from Florida, calls deliberate practice, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
Vigeland: I think one of the practical applications here, you say the talent myth is dis-empowering because it causes individuals to give up if they don’t make early progress. And your answer to that is again, look, don’t worry about it, just keep practicing.
The interview continues with a very interesting experiment.
SYED: Yeah, in fact a brilliant psychologist, Carol Dweck from Stanford, has done some terrific research in this area.
She took 400 fifth graders and gave them some simple puzzles. And afterwards half of them were praised for intelligence, for talent — you must be really smart at this. The other half were praised for effort. Gosh, you must have worked really hard.
Then she gave them some more difficult tasks to complete.
Those who were praised for talent, for intelligence, when they come across these really difficult challenges and started struggling, they thought, oh my goodness, I don’t want to lose that smart label. And it actually zapped their ability to persevere on the task. Those who were praised for effort, when they came across this really difficult problem they thought great, I can demonstrate now how hardworking I am. And they really ratcheted up their enthusiasm, kept going.
So what Dweck argues very convincingly is that we must praise young people in any educational scenario for their effort and not for their talent, and try to embed what she calls the growth mindset.
Vigeland: So this is really a message to parents everywhere to stop calling your kid a genius and instead say, hey, good job for studying.
Spirituality
This dialogue presents an interesting paradox; while “talent myth” might be a common term used in this field of research, in the field of music it is a different thing.
To clarify – I would point out that of course people can be born with certain attributes that are advantageous in the right circumstance. In music however, the shining aura of innate talent is not so tangible.
Here are some tough questions to ask:
- Is this approach to training too existential and cold for us to accept?
- Is this discrepancy related to religiosity, that talent is something immeasurable like the spiritual soul?
- Is there some kind of middle ground?
- Does practice micromanagement kill the spirit of the music?
There is I think one universal point worth remembering.
Diligent, focused practice is a fast path towards achieving excellence. Intense concentration on the process – instead of on the outcome – can produce better results.
Additional reading:
- Listen to or read the entire Marketplace interview here.
- The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
(FREE 44-page PDF). Highly recommended.
The Talent Myth
- Matthew Syed’s book, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
The Talent Myth Malcolm Gladwell
- A related approach to explore is determining what is a goal and what is a dream. I touched on this a while back in “Dream Big, Think Small.”