Talent: A difference that makes a difference - by Greg Downey
Thank you Miguel for finding this!
Malcolm Gladwell’s thoughts on this topic in his book Outliers are interesting as well. Here’s a quote from Gladwell on talent that may be a useful one to review before reading this article:
“Talent is the desire to practice. Right? It is that you love something so much that you are willing to make an enormous sacrifice and an enormous commitment to that, whatever it is -- task, game, sport, what have you.”
Gladwell also mentions the “Matthew Effect” in his work, which gets at the main point in
One of the core observation of Ericsson’s research is that expert performance seems to take a minimum of 10 years or 10,000 hours of ‘deliberate practice,’ progressively more challenging, and expert coaching, even with people labelled by others as ‘prodigies’ (see Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer 1993). As Ericsson, Prietula and Cokely (2007) describe, repetition is not enough:
When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.
The problem for many people is that they’re not practicing deliberately; if they did, they would see a bigger improvement in their performance.
…
To put it simply, talent identification can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, pernicious because it widens the gap between those who are ‘promising’ from those who do not show early signs of ‘talent,’ even if those alleged markers of talent do not actually feed directly into the final expert result. That is, talent identification may focus on variables that are irrelevant for future accomplishment and yet still produce both enormous disparity and achievement in those labelled ‘talented,’ although the labelling is empirically incorrect (outside of the socio-cultural coaching system itself).
What may be a small initial difference, even a neurological advantage, can be compounded and exacerbated in many cases by the culturally-based perception that the small initial difference represents ‘talent,’ some innate superiority waiting to reach fruition. Once a person is identified as ‘talented,’ the socio-cultural mechanisms around sport that embrace and seek to develop that talent, to varying degrees fix that early diagnosis by transforming it into a distinctive developmental niche.
…
Clearly, there are initial differences in ability, some of which may be due to innate advantages in some individuals. But I suspect that a cultural system designed to identify ‘talent’ early and concentrate coaching resources on those with early promise can actually make the expert skill more rare as it demotivates those who might develop expert skill without the early advantage or mature more slowly. Rigorous talent identification may produce a handful of highly skilled individuals, but it may concentrate training resources so much that it makes the overall skill more rare than in a more open developmental program.
Conclusion
In summary, although I agree with Ericsson that expert performance clearly requires extraordinary efforts at development, strong coaching, and intense motivation, I don’t want to underestimate the importance in this process of very early differences in ability. Far from being irrelevant, early differences may contribute to future expertise, as they are compounded, exaggerated, or even leveraged into entirely unrelated abilities. If resources are allocated depending upon early diagnosis of ‘talent,’ then talent matters. The more a society believes in ‘talent,’ the more likely it is to become a reality, and the greater disparity we are likely to find between those designated as promising from those who don’t show early promise.
………………..
Related previous post: What it takes to be great
Related books:
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
Outliers: The Story of Success
The Road To Excellence: the Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games
- Talent...
My friend Shane over at Farnam Street posted an interesting interview excerpt with a quote by Kirby Ferguson about talent that I thought was interesting, and that matched well with a Malcolm Gladwell quote I had posted previously. Both quotes are below....
- Expert Enough Show Ep. 6 - 10,000 Hours Of Golf With Dan Mclaughlin
In this episode of The Expert Enough Show, Corbett Barr sits down with Dan McLaughlin of TheDanPlan.com to find out. Dan is testing the 10,000 hour rule by trying to become a professional golfer through 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. His goal...
- The Dan Plan: Testing 10,000 Hours To Expert Performance
A big thanks to Will for passing this along! Link .......... Site: The Dan Plan .................... Related previous posts:The truth about grit - By Jonah LehrerWhat it takes to be greatRelated papers:“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition...
- Genius: The Modern View - By David Brooks
A big thanks to Miguel for passing this article along, as it applies to a subject that I am very interested in. Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout...
- What It Takes To Be Great
Practice makes perfect-The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond...