Why Talent Is Overrated
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
For a great psychological (layman's) treatment of this, see Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.
The harder I work, the luckier I get
So, in this sense it's actually irrelevant whether or not inborn talent is necessary, because the mere belief that it is could have negative effect on your effort.
The thing to be proud of is discovering your talent and actually putting it to use in a way that benefits you or other people.
In a church choir, there are tons of people talented in singing. But they don't try to develop or focus on those talents.
And of the programming crew here, perhaps some of you could have turned out to be the greatest footballers in the world. But you may not even know that the balance and co-ordination for this is within you. Instead you're here writing medicore PHP code.
To develop a talent, one needs a positive feedback loop. Many people don't get that in the area they have natural abilities in.
So, talent is irrelevant. Everyone has it. It's the development of the talent that counts.
i would even say as far that limitations (talent, physical, money etc) are necessary to make it big
I suppose if your limitation is mild poverty though, you'd probably have a lot more ambition to move onto something better than somebody born into a comfortable middle-class life.
But, on the other hand, nothing in these studies suggest that some talent-like property is necessary.
I must have imagined that.
Show me a quarterback whose 5'2" dad who stopped at middle school peewee trained them, and I'll be impressed.
"László Polgár (born 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and father of the famous "Polgár sisters": Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsófia (Sofia), and Judit. He authored well-known chess books such as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games and Reform Chess, a survey of chess variants.
Although he himself is a modest chess player, Polgár is an expert on chess theory, owning over 10,000 books about chess. He is interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that "geniuses are made, not born". Before he had any children, he wrote a book entitled Bring Up Genius!, and asked for a wife who would help him carry out the experiment. He found one in Klara, a schoolteacher, who lived in a Hungarian speaking enclave in the Ukraine. He married her in the USSR and brought her to Hungary. They have three daughters. He homeschooled his three daughters, primarily in chess, and all three went on to become strong players. An early result was Susan winning the Budapest Chess Championship for girls under 11 at the age of four"
http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2007/02/geniuses-are-made-no...
Also reminds me of one of Feynman's anecdotes where he mentions that his dad was really involved in educating him:
"My father taught me continuity and harmony in the world. He didn't know anything exactly, whether the insect had eight legs or a hundred legs, but he understood everything. And I was interested because there was always this kick at the end-a revelation of how wonderful nature really is." (from "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track", an awesome book).
This article was a good reminder for me. I need to get back into that mindset.
Bill Gates, the world's richest human, is a more promising candidate for those who want to explain success through talent. He became fascinated by computers as a kid and says he wrote his first piece of software at age 13; it was a program that played ticktacktoe. The problem is that nothing in his story suggests extraordinary abilities.
From wikipedia:
"Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test[17] and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973.[18] Prior to the mid 1990s, an SAT score of 1590 was equivalent to an IQ of about 170 (roughly the one in a million level),[19] a figure that would frequently be cited by the press.[20]"
Source: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
"This photo's from Lakeside High School, a private school that Paul Allen and I attended. Paul was two years ahead of me in school, looking here you might think he was about ten years older than I am...This particular room was very important cause this is where the first computer connection was created ...the mothers club funded that teletype this was when I was in eighth grade and first figuring out how to use the computer, and a bunch of kids came down and were fascinated but the two who really stuck to it the most were Paul and I. In fact, people thought it was strange that Paul kept talking to a kid who was two years younger than him, but I had won this nationwide math contest and so Paul knew I thought I could figure stuff out and he kept challenging me saying hey can you understand this or you know can you figure out how to do that and so he and I became very close friends and that led directly to the creation of Microsoft only about five years later."
Microsoft without Gates, as narrated by Bill Gates.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/gates...
From an interview with Playboy in the early nineties: GATES: I was 11. But he was an enlightened guy. He was always challenging me. He would ask me questions, but he would never tell me whether my answer was right or not. He would say, That's an OK answer. Then our time would always be up and he'd give me more stuff to read.
PLAYBOY: Ever wonder what might have become of you if you had gone to public school instead of Lakeside, where you met Paul Allen and fell in love with computers?
GATES: I'd be a better street fighter.
PLAYBOY: When did you know you had something special to offer? When did you become aware you were different?
GATES: [Big raspberry] I have something special to offer, Mom! Mom, I just figured it out: I have something special to offer! So don't make me eat my beans.
PLAYBOY: You know what we mean.
GATES: When I was young we used to read books over the summer and get little colored bookmarks for each one. There were girls who had read maybe 15 books. I'd read 30. Numbers two through 99 were all girls, and there I was at number one. I thought, Well, this is weird, this is very strange. I also liked taking tests. I happened to be good at it. Certain subjects came easily, like math. All the science stuff. I would just read the textbooks in the first few days of class.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Bill.Gates.html
I recommend CNN learn to use google.
If (and I don't know if he did or not) Bill Gates had been practicing those skills since the age of 3 or so (as Tiger Woods did), one would expect him to be highly capable by the age of 11, and to score well in any test of those skills. etc
How do you even define talent anyway? If it's just something you're good at, enough practice will get you there provided you are physically able.
I used to believe this strongly as well. I worked with a great web graphics designer on several projects 3-5 years ago. We'd collaborate on overall flow and wireframes. He'd make it look good, and I'd make it work.
I commented once that I wished I had his artistic talent. His response was basically that if along the way I'd spent as long in photoshop working on and trying to dream up mockups as he had, I'd be just as good.
Since then I've come to strongly agree with him.
If you want to make it to the top in sports, you need the talent, which in this case, means the right genes.
Usain Bolt will never beat Haile Gebrselassie in a marathon, no matter how much training (or doping), and vice versa.
I am asking honestly, not to be condescending.
Small differences in heredity can have drastic effects on mental limits. Those limits may not be as easy to see as height is, but they are real, nonetheless.
Either way, my point was that I felt you should ignore physical attributes not related to mental abilities when discussing talent. I think using them as examples of "talents" making a difference just confuses the issue.
We each have different innate limits that no level of "deliberate practice" can overcome. Yes, the power of sheer will can do amazing things, but our genetics still limit us. Lion DNA differs from human DNA by less than 10%, but no amount of training could ever allow a human to close the gap created by genetics and leap or run as quickly as a lion.
But this "talent", to make effort in a specific way, seems more a moral "talent" - like courage or kindness - than anything else. These qualities can be cultivated, and are a necessary part of being human that are within us all. They are within you.
That I can agree with :( A very interesting article once you get into the description of deliberate practice and how to implement it.
To pick one concrete example, great musicians often have perfect pitch and are rarely tone-deaf; and, great musicians always work hard at music.
And so it goes with everything else.