Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. – Theodore Roosevelt
Think about your role models and the people you admire for a minute.
If you had to describe all the qualities that contributed to their greatness, what would your list include?
For example, take Lady Gaga. She’s someone millions of people might consider a role model. She’s reached the top of her game in just a few short years.
What qualities led Lady Gaga to her greatness? Certainly she’s dedicated, focused, creative and passionate. She also has an obviously strong belief in herself and her abilities.
What about her talent? Is she a gifted musician, singer and performer?
Gaga is described as having been a child prodigy on the piano, starting at four years old, and writing her first piano ballad at 13.
If she started at four, you can imagine she got thousands of hours of practice in. There’s no question she’s a talented singer and pianist (here she is at age 19 playing an NYU talent show), but is the talent what enables her success and massive following?
Could Lady Gaga be who she is without having been a child prodigy on the piano? Could practice alone have been enough (along with the dedication, focus, etc.) to propel her to greatness?
Can talent be trained? Can someone without natural ability practice enough to compete at an expert level with someone who is “gifted?”
What do you think? Is talent essential to greatness, or can dedication and practice overcome a lack of natural ability?
We’ll be working on answers to those questions and more here at Expert Enough. Get email updates from us to follow the conversation. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think.
Photo by Hani Amir
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The path to success is eliminating talent from your vocabulary. If you have the mindset that anything can be achieved by anyone through hard work & dedication, you can’t fail.
I honestly hate the concept of talent. Once people get in their mind that they lose at something because their opponent had mich more “talent”, they think that this “talent” idea is something they are either born with or without. If you have the mindset that you can do it not because of Talent but because of hard work, you’ll never fall short.
Thoughts?
@jrcooper I agree.
‘Talent’ is also a convenient cop out for people too – there’s no point practicing much harder I’ve reached the edge of my talent at (insert whatever discipline they are talking about). Whereas if you use the right training and practice methods you can get better at anything on a constant and consistent basis. (If talent were all that were needed why do all the top sports players and musicians train ferociously hard???)
@Paul_Wolfe I’ve noticed that too!
Derek Sivers had an awesome article on the idea of talent & the mindset it brings to people. For example, by telling your children “you must have done really great on this test because you worked hard!” is better than “you must have done great on this test because you’re great at math!”. If you used the second one, children would think they would do good or bad on something based on how talented they work, rather than how hard they worked. It’s the same thing with all of us too, not just children.
@jrcooper do you have a link to that article? Derek Sivers has some great thoughts on expertise I know as well.
I’ve been looking for it for an hour, but I can’t seem to find it! It’s hard picking out one great thought from one of his numerous awesome articles.
Sorry Corbett
Hey Corbett,
Check out this link:
http://www.teachersdg.org/2011Seminar%20Docs/Stimpson%20Session%20-%20Dweck%20Article%20-%20Raising%20Smart%20Kids.pdf
Article was written by psychologist Carol Dweck, who did all the research.
She also wrote a book: “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” (got pretty good review on Amazon)
I think that is what jrcooper was talking about.
I am interested in topic related to talent as well, so I just pull this link out of my favorites. Hope this will help.
Should be a great blog, Good Luck with everything. hopefully, I can contribute in the future as well.
I agree with you completely. Talent definitely exists: It’s mostly the environment you grown in. In other words, it includes the resources you have (books, friends, parents, teachers, etc.). Owning a better brain is not something I believe in strongly.
But can you change what happened to you in your childhood? Can you choose your parents? Can you choose a better body? Then why do you focus on what you can’t change?!
I think it’s debatable if talent is necessary to get to the absolute top. I think in most cases it probably is, but I also think it’s ridiculous to think about it. Why do you want to get to the absolute top? Instead, focus on becoming the best YOU. Don’t think about beating Bill Gates on the richest people list. That’s just pride and ego thinking for you.
Corbett
I’ve been waiting for this blog to start posting with interest – because it touches upon a topic I’m really, really interested in.
There is such a thing as talent – and you need to be supremely talented to be ‘world class’ at anything.
But that talent ISN’T something you were born with, it’s something that you get from 1000s of hours of the right kind of training and practice (that practice is called Deliberate Practice by the way).
For me the most illuminating book on the subject is TALENT IS OVERRATED by Geoff Colvin.
Paul
@Paul_Wolfe thanks for the book recommendation Paul, I’m going to pick that one up right now. Cheers, thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment too!
@Corbett Barr It’s a great book – I was researching a book on practice for the bass guitar when i found it. Totally blew me out of the water and turned my life upside down. If you want some articles on ‘deliberate practice for online business’ I could definitely write some.
Here’s an example of one I wrote on my blog – and also an introduction to Deliberate Practice:
http://www.onespoonatatime.com/lessons-for-content-marketers-from-tiger-woods-an-introduction-to-deliberate-practice
Another book worth reading is The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.
Paul
Hey Paul, I love the concept of deliberate practice. It’s definitely something I’d love to see articles on here. If you’d like to take a crack at it, we’d love to read your submission. Here are the details on writing for us: http://expertenough.com/write-for-ee
Corbett
OK, I’ll submit something. I just need to figure the angle for you guys…
Paul
Corbett,
I second Talent is Overrated.
Also, another book you will find IMMENSELY useful in writing on Expert Enough is Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
I wrote a monster 3 post series about those 2 books as the intro to my blog, if those are at all useful.
The first one is here for whatever it’s worth: http://milkthepigeon.com/2011/08/13/how-to-learn-any-skill-2x-as-fast-in-half-the-time-making-greatness-pt-1/
– Alex
You’ve actually struck directly onto the topic of the post that’s going live tomorrow! (You sneaky people – maybe we’re all on the same wavelength?)
In short, talent is worth very little in what you can do. Talent is the starting point, but skill – which can be learned, taught, and acquired – is far more valuable. Having a “talent” for something accomplishes exactly nothing. Having skill – having earned skill – means you really have something.
I definitely agree with Paul about the book recommendations (Gladwell’s “Outliers” is great too). My favorite definition of talent is from an interview Gladwell did:
“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.”
I linked to some resources in a post I did, but I’ll probably be adding a couple of the ones you guys recommended to it soon: http://www.valueinvestingworld.com/2009/01/what-it-takes-to-be-great.html
Thanks!
Greatness comes from focused, deliberate practice, nothing else. There are many child prodigy’s who don’t end up being great in their field. On top of that there are a million people who show zero talent to begin with, but PRACTICE themselves into greatness.
Michael Jordan was cut from the basketball team at the age of 16. Now he’s praised as the best player in the world.
He did that through practice, and lots of it.
Talent will give you a bit of a leg up, but nothing more than that.
Talent is nice. It is important to have dedication and to practice in addition to talent, but Talent+hard work+focus alone does not lead to greatness in my opinion. One needs to be able to present your skills suitably in order to tempt the target audience to achieve greatness.
There are people I know who are incredibly hard-working and good at what they do, but they lack the show-casing ability. And then there are some not so good people but with better show-casing, they make people get up and take notice.
Then they should practice their ability to sell themselves.
That’s a skill as well.
You should read Bounce by Matthew Syed, it cover precisely this topic and it points to a lot of evidence that shows talent is almost completely negligible. One notable example is of a Czech man who believes that anyone can be trained to become great at something, so he trains his three daughters to become world-class chess champions from a young age… which they all become.
I think the idea of innate talent for a skill is a really damaging idea. Unfortunately it’s one that our culture really can’t let go of. Maybe because it removes personal responsibility.
I wrote an article about why I think it’s such a damaging idea a few weeks ago:
http://www.nomadicneill.com/blog/2011/08/04/talent-a-damaging-idea/
People think I’m talented at the piano. What they don’t see is the years of practice behind it. I used to think those who could play by ear—as opposed to those trained at classical piano like I was—were so good because they were talented, until I taught myself to play by ear. This totally changed my view about talent.
The idea that you need talent to get there, is just an excuse to not do anything. I’m a graphic designer. I may have the innate talent but it’s the “dedication and practice” that is getting me somewhere.
Talent can be trained. I believe.. if you have the talent but no dedication and hard work, there is no way you can be successful. Period
btw, Corbatt, congrats on the success of this blog. I just checked out your Alexa ranking and its increadibly high. I’m so impressed=)
Hi Corbett,
Thank you for this post. It is so awesome – especially because of all the comments that follow. I learned a lot!
Cheers,
Az
I’m surprised that no one has commented about the claims about Lady Gaga herself. I have never considered her a great dancer or singer, but rather an imitator (Madonna, Bowie, etc, have dressed in similar fashions much earlier) and performance artist. Whether talent (as measured by who?) has anything to do with it, I don’t know.
She certainly has imagination and persistence. These two qualities will often trump any so called ‘talent’ one might have or develop.
Hi Corbett, I love Expert Enough…I have the manifesto up on my office wall.
You do need talent to become world class but in order to answer that effectively I think that the very definition of talent needs to be looked at.
I work across a range of sports developing coaches that work with talented athletes delivering seminars on talent and talent development on a regular basis and often have a debate about what talent actually is.
There is usually a group that think it is a natural or innate quality (you have either got it or you haven’t) while others think that internal factors such as determination, drive and commitment are key along with environmental factors such as parents, coaches and luck! It is essentially the nurture v nature debate once again.
For me I think talent is too often confused with ability. When we talk about someone being talented we are actually talking about them being able to perform a skill or activity to a given performance standard. If someone is above the norm by a given margin then we classify them as being talented. The problem is that this doesn’t give the whole picture…it is no use having ability if you don’t have the required internal factors to turn that ability into something special. Likewise, you can be as determined as anybody but if you just don’t have the raw materials you won’t make the grade.
The best metaphor I can think of is a computer… If you have a machine with amazing hardware but poor software it is a substandard machine, if you have great software but the hardware is not up to scratch you get the same result.
The ratio of how important each of these aspects is changes depending on the activity you are performing. Activities that are predominantly skill based and require little in terms of physical or high level cognitive abilities are more about hard work, perseverance and practice. Activities that require more physical / cognitive abilities may suit some people more than others but there is always a high element of the hard work or practice involved.
If we can understand that talent is that rare combination of ability that is then multiplied by determination and drive (all of which can be developed by the right coach!) then we must conclude that you definitely need talent to achieve greatness.
If you take talent to mean ability then (depending on the domain) you don’t need talent to achieve greatness as long as you have the time, resources and commitment.
As Muhammad Ali said ” you need the skill and the will…but the will is more important than the skill”.