
Why Talent Is Overrated - comatose_kid
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_colvin.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008102116
======
whacked_new
I wouldn't say talent is overrated. I'd say hard work is underrated; talent is
misunderstood. Luck is also underrated. Wealth is overrated.

~~~
sabat
Talent alone does little or nothing. Talent + hard work = great potential.
Talent + hard work + luck = success.

For a great psychological (layman's) treatment of this, see _Mindset: The New
Psychology of Success_ by Carol Dweck.

~~~
thalur
I would say that talent is how good you can be at something without having to
try (i.e. without hard work), and that as such it is a continuous quantity
rather than a binary one. When talent runs out, the only way to get better is
through hard work. In a way, I think being too talented at something is a
handicap because you never learn how to work hard, and so you are unable to
progress any further than your talent will take you.

------
markessien
'Talent' is not something anybody should be proud of having. Everybody is born
with a particular advantage over other people in some particular area. Some
discover this advantage and put it to good use. Others do not, or never have
the chance to develop it. So 'Talent' is irrelevant, because everybody has it.

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.

------
zasz
It makes more sense to say that talent is necessary but not sufficient. I'd
like the writer to provide examples of people who had no apparent talent at
all, even lacking whatever talents are necessary to get into a good college,
and show me how many billionaires you get from that group. Saying that out of
a crowd of Ivy League graduates, since only two made it big, that being an Ivy
League graduate had absolutely nothing to do with it at all, makes no sense.

~~~
hs
Thomas A Edison lacking talents to get into a grade school has physical
limitation (deaf) but invented? phonograph?

i would even say as far that limitations (talent, physical, money etc) are
necessary to make it big

~~~
zasz
Just because you're deaf, doesn't mean you can't have mechanical aptitude. And
what if your limitation is that you have Down's Syndrome? Clearly, some parts
of human ability are genetic, and some of the variance in human ability is
innate. I'm just not impressed to hear that out of a hundred smart people,
only 5 became successful. That doesn't prove talent has nothing to do with it.
If a study showed that the rate of success was 5% regardless of "talent,"
whatever that is, that would be something, but the article didn't do that.

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.

------
mattmaroon
Did they just use, as an example to prove that talent is not genetic, one
former NFL quarterback having two sons who are NFL quarterbacks? Or did I
imagine that?

I must have imagined that.

~~~
prospero
I think it was meant to show that if you look beneath the inherited skill,
you'll find a lifetime of hard work, just like with anyone else. Still, that's
not what I'd call quality writing. I'm surprised it made it past the editor.

~~~
mattmaroon
Right, because if you accept the contrary argument, that it's about nothing
but raw talent and work is irrelevant, you would assume that the training
didn't hurt but didn't matter either.

Show me a quarterback whose 5'2" dad who stopped at middle school peewee
trained them, and I'll be impressed.

~~~
tyn
From Wikipedia:

"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"

~~~
jyothi
I would rephrase it as - "geniuses are born and can be made"

[http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2007/02/geniuses-are-made-
no...](http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2007/02/geniuses-are-made-not-
born.html)

------
DanielBMarkham
I've always felt that early music education had something to do with brain
development later in life. This article helped to explain a lot. To be able to
identify weak areas and purposely practice at them is something I used to do
in my 20s all the time, mainly because my music education told me that this
was the way to improve a poor-performing piece.

This article was a good reminder for me. I need to get back into that mindset.

------
helveticaman
I couldn't help but notice the discrepancies between the article and reality:

 _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...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/gates_microsoft/index.html)

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.

~~~
13ren
I know what you're saying, but those quotes also describe deliberate
practice... look how hard Gates worked at 11 yo, and in what way.

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

------
SapphireSun
I would say that talent is a useless idea. What really matters is an openness
to new ideas, the courage and diligence to pursue them, and a genuine interest
in success. Sometimes these things do not appear at all in someone but then as
they acclimate themselves to an environment, they polish themselves to a
shine.

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.

------
thomasmallen
If you're in a creative position, talent is essential. But if you simply need
to make the right decisions (or not too many wrong ones) and get the job done
reasonably well to get ahead. For a guy like Ballmer (featured in the
article), discipline and diligence far outvalue talent.

~~~
blakeweb
> If you're in a creative position, talent is essential.

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.

------
danielh
The sports analogy is misleading.

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.

~~~
Goronmon
I think it's much easier to discuss "talent" if you ignore physical
attributes. Not just because it avoids using the word "talent" too broadly,
but because physical attributes only apply in a very limited number of
professions.

~~~
xiaoma
Like the rest of the body, the brain exists in the physical world. All
"talent" is based upon physical attributes.

~~~
Goronmon
I was using the dichotomy between physical and mental in this context. Perhaps
I didn't make that clear but it seems you are just being difficult for the
sake of...well...being difficult. Was my point really that difficult to
understand?

I am asking honestly, not to be condescending.

~~~
xiaoma
I believe it's a false dichotomy in this context. Our bodies and brains are
both shaped by our genetics as well as our experiences.

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.

~~~
Goronmon
If those limitations are hard to measure, nearly impossible to judge at a
glance, and are not guaranteed to even be present in an individual, how do you
have a discussion about their effects on a person's success?

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.

------
auston
I thought Ballmer knew Gates well in college. I'd say that would definitely
help him get that CEO position.

------
xiaoma
As my old basketball coach liked to say, "You can't teach tall."

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.

------
acgourley
Wouldn't it take talent to actually perform deliberate practice? Most people
don't have that kind of self control.

~~~
13ren
From this one talent springs all.

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.

------
thalur
"You could say that work, like deliberate practice, is often mentally
demanding and tiring. But that's typically not because of the intense focus
and concentration involved. Rather, it's more often a result of long hours
cranking out what we already know how to do. And if we're exhausted from that,
the prospect of spending additional hours on genuine deliberate practice
activities may seem too miserable to contemplate. "

That I can agree with :( A very interesting article once you get into the
description of deliberate practice and how to implement it.

------
vlad
Bodybuilding came to my mind. People say they don't have good genes (I would
say some percentage of professional athletes do have far better genes than
anyone else, but not most professional or college athletes). However, unless
they try lifting weights 4x a week and/or trying to be good at a sport for
five years in their early 20's, they will never actually know.

~~~
gaius
"A stronger will beats superior genetics" -- Dorian Yates. He's only partially
right, tho', as Stuart McRobert demonstrates.

------
jcl
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full
of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." --
Calvin Coolidge

------
mlLK
'Deliberate Practice' is what Easterners might call 'Kung Fu', while we
Westerners often associate the concept with Chinese Martial Arts, I think the
East associates this term in a much broader context whereas Kung Fu is used
for describing much more than just martial arts.

------
mhartl
An aphorism about babies and bathwater comes to mind.

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.

------
namcos
A dropout can beat a genius through hard-work and determination. -Naruto

~~~
nicko
Never argue with an idiot. They will only drag you down to their level and
beat you with experience.

~~~
mlLK
Is there a source for this? Or is this all you?

~~~
nicko
No, not me I'm afraid, but a good question that I couldn't get google to
answer (in 30 seconds). I did however find this one credited to Mark Twain -
'Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the diference'

------
benbeltran
Talent isn't everything, but it sure helps. But then again, maybe "talent" is
just the product of hard work and dedication in the form of an almost scary
obsession with something.

------
thewordpainter
Too many people aspire for mediocrity; Not many people aspire for GREATNESS

------
debt
I believe I'm talentless so I couldn't agree more with this article.

------
wumi
desire trumps ability

------
known
Success = Passion + Potential + Patience

~~~
cadalac
\+ Talent

