Talent Is Overrated (4 page)

We must be clear about what we mean by the term. People often use it just to mean excellent performance or to describe those who are terrific performers. “The Red Sox have a lot of talent in the outfield” means only that the outfielders are very good. “The war for talent,” a popular topic in business and the title of a book, means the fight to attract good performers. In the TV business, “talent” is the generic term for anyone who appears on camera. “Get the talent on set!” just means get the performers to their places; anyone who watches much TV realizes that in this case the term is totally nonjudgmental.

None of those meanings is the critical one. When the term is used in ways that change the courses of people's lives, it has a specific meaning. It is a natural ability to do something better than most people can do it. That something is fairly specific—play golf, sell things, compose music, lead an organization. It can be spotted early, before the ability is fully expressed. And it is innate; you're born with it, and if you're not born with it, you can't acquire it.

By this definition, most of us believe that talent exists in practically every field. Listen carefully to your next conversation about music, sports, and games; it's difficult to talk about participants for more than two sentences without invoking “talent.” In other realms the concept is never far away. Russell Baker, the great former
New York Times
columnist, believed he was born with “the word gene,” a writer in the making literally from birth. In business, we commonly say that Bob is a natural salesman, or Jean is a born leader, or Pat has a head for figures. Warren Buffett often tells people, “I was hardwired at birth to allocate capital,” which is his way of saying he came into this world with an ability to spot winning investments.

We're all sure that talent exists, but that doesn't mean we've really thought about it. Hardly any of us have done that. The notion is just part of our conception of the world, and it's worth asking why.

Much of the answer resides in an unlikely place, the writings of a nineteenth-century English aristocrat and explorer who never finished college. Francis Galton had believed as a young man that people were born with largely the same capabilities, which were developed to varying degrees during life. Despite the ancient view from mythology and religion that all kinds of gifts were god-given, the idea of equal abilities had become popular by Galton's time. It grew from deep roots in the eighteenth-century notions of equality that fueled the American and French revolutions. Then Thoreau, Emerson, and others told the world that we all possess greater strength and potential than we ever imagined. The evidence flowered in nineteenth-century economic expansion; as trade and industry thrived from Europe to America to Asia, and people found wealth and opportunity on every shore, it seemed everyone could make of themselves what they would.

Galton accepted that view—until he read the works of his cousin, Charles Darwin. Suddenly Galton's opinion reversed, and he promoted his new theory with a convert's zeal. Indeed, some of his influence—which was enormous and remains so in widely held views on this issue—probably stemmed from the bulldozer confidence with which he wrote. “I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort,” he wrote in his foundational work,
Hereditary Genius
(the possibility that girls or women might merit attention never occurred to him). “It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality.”

Galton's view was simple: Just as height and other physical traits tend to be inherited, so does “eminence.” He proved his theory, he said, by “showing how large is the number of instances in which men who are more or less illustrious have eminent kinsfolk.” By scouring the obituaries in the
Times
, he assembled hundreds of pages of evidence illustrating this tendency among judges, poets, commanders, musicians, painters, “divines,” and “wrestlers of the north country,” among others. Eminence in particular fields ran in particular families. The ability to achieve such eminence must therefore be inherited, present at birth.

Though it is tempting to smirk at someone who studied eminence among wrestlers of the north country, we must not lampoon Galton. By trying to apply Darwin's ideas to nonphysical human traits, he pushed science forward, and he advanced techniques of statistical correlation and regression that today are essential in all of science. He understood that he was raising deep questions about where greatness comes from. He coined the phrase “nature versus nurture.” And he established what he called “natural gifts” as a subject of scientific inquiry, which it has remained to this day, as seen in modern scholarly publications such as the
Journal for the Education of the Gifted
and
Conceptions of Giftedness.

The idea of giftedness—which is the same as our definition of talent—thus has a very considerable head of steam behind it. But what if the concept itself turns out to be troubled?

A number of researchers now argue that giftedness or talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. A few contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence.

Their argument is stronger than we might at first imagine. Many studies of accomplished individuals have tried to figure out the key elements of their achievements, in part by interviewing the individuals and their parents, as in the English music study mentioned earlier. In these studies, all the subjects are people of whom we'd say, “They're very talented.” Yet over and over, the researchers found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. Such signs did occur occasionally, but in the large majority of cases they didn't. We can all think of examples of people who seemed to be highly talented, but when researchers have looked at large numbers of high achievers, at least in certain fields, most of the people who became extremely good in their field did not show early evidence of gifts. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, and mathematicians. Of course such findings do not prove that talent doesn't exist. But they suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.

Once training begins, we would suppose that talent would certainly show itself; after only three piano lessons, little Ashley is playing pieces that other kids need six months to learn. But again, this does not happen reliably in people who go on to achieve a great deal. In a study of outstanding American pianists, for example, you could not have predicted their eventual high level of achievement even after they'd been training intensively for six years; at that point most of them still weren't standing out from their peers. In retrospect, we'd say all of them were “talented,” but talent is looking like an odd concept if it hasn't made itself known after six years of hard study.

Even those few cases in which parents do report early, spontaneous signs of talent turn out to be problematic. Various researchers have found cases of children who reportedly spoke or read at extremely early ages, but they then found that the parents were deeply involved in the children's development and stimulation. Given the extraordinarily close relationship between parents and small children, it can be hard to say what originates where. If baby Kevin smooshes paint on a piece of paper in a way that looks to Mom and Dad like a bunny rabbit, they may decide he's an artistic genius and begin nourishing that notion in every way they can find. We've all seen it happen, and in fact research has found that such interactions do result in differing patterns of abilities in children. We'll look into this more deeply in the final chapter.

You might suppose that in the age of genomic research, there should no longer be any question about precisely what's innate and what isn't. Since talent is by definition innate, there should be a gene (or genes) for it. The difficulty is that scientists haven't yet figured out what each of our twenty-thousand-plus genes does. All we can say for the moment is that no specific genes identifying particular talents have been found. It's possible that they will be; scientists could yet find the piano-playing gene or investing gene or accounting gene. But they haven't so far, and evidence we've already seen suggests that finding talent genes may be a long shot. The extreme increases in top levels of performance in a wide range of fields over the past century have happened far too fast to be connected to genetic changes, which require thousands of years. For that reason, it would seem impossible to argue that genes are what make people great at what they do. The most one could say is that if genes exert any influence, it would seem to be much less than the whole explanation for achieving the highest levels of performance.

Talent skeptics are careful to say that the evidence, taken together, doesn't prove that talent is a myth. They allow that further research could eventually show that individual genetic differences are what make the greatest performers so accomplished. But hundreds of studies conducted over decades have failed to show this. On the contrary, the preponderance of them have suggested very powerfully that genetic differences of this particular type—that is, differences that determine the highest levels of performance—don't exist.

And yet . . . how can this be? The antitalent argument may sound sensible at each step, but at the end we're still left with the job of explaining the transcendent greatness of history's most magical, most enduring performers. And how can one possibly account for staggering, immortal achievement
except
as a mysterious divine gift? In fact, when first presented with the logic of the antitalent thesis, a great many people respond immediately with two simple counterarguments: Mozart and Tiger Woods.

Mozart is the ultimate example of the divine-spark theory of greatness. Composing music at age five, giving public performances as a pianist and violinist at age eight, going on to produce hundreds of works, some of which are widely regarded as ethereally great and treasures of Western culture, all in the brief time before his death at age thirty-five—if that isn't talent, and on a mammoth scale, then nothing is.

The facts are worth examining a little more closely. Mozart's father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Wolfgang's teacher by more than just his own eminence; he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children. While Leopold was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year Wolfgang was born, remained influential for decades.

So from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him. Of course his early compositions still seem remarkable, but they raise some provocative questions. It's interesting to note that the manuscripts are not in the boy's own hand; Leopold always “corrected” them before anyone saw them. It seems noteworthy also that Leopold stopped composing at just the time he began teaching Wolfgang.

In some cases it's clear that the young boy's compositions are not original. Wolfgang's first four piano concertos, composed when he was eleven, actually contain no original music by him. He put them together out of works by other composers. He wrote his next three works of this type, today not classified as piano concertos, at age sixteen; these also contain no original music but instead are arrangements of works by Johann Christian Bach, with whom Wolfgang had studied in London. Mozart's earliest symphonies, brief works written when he was just eight, hew closely to the style of Johann Christian Bach, with whom he was studying when they were written.

None of these works is regarded today as great music or even close. They are rarely performed or recorded except as novelties, of interest only because of Mozart's later fame. They seem instead to be the works of someone being trained as a composer by the usual methods—copying, arranging, and imitating the works of others—with the resulting products brought to the world's attention (and just maybe polished a bit) by a father who spent much of his life promoting his son. Mozart's first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That's certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

This is worth pausing to consider. Any divine spark that Mozart may have possessed did not enable him to produce world-class work quickly or easily, which is something we often suppose a divine spark will do.

Mozart's method of composing was not quite the wonder it was long thought to be. For nearly two hundred years many people have believed that he had a miraculous ability to compose entire major pieces in his head, after which writing them down was mere clerical work. That view was based on a famous letter in which he says as much: “the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind . . . the committing to paper is done quickly enough . . . and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.”

That report certainly does portray a superhuman performer. The trouble is, this letter is a forgery, as many scholars later established. Mozart did not conceive whole works in his mind, perfect and complete. Surviving manuscripts show that Mozart was constantly revising, reworking, crossing out and rewriting whole sections, jotting down fragments and putting them aside for months or years. Though it makes the results no less magnificent, he wrote music the way ordinary humans do.