Talent Is Overrated (5 page)

Recent scholarship has put his abilities as a prodigy performer in a new perspective as well. Researchers constructed a “precocity index” for pianists; they figured out the number of years of study needed by a pianist under modern training programs before publicly performing various works, and then compared that with the number of years actually needed by several prodigies throughout history. If the average music student needs six years of preparation before publicly playing a piece, and a given prodigy did it after three years, that student would have an index of 200 percent. Mozart's index is around 130 percent, clearly ahead of average students. But twentieth-century prodigies score 300 percent to 500 percent. This is another example of rising standards. The effects of today's improved training methods apparently swamp the effects of Mozart's genius as a performer.

To repeat, these facts obviously don't affect our regard for Mozart's music. But they drain a lot of the magic and romance out of how it was created, and some people don't like that. In a paper titled “Mozart as a Working Stiff,” Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw describes what happened when he suggested at a Mozart conference in Vienna that the adult composer was focused on turning out product because he needed the money and rarely if ever wrote a work for which he wasn't being paid. “I was quite taken aback at the vehemence with which my remarks were attacked,” he recalls. “The moderator of the session took it upon himself to denounce me from the chair.” The offense was suggesting that Mozart was merely a human performer with human motivations, not a demigod propelled solely by the divine spark.

That incident raises a significant issue that recurs in judging the greatness of anyone whose field is creative and artistic. We can measure quite precisely the achievements of athletes, chess players, and others whose work can be evaluated objectively. In the world of finance, fund managers and other investors are judged by criteria that can be carried to several decimal places. Even scientists can be judged fairly objectively, if not too precisely, by the influence of their work in the years after it was done. But composers, painters, poets, and other creators are judged by standards that inevitably shift, so we must at least be careful in drawing conclusions based on their greatness. Some artists have been celebrated in their lifetimes and then forgotten by posterity; others were ignored in life and “discovered” only later. J. S. Bach's
St. Matthew Passion,
now widely regarded as one of the greatest musical works ever written, was apparently performed only twice in his lifetime; though the fact strikes us today as incredible, Bach's music in general was not especially esteemed after his death until Felix Mendelssohn championed it decades later. (Mendelssohn's own music would be widely scorned after his death, though it's highly popular today.) The important point is that if we had been studying greatness in 1810, we probably wouldn't have paid much attention to Bach, or in 1910 to Mendelssohn. As for Mozart, the angry moderator of Zaslaw's panel insisted that Mozart's music could not even be compared with that of his contemporaries because it “belonged only to the highest spheres of creativity.” To which Zaslaw responded that “Mozart's music ascended into the higher ether only in the course of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime, it was right down on the ground along with that of the other composers.”

Regarding how he produced this music, however it's evaluated, the
New Yorker
's music critic, Alex Ross, sums up much of the recent scholarship on the Miracle of Salzburg: “Ambitious parents who are currently playing the ‘Baby Mozart' video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard.”

Researchers on great performance sometimes call Tiger Woods the Mozart of golf, and the parallels do seem striking. Woods's father, Earl, was a teacher, specifically a teacher of young men, and he had a lifelong passion for sports. He spent the first half of his career in the army, where, he says, his assignments included teaching military history, tactics, and war games to cadets at the City College of New York. In high school and college (Kansas State) he had been a star baseball player, and in the time between college and the army he would coach Little League teams “and take them to the state tournament,” he wrote in a little-noticed book,
Training a Tiger,
published shortly before Tiger turned pro. “I love to teach,” he said.

Earl had plenty of time to teach his son and was intensely focused on doing so. His wife Kultida and their son, Tiger, were Earl's second family. He had married young and had three children with his first wife, but that marriage ended in divorce. By the time Tiger came along, Earl's previous children were grown, he had retired from the army, and at age forty-four he was working for McDonnell Douglas in Southern California. He was also fanatical about golf. He had been introduced to the game only a couple of years earlier but had worked extremely hard at it and had achieved a handicap in the low single digits, placing him in the top 10 percent of players. When Tiger was born, Earl wrote, “I had been properly trained and was ready to go. I took over new ground in starting Tiger at an unthinkably early age.”

So here's the situation: Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed “golf addict” who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible. Earl's wife does not work outside the home, and they have no other children; they have decided that “Tiger would be the first priority in our relationship,” Earl wrote. Earl gives Tiger his first metal club, a putter, at the age of seven months. He sets up Tiger's high chair in the garage, where Earl is hitting balls into a net, and Tiger watches for hours on end. “It was like a movie being run over and over and over for his view,” Earl wrote. Earl develops new techniques for teaching the grip and the putting stroke to a student who cannot yet talk. Before Tiger is two, they are at the golf course playing and practicing regularly.

Tiger's prodigious achievements have become well known; he was a local celebrity by the time he reached elementary school and became nationally famous in college. Amid all that has been written about his legend, a couple of facts are especially worth noting. First is the age at which he initially achieved outstanding performance at a level of play involving regular international competition. Let's call it age nineteen, when he was a member of the U.S. team in Walker Cup play (though he did not win his match). At that point he had been practicing golf with tremendous intensity, first under his father and after age four under professional teachers, for seventeen years.

Second, neither Tiger nor his father suggested that Tiger came into this world with a gift for golf. Earl did not believe that Tiger was an ordinary kid (but, then, parents hardly ever believe that). He thought Tiger had an unusual ability to understand what he was told and to keep track of numbers even before he could count very high. Tiger has repeatedly credited his father for his success. Trying to understand his early interest in the game, he has not invoked an inborn fascination. Rather, he has written, “golf for me was an apparent attempt to emulate the person I looked up to more than anyone: my father.” Asked to explain Tiger's phenomenal success, father and son always gave the same reason: hard work.

One of Tiger's boyhood coaches later recalled that, on first seeing him, “I felt he was like Mozart.” As indeed he was.

If the concept of specific talents turns out to be troublesome in music and sports, it's even more so in business. We all tend to assume that business giants must possess some special gift for what they do, but evidence turns out to be extremely elusive. In fact, the overwhelming impression that comes from examining the early lives of business greats is just the opposite—that they didn't seem to hold any identifiable gift or give any early indication of what they would become.

To consider a few of the most prominent examples: Jack Welch, named by
Fortune
magazine as the twentieth century's manager of the century, showed no particular inclination toward business, even into his midtwenties. He grew up as a high-achieving kid in Salem, Massachusetts, getting good grades, though “no one would have accused me of being brilliant,” he later wrote, and becoming captain of his high school's hockey and golf teams. It was a good enough record to get him into an Ivy League college, but his family couldn't afford it, and he ended up going to the University of Massachusetts. He majored not in business or economics but in chemical engineering. He then went to the University of Illinois and got a master's and a Ph.D. in the same field. As he approached the real world at age twenty-five, he still wasn't sure of his direction and interviewed for faculty jobs at Syracuse and West Virginia universities. He finally decided to accept an offer to work in a chemical development operation at General Electric.

If anything in Welch's history to that point suggests that he would become the most influential business manager of his time, it's tough—in fact, impossible—to spot it.

Bill Gates, the world's richest human and symbol of a fundamental economic revolution, is a more promising prospect 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 thirteen; it was a program that played tic-tac-toe. Gates and his friend Paul Allen, with whom he later founded Microsoft, were constantly contriving ways to get more computer time on the big clunky machines of the day. They started a business, Traf-O-Data, to build computers that would analyze the data from traffic monitors on city streets; Gates says the device worked, but nobody bought it. After going off to Harvard, he remained immersed in the exciting and fast-changing world of computers.

It's clear that Gates's early interests led directly to Microsoft. The problem is that nothing in his story suggests extraordinary abilities. As he is the first to note, legions of kids were interested in the possibilities of computers in those days. Harvard at that time was bursting with computer geeks who well understood that a technology revolution was happening. What suggested that Gates would become the king of them all? The answer is, nothing in particular. On close examination, it was probably not his software expertise that was most critical to his success. The more relevant abilities were the ability to launch a business and then the quite different abilities required to manage a large corporation. And Traf-O-Data notwithstanding, one looks in vain for signs of those abilities in world-class proportions, or at all, in the young Gates.

In surveying the world's business titans we find Welch-like stories more often than Gates-like stories, lacking even a hint of inclination toward the fields or traits that would one day lead to fame and riches. One of Gates's predecessors as the world's richest man, John D. Rockefeller, illustrates the point. He grew up as a poor, pious boy, hardworking, notable mainly for his seriousness and maturity. But as his most distinguished biographer, Ron Chernow, observes, “In many respects John was forgettable and indistinguishable from many other boys. When he later dazzled the world, many former neighbors and classmates struggled to summon up even a fuzzy image of him.” One thing many acquaintances did recall was young John's firmly stated intention to become rich. But then, Chernow notes, “There was nothing unusual about Rockefeller's boyhood dreams, for the times were feeding avaricious fantasies in millions of susceptible schoolboys.” The most typical assessment seems to come from a woman who tutored the Rockefeller children and later recalled, “I have no recollection of John excelling at anything. I do remember he worked hard at everything; not talking much, and studying with great industry.”

Over and over we find these stories of the early life that tell us nothing of what's to come, sometimes in even more extreme form. David Ogilvy, regarded by many as the greatest advertising executive of the twentieth century, was expelled from Oxford, slaved in a hotel kitchen in Paris, sold stoves in Scotland, and farmed in Pennsylvania, among many other apparently random occupations that consumed the first seventeen years of his career. Predicting that he would make his mark as an advertising legend would have been difficult, considering that he presented precious little evidence that he would make any mark at all.

But what about Warren Buffett, yet another of the world's richest men, quoted earlier as saying he was born to allocate capital? He showed not only early signs of interest in his eventual field of eminence, like Gates, but also precocity. As a boy, Buffett was intensely interested in learning about business and investing, and he wanted to make money. He ran several newspaper routes, and at age eleven he bought his first stock, Cities Service preferred. At fifteen, he and a friend bought a used pinball machine and installed it in a barbershop; within a few months they'd added two more machines. Buffett used his profits to buy forty acres of farmland, which he rented to farmers. He was also known as a kid who could add large numbers in his head, and he graduated from high school at sixteen. Later, in graduate school at Columbia, he studied under the famous investing authority Benjamin Graham and received the only A+ that Graham ever awarded.

Buffett's achievements as an investor are world famous, and his story makes it easy to understand why he and many others would say he was born to do what he did. But that explanation—an inborn ability to allocate capital—is not the only way or even the easiest way to account for his success. Buffett's early obsessive interest in money seems unsurprising in someone growing up in the Midwest in the Depression. Similarly, his fascination with stocks and investing is not especially intriguing when one considers that his father was a stockbroker and investor whom young Warren adored. Warren went to work in his father's office at age eleven and thus began learning about investing at a very early age. Yet there's little if any evidence that, even into his early twenties, he was especially good at it. For a while in his teens he was an enthusiastic “chartist,” trying to predict the movements of stock prices by studying charts of past movements; research has shown this technique to be worthless as a way to beat the market (though, like many ineffective techniques, it still has believers). Later he tried to be a market timer, choosing the perfect moments to get into and out of stocks; this strategy also is a guaranteed loser over time, and Buffett couldn't make it work.