Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash
Talent is one of my least favourite words.
Being talented implies that a person is gifted with a set of skills or breadth of knowledge at birth, or that someone has a genetic predisposition that gives them an advantage in learning and developing in a particular domain.
From this point of view, long hours of hard, consistent, deliberate practice are pushed aside in favour of more attractive explanations of success: fate, luck, and determinism.
The truth is, relying on talent to justify why some people reach the pinnacle of their field is just plain lazy.
And as research has shown, it’s simply not true.
Deliberate Practice
Mozart wasn’t talented, he put in more hours of deliberate practice throughout the early years of his childhood than many of us can fathom. The same goes for every other star athlete and musician you can think of, as well as for every other top performer in a given field.
Deliberate practice is purposeful and systematic and aims to identify specific weaknesses for the user to improve upon. This requires continuous feedback from someone more knowledgeable or the use of another method of recognizing faults and modelling behaviour after someone else’s successes.
This type of practice is far from mindless. It is the opposite of practicing for the sake of practicing. Every session, and every repetition within the session, has a very specific purpose.
But deliberate practise is not reserved for professional athletes or elite musicians. In recent years, authors have shared these ideas with millions of readers around the world through popular literature.
2008 saw the release of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, as well as Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, both informative yet entertaining reads on deliberate practice. (The often-cited 10,000-hour rule, whereby a person must log at least that many hours before they can be considered an expert in their field, was popularized by Gladwell’s book.)
In 2016, Anders Ericsson, one of the world’s leading researchers on deliberate practice, along with writer Robert Pool, released the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.
While many are familiar with the 10,000-hour rule, and millions of copies of the above books have been sold and read, one key question remains:
Why are so many people still using talent to explain success?
How Talent can be Dangerous
Using talent to explain success (or lack of success) can be dangerous for two reasons.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
You say you’re not athletic, so you tend to avoid sports. A teacher says math is not your strongest subject, so you justify bad grades by saying algebra just isn’t your thing.
You set the prophecy and then you fulfill it because deep down you actually believe whatever assumptions you’re telling yourself.
This is a very common story in schools, where children are turned away from a certain path because they don’t show success right away. In reality, not all who have early success in a given field go on to be successful at the highest levels.
Every individual has potential, and that potential needs to be cultivated and developed in order to have success. Of course, some limiting factors do exist, but those are usually related to height and size (commonly seen in sports like football, basketball, and gymnastics).
Self-fulfilling prophecies represent a dangerous way of thinking – one that encourages people to be passive and to relinquish control over their futures instead of believing in the proven powers of deliberate practice.
Locus of Control
Locus of control is the degree to which you believe that you have control over the outcomes of events in your life.
An external locus of control explains success with talent. Either you have it or you don’t – and if you don’t, there’s not a lot you can do to change it. You’re not in control.
An internal locus of control favours deliberate practice. Anyone can be successful if they put in the right amount of work over an extended period of time. You are in control.
The danger is that an external locus of control can lead to lazy, passive thinking.
Rather than appreciate someone else’s hard work and dedication, you discredit their success and justify it with chance.
Instead of accepting your role in poor performances or failures, which would lead to identifying areas of weakness that could in turn lead to personal improvement and growth, you play it off and say “this is just not for me.”
Every time you use the word talent… you’re inching further away from the values of personal responsibility, hard work, dedication, and patience.
Every time you use the word talent… you’re ignoring the enormous amount of literature supporting deliberate practice.
Every time you use the word talent… you’re doing yourself a disservice by not taking your future into your own hands.
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