The Truth Curve

“Talent is cheaper than table salt.  What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

- Stephen King

In a previous article, I made the argument that it is deliberate practice - that daily slog through the unpleasant and the difficult - that gets you to success.  If success is overwhelmingly comprised of hard work, like Stephen King suggests, then does talent matter? 

I would say, yes.  Here’s why:

Let’s assume that talent comprises a small part of success and that it really is hard work that accounts for most of one’s success.  Then why bother with talent at all?  It’s so limiting, after all.  Why not be and do whatever you want to be and do regardless of the talents that you were born with?  A lot of us (especially in my generation) grew up with the notion that you can do “whatever you set your mind to.”

Even if talent accounts for a small percentage of success, it’s visible to us.  We’re able to pick out the Picasso from the Shmicasso.  Now, Shmicasso may be creating paintings exactly like Picasso (or so it seems) but there will always be something about Picasso that makes his work brilliant and that of Shmicasso just average. I don’t know how we know but we do know and we see the difference.  Perhaps when Picasso chooses to put a yellow line here, it’s brilliant. Shmicasso instead puts the yellow line over there.  We can’t put our finger on it but there is something about that yellow line that gives the Picasso painting a sense of “just-rightness” but makes the Shmicasso painting seem just average.  Shmicasso’s work may look competent and solid but it doesn’t wow us, and all because he misplaced the yellow line on the canvas.

I don’t know what talent is exactly; it has always struck me as a mysterious gift.  But I believe it is about having the right judgment.  Talent is the ability to generalize from one situation to another without the benefit of previous experience.  It is the ability to use intuition about what is good and what is not good.  It is about making the right aesthetic or strategic choice nearly all the time.  The person who has no talent in a certain domain can be taught the rules or steps to follow and he will follow them, do well and turn in a solid performance.  But as soon as there is a twist or an unexpected situation, the talentless person is lost; he does not know what to do because it’s not in the steps or rules he learned.  He can’t improvise.  The talented person, on the other hand, knows what to do even though he has never faced that exact situation before.

So what?  If you do not have the talent but work hard enough and succeed, then isn’t that enough?

Is it?  Is it enough to be average in something?  Are you okay with being average?  Godin argues that you should be the best; that average is not a good use of your limited time.  Not only is this not a good use of your time but you would also be depriving the world of your unique contribution.

However, if you just have talent but don’t work to develop it, then you won’t even get out of the starting gate.  People with far less talent will beat you and enjoy success.  Their work won’t be particularly brilliant but at least it will be done.  Having talent and not using it is like sitting on a diamond mine and never doing anything with it.  By itself, the diamond is worthless: it’s a lumpy rock that has little value.  It only has potential.  The value is in the cutting of it.  How you cut it and set it brings out its brilliance.

True success and satisfaction will come not from your ability to work hard but from your ability to identify your unique talents and then work hard to bring them out.  Now that is a powerful combination.

Tags: Productivity, Success, Talent, Work by Julie
No Comments »

At one point in my life, I dabbled in pottery making.  I fell in love with pottery making before I even knew how to do it and decided that this was going to be my craft.  So I bought a book on pottery making.  But there, in the chapter on throwing pots, the author said something about needing to throw a hundred pots before you can even master the first shape (the cylinder).  A hundred pots just to master one shape?  This clearly didn’t apply to me.

So I learned how to throw the clay onto the wheel and form a cylinder.  It was hard and messy and the results were predictably amateurish: a bowl that I made had a thicker wall on one side and a thinner wall on the other; the teapot that I made out of coils of clay was lopsided and reminded me of a gnome’s hat for some reason (not an effect I was going for).  So I dropped pottery making and moved on to yet another hobby that would surely be easier to master.

I used to believe that if you have talent, then it’s easy to create the piece of art you envision.  If I could only find the perfect medium — clay or watercolors or stained glass or whatever — I would create the beautiful pieces of artwork I saw in my mind.  But every medium that I tried proved to be horribly flawed: Clay was messy, stained glass was brittle and unforgiving, watercolor was… well, watery.  Twenty years and twenty abandoned hobbies later, I’ve begun to realize that my premise was not true.  Mastering a craft or a hobby is anything but easy and talent plays but a small part in the process. 

So, what is the key to a perfectly thrown pot with even walls?  Or a perfect golf swing?  Or becoming a world chess champion?  Not surprisingly, it’s practice.  But not just any kind of practice.  Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice.”  Just practicing for many years and gaining experience doesn’t guarantee a better performance.  There are plenty of people with decades of experience in their fields who don’t outperform novices.

Deliberate practice involves specifically practicing the hardest skills in a structured manner meant to stretch you beyond your current abilities.  For athletes or musicians, the coach might set lessons that get progressively harder.  The figure skater must practice the same jump 200 times until it is flawless; the pianist must practice each piece until the nuances of the music are just right. 

It’s always tempting to practice what you’re already good at but experts resist doing that.  Instead, they practice the skills that will push them to the next level of performance.  What separates the experts from the amateurs is the way in which they practice.  Amateurs either don’t practice in a way that would constantly push their skills further and further or they focus on perfecting that which they are already good at.  Experts, on the other hand, practice the most difficult skill over and over again, each time pushing the practice further. Ericsson says that the practice should never get easier; if it does, it means the person is coasting, not improving.

Why don’t more people do this kind of deliberate practice?  Because it’s hard.  It’s the kind of practice that requires a lot of exertion, leads to repeated failure and the reward is perhaps a 1% improvement.  A lot of people don’t want to work for a 1% improvement.  But it’s that 1% improvement - a tenth of a second faster for a swimmer or an extra jump for the figure skater — that will separate the gold medalist from the silver medalist.

What hobby or craft or sport are you trying to master?  Realize that it’s not talent that will get you to the top.  Instead, it’s practice… deliberate practice.

Tags: Goals, Growth, Psychology, Work by Julie
1 Comment »