That said the practice amount myths have been disproved. But people often mistake simple factors like the time of year you are born and your access to training and experience for natural talent.
A child born in early in the summer will be almost a year younger and will get less play time compared to the late summer/fall born children who are almost a year older and thus larger as an example.
Without a direct attribution to a genetic factor it appears that lots of these examples are nurturer based traits. But without the right mindset and environment these natural advantages will simply be untapped. How would you even know what your limits are without putting in the efforts to discover those limits?
Wrong. You need both.
The athlete with good genes and unparalleled drive will always beat the athlete with great genes but poor drive.
Every. Single. Time.
Also worth pointing out the ‘slow adapters vs fast adapters’ debate. Some people pick things up quickly.
Some athletes adapt to a sport really fast. Others take longer to catch up. But often when they do catch up, they blow past people that were crushing them early on.
Very few of the boy’s singles champions at the tennis grand slams have gone on to win an actual grand slam. Andy Murray and Andy Roddick are the only two that come immediately to mind.
What’s wrong with crushing disappointment? It’s better than a lifetime of “what if” regrets IMHO. The problem with telling people they can’t do something is that truly motivated people often find a way to achieve their dreams (or some version of it).
Still, I come away from the film “Rudy” not seeing it as a lesson in how if you believe you can achieve. The message I get is if you put all your attention and effort into something you have little natural aptitude for, maybe at best you might get a chance to participate out of pity, at a time when your contribution will have no possible impact on the outcome.
You could settle for point guard like Muggsy Bogues (5’3")
The problem with show business, professional sports and being an astronaut is that there are relatively few positions available, even for the top talent.
That said, certain professions lend themselves to “shoot for the stars but miss and still land on the moon” better than others. For example, even if you never make the astronaut program, you can probably still do something in life with your successful Air Force career and PhD from MIT. Failed rappers and basketball players don’t really have much to fall back on.
True for sports and space, but not really for show business. There are very few series lead jobs (which are kind of like C-level exec jobs) but plenty of principal roles getting residuals. Most are short term, so you interview (audition) a lot more than we in the regular business world are used to. But access to these interviews is limited. First, you need to be in LA or New York mostly. Second, you only get to see a casting director if you have an agent who pre-screens you for a job. And even getting an agent is a big pre-screening.
After many a long year of human observation, I now believe that the ability to persevere, build skills over time, organize yourself, work hard but also work well, is ALSO an innate talent. We tend to think that only things like being able to carry a tune, swim faster than anyone else, or fix small machines are “talents”. But all of it is.
Everyone knows highly intelligent or very talented people who never seem to get anywhere, all their lives, despite a lot of random efforts. They lack other things. And those lacks are extremely various. I know people whose lives would have been completely different if they had been able to tolerate working under a boss (any boss), or were able to not fuss endlessly over inconsequential details instead of focusing on the larger goal.
Success, no matter how generally you define it, is almost always made up of a complexity of personal traits along with external factors like being born the right race, to the right parents, at the right time in history, etc.
I think one thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that success is definitely in the eye of the beholder. There are lots of folks who think one must achieve ridiculously high standards before they can call themselves something. Like, believing you can’t call yourself a scientist unless you have a Ph.D and run your own research lab. Or you can’t call yourself an artist until a gallery exhibits your work and people commission your artwork. Or the only athletes who count are professionals or Olympians.
There is this notion that everything we do must be profitable enough to make a living wage from it. If it isn’t your career, it doesn’t count.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut and an artist. The astronaut thing obviously didn’t pan out (though I am a bit of a space cadet), but I do produce art. It isn’t great art. I haven’t made a lot of money from it. But I am still an artist.
A kid who wants to be an actor and grows up to do community theater has achieved their goal, even if their acting isn’t financially lucrative for them. Now, if they spent $100K to accomplish this, that is crazy. But it is not accurate to say they aren’t successful.
Or that the price for becoming a pro will include them losing the kid once the kid becomes an adult capable of saying “fuck you and that money is mine”. Often parents aren’t pushing the kid to be “everything the kid wants to be” but “everything the parent wants the kid to be”, which involves both high expectations and a denial of any interest of the child’s which doesn’t align with the parents’ targets. And it may not even be any kind of famous person; see: “mothers wanting their daughters to go to nursing school so they can better care for Mother Dearest” (I’ve met several of those including my own) or “parents who didn’t even attend college deciding their son must become a lawyer” (tons, for some reason a lot of no-college parents become fixated on either medical or law).
This may be a good point that may explain the division here.
I personally view having a goal and working towards it as a mark of success and that trying is of value in itself irrespective of outcome. I personally don’t view not reaching a goal as being nearly the same as never trying which I view as choosing failure. The process of continual self improvement is the point and those habits translate to all parts of life even down to the washing dishes or driving a car.
Without action wants are just wishes, and thus “want to be” requires action IMHO.
You may not get everything that you want, and that is fine. But if want involves action in your connotation you will be far more likely to get things than if you just wish for them but take no action.
That sisu, determination, and/or tenacity of perusing the goal is what is being sold by “You can be anything you want to be” as advice IMHO.
I didn’t know there was a myth to disprove. Malcolm Gladwell (I think it was in Outliers) claimed that you need to something for 10,000 hours to get really good at it. Maybe that’s the myth you’re talking about but I don’t know if that claim ever reached mythic proportions.
Also discussed by Gladwell in Outliers, using pro hockey players as an example. He may have even been correct, but Gladwell is not a research scientist and he commits the fallacy of collecting a lot of anecdotes and calling it “data.”
And speaking of data, what is the basis for this claim? If we’re just exchanging opinions, it’s a fine opinion, but the statement seems to be presented as an indisputable fact.
Employee A: Baseline skill is 90. Sometimes puts in a 120, but sometimes puts in a 60, and you don’t really know what you’re going to get from performance to performance.
Employee B: Baseline skill is 80. Consistently gives you 80.
Those authors didn’t like Gladwell’s particular usage based on their work BTW but the concepts similar to the one Gladwell monetized were popular for quite a while.
And yes deliberate practice as the primary indicator or cause of success has been debunked.
Really all of these simplistic explanations are probably false, but one book that tries to give an overview without fighting with non-open data fields like this is *The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance *
I’m not sure this makes your point, because I’d happily hire Employee A in this example. Most work is knowledge work these days, and an employee who can reach 120 even sporadically has the potential to drive WAY more value than an employee forever capped at 80, especially if solving more complex or larger problems relies on deeper insights.
Or to put it another way, you can choose between an employee who will solve a $20 million dollar problem for you once or twice in their career, but otherwise contribute at a $60k problem solving level annually, or you can choose an employee who reliably solves $100k problems every year - which employee do you want?
The problem with the first guy is that you never know when you are going to get his A game. It’s utterly unpredictable, and most businesses do better when they can predict results.
No, I get that, it’s just in business and other “winner take all” domains with long tails, talent actually can make a HUGE difference in outcomes, so it’s not a good example of the talent vs. “hard consistent work” paradigm.
You see this in trading - there are two general types, one type that returns pretty steady positive returns annually, and one type that returns basically nothing for long periods of time, but every few years brings in 200x more than the first type ever returns. Who would you hire for your firm?
I get that if you’re hiring employees to make widgets, you want your solid repeatable 80 guy, because you have inventories and supply chains and predictability to manage. But when it comes to knowledge work, I think the relationship largely breaks down, and there can be greatly disproportionate positive outcomes driven by an employee who is capable of 1.5x smarter spurts of talent than the 80 guy, and those are the guys you want if you’re in knowledge work, programming, data science, finance, R&D, or a bunch of other fields.
You typically need both kinds of people in that kind of work. The problem with the geniuses is that they are passionate about things they are passionate about. Yes, they do great work, but only when they are motivated to do so. You give them project A, they come back later with project B. Project B is awesome, but you really need project A. Those kinds of people aren’t always good with the the day-to-day grind. For that, it’s good to have people who consistently get the job done even if it’s mundane work.
Sure, fair enough. I’m totally willing to stipulate that most-if-not-all businesses need a mix of reliable types and brilliant types to provide enough stability for the times the brilliant ones aren’t producing at their highest.
I think my point stands that it’s not the best example for measuring the equality of talent vs hard work, because talent actually matters disproportionately more in that and other long-tail winner-take-all examples.