I know that tone deafness is inherited, but I don’t know about other things that could make you inherently good at something.
I read this book a few years ago:
Insofar as anyone can define “talent”, there seems to be a genetic component. But that doesn’t mean talent will be developed or lead anywhere. It usually takes coaching, experience and desire. When I was a sports coach I saw a number of kids who seemed to have a knack for the game, but had little desire. Or they didn’t have the concentration. Or they weren’t “coach-able”.
My sense of it was that people get an advantage from a sport being familiar to them early on. I believe the book puts forth the statistic that if you are a son born to a MLB baseball player, you are vastly more likely to reach the majors than those without the family connection. But of course, it’s not a guarantee.
Not sure what the state of the art is on the science of talent. But I’m comfortable saying some people have a knack, or a talent for a sport, or music or whatnot. But that’s not at all a predictor of great success.
That’s a massive topic and you’re going to have to narrow it down some to get useful information.
I’ll make two meta-observations though on how the bulk of the writing/thinking around talent can be subtly misleading:
- The most salient competitive areas where we tend to judge talent tend to be artificial environments where only a few large factors dominate: Who can run the fastest or lift the most weight or memorize the most words in a spelling bee etc. This allows for clean rankings and legible progress and the most fruitful data to study talent.
The areas most relevant to most people though, tend to be skills with hundreds of different factors at play: How to become better at managing people or providing great customer service or being a good friend to someone or taking care of a pet. Because there’s so many different components, it’s impossible to provide any linear ranking of best, just very broad categories of skill. There’s so many different ways to be good/bad at any of these individual things that individual variance in innate aptitude tend to wash out and it’s much more about finding a particular expression of good that fits with your natural inclinations.
- We tend to focus talent discussions on the very top end of the field because those tend to be the most salient people in society. We look at Olympians for tips on how to get better at sport, Billionaires for how to do business better, Nobel Prize winners for what scientific accomplishments look like. But at the top, the paths to success progressively narrow and luck becomes an overwhelming factor drowning out the signal. Everyone else you’re competing with has already eliminated the low hanging fruits of improvement and you’re all stuck eking out tiny differentials from the same set of factors.
Far more relevant to most people is going from say, the 20th percentile to the 10th percentile and the picture looks far more different there. People at that level haven’t hyper-optimized everything yet and there are multiple paths towards improvement you can take.
These two tends to systematically overstate the importance of innate factors which, to the vast majority of people, are a distinct asterisk.
Instead, what comes out is that two factors overwhelmingly dominant:
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Motivation: most people will rationally decide at some point that the cost of further improvement is not worth the benefit and that’s where they will plateau. The people who push past that point, whether healthily or unhealthily, have developed a motivation that makes them want to succeed more than the pain of growth. At this level, innate talent is an input into motivation in that it’s easier to stay motivated if something is easier for you/you believe you have a higher chance of success.
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Meta-learning: How effective are you at figuring out the right way to improve. You can have all the motivation in the world but if you’re improving on the wrong dimensions, then you don’t make progress. There’s been a ton of writing over the years over what helps improvement the most (feedback being fast, clear and directional for example).
These two factors overwhelmingly dominate innate ability until you reach close to the highest levels. Too often, the role of innate ability is used as an excuse for why you don’t have to actually work on the motivation and meta-learning rather than a real limitation.
I read once that Olympic record-holders and professional athletes are over-represented in October and November birthdays. The claim was that the Summer vitamin D boost that mothers get while pregnant increases bone and muscle development in the baby.
When it comes to the extremes of human achievement, it makes sense that things like that could make a difference. It also seems clear that most chess champions are playing when they are very young children. Is it like “The Knowledge” among London cab drivers, in that the activity itself can drive brain development? Possibly. It makes sense.
I have also seen it written that the wrist of great violinist forms differently in youth due to the twisting involved. It said that people who do not start by age 9 physically cannot become truly great.
All in all, I think it comes down to dedication. Millions of babies are born in October and November without becoming athletes. And millions of children learn chess in their youth without finding it all that interesting. Talent is where we find our dopamine.
This is not a scientific thought, but I figured it was all about dedication to something you are interested in, or have the physical dexterity for. Not everyone can be a great athlete, you need to have the right body shape, flexibility, or constitution for it. And other kinds of talent, like creative or academic, just require an involving interest in, and a lot of time and dedication, which not everyone has available to them.
Yes, not only luck, but over-emphasizing talent.
For instance, I play chess, and it’s quite common to meet people who believe that chess is some kind of IQ test because Bobby Fischer had Googol IQ or whatever. Then they crash out when they lose a game because they don’t want to think they’ve been intellectually bested.
When the truth is, you can get damn good at chess, probably better than 99.99% of players, by learning standard principles and having no particular analytical aptitude.
Talent, endurance and youth only start to become key factors when we’re talking about FIDE masters and beyond.
Yes and it’s not just motivation to continue practicing, but to keep levelling up.
It’s not in my nature, sadly. I learn a few tunes on the piano that sound impressive, and I’m pretty content to just play those over and over. My brother, who learned to play the guitar very well in relatively little time, is always trying to push himself, no matter how good he already is.
It helps if some of this push can come externally. There’s no substitute for being in a competitive environment, especially one where copying and building on what others have done is expected.
I’m not so sure about these. I mean, certainly they matter and are important to success in a given task. Nevertheless, there does seem to be some innate ability involved. Some people are just wired better than others for a given task.
For example, the NBA has no shortage of people who work very, very hard to be the very best at basketball that they can be. Yet, clearly some few rise above the rest. Not due to a better work ethic or focus but because they are simply better at the task and always will be.
I read this last year. I’m a pretty avid sportsman, so it was a really interesting book to me, diving into the many reasons a person might excel at certain sports, including training and genetic components of the equation. Reading it led to some provocative (and in some cases unsettling) questions regarding race and genetic advantages in certain sports. I thought the author did a great job bringing up these issues while not giving ammunition to the race baiters.
But this is exactly what I was talking about re: how we reach for examples!
Basketball is exactly the type of artificial environment deliberately constructed so a few hyper-legible variables explain a large part of performance. Even in real world tasks where we know height has an influence, we know CEOs tend to be taller than average and taller political candidates have a higher shot of winning elections for example, height is just one of hundreds of different factors that go into predicting success. There are still millions of different strategies for people of every single height to attempt to achieve success in those realms.
And as soon as you reached for basketball, you immediately went for the top 500 people in the population to try and explain success. But it’s only when you reach that extremely highest of level in such a constrained field that the minimum requirements become high enough to hit into the limits of innate ability. This is a deliberate outlier example that people pretend is the norm when it’s extremely not and the reason why is because people like to use the outlier as an excuse as to why they shouldn’t even try.
I disagree.
Sure, the NBA is the cream of the crop but the people who got there didn’t do so in a day. They got there over many years. A quick Google search says there are ~36,000 players in the NCAA (college, all divisions). Expand that to high school and guessing hundreds of thousands.
Certainly not all people who play basketball will commit themselves to being the very best possible but there is no shortage of kids trying and they have to work their way up to the tippy-top. That suggests to me that innate potential is important from the get-go. That’s how they get to the NBA.
You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. Neither of us are in disagreement about the role of innate potential of getting into the NBA, what I’m pointing out is that this is not instructive of anything much outside of the specific task of getting into the NBA and represents an extreme outlier that we’ve mistakenly believed represents a norm because of how conversations around talent tend to flock to these extreme examples.
Right. I made a thread about this a while back, about bad extrapolations from looking at professionals.
WRT basketball, based on looking at the NBA we might surmise that it’s a prerequisite to be 6’6 and above, say. But actually at the amateur level a 5’9 guy who’s practiced a lot and loves the sport may destroy lots of guys of whatever height (paging the Professor…)
But at the professional level, you basically need to max out every stat that might give an advantage. (Yes I know there’s always one or two shorter guys in the NBA at any time but you get my point; generally speaking you can’t afford to have weaknesses at the professional level of any competitive sport)
That’s kind of an open ended question since there are potentially thousands of things a person can be talented in.
Fundamentally I would assume it comes down to a mix of genetics, practice but also having the social support necessary to engage in a practice. A child of a professional athlete is far more likely to play sports either professionally or in college than the general public from what I can tell. Part of that is genetics, but part of that is having access to highly competent people in that field.
Also when it comes to talent like working in entertainment, having rich parents helps because you can devote all your time to your art and not have to worry about earning money. You can spend years working in entertainment and not have to worry about paying the bills, while the people who have to pay the bills end up having to drop out of the profession or can only devote a small % of their life to it.
Lance Armstrong used drugs, but his body was basically just really good at sports like cycling. His VO2 max was much higher than normal. He had more slow twitch muscle fibers. he cleared lactic acid from his body faster than most people.
Another important factor re Birthdays is that most sport is played at a junior level in age categories, and those are very commonly grouped as ‘all kids who turn 12 this year’. There are few sports where you automatically move up am age division when you have a birthday.
This means that those children, say playing in the 12-year old category, who have birthdays in January/February period can be at at a significant advantage compared with those born later in the year. This has obvious physical benefits - they can be physically stronger and more agile, purely because they are more physically mature (and more intellectually mature to some degree). This can also lead to better motivation, as they are enjoying the competition more (because they are better at it) than those less developed, which means
a) they are more likely to keep playing the sport
b) they are more likely to be chosen for more advanced coaching
As a junior athletics coach, I am well aware of the talent spotting rule - ‘take note of who wins the race, but keep on eye on the little scrawny kid coming in third - if they grow, they could be anything’.
I doubt this. Has it been checked against star athletes born in the southern hemisphere? Do kids born in in April or May in Australia or Argentina perform better than their peers born at other times during the year. What about kids born near the equator?
O don't kknow enough about sports to weigh in, but I think @Shalmanese is making great points. I just want to add that creativity is not a talent, it's a process. Having worked in creative jobs most of my life (i.e. for more than 40 years), I can say that being creative is not something I was born with. But, as with other examples in this thread, the more you do it, the better you get.
Talent is wider than just those that attain the heights of international success. Further, sports is a very narrow space to restrict talent to.
There is a saying about persistence being the most important part of success. Talent alone won’t get you there. Talent exists for many who either don’t care, or never applied themselves with a focus on success versus just enjoying an ability.
I know many people who you would clearly call musically talented. But it remains a hobby. Painting and sculpting too. An ability to capture the essence of something in a few lines, or paint fabulous scenes or portraits. Often with little to no formal training.
Making a career in the arts is a pretty sure path to penury. People still try. But most are smart enough not to make a hobby they are good at and enjoy their job.
Where does talent come from? Nature versus nurture. But what balance?
Child prodigies are an interesting one. Many peak and once an adult are nothing remarkable. Still good, but not the towering talent relative to others the same age when a child. Then there are those that keep improving and are superstars as adults. Hilary Hahn for instance. Or Terrance Tao.
Clearly people’s brains get wired differently. Maybe subtly, maybe significantly. The entire mechanism of neurogenesis is just so plain weird that it is a minor miracle we are as alike as we are. Its isn’t hard to believe that there are genetic factors that likely influence the development, but similarly very had to imagine identifiable genes for specific traits.
In the extreme we get the occasional savant with an ability in a particular skill that exceeds conventional understanding of what is possible. Talent? Certainly innate. Difficult not to consider this one end of a talent spectrum.
I believe that was a chapter or two in Freakonomics - but applied to hockey players specifically, then expanded to many other team sports. It was pointed out that most of the players on a Junior level team (18-21?) were born between January and April. When the team categories are determined by age, a child who is 5 years 11 months is physically much more developed than one 5 years 0 months, and it takes quite a few years for the difference to average out, at which point those older members of the team will already have been spotted and chosen (and motivated by winning) to keep playing - a self-reinforcing feedback cycle
The counter-example is Ben Johnson, who was noted as a star runner in high school, and pushed by a support team to the point where he won the gold medal in the 88 Olympics. Then it was revealed he had been using steroids. The athletic body made the mistake of lifting his suspension a few years later, only for him to demonstrate that without drugs, he was nowhere near as excellent.
This is a key point. Most stars in solo sports (and even some team sports like hockey) have parents who spend large sums on facilities, coaching, and equipment. Along with devotion to the sport, support is a key factor. Consider something like golf - You’re not going to play golf very well if you don’t have an opportunity to play a lot while young, usually because daddy is a member of the country club. Rarely do we see someone like Chi-chi Rodriguez who managed to play a lot because he was allowed on the course he caddied on as a youngster. When you consider the athletic sports that substitute for legacy admissions in the recent university admissions scandal - rowing, tennis, etc. - money is key. (there’s the 10,000 hour rule, but it does ignore that there is such a thing as talent also)
But still, generally good performance is developed at an early age and with constant repetition. Perhaps this filters out the less talented, or the less motivated -likely both.
Only to a small extent. Kids trying to get a manager in NY were told to say “I love Cheerios,” which was enough to screen them. When you hang around enough professional kids, you can see the difference between them and the ordinary ones. We recommended a kid in a drama camp to our daughter’s management, and he immediately got some big movie roles.
Now, it is true that parents have to have the resources to bring the kid to auditions, at least when they are young, and the resources to last if things are tough when they are older, but younger professionals are not encouraged to take classes.
There are distinctions within the ranks of professionals. One person in the cast was far more charismatic than the rest, and it was no surprise she went far. It was from inherent talent, not practicing.
When I tried out for Jeopardy there were a lot of people there who studied like crazy, took the test over and over, and never got on. I never studied, went only once, and got on immediately. It was something I’m just good at. Relatively little to do with intelligence.
Interesting book on the subject:
What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work from the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code and The Little Book of Talent provides readers with tools for maximizing potential in themselves and others.
Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Daniel Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.
• Deep Practice: Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.
• Ignition: We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.
• Master Coaching: What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished.
Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, The Talent Code will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.
I listened to the audiobook-- riveting!
That book sounds like woo Adding myelin to your brain? Myelination of neurons is required to make them function. The process is what turns on higher brain function as the brain develops. Learning activities are known to cause some additional myelin genesis. This isn’t exactly a new revelation.
It is like: New secrets of fitness. Exercise! it’s fabulous!! Unlock new capabilities by strengthening muscle tissue. Our groundbreaking book tells you how.
It strikes me that the word “talent” isn’t being used in its general meaning. Talent is intrinsic ability. It sometimes gets used loosely to mean skilled, but most would not use it that way.