Talent is Overrated

In sum: The data shows that talent is overrated.

Ten years. Or about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Whether we’re talking about sports stars or X-ray diagnoses, that’s what it takes to achieve truly great performance levels.

(For the record: That’s about 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. For 10 years. :)

Wolfgang Mozart was born a genius, right? Just kinda fell out of the womb and started composing crazy great stuff, right?

Might want to re-think that one.

First, consider the fact that Mozart’s dad, Leopold, was a famous composer who LITERALLY wrote the book on how to teach children music. He’d been practicing for years with Wolfgang’s older sister and got to work with little Wolfgang around the time most little doods are getting potty trained.

Long story a little shorter, when you look at his career, you’ll see that, as Colvin points out above, Mozart put in EIGHTEEN years (!!!) of remarkably diligent training before he created something truly extraordinary.

As Carol Dweck (the Stanford researcher and leading authority on motivation and achievement) asks in her great book Mindset (see Notes): “Is it ability of mindset? Was it Mozart’s musical ability or the fact that he worked till his hands were deformed? Was it Darwin’s scientific ability or the fact that he collected specimens non-stop from early childhood?”

Talent is overrated. Long live hard work! :)

Well, there ya go. Step one: Know what you want to do.

There’s NO WAY we’re going to put in the necessary work without this clear picture.

For me, the highest level answer to the question is that I want to be an extraordinary human being. I want to live in integrity with my deepest values. To be a great husband, father, friend, creator, teacher and leader. Specifically, I want to master wisdom. I’ve created my life such that I get to do that full-time and I’m excited to spend the years and decades necessary to achieve a high level of mastery and, hopefully, to create more and more meaningful goodness for people.

Back to you: What do YOU want to do?

That’s pretty powerful.

Colvin points out the fact that all the students knew that practicing by themselves was *the* most important thing they could do to improve their skills. They also all agreed that it wasn’t particularly fun. But, as it turns out, only the top two tiers actually practiced on their own a lot.

As Colvin says: “They all knew it, but they didn’t all do it.”

This is a theme we talk about ALL. THE. TIME. Whether we want to become musical geniuses or just better human beings, we need to do the things we KNOW are best for us. Period.

Michael Beckwith talks about how discipline can turn into “blissipline” and says this in his great book Spiritual Liberation (see Notes): “The gift of self- discipline is that it has the power to take you beyond the reasoning of temporary emotion to freedom. Think of how empowered you’ve felt on occasions when you haven’t given in to the ‘I don’t feel like it’ syndrome and honored your commitment to yourself. What does not feeling like it have to do with it? The combination of love for something with the willingness to do what it takes to practice it—discipline—results in freedom.”

Let’s decide on what’s important to us and then do it.

Love it. My hunch is you’ve seen the same type of pattern in your creative life.

Personally, it’s amazing to see how much more creative work I can get done when I start my day writing BEFORE I allow myself to get online. Much like the violinists doing their challenging practice earlier in the day when they’re fresher, I find it MUCH (!) easier to write earlier in the day and I’m MUCH (!) more likely to get awesome creative work done if I start with it first thing.

How about you?

How do you start your days? Do you hop online and watch your day dwindle away in reactive activities all day long? (OMG I’ve done that way too many times! :) Or, do you have clear goals on what you want to achieve and discipline yourself to crush it before you let the day get away?

Powerful thing to ponder, eh?

* writing note to self: remember this and put it in to practice way more often! * :)

Oh, one more thing. About the sleep and the naps: YES!

Not that I really needed it, but I feel fully justified in taking what I call “napitations” (= nap + meditation :). In fact, that’s another correlation to my highest productivity bursts: I tend to rise with (or before) the sun, meditate, move, work hard, take a napitation and then get back to working hard.

* writing another note to self to do this even more consistently * :)

After presenting that definition, Colvin proceeds to focus on each of those elements in his chapter “What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t.” Get the book for more details.

In the meantime, know that simply showing up and “practicing” isn’t gonna cut it.

Think of a recreational golfer who goes to the driving range and “practices” for an hour or so vs. the professional who goes to the course and deliberately, intensely, and passionately works on improving their game. :)

That’s great stuff. We talk about something similar in the Note on Tal Ben-Shahar’s great book Happier where we describe the zones as “comfort – stretch – panic”—with the stretch zone being our ideal place to grow.

I love to imagine a rubber band held between your pointer fingers on your left and right hands. If you don’t pull at all, there’s no tension. Comfort zone. Not a whole lot of growth. If you pull TOO hard, you’ll snap the rubber band. Snap zone. Ouch.

The ideal? Stretch it so there’s some nice dynamic tension. Not too much. Not too little. The stretch zone. Ahhhhh. :)

THAT’s where we want to play.

Begs the question: Where are YOU playing these days?

Again, we like to kid ourselves that great innovations just pop up out of nowhere into the laps of born geniuses.

But, alas, that simply isn’t so. As Colvin so beautifully says: “Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation.”

Colvin brilliantly tells the story of Shizuka Arakawa, who won the gold medal in figure skating at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Apparently she rocked some crazy move called “a layback Ina Bauer”—which basically required her to bend backward “almost double with the feet pointing in opposite directions—leading into a three-jump combination.”

Now, when most of us watch something like that it simply looks IMPOSSIBLE to do. (And, for most of us, it pretty much is. :) But Shizuka, who won the gold at twenty-four, had been training for NINETEEN years—consistently pushing her edges. Falling down again and again and again…

Colvin calculated the number of times she probably fell and says: “Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.”

So, back to you. Are you playing it safe and doing what you’re already good at? Or, are you pushing your edges—willing to fall on your butt 20,000 times en route to your own personal greatness?

Carol Dweck’s Mindset is essentially an entire book dedicated to exploring the scientific underpinnings of this question: What do you really believe about greatness/genius/excellence?

She’s discovered two different perspectives we can have: a “fixed mindset” or a “growth mindset.”

As she says: “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.”

That’s the fixed mindset. And, here’s what she says about the growth mindset: “In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. The growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”

So, what do YOU believe?! For yourself? For your kids?

Check in on that. If you’re stuck in a limited, fixed mindset but want to step into a fuller expression of your potential, study and learn more about how you can make the shift! And, know that these PhilosophersNotes are pretty much all about helping us do that.

(And, for the record, one of the reasons I work so hard on all this goodness is because *I* need to remind myself of these truths and firmly establish myself more and more consistently in the glorious growth mindset!! :)

Whether we feel called to dedicate our lives to achieving greatness or simply to become better and better human beings, as Colvin tells us: “what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for the pre-ordained few.”