The Talent Myth: What ‘Outliers’ and ‘Talent is Overrated’ found about Success

Dec 10, 2011

“Sehwag already held the record for the highest Test score of 319 by an Indian.” Jigneshbhai read from the Sports page of his newspaper. He looked up to us and further informed us “Now he also holds the record for the highest ODI score of 219 by an Indian and by any cricketer.”

“That’s not bad going” he remarked, evidently quite impressed.

“Especially for someone who scored 1 and conceded 35 runs in 3 overs, and then was not picked for 20 months” Swami came up with some amazing trivia. For whatever his temperament about investing might be, there is no doubting that he was a true-blue cricket fan with the ability to come up with these kinds of figures out of the blue. He continued with more.

“Till he was promoted to open the innings seemingly by chance only because Sachin Tendulkar was injured, his career went nowhere. That’s when his ‘hand-eye coordination talent’ came to the fore.” he remarked like a true expert.

“Yeah, talent when spotted correctly is amazingly impressive right?” Jigneshbhai and Swami seemed to share a common interest, for now at least, for cricket.

“Talent is God’s gift” Swami was still in his exuberant mood. “What else can we say when we see players like Sachin, Federer, and Tiger Woods in full flow

, except that these are exceptional talents?”

“Yes – we love talking about talent. Warren Buffett is a born investor; Bill Gates was a child prodigy and Steve Jobs was a blessed artist. As if all that these people had to do was show up and decide to become what they became – lo and behold!”

Jigneshbhai seemed to

 agree with Swami on the impressiveness of talent, but also not quite beyond that.

I looked at Swami expecting some question on this provocation.

But Jigneshbhai saw the tinge of a frown and quickly continued.

“Talent is overrated” he said and after a short pause, “I am not saying it. That’s what this book said, and he showed us the book by that name.”

He read out a section from there. “It says that the best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what is called “deliberate practice.” It means activities that are explicitly intended to improve performance, that reach for objectives just a bit beyond one’s current level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.”

“So basically they work harder than anyone else” Swami summarized it.

“Yes – it looks like that is the theory. That’s how Outliers are created. In fact, another book ‘Outliers’ says it takes 10,000 hours of hard work.” Jigneshbhai seemed to have read these two books back-to-back and was carrying both today. He read out from the other book.

“The 10,000-Hour Rule says that the key to superlative, outlier success in any field is a matter of practicing a specific task or a set of tasks for a total of around 10,000 hours. The closer one gets to the 10,000 hours, the closer is one likely to get to what looks like genius.” And he looked up to us with a smile.

“That’s a lot of hard work to become a genius” Swami remarked.

But he didn’t seem convinced fully. “But you and I can’t just practice for 10,000 hours and play like Sachin!” he dismissed the rule that Jigneshbhai had read out.

“That’s both the good news and bad news” Jigneshbhai explained. “It means we have a chance because talent is not all, but it also means it is not an easy chance because 10,000 hours is quite a lot.”

Swami and I looked at each other, and both of us seemed to be thinking that both the options seem hard. First have the talent, and next work for 10,000 hours. So it looked like that theory didn’t quite fully agree with Swami’s appreciation of “hand-eye coordination” or “inborn gift of batting” or “God’s gift to tennis or golf.”

“There’s got to be something more that we are missing” Swami revolted.

I noticed that the old wealthy man from the sprawling bungalow had been listening to our conversation for a while. He walked to our table as usual and smiled at me and Swami.

And then like Po said in Kung Fu he said “There is no secret ingredient. It’s just you.”