Is Talent Really That Important?
By Laura Vanderkam
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
www.american.com
Geoff Colvin argues that ‘deliberate practice,’ not innate ability, is the true key to world-class performance.
…It is a provocative thesis, which Colvin first put forth in a 2006 Fortune article that ignited a furious debate in the blogosphere. Like Malcolm Gladwell, who has also written a new book on top talent (Outliers), Colvin is deft at finding studies and anecdotes to back up his assertions. For example, he highlights one study which found that top violinists put in more than twice as many hours of solo practice as their lesser peers. And he describes how comedian Chris Rock hones his act at small clubs, so that by the time he plays larger venues he knows exactly how the audience will react to each joke.
The story of the Polgar sisters, which Colvin tells at length, also seems to undermine the notion of God-given talent. In the 1960s, Hungarian educational psychologist Laszlo Polgar postulated that great performers are made, not born. To test this theory, he designed an experiment. Polgar and his wife, Klara, devoted their lives to turning their three daughters into brilliant chess players. Laszlo was only a mediocre player, and Klara hadn’t played much at all, but they filled their home with chess books and homeschooled their girls so they could spend several hours each day mastering the game. As a result, their oldest daughter, Susan, was eventually named a grand master. The other daughters also became top players.
Even the usual stories of prodigies—such as Mozart and Tiger Woods—indicate that “deliberate practice” is more important than God-given ability. Mozart started playing the piano at age 3 under the tutelage of a father whose coaching methods had a lot in common with Laszlo Polgar’s chess instruction. Mozart did not compose his best symphonies until he had been studying composition and practicing—hard—for well over a decade. Tiger Woods began playing golf as a toddler under the guidance of his father, an excellent coach. By the time he started winning major titles in 1997, he had been honing his game daily for 20 years.
Colvin’s message to readers is clear: if you want to perform at a world-class level, you can. You simply have to put in many hard hours of “deliberate practice.”
Here is the full article.
What absolute nonsense. Mozart without talent would be nothing, maybe some third rate rapper. First talent, then training and practice. Many people are tone deaf, or lack perfect pitch.
MANY intelligent people spend 1000’s of hours on chess and never get above 1500.
i just started studying last week but am already above 2400+ fide and and nearing grandmaster with no study at all. I understand grandmaster is not world class but it is quite close. maybe i am lucky with all this talent
Colvin has it backwards. The reason Tiger and other elite performers practice so much is because they’re talented. If someone has no aptitude for chess, he’d give it up (or play casually) rather than spend 10,000 painstakingly honing his skills.
There’s also a “survivor bias” going on here. Of Laszlo’s experiment had yielded nothing, then wouldn’t be a story.
No one would argue that it takes a lot of hard work to become world class at chess (and other disciplines with quantifiable measures of achievement). But to say that anybody can be world class with enough hard work is taking it too far. There is such thing as innate talent.
Take IQ, for instance. The most rigorous interventions (think of this as training) have produced only modest improvements – several points at most – which go away when the effort ends. You can’t achieve a world class IQ just by working hard. You had to have to potential at birth.
The Polgar sisters are obviously very intelligent and had an aptitude and passion for chess. Most intelligent kids might achieve an expert level rating with a similar upbringing but very few would make it to grandmaster level. These kids were statistical outliers.
Anonymous Tuesday, December 16, 2008 5:56:00 PM CS is right. Talent does matter.
In order to sell books, authors sometimes take a single solid observation and extend it to an extreme. Talent clearly does matter in nearly anything that matters. But practice, training and experience are needed to fully manifest that talent. Fischer obviously had a talent for chess – but he wouldn’t have become a great player without playing against tough players and a lot of home analysis work. The take home point is that for most patzers, practice and training can help you become better so get up and get to work. Just don’t expect to become a GM, but you will get better. It is intuitively obvious – but a lot of people give up. They throw up their hands and say “I just don’t have a talent for XX” (math, music, languages) when confronted with a little work. So rather than giving up, Colvin suggests most of us need to get to work and put in the time and effort.
Well, I don’t have a talent for languages but I can accumulate language knowledge by hard work. Eventually I will speak the other language just fine.
But no matter how many hours I spend on chess, I still stay around 1500. That’s because I have no talent for it, and accumulation of experience doesn’t help.
Colvin is making the false claim that ‘world class’ performance arises mostly from practice, this is clearly nonsense. A little weak clumsy guy is never going to be a Tiger Woods. A tone deaf person will never be a Mozart. A person who hangs pieces after 10,000 games is always going to be a loser.
‘A person who hangs pieces after 10,000 games is always going to be a loser.’
What’s wrong with hanging pieces?? Same as talking rubbish non-stop.
Interesting article to see on this blog. Certainly Susan Polgar is probably more qualified to comment on this than anyone else. Perhaps her posting of the article means she agrees with it?
My thought: Talent (innate ability) does not matter (or even exist), though other innate qualities do matter, namely “stick-to-it-ness”. Ability is borne of deliberate practice, but deliberate practice only comes if you have some innate tendency to keep working at it (beyond Dad) and not get bored and give up easily. Perhaps we can speculate a biological model ranging from Attention Deficit Disorder on one end and Autism on the other end, and the latter end are more likely to achieve success.
The other thought I had, while watching a poor guy flipping burgers at Burger King is, “Wow. he’s really good at flipping burgers. There’s no chance in hell I could flip a burger that cleanly and then construct a burger that quickly. Clearly he’s had thousands of hours of practice.”
hi there!
the problem with all that “talent is essential” talk is that we don’t really have any means whatsoever to measure this supposed “talent” that determines future performance: talent is determined afterwards: “Tiger Woods, ohh he is talented!, the Polgar sisters?, of course they are talented!”
this is, at the present time, absurd. if you claim that future performance is determined by peexisting “talent” then you must be able to measure it *before*, and not afterwards, doing the opposite is just bad logic.
i don’t claim that “talent” doesnt exist, but i’m not sure we (as a society/culture) are looking at it in the right way.
for example, as for the guy that hangs pieces after 10,000 games, or the guy that is still at 1500 after those same 10,000 games… i am positive that its says much more about this person’s thinking habits and training methods than it says about his supposed “talent”.
Very often people do poorly despite there practising exctly the way a champion does.
Some people learn quickly,some are scarcely capable of learning any skill.Practice is only one small part of expertise.
Let me share my experiences.
I taught my daughter to play chess around 4.Since I was just an above average club player ,I asked my friend to coach her in August 2011 when she was 11.Everyday I used to give her games/positions/studies to analyze/solve-slow deliberate practice.Within a year she became incredibly good at solving/analyzing and performed reasonably well at tournaments.But in January 2005 she told me that she wanted to give up chess to focus on studies.My conclusion is that a bit of talent,enthusiasm ,character and deliberate practice creates a genius.
At 52, 6 months back I -a diabetic started taking chess seriously-deliberate practice -and have improved significantly…