[Long read] The Talent Debate: nature or nurture? | NPM Capital

The idea of innate talent as the defining factor for success has been losing ground in recent years in particular. It has become increasingly clear that outstanding achievement always goes hand in hand with hard work and steady practice. It can also be the result of fortuitous circumstances. Sometimes the key to success is being at the right place at the right time with the right idea, in which case talent is a matter of sheer luck.

At the age of 15, Stan Smith was rejected from being a tennis ball boy because he was “far too clumsy” according to his trainer. He would go on to achieve the ranking of number 1 tennis player in the world. The famous opera singer Enrico Caruso’s teacher said he couldn’t sing. “Great band, but I would replace the lead singer” was said about rock legend Mick Jagger by his impresario. As a young boy, Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was “too stupid to learn anything”. Dutch football coach Guus Hiddink claimed football player Klaas-Jan Huntelaar didn’t have “what it takes to reach the top”. Beethoven’s music teacher once told him that he was “a hopeless composer”.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four and did not read until he was seven, causing his teachers and parents to think he was mentally disabled. The first conqueror of Mount Everest, Edmund Hilary, was at first a shy figure who provoked the despair of the gym instructor: “What will they send me next?” After his first audition, Sidney Poitier was told by the casting director, “Why don’t you stop wasting people’s time and go out and become a dishwasher or something?” Instead, he went on to break new ground by becoming the first black actor to win an Oscar for best actor in 1963.

These are just a few quotes from the list ‘50 Famously Successful People Who Failed At First’ on www.onlinecollege.org. But you can find numerous anecdotes on the internet of world-famous people whose talents were not recognised initially or for a long period of time. What these interesting stories tell us is that talent is an elusive phenomenon, something that is not always tangible and often isn’t observed in advance but in retrospect.

So it is not surprising that the concept of talent is a controversial one from a scientific perspective. American psychologist Benjamin Bloom published a study in 1985 entitled Developing Talents in Young People in which he studied what contributed to the greatness of talented individuals. He came to the conclusion that none of the studied individuals had a proven talent in some area during their school years. He suggested that high achievement is largely the result environmental factors. Bloom: “We were looking for exceptional kids, and what we found were exceptional conditions.”

Rare bird

Bestseller author and management guru Malcolm Gladwell claims that it is not so much talent that determines how far a person will rise but a combination of factors, such as the environment a person grows up in, the mentors they have, and something best described as ‘fortuitous circumstances’. In his book Outliners, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success of various individuals. He looks at, for instance, Bill Gates. As a child, Gates was exceptionally competitive – a trait which runs in the family. But what mainly contributed to him becoming a fabulously successful entrepreneur was the fact that he was able to attend an elite private school where he had unlimited access to a computer terminal. As Gates himself says, this was one in ‘a series of fortunate events’ that led him to be that rare bird in the world having access to the technology he used to develop his programming skills during the computer revolution.

Add to that the fact that he worked until the wee hours of the morning on numerous occasions, because this was the only time the terminal was available. This is where another aspect that is often mentioned in relation to talent comes around the corner: ‘deliberate practice’, a concept introduced by Anders Ericsson, a Swedish born psychologist and psychology professor at Florida State University.

In 1993, Ericsson published a paper in the Psychological Review that would later become famous, in which he showed on the basis of biographic data that the most celebrated violinists in history also had spent the most time practising. He concluded: “It’s complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it’s so rare. But it isn’t magic, and it isn’t born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery. These people don’t necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort.”

Practice, practice, practice

In short, what Ericsson’s paper boils down to is ‘practice makes perfect’. The same conclusion was drawn several years later by British psychologists Michael Howe, Jane Davidson and John Sloboda. In their article Innate talents: reality or myth? they claim that believing in (innate) talent is not necessarily irrational. However, there is no evidence to support that talent is more important than training and practice. According to Howe, the special musical expressivity that music teachers often refer to as ‘talent’ is not innate. It emerges spontaneously as a result of early musical learning experiences, encouragement from family and teachers, and above all, extended deliberate practice.