What if talent is over-rated and can't be predicted
It's widely accepted as the gospel that to make it in sports you gotta have talent. Every coach wants talent in their team. What is talent we all love to speak about. And does making it really account to it. What if talent is over-rated and it does not exist in the form we think it does.
How can we define something as abstract as talent. Csikszentmihalyi defined talent as
“a social construction: It is a label of approval we place on traits that have a positive value in the particular context in which we live” .
To accept talent as a multidimensional construction we need to accept also that the power of deciding who has talent and who has none is not something should be taken lightly. We are in a war for talent. Based on Christensen the assessment of talent is based on three trends. The first is the practical sense. It's the visual experience and gut feeling based on experience and feel for the game. It's essential to get mental pictures that some way evoke a response. Something seen before that was good. Something that looks just right. The second is based on the fact that classificatory schemes of the coaches are characterized by their preference for the hard working and dedicated athletes that are willing to learn. This was described by Csikszentmihalyi & co of having an auto-telic personality. These are the people who do the extra mile. The third is that talent label is a matter of taste. Who can act as arbitor of taste is socially configured. Based on experience and such. It's a choice. This person can identify talent and that person can't. Socially configured collective decision.
The talent mind-set is the new orthodoxy in management as well. In the modern corporation the system is considered only as strong as it's stars. This translates to sports. Mc Kinsey, the management consulting firm, conducted a project that profoundly differentiated the winners from losers. And the best where obsessed with talent issues. These firms hired the best from the first-tier business schools and placed a huge weight on talent. At the heart of this is the process known as differentiation and affirmation. This means that once or twice a year the employer holds these candid, no-holds barred talks and put people in groups A, B and C. The A's must be challenged and compensated lavishly. The B's need the affirmation. The C's? Either man up or they be shipped out. How you do this. It's anyone's guess. By smarts. The correlation between IQ and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3. Number 0.1 or below means no correlation at all and 0.7 is very strong one. Enron was advocat of Mc Kinley approach. Enron is bankrupt and a case study of how to fuck up.
How does talent and recognizion computes with late bloomers. It doesn't. We have the prodigies - like Picasso. And we have the Cézannes. David Galenson decided to find out whether the assumption about creativity and talent is true - it being a young mans game and overtly visible. As an ecomist he did a simple analysis, tabulating the prices paid at the auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they made them. For Picasso. A painting done in his mid twenties was about four times more expensive than a painting he did in his sixties. For Cézanne the opposite applied. Painting he did in his sixties where valued fifteen times to those he did as a young man. Picasso fits the genius mold we tend to worship. It's all very easy and clear from the get go. These geniouses don't do research. They are conceptual. They start with a clear idea and execute it. The late bloomers search. Cézanne said "I seek in a painting".
This confuses things. For every Michael Jordan and Picasso, how many Cézannes we miss. This translated to sports. If you have a limited pool of athletes -forget the Jordans and Picassos. You will see them. They are the one's for who it's easy. It's the Cézannes you need to look for. They are repetitionists and perfectionists. They can work on a single thing for a long time - to make it perfect. They work on trial and error. Never quit. Like Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara who took numerous trips to Haiti before the book was there. It was a journey. These are the hard cases. They have the look of failure on them from the start. One thing common to them is they have a circle of people who support them and get them through the hard times. For Cézanne it was the writer Emile Zola, painter Camille Pissarro and his sponsor Ambrose Vollard. For Fountain it was his wife Sharie. We need to understand this - we can't capitalize these late bloomers today. It's all tomorrow from here. It's essentially a love story. They have people who believe in them and support them even when they themselves have serious fits of self doubt. Sometimes mundane things like loyalty and willingness to write checks is all that's got to do with rarefied thing like talent.
We want the stars but we need the hard cases too. Thing to learn - don't write them off too early. They might have thing or two to offer if you cultivate them properly.
How does talent and recognizion computes with late bloomers. It doesn't. We have the prodigies - like Picasso. And we have the Cézannes. David Galenson decided to find out whether the assumption about creativity and talent is true - it being a young mans game and overtly visible. As an ecomist he did a simple analysis, tabulating the prices paid at the auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they made them. For Picasso. A painting done in his mid twenties was about four times more expensive than a painting he did in his sixties. For Cézanne the opposite applied. Painting he did in his sixties where valued fifteen times to those he did as a young man. Picasso fits the genius mold we tend to worship. It's all very easy and clear from the get go. These geniouses don't do research. They are conceptual. They start with a clear idea and execute it. The late bloomers search. Cézanne said "I seek in a painting".
This confuses things. For every Michael Jordan and Picasso, how many Cézannes we miss. This translated to sports. If you have a limited pool of athletes -forget the Jordans and Picassos. You will see them. They are the one's for who it's easy. It's the Cézannes you need to look for. They are repetitionists and perfectionists. They can work on a single thing for a long time - to make it perfect. They work on trial and error. Never quit. Like Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara who took numerous trips to Haiti before the book was there. It was a journey. These are the hard cases. They have the look of failure on them from the start. One thing common to them is they have a circle of people who support them and get them through the hard times. For Cézanne it was the writer Emile Zola, painter Camille Pissarro and his sponsor Ambrose Vollard. For Fountain it was his wife Sharie. We need to understand this - we can't capitalize these late bloomers today. It's all tomorrow from here. It's essentially a love story. They have people who believe in them and support them even when they themselves have serious fits of self doubt. Sometimes mundane things like loyalty and willingness to write checks is all that's got to do with rarefied thing like talent.
We want the stars but we need the hard cases too. Thing to learn - don't write them off too early. They might have thing or two to offer if you cultivate them properly.
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