Popular knowledge tells us that genius is born, not made. According to a study conducted by University College London professor Chia-Jung Tsay, we have a natural bias towards people we believe have talent.
Through a series of studies, researchers discovered that managers show a strong bias for people whom they believe have natural talent. It’s terribly seductive to believe that successful people are born with a natural gift. That makes it much more palatable to swallow any shortcomings in our own performance.
Popular knowledge tells us that genius is born, not made. According to a study conducted by University College London professor Chia-Jung Tsay, we have a natural bias towards people we believe have talent. Through a series of studies, researchers discovered that managers show a strong bias for people whom they believe have natural talent. It’s terribly seductive to believe that successful people are born with a natural gift. That makes it much more palatable to swallow any shortcomings in our own performance.
Trouble is, there is really no such thing as natural talent.
A recent study by anders Ericson a Conradi Eminent Scholar and professor of psychology at Florida State University concluded that what people observe and call ‘talent’ can be accounted for as the result of practice.
“We don’t know of any evidence, that would make some less likely to succeed than other individuals who are willing to engage in the appropriate training.”
Anders Ericson
Excelling in one subject matter or another is a matter of practice, not innate raw talent, the authors say. This might be frustrating news to those who have spent their lives convinced that they are “just bad at math” or “just terrible singers.” And instead of spending years noodling around in search of a true calling, we all might be better off to pick an area we are interested in and fearlessly dedicate ourselves to that area.
“A lot of people believe that there is massive amount of evidence that people have their gifts and that they should go out and look for what that gift is.,” Ericson says. “We argue that there is no gift to be found, basically that we are much better off picking something that they want to be good at and working hard at it effectively achieve a high level of performance.”
The notion that practice, full stop, is the key to success has been largely popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s hypothesis of The 10,000 Hour Rule that states that really anyone can become successful at something if they dedicate 10,000 hours toward mastering it.
Where Ericsson and Pool differ is that they say that practice is not enough — it has to be smart practice. Putting in time repeating the same efforts on repeat is not going to make you an expert at anything. Rather, an individual has to be exceptionally self-conscious of the time being spent working on a task and needs to be working with a teacher who is a master of the particular topic already.
“To get improvement you have to do purposefully practice where you actually identify things that you want to change”
Anders Ericson
Stacking hours of practice endlessly on top of each other won’t accelerate the process. Instead, you’ll just get tired.
“There are constraints here on how many hours you can sustain that concentration to make improvements. And that will be a limiting factor,” Ericsson says. “Also by pushing yourself, spending more time, you can get psychological burnout, where there is no physical problem, it’s just that you are tired and you have lost your motivation. And that is something that happens occasionally when people put in too much effort. You need to find that perfect balance where you push yourself as much as is necessary and then you get enough rest.”
Discipline and dedication are the key to becoming an expert in anything. It takes of lot of focused hard work. So, to sum up Ericssons argument: While you may not be an amazing tattooists right now, the only thing that is guaranteed to stop you from becoming one is believing that those of us who can tattoo well are born with some special magic fairy dust in our brains.
It’s this hard work that separates us from everyone else. Not Talent.