Why Talent Is Overrated.

Ordinary excellence

Today’s letter is an excerpt from our course on “The Mundanity of Excellence” in the Stoa app. To access the full course, download the Stoa app.

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When it comes to understanding what sets apart exceptional people from average or good, Dr. Chambliss thinks that talent is overrated. It is not that talent, an innate ability or propensity to be good at something, doesn’t exist, but that it is a poor mechanism for explaining differences in ability.

In 1989 Dr. Chambliss published the sociology paper “The Mundanity of Excellence”. In it, he tried to understand what set world class swimmers apart from average one, and talent was a much smaller factor than he expected.

One reason talent is overrated is that there are other more measurable factors which better correlate to success. If we had to pick some way to predict who, out of ten thousand kids, would grow up to be the best swimmers, we have tangible things we can measure. Being from a certain part of the country, like Southern California where it is warm all-year round, which allows for constant outdoor swim practice; or being from a family with a high household income. So why point to talent? If we want a way to explain excellence that is outside of people’s control, we have a better way of doing that.

Next, Dr. Chambliss argues that talent is indistinguishable from its effects. The argument here is that talent is a lagging indicator. We call successful people talent to explain their success. And when someone we previously ignored wins, we say we must not have noticed their talent.

In other words, if we have no concrete way of distinguishing between exceptional people that are talented and those that are not, then talent is just the title we apply to people who are good at something. And in that case, it is not what sets great people apart from those that are average, it is just a word to describe greatness.

Finally, Dr. Chambliss acknowledges that some innate ability is required for world class success. But talent is better thought of as a floor rather than a ceiling. And that floor is actually quite low. He knew this from observing 100s of swimmers. No one could tell, when they walk in, who will be great, who will be average, and who will quit.

So if talent is such an ineffective concept, why do we refer to it so much? Why does it have such prevalence? Why do we talk about the musical savant, the gifted-athlete, or the genius with a kind of other-worldly reverence?

Dr. Chambliss argues that we want to believe in talent to protect our ego. It is emotionally convenient for us to believe that our being average, in a sport, in our careers, in an academic subject, is the cause of not having talent. It hurts less if, when we see the high-performance of others, we can wave it away.

Existentialism as a philosophy argues that we have total freedom to do, or be, whatever we want. We create our own essence with each decision we make. But that freedom is terrifying, because it comes with the responsibility for constructing our own lives. So lock ourselves in boxes. We tell ourselves stories “I could never be an olympic athlete, I don’t have the talent; I was never good at math; I can’t learn other languages.”

But these stories are not true. They are mechanisms of self-defense. They are ways of removing responsibility and accountability from being average. In most, if not all domains, we choose to be average. We are not locked out of excelling at them by something outside our control.

So be careful about how you think about talent. It is not that helpful for identifying who will succeed, and it can often be used as an excuse to fail.

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