The Myth of Talent

“Summing up the extensive evidence, Erikson and his co-authors observed that: ‘The research for stable and heritable characteristics that could predict or at least account for the superior performance of eminent individuals has been surprisingly unsuccessful.’ Yet at the time of their article the talent-based view of high achievement was still the explanation most widely favored. Why? The authors offered a simple reason-the conviction and the importance of talent appears to be based on the insufficiency of alterative hypotheses to explain the exceptional nature of expert performers. That is, nobody had a better idea. So here was their better idea. It could be put very simply- What the authors called deliberate practice made all the difference. Or as they put it with stark clarity in their scholarly paper- the difference between expert performers and normal adults reflects of a lifelong period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain……it explicitly rejected the ‘you’ve got it, or you don’t’ view.” –Talent is Overrated: What really separates World Class Performers From Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin.

Put another way, those who reached elite status were not given gifts that the rest of us weren’t. Sure, some of us certainly have advantages and some have disadvantages, but research shows those to be largely peripheral to achievement. Those who achieve things that seem unattainable for most are different from the average person, but not in the ways you may think. Let’s look at those differences…

In a study of elite and sub elite figure skaters, a clear divide was found in one metric: The sub elite spent the most time working on the jumps they could already do, while the skaters that reached the highest levels spent considerably more time working on the jumps they could not do. Put even more simply, the elite skaters fell down a lot more often, and spent more time appearing to be failing. I see this so often in soccer. Players with a wicked right footed shot from distance head out onto the pitch for hours of practice, most of it spent hitting the right footed rocket from distance, their sweet spot, and never improving a bit. Nobody wants to go out and do stuff they suck at, especially with an audience, but it is a requirement to reach our potential. Coaching is no different. How many youth coaches look to protect their ego by only entering tournaments they can win or sandbagging into a lower division ‘just to be safe’ or teaching young players to do things to win games at the 7v7 level but will totally fail them and have to be unlearned at 9v9.  Not only does that fail to develop the players, but it also guarantees we will never grow as coaches. Don’t ask your players to challenge themselves when you as their coach are not. The path forward must be the same for both. Fail more than anybody else, believing in and even enjoying the process, knowing that one day the tables will turn.

A lot of you reading this are probably about my age and have been driving cars now for 20 or 30 years. Would you consider yourself elite? If 10,000 hours is required for mastery, why aren’t you elite? Because it’s not purposeful. I’ve always had an unfortunate ability to drive for hours, hundreds of miles, and have no idea where I am or what I’ve passed. Its driven people nuts as they call to get an update and ask me where I am, or what I’ve passed, and I have no idea. Driving is automatic for me; I can do it and zone out and think about other things. It doesn’t challenge me, it doesn’t require focus, and I don’t have clear objectives, other than arriving intact, and of course, on time. I could get a call asking, “Hey man did you pass the 25-foot-tall pink elephant that spits fire from its trunk with disco balls for eyes yet?” and answer “eh, I don’t know. Maybe?” I want to be very clear on this point: You can practice soccer for 25 years and barely get any better if that practice is not optimized for growth. Practice must mimic the demands of the game.  It cannot be done on auto pilot. If it is, don’t even think about including it in that magical 10,000 hours. Take that same example of a player taking hundreds of shots a day to ‘fix’ their shooting issues in matches. So often I’ve seen that at all the levels I’ve coached, when I ask them ‘what was your target on that last shot?’ I’ve been met with a blank stare, an ‘I don’t know, the goal I guess.’ In a game of soccer is the goal the target, or the exact parts of the goal the goalkeeper is not in? Or I’ll ask, ‘What did you change in those shots to see how it affected the flight of the ball?’ And again, be met with ‘Nothing, I guess.’ If the practice is not purposeful, it may be fun or a good workout, but it will not increase performance. While getting hours in doing what we are hoping to excel at is critically important, hours alone will not improve performance.

Jerry Rice, probably the greatest WR of all time, maybe one of the greatest football players of all time, was far from the fastest WR of all time. Which should be of some interest with raw speed being probably the highest valued trait among NFL wide receivers. While he did get some attention in college, and some accolades, he went to a small school and NFL teams were largely not very interested. 15 teams passed on him in the draft before SF finally took him. What is not surprising about Rice, which is also true of so many other elite athletes from Caitlin Clark to Michael Jordan to Carli Lloyd and young soccer phenoms like Olivia Moultrie, is the work they put in when nobody is watching. Rice’s off-season workouts, which he did 6 days a week, were so grueling that despite repeated requests to the 49ers trainers to reveal what they actually consisted of, the information was not released at the time out of fear people would hurt themselves trying to replicate it. Estimates looking at Rice’s career put less than 1% of his work in professional football actually being on the field competing with his team. Also worth noting, a large portion of his regular off-season training was done alone (not in a forced group environment that could have resulted in overtraining.) As Damian Lillard said: ‘If you want to look good in front of thousands, you have to outwork thousands in front of nobody.”

One of my favorite studies was done some years back to challenge the idea of ‘gifted’ or ‘advanced’ students, and seemingly under achieving students, specially challenging the notion that they were genetically different. It followed them well after their academic careers had ended and has had a significant impact on the way I coach, lead, and manage my own path to the goals I plan to achieve. The study found students with equal IQs, learning abilities, a host of other metrics that will bore you, to determine a baseline group of seemingly equally capable students, by quantifiable metrics. They were then randomly divided into 2 groups: one was told they were gifted, and told they were placed in advanced learning environment. The other group was not told anything of the sort, but just put into the classes. They were then given the exact same curriculum and learning experience and followed up on for years after. The group that was told they were high performers, exceled over the group that was told they weren’t, in about every possible area. Tested later, their IQ on average actually increased. They outperformed the latter group in about every category. They took on the identity given to them, regardless of actual ability. As Henry Ford famously said, “whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you are probably right.”

I can still remember the moment when years of research on this topic really clicked for me. I stormed into my office where I was currently coaching, found my closest associate who was also a coach there, and said “I could have been a professional soccer player, I just didn’t do it. I didn’t make the choices required and blamed things that never mattered. And now I’m pissed.” She laughed, accustomed to such seemingly unprovoked passionate exclamations from me, and asked me to tell her more. About an hour later, she said “Damnit man, now I’m pissed too.”

So, we have cleared up a few misconceptions regarding becoming elite that I think are important to understand, and we now arrive at what I believe to be the building block for all else, the cornerstone that all else must be built on that of all the greats have: You have to love it.  If you do not love what you do, with an obsessive passion and unshakable confidence (even if borrowed from others at times), elite status cannot be achieved. Nothing written above matters. The hours cannot be endured. The choices are too hard. You will quit. This, I believe, is the great divide. In the age of information, we know what success takes. But just knowing what it takes to succeed does not equal success. Once the love and passion are gone the path to success doesn’t matter, it can no longer be done. Continued efforts without that flame being re-lit will end in failure, burnout, or the ever-increasing tragedy in youth soccer (sorry, that’s the world I live in and I work it into everything) of players just walking away from the game in droves. And outside of sport, people giving up on dreams that they were so close to reaching.

Coaches and parents, if your players don’t love playing the game, you are setting them up to fail. I don’t care how much you know or the quality of information you yell at them, they will never reach their true potential. Sure, a few with David Goggins level self-discipline may sneak through, but it’s extremely rare. Don’t misunderstand my point here, there are many times in the journey to greatness that are not fun. Our job is not to protect our players from challenges, or anything that isn’t fun. Quite the opposite. But what keeps people from quitting when its not fun, when most everyone else would throw in the towel because it seems impossible (and it will), is their love and passion for what they do. Discipline, motivation, confidence, all the things we demand our players just find, they don’t happen in a vacuum, they can’t just be ordered up from a menu, so stop demanding it and start building it. And if your path to those things kills their love of the game, find a new path. Stop drawing them an exquisitely detailed map for a journey they will never be able to complete. Coaches, do yourself what you ask of your players, as what you say will have little value if it doesn’t match who you are. If you don’t love what you do enough to purposefully fail over and over, and outwork everyone in front of no-one surrounded by people who love you enough to push you past what you thought capable, you haven’t earned the right to ask it of your players. If you don’t fiercely believe in them, and vocalize that, don’t expect or ask that they believe in themselves. Once those boxes are checked, the journey has begun. The map forward from there is readily available but is useless without what is required to sustain it. Protect most fiercely that which the journey cannot be completed without.

The greatest factor in whether potential is wasted or realized, between average and elite, Is not found in talent or genetics, but in how much we love the pursuit, what we are willing to risk, and the choices we are willing to make. Creating that culture in our teams and organizations is easier said than done, and requires a lot of intentionality, un-learning, and re-learning things as leaders that no longer serve us, or this generation of athletes. More on that to come….