7 ms·

Talent isn’t a myth, it’s a prerequisite. Same for hard work. I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I woul

by Swizec 6y ago

Talent isn’t a myth, it’s a prerequisite. Same for hard work. I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good. Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know. For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked okay. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend. Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill. Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off. Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.

jackcviers3 6y ago
Or, programming is simply easier than painting or boxing, and boring and tedious for most people. Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing. Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming. Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting. The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique. The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Yep all those things you describe fall under talent. A big one in sports is your genetic predisposition to how fast you can recover. Or how much punishment you can take before your body breaks. A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets. After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time. > with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics. What else could it be?
  - toss1 6y ago
    >>What else could it be? At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned). Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day. A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0] Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing. One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author. OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?) [0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314 https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...
hinkley 6y ago
Talent is a multiplier, but the needle can go negative. It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either. If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis. She lives with a broken man A cracked polystyrene man Who just crumbles and burns Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.
- Swizec 6y ago
  I like the way my sister talks about this: > Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. To reach elite levels you need both.
  - jnsie 6y ago
    Your sister isn't Kevin Durant, by any chance. :-) No idea if this phrase was originally his, but it is often attributed to him.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      fortune favors the prepared mind Is a very similar sentiment but suffers from use of the passive voice. It is a thing that is very obvious in hindsight, but isn't very, I don't know, motivational? Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.
throwaway2245 6y ago
> I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class. These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill. Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.
- Swizec 6y ago
  If you read Tyson’s story, it’s more that he was extremely talented and people with a talent for the business of boxing took him under their wing. Because they spotted an opportunity. Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook. But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.
- burade 6y ago
  Lol What??! You think Tyson went out and looked for a trainer? No. He just happened to be an explosive beast who could knock out grown men at age 13.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Just want to reiterate this. Tyson, in no uncertain terms, was a pure physical phenom. He in no way satisfies the nature vs nature debate (more or less makes it undebatable in his case, as it’s pure nature at work there).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago
pier25 6y ago
As you're describing it, talent seems like having developed a set of cognitive skills that fit better with a particular task. Or maybe it's about personality traits.
Bjartr 6y ago
Serious question: When you spent 30 hours on the painting, did you enjoy it? What about for the python?
- Swizec 6y ago
  Loved it. I was seriously into sketching and later digital painting from 6th grade to freshman year of college. Almost went to study art (or try the entrance exam at least). But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding. Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for. I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)
marcinzm 6y ago
From personal experience I agree with this. I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.
- fn-mote 6y ago
  I work with a lot of very talented people. I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc. When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result. Now my advice is "don't look around"... Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.
- jimmyvalmer 6y ago
  > That depressed me for a while because he should [have won]. Wow, that's a humblebrag taken to the next level.
  - 1996 6y ago
    No, it's accurately conveying the sadness and the loneliness when you see the right moves (in life, in work) and people being oblivious to them and ending up poor/unhappy/etc.
    - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
      In that case, throw the game, and let the sap win. Problem solved.
iillexial 6y ago
>I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. I imagine you could do this if you start training from the childhood and it will be the only thing you're doing.
ipiz0618 6y ago
> Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice. Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.
andybak 6y ago
I agree with most of what your say but I'm not sure how it relates to the points in the article?
- jaspax 6y ago
  The author suggests that talent "doesn't exist", which is pretty clearly false.
  - andybak 6y ago
    1. You put quotes around the phrase "doesn't exist" to imply those were the words used but ctrl+F "exist" returns nothing relevant. 2. I don't think the article body suggests that at all and the article title specifically modifies its claim with the word "largely".
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    My read was that talent, as discussed in bullshit mba speak, is meaningless. Which I can easily get behind. Most MBA speak is just a cloak for confirmation biases.
- sanp 6y ago
  I look at swizec's reply as defining some attributes of talent (something the article says is not generally defined when people talk about talent)..

by Swizec 6y ago

jackcviers3 6y ago

Or, programming is simply easier than painting or boxing, and boring and tedious for most people. Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing. Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming. Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting. The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique. The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.

Swizec 6y ago
Yep all those things you describe fall under talent. A big one in sports is your genetic predisposition to how fast you can recover. Or how much punishment you can take before your body breaks. A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets. After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time. > with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics. What else could it be?
- toss1 6y ago
  >>What else could it be? At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned). Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day. A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0] Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing. One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author. OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?) [0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314 https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

hinkley 6y ago

Talent is a multiplier, but the needle can go negative. It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either. If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis. She lives with a broken man A cracked polystyrene man Who just crumbles and burns Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.

Swizec 6y ago
I like the way my sister talks about this: > Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. To reach elite levels you need both.
- jnsie 6y ago
  Your sister isn't Kevin Durant, by any chance. :-) No idea if this phrase was originally his, but it is often attributed to him.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    fortune favors the prepared mind Is a very similar sentiment but suffers from use of the passive voice. It is a thing that is very obvious in hindsight, but isn't very, I don't know, motivational? Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.

throwaway2245 6y ago

> I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class. These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill. Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.

Swizec 6y ago
If you read Tyson’s story, it’s more that he was extremely talented and people with a talent for the business of boxing took him under their wing. Because they spotted an opportunity. Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook. But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.
burade 6y ago
Lol What??! You think Tyson went out and looked for a trainer? No. He just happened to be an explosive beast who could knock out grown men at age 13.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Just want to reiterate this. Tyson, in no uncertain terms, was a pure physical phenom. He in no way satisfies the nature vs nature debate (more or less makes it undebatable in his case, as it’s pure nature at work there).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago

pier25 6y ago

As you're describing it, talent seems like having developed a set of cognitive skills that fit better with a particular task. Or maybe it's about personality traits.

Bjartr 6y ago

Serious question: When you spent 30 hours on the painting, did you enjoy it? What about for the python?

Swizec 6y ago
Loved it. I was seriously into sketching and later digital painting from 6th grade to freshman year of college. Almost went to study art (or try the entrance exam at least). But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding. Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for. I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)

marcinzm 6y ago

From personal experience I agree with this. I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.

fn-mote 6y ago
I work with a lot of very talented people. I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc. When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result. Now my advice is "don't look around"... Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.
jimmyvalmer 6y ago
> That depressed me for a while because he should [have won]. Wow, that's a humblebrag taken to the next level.
- 1996 6y ago
  No, it's accurately conveying the sadness and the loneliness when you see the right moves (in life, in work) and people being oblivious to them and ending up poor/unhappy/etc.
  - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
    In that case, throw the game, and let the sap win. Problem solved.

iillexial 6y ago

>I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. I imagine you could do this if you start training from the childhood and it will be the only thing you're doing.

ipiz0618 6y ago

> Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice. Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.

andybak 6y ago

I agree with most of what your say but I'm not sure how it relates to the points in the article?

jaspax 6y ago
The author suggests that talent "doesn't exist", which is pretty clearly false.
- andybak 6y ago
  1. You put quotes around the phrase "doesn't exist" to imply those were the words used but ctrl+F "exist" returns nothing relevant. 2. I don't think the article body suggests that at all and the article title specifically modifies its claim with the word "largely".
- sdenton4 6y ago
  My read was that talent, as discussed in bullshit mba speak, is meaningless. Which I can easily get behind. Most MBA speak is just a cloak for confirmation biases.
sanp 6y ago
I look at swizec's reply as defining some attributes of talent (something the article says is not generally defined when people talk about talent)..