Is talent a destructive myth?

[Cortina]

Is talent a destructive myth?

Worth a listen, it's very short. See thread on Secondary education for more details. It's great Matthew Syed has agreed to answer our questions on Mumsnet. Also ties in to Gabby Logan sport Q&A session.

So many of us decide we have no aptitude for certain subjects/areas very early on...

Yes, if you call a child 'gifted and talented' for example that's ok if it's a tag to say that their current attainment in tennis, maths, english etc surpasses that of their peers and they should be encouraged to continue to develop. If it's assumed to mean 'possess innate all round high ability in every area' then it's problematic.

Grimma I think Dweck would say that was a 'fixed mindset' :). If I failed a important paper you set, privately you'd think 'I didn't cut it'. I couldn't really recover especially if I then worked hard and made a few other mistakes. Your fixed mindset has made you into a judge not an ally.

Didn't those we view as 'genius'/ supremely talented have to work hard for their efforts though? Jackson Pollock, Mozart, Darwin, Edison - none of these would 'cut it' by your definition.

Doesn't it take time for potential to flower (as Dweck) says?

Agree with your penultimate... but baffled by your last post. I'm not sure what definition you inferred, maybe I wasn't clear - what I meant was you have a high level of ability and work hard. The popular media tend to focus on the 'Eureka' moments, but as Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind"

Great scientists are unlikely to have fixed mindsets - the whole thrust of science is continual improvement, taking our knowledge where it hasn't been before.

We are in agreement. Sorry, didn't read it properly.

I think it depends on how much time you give to your teenager, for their talent. To me that means, is it getting in the way of the teenager's schoolwork??? If so, it's destructive until graduation. If it's not in the way and your teenager is doing well in school, then it is not destructive. Talent is wonderful, but there IS a time and a place for it. Practice is good, but being in a band isn't, if the teenager is not doing well in school (like my step-son). All areas - talent, friends, gf or bf's, will be destructive to some degree to their schoolwork. But it's up to the parents to set the limits. We find it hard (me & my bf) to do that since my step-son is back and forth with Mom and Dad. I have tried time and time again to get on the same page with all 3 of us and we finally are but there's only a month left of school now. I wish I was listened to earlier. But I can be soft also. We ALL learned our lesson this year. I even said to my step-son that I hope he learned his lesson, putting off schoolwork and having to make it up at the end of the year. He may still not do well this 1/4.

Wondering if the idea you form about yourself, and the experiences of success or failure in certain areas at a young age are what really matter. Also, I wonder if early efforts at formal teaching (children starting school in the UK at 4 for instance) do more harm than good.

I do believe in the hard work ethos.

But then again I do see people who waste many many years of their life- and a lot of money- because they cannot see that hard work on its own is not enough for them to succeed in their field. They end up burned out and damaged, because they can't admit that this particular thing was not for them. They blame themselves for not working hard enough, when they are working as hard as any human being should and their health is suffering from it.

A bit like those Eastern athletes who ended up on drugs because the success culture they lived in did not allow for the attitude of "oh well, I have done all I can but Western Athlete X simply runs faster than me".

My brother gave up his career as a violinist when he realised that however hard he worked he would never make it to soloist rank; his fingers just weren't flexible enough. He had been working several hours a day on his violin since he was a small kid, was now working on it full time and was getting to an age where most violinists start being at their best- so it was pretty clear it wasn't going to happen. He quit while the going was good and has had a successful academic career in a totally different field.

Do I wish he had persevered in the belief that anyone can succeed? He would have been stuck in a second-rate orchestra, on awful pay conditions, still slogging his guts out and still wondering why he wasn't making it. Instead, he managed to come up with a Plan B.

There is a second side to the coin of "you can do anything if you only work hard enough". And that is "if you aren't succeeding you can't have been working hard enough". "If you only push a little harder you can do it". I have seen people have breakdowns because they've believed this. Or high blood pressure. Or threatened heart attacks. Or ulcers.

I want my dcs to work hard because they love working hard. But I'd rather not see them dead from stress before their time.

Cory, in Bounce Matthew Syed dicusses a study of violinists. A group were followed deemed absolutely gifted, fairly good and pretty poor/average. The only difference between them was apparently hours of practice. They improved in relation to to much they practiced that was the only factor that separated the outstanding from the merely average. In your brother's case Syed would say your brother's 'hardware' was the limiting factor I think. Glad he found happiness by following a different path. This and similar studies demonstrate these sort of results time after time. I found this very difficult to believe at first.

Cortina - my experience of music college was exactly the same as Cory and her brother's experience

I was a violinist and for years I was convinced that I was going to be a professional musician. I started playing at the age of 4 and fell in love with it. I ate, drank, breathed music, practised for hours a day, I really couldn't have done any more than I did, there physically wasn't time in the day. However, when I got to music college, there was an unbelievably talented boy from Venezuela, who was effortlessly brilliant. He took half the time that I did to pick things up and yet the end result was always that much better. What made it even more irritating was that he'd only started playing the violin when he was 11 or 12, so I'd actually had hours and hours and hours more practice than he had. According to Syed's theory I should have been better, no contest, but I wasn't. Eventually I realised that if I carried on I'd be able to have a career as a musician, I was good enough for that and if most people heard me they would have thought I was brilliant, but it would have been in an orchestra or maybe if I was lucky in chamber music, but there was no way I was going to make it as a soloist. I decided to pursue another career and was very successful at that until I had my kids.

The flipside of the Syed-theory-coin is that if you're not successful, then you haven't tried hard enough. It's very close to the idea that if you just think positively you can cure cancer and if you do end up getting terminally ill then you just haven't been positive enough

I think this Syed chap is spouting a load of c**p.

Of course a million hours of practice at whatever will effect improvement, but only over someone of the same innate ability.

Agree, generalhaig, with your last paragraph. We've all heard those women who claim that other people's bad birth or caesarean is because they just didn't try hard enough or were being a wimp [been there got the t-shirt emoticon!]

I think we all agree that talent = good, hard work = good, but talent + hard work = unstoppable

The thing is I'd like my dd to really try hard for the career of her dreams. But if it doesn't come off I also want her to be able to accept that before she is ill from overwork, heavily into debt and too old to start another career. I want to see her work hard at 18- and accept some sacrifices to reach for her dreams. But I don't want to see her a burnt out wreck at 50 because she was unable to accept limitations. I'd like her to give it maybe 10 years- but not 30!

Cortina - Syd can only show a correlation between amount of hours practised and outcome - not cause.

It is equally possible that people who aren't talented don't put the same number of hours in as people who are talented. So it is only a correlation not a cause.

It would be very hard to prove cause and not correlation.......

Indigo, Syed cited an interesting example re: talent about a study of violinists at the Music Academy in West Berlin. 'By the age of twenty the best violinists (destined to be top soloists) had practised an average of 10,000 hours, more than 2,000 hours more than the good violinists (destined for top orchestras), and more than 6,000 more than the violinists hoping to be music teachers'. Arguably they were all 'talented' enough, in that they'd got to the Music Academy in the first place, and I was surprised that hours of practice seemingly made so much difference.

Also, on the same sort of theme, I thought Senua's question to Matthew Syed & his answer was interesting:

It is tempting to look at the likes of Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters or the Hungarian chess family and say that they got there by hard work and tenacity, and if they can do if then so can you. However, it is in the nature of things that we only hear about the success stories. Has anyone actually scientifically tested this theory? There must be kids who have had the intensive input and training but didn't become champions: what is your analysis of them? What are your thoughts on the opposite end of the spectrum?

Matthew: Thanks - I had exactly the same question when I first came across this evidence. What of those who practised hard and failed? Is there survival bias in the statistical evidence? I am glad to say that I found no evidence of this. With deliberate and purposeful practice, we are all transformed with dramatic implications. All of our brains have this plasticity.

Still doesn't rule out correlation instead of cause.

If you are really talented you get more positive feedback about how brilliant you are (the top soloists compared to the top orchestras compared to the music teachers).

The positive feedback causes you to practice more. And causes you to be invited to perform more. And then by the time you're 20 you end up with having practised significantly more hours than the other talented-but-not-quite-that-talented-violinists.

But it was because you were that talented in the first place that all those things happened....

The evidence against Matthew is GeneralHaig's story. I think he didn't search hard enough to look for evidence against his theory. (Cognitive Bias)

Well Gabby LOGAN DOES NOT SEEM TO BE ANSWERING ANY QUESTIONS...IS IT A LEG PULL?

I like Cortinas line. Gabby Logan seems to be hooked on competition for its own sake. Nice people dont always need to be winners all the time.

Hello there - I would like to insert another element in the debate - how the perception of 'talent' changes historically and how much the market influences our perception of talent.

One might not considered talented because one is working towards a change of style which will result in a change of aesthetic paradigm. (I freely admit that this relates mostly to the the arts. In sports the question is more black and white)

A work like Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) in 1860 would not have been considered talented or innovative but simply out of place. In 1860 Monet was considered a genius. Does that mean that Picasso is better than Monet or viceversa? Neither. They are all products of different times.

I bet there were many painters who were innovative and talented but their chosen aesthetics never mingled with the zeitgeist or with the art market at the time and they never became Picassos or Monet. Then there are artists, like Hirst, whose talent is questionable but were exactly in the right place in the right time.

I think that the point that I am not very successfully trying to make is that what we perceive as genius and talent might be considered derivative or overrated in 50 years' time, whereas not-so -talented people may be seen as innovators.

So is it talent a destructive myth? Yes, in the visual arts it definitely is!