CRITICAL MASS

The myth of the myth of talent (which is rarely enough)

Talent is Overrated
Talent is Overrated

"There are people working in the Peavey factory who can play guitar just as well as Jimi Hendrix," Billy Bob Thornton once told me, and I believe that he's right. Maybe not in the specific case of Hendrix and the people assembling amps on the floor in Meridian, Miss., but in a more general sense.

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Outliers

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Invision/AP

In this Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015 file photo, Taylor Swift arrives at the MTV Video Music Awards at the Microsoft Theater, in Los Angeles.

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AP file photo

In this 1970 file photo, rock and roll guitarist Jimi Hendrix is shown performing on the Isle of Wight in England.

I think what Thornton meant is that talent is not scarce.

In a sense, this is pretty obvious. Just thinking about guitar players, I know six or seven "amateurs" whose taste and technique I'd put up against anyone. You can walk into any local art gallery and be amazed by the things that people you have never heard of can do. Every minor league baseball player could play in the majors without embarrassing himself. If you don't believe talent is everywhere, you should spend an afternoon watching YouTube.

The bitter lesson is that talent, in itself, is rarely enough. Talent does not necessarily translate into performance, and performance does not necessarily translate into success. Lots of other factors go into determining how successful a person becomes, and measures of success are subjective anyway. There are studies that show that narcissists -- who are the worst sort of leaders and managers because they tend to claim credit and deflect blame -- are nevertheless more successful in the corporate world than more effective team players. The very qualities that make some people better managers can retard their careers.

On the other hand, it could be argued that narcissists have more talent for self-promotion than modest, mission-focused managers. Talent does not always manifest itself as a social good -- there are talented criminals and liars. A talented politician is not necessarily suited to the drudgery of governance. A talented writer is not necessarily a good editor. Ted Williams had as much talent as anyone who ever played the game of baseball, but he had trouble relating to players who didn't have his physical gifts and couldn't do what he did naturally.

While there are some who will argue that what we perceive as talent is really no more than the application of dedicated practice -- see Malcolm Gladwell's 2002 New Yorker story "The Talent Myth" and his 2008 book Outliers, which popularized the notion that the key to obtaining world-class expertise in any skill is largely a matter of practicing the right way for about 10,000 hours -- it's pretty clear we're all born with some innate physical and intellectual gifts. Some of us have a better musical ear than others; some of us are taller.

But if it's indisputable that, in this sense, people are not created equal, it's fair to wonder how big a role talent plays in human achievement. Talent isn't a myth, but maybe we can go along with the idea expressed by Fortune magazine editor-at-large Geoff Colvin in his 2008 book Talent Is Overrated.

Colvin's keenest observation may be that while the road to acquiring world class expertise is through "deliberate practice," just putting in the hours won't necessarily make you great at anything. He points out that most people only ever become OK at what they do for a living, though they might practice their job for 40 years or more.

"Look around you," he writes. "Look at your friends, your relatives, your co-workers, the people you meet when you shop or go to a party. How do they spend their days? Most of them work. They all do many other things as well, playing sports, performing music, pursuing hobbies, doing public service. Now, ask yourself honestly, how well do they do what they do?"

Colvin suggests the "most likely answer is that they do it fine ... well enough to keep doing it. At work they don't get fired, and probably get promoted a number of times. They play sports or pursue their other interests well enough to enjoy them. But the odds are that few, if any, of the people around you are truly great at what they do. Awesomely, amazingly, world-class excellent."

While that might sound harsh, it's obviously true -- the world is not some Lake Wobegon-like Montessori school where all children are above average. Fortunately for us, most jobs don't require a whole lot of talent. Most jobs just require us to do the same thing over and over again. While we might notice the difference between an excellent waiter and an average one -- or between an excellent newspaper columnist and an average one -- the truth is there isn't a whole lot riding on the performance of these workers. And while no one would want to go to a mediocre doctor, by definition most people do.

And, as Billy Bob Thornton said, there are virtuosos who toil in obscurity.

INEXPLICABLY GREAT

One of the interesting things about any field of artistic endeavor is that there are invariably artists who, despite a lack of technical expertise or obvious physical gifts, somehow connect with audiences in a profound way. (Van Morrison called this the "aargh." I can't think of a better term.)

While I could make a case for Bob Dylan's musicality (he's a better singer and musician than a lot of people give him credit for being), he's often cited as a "singer who can't really sing." On the other side of the spectrum, there are those who suggest Taylor Swift is a banal songwriter and performer. Performers like Lou Reed, John Lennon, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Neil Young are regularly accused by their detractors of having little talent. Steve Earle was once subjected to a humiliating "singing test" by his record label. Keith Richards, whose guitar skills are sometimes questioned, recently described the rap genre as music for tone-deaf people. (Keef should remember mainstream tastes tend to favor the audacious and the loud over the subtle and intricate; there were plenty of people who thought the Rolling Stones were just noisy schoolboys.)

While I'd argue that all these artists -- Swift included -- possess more innate ability than most of us, I'd agree that there are plenty of hobbyist guitar players who can match Lennon's chops, and that there are church-choir voices that some people would prefer over the frayed and strained braying of some of the aforementioned. But taste is subjective, and Dylan -- especially early Dylan -- was always in key and cognizant of the effect he was producing. Swift uses Auto-Tune on her recordings, and the effect grates on some ears, but the truth is she's not using it as camouflage to correct her pitch but to achieve a particular sound.

To criticize Swift for using Auto-Tune is like criticizing an electric guitarist for using a distortion pedal: It's legitimate, but it doesn't necessarily impugn her ability. It's an aesthetic choice.

'IT' FACTORS IN

Most forms of pop music evolved from folk music, which means that it's generally a democratic form that doesn't require an awful lot of talent to perform. Almost anyone can learn to strum three or four chords on a guitar, and a lot of singing is just muscle memory. What makes artists good at pop music is not the skill they apply to their work but the way we respond to it.

There's a guitar solo in Neil Young's "Down by the River" that anyone can play -- it's just the same staccato note repeated for eight bars -- but Young somehow imbues this perverse, nihilistic exercise with freighted feeling. It's not the note itself but how it's played that provides us a kind of insight into Young's murderous narrator.

Yet those of us who look to the ineffable for support of our crackpot theories are always subject to being charged with wishfulness by the more technical minded. Yes, there are guitarists faster than Eric Clapton, who can play more notes more accurately in less time. What is quantifiable almost always favors the engineers -- when Johnny Cash wanders off-key, there's always some technician waiting to point out his pitchiness.

The rise of game shows like American Idol and The Voice feed the idea that talent is measurable, and that we might reach consensus on who is great. It's kind of like the Moneyball debate in baseball -- you have the sabermetricians mining data while the old scouts trust their senses: Can science explain Beyonce?

If talent were really a controlling factor, wouldn't there be more ordinary-looking people making hit records than great-looking ones? (Actually, you might be able to make a case that good-looking people tend to be more talented than ordinary people -- in baseball this is called the "good face" syndrome -- but we're not about to go down that road in a column in a Sunday Style section of a general-interest newspaper. That way lies monsters and eugenics.)

MOZART'S DAD

Truth is, whether you succeed or not probably does depend more on hard work and marshaled effort than any innate talent -- putting 10,000 hours of practice into anything might not make you world class but it will make you better. A lot of what we consider innate is at least partially earned. Studies have shown that endurance runners develop larger than average hearts, they aren't necessarily born with them. Most child prodigies have advantages of nurture; they're born into families that encourage or insist on the child putting in a lot of time.

For instance, while Wolfgang Mozart is often cited as an example of a natural talent who was composing and performing as a 3-year-old, Colvin points out that his father "was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right." And while we might assume Wolfgang inherited Leopold's gift for music, Colvin writes that Leopold was "a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age 3 ... he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children ... he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue."

Colvin goes on to say that Wolfgang's early compositions are just arrangements of the work of other composers, and that it wasn't until he was 21 years old -- after 18 years of training -- that Mozart wrote his first widely acknowledged "masterpiece." While we might like to believe in the legend of a child born to create music, a lot of the stories about the young Mozart are dubious. He probably didn't compose fully formed pieces in his head, there's plenty of evidence that he scribbled down fragments here and there, that he was constantly revising and rewriting. That's the dirty secret of genius -- it's always working.

That doesn't mean that any child can, with the right sort of training, become a Mozart -- only that Mozart probably wouldn't have become Mozart without the hours of deliberate practice, or without having been born into the household of Leopold Mozart. It takes luck to make a Mozart, not just talent and opportunity.

Like Billy Bob Thornton says, there may well be people who can play guitar "better" than Jimi Hendrix. But we've already had our Hendrix. Maybe they don't have the aargh. Or the ambition. They just have talent.

And that and $3 might get you a cup of coffee.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 09/20/2015

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