“Talent” is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation we have for athletic success. Great athletes, we seem to believe, are born with a special gift, almost a “thing” inside of them, denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic, psychological, or physiological. Some have “it,” and some don’t. Some are “natural athletes,” and some aren’t. While an athlete, we acknowledge, may require many years of training and dedication to develop and use that talent, it is always “in there,” only waiting for an opportunity to come out.
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But talent fails as an explanation for athletic success, on conceptual grounds. It mystifies excellence, subsuming a complex set of discrete actions behind a single undifferentiated concept.
The above quote is from Daniel Chambliss’s landmark study The Mundanity of Excellence, published in 1989. I wrote briefly about Chambliss’s work in a prior edition of The Owner’s Memo.
But Chambliss’s view on talent was gnawing at me, and it wouldn’t let go.
Chambliss’s three controversial points
Daniel Chambliss is a professor of sociology and was an amateur swim coach. In the 1980s, he conducted research to discover what made the most elite swimmers different from others. He spent roughly a year and a half attending national and international swim meets, including the 1984 Olympic Games, and he was a swim coach in New York State for five years.
In the paper, Chambliss makes three main points, and all of them go against the grain of conventional wisdom. The first two are:
Excellence in swimming requires qualitative differences rather than quantitative ones. Top swimmers do things differently than the rest. The styles of strokes, dives, and turns are dramatically different at each level. Top performers do not merely train for more hours or “work harder.”
Excellence (and motivation) is much more mundane than we think. The very best swimmers find a way to make the necessary practice and repetition interesting, competitive, or compelling in some way.
However, it is Chambliss’s third point that I found the most interesting and perplexing:
“Talent” is a meaningless description. Chambliss argues that the common refrain, that great athletes are “talented,” is meaningless and circular because we only call an athlete “talented” after they achieve success, like winning competitions or performing some great feat.
“Talent” is meaningless
Immediately after reading Chambliss’s article for the first time, I recall feeling a little uneasy. Was there really no such thing as “talent”?
On one hand, great athletic performances do have a mystical, amazing quality about them and seem so far removed from what we ordinary humans are capable of. We see Lionel Messi leading his team to an improbable World Cup comeback win or Michael Phelps winning a record eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games or Usain Bolt running the 100-meter dash in 9.58 seconds, and we know we are incapable of doing the same. We sit stunned for a moment at the thought that a person could come through for his team again and again or win eight separate competitions under the highest pressure or be so much faster than the fastest people in the world. We elevate them to the status of gods.
It’s virtually impossible for a casual observer to understand, in detail, all the hard work, practice, and development that went into creating a Messi, Phelps, or Bolt. So, we reach for the easier explanation: they have something we don’t; they have talent.
On the other hand, Chambliss makes a strong point. I have never heard the word “talent” used to describe a person beforethey achieve something great. It’s almost laughable to think we could look at a two-year-old, for instance, and say “That kid’s got a lot of football talent,” before they’ve ever touched a ball.
That fact should give us pause. If the word “talent” is never used beforehand, if it only emerges after the fact, after the championship was obtained, the gold medal was won, the race was run, the catch was made, or the defense overcome, then it is not reporting anything new at all. Chambliss would argue that it is better simply to say the person was successful or that they beat everyone else.
Really? Is there no such thing as talent?
I understood this line of reasoning the first time I read Chambliss’s article, but I felt skeptical. Surely, talent existed. Every time I saw my children’s sports teams practice, I saw talent, didn’t I? Some kids were clearly better than others. What else could explain a nine-year-old spinning, then leaping, then catching a football in the air if not “talent”?
This was the same argument I recently received from a reader, Blake:
Mr Chambliss’ contention that [“talent”] is circular, that we call them talented after they succeed, is obviously incorrect to any parent, grandparent or coach who has ever watched the first t-ball practice full of 6 year olds. You won’t be able to spot every talented athlete, but you can pick out most of them. It was a pretty good indication that my 6 year old granddaughter had something going on when she outran everybody in her class. She eventually won 3 state championships in track.
Blake’s argument does a good job of summarizing how I felt while reading Chambliss’s article. On a first reading, it seems ridiculous that talent might not exist.
But after thinking about it awhile, I believe Chambliss is right.
Chambliss’s foundational argument is that if two people are different, then there must be something causing that difference, and that holds for success in sports as much as anywhere else. Critically, some of the time, the cause of success may not be apparent to the naked eye or even yet measurable with the means we have available.
Chambliss tries to address this point by listing a variety of factors that, in his experience, tend to produce better swimmers:
…geographical location, particularly living in southern California where the sun shines year round and everybody swims; fairly high family income, which allows for the travel to meets and payments of the fees entailed in the sport, not to mention sheer access to swimming pools when one is young; one’s height, weight, and proportions; the luck or choice of having a good coach, who can teach the skills required; inherited muscle structure—it certainly helps to be both strong and flexible; parents who are interested in sports. Some swimmers, too, enjoy more the physical pleasures of swimming; some have better coordination; some even have a higher percentage of fast-twitch muscle fiber.
Notice how long Chambliss’s list is. Once I saw the list, I also got the impression that it could be much longer. For instance, I might add a host of psychological traits too, like resilience, which would help in brushing off losses, and a tolerance for repetition, since the sport consists of going back and forth over the same stretch of water.
There are many potential reasons a person, even a very young person, might be a better swimmer than someone else, and their superiority might even be visible at their very first swim practice.
For very young people, I think it is particularly helpful to think about physical differences because other benefits, like psychological ones, might not yet be apparent in their first attempts at a sport. We must also bear in mind that some physical differences may be hidden from view.
What is it about a six-year-old that makes him able to throw the baseball harder than the rest? Physical size is often readily apparent and can make a big difference, as proponents of youth redshirting will tell you. But sometimes there are kids who are no bigger than their teammates but can still throw harder. Chambliss suggests there may be physical characteristics, like the proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, that aren’t visible and may explain their success. It’s also possible there are other invisible factors: maybe Dad loves baseball and tends to keep a foam ball around the house that he and the kids are always playing with. And if Dad were asked, the behavior might be so second nature to him that it wouldn’t even spring to mind as having benefitted his child.
It’s better to believe talent doesn’t exist
Of course, neither I nor Chambliss can prove that any hidden factors are the cause of any success, but there are three reasons I think it’s preferable to consider what factors might be behind success rather than claiming it is due to that magical “talent.”
1. Searching for factors shows us what to work on
Using “talent” as a simple explanation for success prevents us from understanding how we ourselves could be better at whatever we are considering.
Imagine for a moment that you had a child who was a classmate of Blake’s granddaughter, whom I’ll call Betty, and who wanted to run as well as Betty did. (Let’s also imagine that these girls are old enough to want to work on improving.)
By studying Betty more closely, we might find some reasons she was so great, and that could help encourage our own child to work on improving in the same vein.
If, for example, Betty was lean and muscular and this tended to help her burst off the starting line, and if Blake told us that Betty also loved gymnastics, we might infer that she was effectively working out when her classmates were not, and that might encourage our child to believe she could improve by doing the same.
What about factors outside Betty’s control? What if Betty was simply taller than everyone else or had longer legs than the other girls? Well, we could marvel at her “talent” or the “gifts” God bestowed upon her, or we could encourage our own daughter to focus on other factors that might confer success (for instance, discipline in practice or mental toughness) to attempt to counter Betty’s natural advantages.
It seems far healthier to me to look for ways to improve or compete than to assume it cannot be done because we are not “talented,” which leads to number two.
2. Believing in “talent” stops us from experimenting
To the extent that you or I believe that some people, whether athletes, salespeople, actors, or physicists, are gifted with some mystical property that cannot be understood, we lose the impetus we might otherwise have to explore.
How many times have you seen a great performance, maybe a great speech, and heard someone say “I couldn’t do that, I’m a terrible public speaker”? Comments like that are common, and they assume that the speaker was always great, endowed with the talent of public speaking.
But how do we know that’s the case? I was reminded of this recently when Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, during an interview with David Senra, said he was once terrified of public speaking. His solution was to use affirmations. Every day, he wrote down repeatedly that he liked public speaking, and, to his surprise, it worked. In his words:
If you tell yourself or write down something about yourself 100 times, it writes into the [brain] at such a deep level that your brain will start reconciling you to that. It just works.
Now, if Lütke had believed that public speakers had some mysterious power, do you think he could ever have mustered the willpower, creativity, or open-mindedness to try something he initially considered absurd? I doubt it.
3. Believing in “talent” relieves us of responsibility
Using the word “talent” as an explanation for success might actively prevent us from exploring ways we can get better, but there is also a more insidious problem with it. It silently relieves us of the effort of trying. It’s a subconscious admission of the fear we have that, if we discovered the banal secrets of success, we would see that success was possible, and then we would need to confront a call to improve ourselves. If success became plain, we might have to answer for not having achieved it.
Chambliss describes this well:
Still, we want to believe in talent. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “What people would like is that a coward or a hero be born that way”, knowing that it protects us by degrading the very achievements that it pretends to elevate… magically separating us from those people who are great athletes, ensuring that we are incomparable to them; and relieving those of us who are not excellent of responsibility for our own condition.
It is easier for the vast majority of us, for the vast majority of the time, to continue moving through our lives, simply believing in gods and ignoring the potential pain, uncertainty, and work that would come from responding to a call to improve.
This unspoken fear exists in investing, too. We hear about the records of great investors, and we are amazed. We know from experience how difficult it is to select and hold great investments. We hear great investors advise amateurs to avoid picking stocks and to invest in index funds instead. Buffett says this repeatedly; for example, at the 2008 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, when asked how someone who was not a full-time investor should invest, he said:
Well, I’ll be very simple: under the conditions you name, I’d probably have it all in a very low-cost index fund… I would recognize the fact that I’m an amateur investor… and then I’d forget it and go back to work.
Hearing this can lead an investor to believe that those who can invest well have a gift, that they have investing talent. But it ignores the other half of Buffett’s advice, that with study, work, and the right temperament, an individual may be able to see beyond the veil of talent and do quite well on their own. From his 1993 annual letter:
On the other hand, if you are a know-something investor, able to understand business economics and to find five to ten sensibly-priced companies that possess important long-term competitive advantages, conventional diversification makes no sense for you.
Buffett is suggesting that the way to investing success is, among other things, to work toward an understanding of business economics and the ability to find good companies at sensible prices. That means reading, thinking, practicing patience, and developing the right temperament, the same kind of mundane ingredients Chambliss found at the pool.