Talent vs Training

May 13, 2006 11:44 AM

A couple of months ago I read an article that stated that world class athletes or musicians were not that much more talented than other people: they just worked harder. Does anybody know which article I mean? I am also interested to learn other opinions about this. How good can you become if you are very motivated and willing to invest the time? My personal interest is in long distance running, but I am also interested in general stories/opinions/articles.
posted by davar to sports, hobbies, & recreation (23 comments total)

This one?
posted by trondant at 11:53 AM on May 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

I think I'd agree in a general sense. I always thought it was so weird that Geena Davis made it to the Olympic trials in archery. But I do think that sometimes, folks are just born with a talent.
posted by Bear at 11:54 AM on May 13, 2006

I've seen both sides--I know musicians who are prodigously talented, but who don't work hard, and are only moderately successful. I've had students with little innate talent who are incredibly disciplined and hard-working, who now have fine careers going.

The truly great, the very memorable ones, though--in my experience--have it all: amazing natural ability, discipline and work ethic, focus, etc.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:58 AM on May 13, 2006

I'm of the mind that hard work can make anyone musically proficient. Can it make you a world-class virtuoso? That's difficult to say. But world-class virtuoso musicians are, pretty much without exception, people who have put in hours and hours of hard work for years.

I used to (up until age 16 or so) be completely unmusical; didn't play an instrument, couldn't sing, would've said I was basically tonedeaf. Now (at 21) I play guitar, sing, write, record, play gigs, etc. Now one could suggest that I always had latent musical ability and didn't tap into it until I was 16, but it seems like a moot point. I got where I am because I motivated myself to learn. I took guitar lessons, I took singing lessons, and I study music composition. So follow your dreams, kids!
posted by ludwig_van at 12:01 PM on May 13, 2006

Musical ability can be reasonably separated into technical and creative ability.

Anyone with a good head for musical basics, and a willingness to train, can become a very strong technical musician—and can thus make a living off of it, through performance and recording.

The creative side is another issue entirely. It's where the interesting stuff comes from—style, improvisation, authorship vs. recital—but it's not always matched with technical skill and discipline, and so you can have very creative and in some senses brilliant people who can't make a dime because (a) they perform poorly and (b) they don't have the discipline to make their music into a profitable craft.

As LooseFilter suggests, the stand-out acts tend to have both in spades. And anyone looking to get along as a working musician will be less likely to go nuts and burn out if they've got a little creative spirit in them.
posted by cortex at 12:26 PM on May 13, 2006

Is it this one? Via kottke.org.
posted by invisible ink at 12:27 PM on May 13, 2006

The economist and journalist who co-write the weekly "Freakonomics" article cited by Frondant provide complimentary materials each week on the book promotion blog. This week, at least, it seems like the complimentary materials are serious academic research articles.
posted by stuart_s at 12:38 PM on May 13, 2006 [2 favorites]

The blog 'Creating Passionate Users' did a post a post on 'Talent vs. Training' a couple months ago called "How to be an expert."
posted by catdog at 12:40 PM on May 13, 2006 [2 favorites]

Thanks everybody! catdog's link was the article I meant, but the others are interesting as well, especially stuart_s's link. I had forgotten the part that you did not just need lots of training, but that you need to train the parts where you suck at, and that that is the most difficult, for most people. Geena Davis is inspirational indeed and the sort of success story I had in mind.

Other links/opinions etc. are still welcome!

Yay askme! I knew someone here would have read the article. If it weren't for askme I may have wondered about this for years. I am actually glad I forgot because otherwise I would have missed the other material.
posted by davar at 1:30 PM on May 13, 2006

You might also want to read Steven Pressfield's The War of Art (excerpt), which posits that the difference between the amateur and the pro is that the amateur succumbs to resistance.
posted by dobbs at 3:18 PM on May 13, 2006

My friend who once ran on the Spanish Olympic track team has a theory that the professionalisation of athletics has made genetics more important. In the amateur era, not many people could afford to train seriously and training wasn't down to a science, and so the main advantage the best athletes had was in their training.

Today, Olympic committees have the money to finance a large number of athletes. They start with a huge batch of young kids, select the ones with the most innate talent and provide them with top-notch training. Since everyone winds up with a similarly high level of training, the differences in genetics become more significant at the Olympic level.

When you start out, training makes a big difference, but as you get to higher and higher levels, the differences between people who all work hard have more to do with talent.

Another one of her theories is that people gravitate towards doing things that they are naturally good at, and avoid things that are more difficult for them than for other people. So maybe more talented people naturally wind up working harder. They get more results for their effort, so they keep going.
posted by fuzz at 3:34 PM on May 13, 2006

I used to be a classical musician... without a huge amount of practice I should add. I always found it relatively easy without needing too much discipline, which most would describe as talent.
I've been giving this subject some thought recently, I teach music and I find it an interesting topic.
My beliefs are that people are talented at whatever interests them. If I was really interested in maths, I'd be really good at it. The more I love something and find it interesting, the more time I spend thinking about it. Although I didn't spend a lot of time practicing at my instruments, I spent a lot of time thinking about music and rehearsing in my head. Any music around me was listened to very intensely. It follows then that people are talented because they work harder because their mind is able to spend time on something that other people would start to find boring more quickly.
Self-belief helps as well though, lack of it can really damage talent.
In short, I think that people have a natural disposition to find certain things more interesting than others, which means they'll be more talented at these things than other people.
posted by BobsterLobster at 6:42 PM on May 13, 2006

I spent a lot of time thinking about music and rehearsing in my head. Any music around me was listened to very intensely.

Indeed, I'm the same way.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:18 PM on May 13, 2006

This is excellently useful info, and should be widely broadcast, especially to those with athletic goals, at any age.

I'm not at all convinced that it applies equally well to serious (as opposed to hobbyist--not a sneer, btw!) artistic goals, much as I'd like to hope otherwise, and as often as I've been impressed with how much it is possible to improve in any area in which you're willing to work your butt off. It's certainly clear to me now that all those obviously missing talents that I imagined were impeding my march to musical greatness have simply been areas in which I was not willing to face down ineptness with serious work... But these are also areas in which it's been VERY hard to find supportive teachers and good information, I suspect because those who can "do it" in these areas have almost uniformly been aided by talent, and have done so in a culture which tells them and their peers that what they can do (swing, play the blues, jump) simply CAN'T be taught. Maybe they're right.

The book "Drawing on the Right-Hand Side of the Brain" takes useful and well conceived aim at confusions like these concerning talent and realistic-drawing skill. But as a drawing teacher and one of those folks who could always draw easily, I've clearly seen that, for those who don't visualize easily, or can't easily rotate a 3D object in their imaginations, or who apparently can't detect the difference between a graceful gesture and a clunky one, it's REALLY hard, and maybe even impossible, to undertake a serious struggle to improve even using ideas from that book. In fact, I consider the examples just given to each be separate gifts/talents, doled out with varying degrees of largess, amongst many other isolatable visual/perceptual talents, including, say, a gift for capturing likenesses, or sensing the right visual equivalent for a dramatic moment, or the ability to infuse simple marks with charisma or liveliness, or even the capacity to find images and marks moving and meaningful to begin with. Without some serious, and seriously rare, motivation (which itself I think could be considered a talent), these obstacles are NOT going to be overcome, or even acknowledged in the first place... And maybe they shouldn't be. I suspect there's much more to be gained, for both the artist and any potential audience, by pursuing the directions suggested by one's gifts and motivations rather than dismissing these in favor of abilities one longs for and admires in the more conventionally talented. In other words, I think there's a very real and not usefully dismissed connection between "talent" and what I don't mind calling "destiny," without feeling the need for a more modern concept.

None of this talk about hard work addresses inspiration, compulsion, honesty, vision, or even moral purpose, which as far as I know still can have as much to do with the success of any artist's work as the skills and practice they bring to their work. And I don't mean to suggest that I think there are universal or even knowable standards in these areas.

I'm also thinking about how generally meaningless any questions about "how hard they worked" are when enjoying the differences between any two artists. The enjoyment of apparently effortless virtuosity or eloquence may even be enhanced by sensing that not all the edges needed to be buffed down to get the job done perfectly, even miraculously, especially when you feel sure that the artist knows that better than you do.
posted by dpcoffin at 7:59 PM on May 13, 2006

My beliefs are that people are talented at whatever interests them. If I was really interested in maths, I'd be really good at it.

Within limits. I've known folks who have very much wanted to be good at something and failed. I take a personal interest in a number of things that I've never gotten good at—I find poker fascinating, for example, and am a big numbers nerd, but I'm terrible at it. Chess and drumming, likewise.
posted by cortex at 8:02 PM on May 13, 2006

Sociologist Daniel F. Chambliss wrote an classic article on this very thing. He analyzed Olympic swimmers. The article is entitled "The Mundanity of Excellence" Sociological Theory 1989 pp. 70-86.
posted by Crotalus at 8:36 PM on May 13, 2006

I was a sportswriter in a former life. I covered it all at one point or another (e.g. MLB, NBA, NFL, Olympics, etc). The most common thread among high-end athletes is how insanely competitive these guys/gals are. When you reach the highest points of a sport, everyone has talent. With a few exceptions, every high-end athlete you see was a superstar at a lower level of competition. So, what separates them at the high end is the mental aspect of the game/sport/event.

It always struck me that Michael Jordan is/was the most competitive man on the planet. He wanted to be the best guy in the room at EVERYTHING. The best player, the best dresser, the best gambler, the best cars ... he wasn't happy unless he was winning at every little thing. This is why he was great. Genetics and raw talent are helpful, yes. But at the tip of the spear, it really is all about which man/woman wants it more.
posted by frogan at 9:36 PM on May 13, 2006

Olympic Gold Begins With Good Genes, Experts Say
posted by SuperSquirrel at 11:03 AM on May 14, 2006

I read an anecdote about some woman coming up to a famous violinist (I can't remember who the violinist was) after a concert and gushing, "Oh, Mr. X, I'd give my life to play the way you do." He said, "I did."

People quite often just don't realize the sheer hard work it takes to excel at something and/or they aren't willing to put in the effort. Or they feel a more balanced life is more important.

And another thing is that if you're doing something you really, really love, you don't feel like you're giving up your life to do it because it is your life.
posted by orange swan at 6:30 PM on May 14, 2006

orange swan, I've heard the same anecdote as well in different contexts. Something like a guitarists coming up to Steve Vai and saying "I'd do anything to have your chops!" and Steve Vai saying "Oh yeah? Would you practice 8 hours a day for fifteen years?" or something.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:27 PM on May 14, 2006

If you're interested in running, and still reading this, take a look at Noakes' book The Lore of Running. I think it's somewhere in that huge and awesome tome that he cites some research that suggests that there are pronounced differences in how physically trainable different bodies are, not in the sense of practicing, or even talent per se, but in terms of physiological response. I think the numbers break out to something like 10% of people are highly trainable, they will come off the couch and their bodies will respond to training runs very quickly and they will get better, 80% are moderately trainable: they will respond but will do so more slowly and with less dramatic results (presumably there is a range in this group), and 10% are not really trainable and will not get faster or have more endurance no matter how many miles they put in.

I think that this may be different from forms of sport and endeavor in which concrete skills might contribute more to outcome. I'm a runner, so I'm by no means suggesting that running is simply brute physical effort, just that there is a range of practicable skills in different contexts.
posted by OmieWise at 8:09 AM on May 18, 2006

Thanks OmieWise (and everyone). Lore of Running is already on my wishlist after it was recommended in another AskMe. It makes sense to me that running (or any other intense sport) is different in this regard than, say, darts. I really do hope I am not one of those 10% that do not improve at all though. That must be incredibly frustrating.

To some extend I can also relate to the comments from the musicians. I had never played an instrument until I took a music class at age 16. All the other students had played an instrument for about 10 years, and were really good at it. I was not the best student, but certainly not the worst. I think that that was because I put a lot of effort in it. (Of course my play was not comparable to their play, but I did all the theoretical things just as well as them). I had totally forgotten this until this thread.
posted by davar at 4:39 AM on May 19, 2006

Check new Scientific American.
posted by dragonsi55 at 10:57 AM on July 14, 2006