Talent Is Overrated (24 page)

The greatest value of a supporting home environment is that it enables a person to start developing early. We've seen that in a few specialized fields, such as baseball pitching and ballet, the body can be adapted in critical ways only at early ages, after which the bones calcify and the changes become impossible; the pitcher will never get his arm back and the dancer will never turn her feet out as fully as necessary. Brain adaptations seem to follow a similar pattern in at least a few cases. Violinists' brains devote more territory to the workings of the left hand—the one that plays the notes—than do other people's brains, and also more space than is devoted to the workings of their own right hands, with the effect much more pronounced in people who started their music study at an early age. A separate effect involves myelin, the substance that wraps slowly around neurons with practice, insulating and strengthening key connections in the brain. Practice in childhood causes myelin to build up more than does practice in adulthood. A study of professional pianists found that the more practice they did before age sixteen, the more myelin they had in the critical parts of their brains. Starting early holds advantages that become less available later in life.

Yet even more important than these advantages is a different factor, and that is the simple matter of time and resources. As we have seen repeatedly, becoming world-class great at anything seems to require thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice. For example, the top-ranked violinists in the Berlin study had accumulated about ten thousand hours of practice by age twenty, at which point they were practicing some twenty-eight hours a week and spending many additional hours studying, taking lessons, preparing, and organizing. For an adult facing the responsibilities of a family and a career, devoting that kind of time to purely developmental activities—activities that cost money rather than earn money—would be exceedingly tough. Only in childhood and adolescence will the time typically be available.

That reality creates another advantage to starting early, a competitive one that we've considered before. In any field where people can start early, starting late may put one in an eternal and possibly hopeless quest to catch up. For example, when those top-ranked violinists turn professional, they don't stop practicing. On the contrary, they practice even more, averaging more than thirty hours a week, accumulating more than fifteen hundred hours a year. Any adult thinking of starting a professional career in any field in which some participants begin their development as small children should first get out a calculator and face the music.

The specific nature of the supporting environment is obviously crucial, and a number of researchers have identified the most important characteristics. In the largest and most famous examination of the topic, the legendary educational researcher Benjamin S. Bloom directed a study of 120 young men and women who were among America's top performers in widely divergent fields—piano playing, sculpting, swimming, tennis, mathematics, and neurology. After extensive interviews with the performers and their families, his team found that their home environments shared a number of traits.

Despite wide variations in the parents' backgrounds, professions, and incomes, their homes tended to be child-oriented. Kids were important, and the parents were willing to do a lot—almost anything—to help them. The parents also believed in and modeled a strong work ethic. Work came before play, obligations had to be met, goals were to be pursued. In one of the most cited conclusions from Bloom's report, he found that “To
excel,
to
do one's best,
to
work hard,
and to
spend one's time constructively
were emphasized over and over again.” In an organization, this would be called the culture—the norms and expectations that are simply in the air.

The parents of these high achievers gave them strong guidance on the general choice of a field, but chance played a large role in the specific choice. The artists tended to come from artistic parents, the athletes from athletic parents, the mathematicians and neurologists from very learned parents, and the parents provided early encouragement in those directions. But a child might end up studying the piano because a piano was available, or become a swimmer because the swimming team needed one more member. The children were not irresistibly drawn to specific fields, nor did their parents force them.

The parents did choose teachers, which was one of their most important roles as their children progressed and needed to be challenged at higher levels. The child's initial teacher was almost always someone who happened to be convenient—a local coach, teacher, or relative. But invariably these kids progressed to a level where they needed a better teacher, and these next teachers were frequently not convenient; parents had to devote lots of time and energy to finding the right teacher and then driving the child to and from lessons. Ultimately these young achievers moved on to some form of master-level teacher, a step that demands major sacrifices of time, money, and energy by both parents and students.

In an organization this progression is analogous to choosing developmental assignments that continually stretch an employee's abilities. Employees aren't children, but many of them, like children, will not voluntarily keep seeking new work experiences that stress their weakest professional muscles; the temptation to continue doing what you do comfortably is too great. Employers, like parents and coaches, have to keep pushing them to develop, and the lesson for employers is that the process requires sacrifices on their part as well—in the form of suboptimal performance by a business unit when a manager is taken away from it for a developmental assignment elsewhere, or periods of little or no productivity from an employee while he or she is learning new skills. But the lesson also is that these sacrifices pay off.

In addition to choosing appropriate new teachers, the parents in the research project monitored their children's practice, made sure there was time for it, and made sure they did it. This is worth a closer look not only because practice is centrally important to achievement but also because kids in particular seem to hate it. If the research suggests factors that contribute to kids practicing, those findings may be valuable to everyone. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago and colleagues investigated why it's easier for some adolescents than others to sustain concentrated, effortful study, the core of deliberate practice and high achievement. The research focused on the students' family environments, evaluating them on two dimensions, stimulation and support. A stimulating environment was one with lots of opportunities to learn and high academic expectations. A supportive environment was one with well-defined rules and jobs, without much arguing over who had to do what, and in which family members could rely on one another. The researchers classified family environments as stimulating or not and supportive or not, creating four possible combinations. Adolescents living in three of those combinations reported the typical low-interest, low-energy experience of studying. But in the fourth combination, the environment that was both stimulating and supportive, students were much more engaged, attentive, and alert in their studying.

This key finding fits exactly with observations in Bloom's research. The environments he examined were also stimulating—“parents encouraged the
curiosity
of their children at an early age and answered their questions with great care”—and were structured and supportive, with everyone having clear roles and tasks, and parents going to some lengths to support their children's practice. In this light we see another clue to why so few organizations produce a steady flow of top performers. Most organizations are not intellectually stimulating, even when the field itself might seem fascinating; rather than offering opportunities to learn and rewarding curiosity, the typical organization leaves inquisitive employees to find their own ways to learn. And instead of furnishing structure and support—meaning clear roles and responsibilities in a positive, forward-looking, build-on-successes environment—many organizations operate in a cover-your-ass culture that is mainly about avoiding blame. Such cultures have always seemed like a miserable fact of life, but the research on supporting environments shows specifically why they're poisonous. It shows additionally why any organization that can buck the trends by providing stimulation, structure, and support is not only rare but also powerful.

We've seen often that early training can produce high achievers who are surprisingly young, and the research has shown us how that happens. We've grown accustomed to watching sixteen-year-old pianists, chess players, and gymnasts who are astoundingly good. Yet why is it that in certain other fields, notably business, we never see sixteen-year-old wonders? The glib answer is that a kid of that age can't legally sign a check or a lease; in fact that answer embodies larger truths about when to begin training a young person in particular domains, how to do it, and what the principles of early development mean for business and related fields.

The fundamental reason why there are no teenage prodigies in certain domains is that it's impossible to accumulate enough development time by the teenage years. Sometimes the reason is simply physical size. A five-year-old can practice the piano or violin—reduced-size violins are made for that purpose—but cannot practice the trombone or double bass because they're just too big. So world-class trombonists and double-bassists tend to be older. In other cases a decade of development is not enough. This is the Nobel Prize effect: There are no teenage particle physicists, even though a child can start learning math and science at age five, because acquiring the necessary knowledge these days seems to take at least twenty years.

Is that why we don't see eighteen-year-old business wizards— because the sheer volume of necessary knowledge is too great to be acquired by that age? The explanation doesn't seem completely persuasive. Let's leave aside those businesspeople who are actually scientists on the payroll of a corporation, and focus on managers. The knowledge and skills needed to be a successful manager are formidable for sure. On the other hand, as any manager who's being frank will tell you, running a business is frequently not rocket science. Formulating a business unit strategy is a lot of work, but not work on the order of, say, proving Fermat's Last Theorem (which took 357 years).

The answer may instead be that traditionally, training in business skills doesn't start early. Our discussion of early development will have caused any businessperson to reflect that virtually nothing like this happens in business—there isn't intensive, focused development of business skills in young people that's anything like what happens with swimmers, artists, and mathematicians, for example. The question then arises of whether it's even possible. Postponing for a moment the issue of whether it's desirable, would it be possible and effective to train young people intensively in business knowledge and skills?

The answer is clearly yes. Development must always begin at the beginning, so you wouldn't try teaching a five-year-old about the capital asset pricing model or the inner workings of the Food and Drug Administration. But you could start teaching basic domain knowledge—the facts of a specific business—and of course this was done routinely for centuries until fairly recently. Kids started learning the family business or some other business before age ten. We can appreciate the wisdom of the apprenticeship system, which immersed people in a particular field under a skilled teacher's direction from a young age, in keeping with the basic principles of early development.

Beyond general domain knowledge, it would be possible to train quite young people in more specific business skills. Basic finance concepts would fit perfectly well in an elementary-level math curriculum; just ask Ram Charan, one of the world's most eminent management consultants, who says his deep feel for corporate finance began with what he learned in his family's shoe shop in India, where he worked from the age of eight. Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell and one of the most celebrated CEOs of recent decades, will tell you something similar about his childhood experiences in his own family's shoe shop in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Fairly young children could also be educated in the business aspects of probability and statistics, which are extraordinarily important in making good economic decisions and avoiding the irrational errors that people very commonly commit, as the study of behavioral finance has revealed. Corporations' number-one complaint about new young employees is that they're terrible at writing and speaking; training them in those skills from a business perspective could begin at a very early age. From such beginning steps, it would seem possible to train young people several hours a day over a period of many years for high achievement in a specific business.

It would be possible—but would it be good? Should we use the principles of great performance and early development to turn out little Jack Welches and Donald Trumps prepared to be corporate titans by the time they reach voting age? The evidence suggests we could do it, or at least come close, yet most of us instinctively reject that idea. Why? The instinct is worth examining.

Developed countries don't use the apprenticeship system anymore because in the nineteenth century the nature of work changed. Most Americans back then got no more than an eighth-grade education, which was all you needed to work on a farm, and that's what most people did. But as the industrial revolution made farming more efficient—thus requiring fewer people—and sparked the growth of factories, which needed more people, eighth-grade schooling was no longer enough. In the early twentieth century something called the high school movement swept America as towns nationwide decided that every student should complete twelve years of schooling. At first this was job training; the new high schools taught students basic math, English, and science skills, and sometimes much more specific skills as well, that would equip them for the growing industrial economy. But later, as the country got richer, high school curricula expanded beyond job skills into all corners of the liberal arts. More students went on to college, the great majority pursuing liberal arts majors. It became a mark of the developed world's twentieth-century prosperity—many would say one of its proudest achievements—that a full, rounded, advanced education came within reach of almost everyone. Your work and daily life might never require you to know Homer or Shakespeare or the history of Russia, or, for that matter, trigonometry or chemistry. But there's more to life than work, and knowing these things enriches your life and makes you a more fulfilled person.