Author: Matthew Syed
_Matthew Syed_
Reading time: 19 minutes
Synopsis
What is Talent, Anyway? (2010) looks at what makes people achieve great things. This can be in sports, art, or other areas. The book uses many famous examples. It shows that great success does not come from natural talent. Instead, it comes from lots of practice and the right attitude towards your goals.
What you will learn: Work hard and have the right mindset to reach the top.
“Wow, you were born for this sport!” People often say this about athletes who perform amazingly. They stand out from others and excite everyone around them. But is this really true? Is top performance decided by our genes or by fate?
These Blinks about What is Talent, Anyway? look at the science of top performance. They explain what happens in your brain and body to achieve this. You will find out why Mozart’s amazing music skills were not really a miracle. You will also learn why professional athletes win gold medals not just because of talent.
In these Blinks, you will also learn:
- how to make new skills perfect,
- what you need to do to perform at your best every time, and
- how your chances of success change if you have the same birthday as a famous person.
Blink 1 – Hard training is more important than natural talent.
In our culture, we often explain great personal achievements by saying people have better genes, a special gift from God, or fate. Child prodigies are seen as examples of people born with amazing talent. Think of Mozart. He amazed the world with his music skills at just six years old. We think he was blessed with genius from the start of his life.
But this idea is not true. Just like other child prodigies who seem to be born geniuses, it takes thousands of hours of practice to develop such a talent. Scientists found that most child prodigies start training very early. They also complete many hours of hard work on their skills in a short time.
When six-year-old Mozart toured Europe, people praised his amazing piano skills. But he had already spent about 3500 hours learning music. Compared to other pianists who spent similar time practicing, his shows were not that special. Mozart just performed at a very young age.
This kind of intense practice can give anyone amazing skills. A study looked at young violin players. It showed that their skill level was directly linked to how much they practiced as children and teenagers. The best players had practiced for an average of 10,000 hours. Those with less talent had practiced only about 4,000 hours.
So, if there is no natural genius, and any normal person can become a great master through hard training, then isn’t there a “little Mozart” inside all of us?
Blink 2 – Only aiming for skills that seem impossible leads to great success.
Imagine a child working hard to play their favorite song by ear. They spend whole afternoons at the piano to find the right notes. When they can finally play the song correctly, they will probably stop working so hard to get better.
This example is true for most people. Many do not practice hard enough to become truly good. When we want to learn something, we often practice only until we can keep up with others around us. Once we reach this level, we usually just practice what we already know. We do not try new challenges. Instead, we use what we have learned automatically, without thinking.
The child plays a decent version of their favorite song for weeks. But they do not make it better, nor do they learn anything new.
Now, let’s look at the best people in any field. We quickly see that they usually do not stop when they achieve something. They aim for skills that are beyond what they can do right now.
What does this mean for you, if you aim for something that seems impossible? Trying to do something difficult that seems beyond your reach at first makes you focus and be disciplined.
Of course, you might fail badly when you try a completely new challenge. But losing is also part of training. You can turn failures into something useful. Mistakes can teach you a lot. They give you instant feedback. They show you what skills you are missing to complete a task. Through losses, you learn much about your strengths and weaknesses. Then you can change how you train.
For many of us, it is normal to practice something only until we reach our first goal. Sometimes, we even give up as soon as problems appear. But to become a champion, you must aim for the stars. Aim for skills that seem impossible at first. And accept short-term losses along the way. If you do not let these stop you, your training will take you far.
Blink 3 – Hard training changes how our brain works.
Desmond Douglas, a British table tennis player, was famous for his super-fast reactions. But when scientists tested how fast the whole British team reacted, they found Douglas was the slowest. So how could he react so quickly when he played table tennis, even with a slow reaction time?
The answer to this puzzle is: Hard training makes two main changes in how our brain deals with a specific task.
First, a trained professional brain learns to “read” complex and typical situations better. This comes from many years of experience. It means the brain is good at quickly finding the important pieces of information for a certain situation.
In a table tennis game, Douglas’s brain can quickly understand important visual signals. This helps him figure out where the ball will go. This gives him plenty of time to react. He is still faster than a less experienced player, even if that player has a naturally quicker reaction time.
Second, a trained expert uses different brain areas than a beginner doing the same task. When you learn a new skill, your mind checks every single movement. The prefrontal cortex, which controls conscious actions, is very active then. But with a lot of practice, these trained movements become automatic. In your brain, control of your movements now moves to areas that handle unconscious actions.
So, when a table tennis player has perfected their topspin shot, their mind is free. They can focus on footwork or tactics. This is why Douglas could become such a fast player, even with slow reactions. Many years of hard training changed how his brain processed visual signals during the game.
Blink 4 – People who believe talent is fixed will never achieve great success.
Imagine you are among the top ten runners in a marathon. What do you think: Were you successful because you were born a runner? Or because you trained hard in all kinds of weather?
If you prefer the first answer, psychologists would say you have a fixed mindset. This is the belief that success depends on things you cannot change, like your genes.
If someone with this mindset is told they have no talent, they will hardly try to succeed in that area. They will not even want to improve. This is because they believe they do not have what it takes. So why should they do many hours of hard training?
Someone with the same mindset who believes they have a natural gift will also not take the important steps to great success. Why practice if fate or genes have already given you everything?
For example, Darius Knight, a promising table tennis player, was once praised for his amazing talent. After this, he cut back on his training. He thought someone with his talent did not need to train so much. As a result, his performance dropped badly. He only got better again when a new coach motivated him to actively work for success instead of relying on his talent.
A fixed mindset can also make you give up too quickly. When we learn something new with the wrong mindset, we often see a small setback as a reason to quit. We feel it proves we are not made for that task.
In one study, children with different mindsets were asked to solve harder and harder puzzles. Children with a fixed mindset started to doubt their intelligence at the first difficulty. They suddenly used worse ways to solve them and finally gave up. The children with a growth mindset, who had learned that practice can help you improve in everything, faced the challenge. They tried hard. They became more creative the harder the puzzles were. And they could finally solve the task.
The study clearly shows this: If you want to succeed, do not let setbacks make you think you lack talent. If you stay excited despite problems and show ambition and determination, you can reach your goal.
Blink 5 – Small events can spark great ambition.
When it came to professional golf, South Korea was always a small player. But after golfer Pak Se-ri won the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Championships in 1998, the number of successful South Korean female golfers on the LPGA Tour grew very fast. This was not a coincidence.
The reason for this is something called motivation by association. It means people’s belief in their own skills and chances of success goes up if they share things with a successful person. This comes from a basic human need: We want to belong. This makes us connect with others, even if the similarities are just by chance. For the South Korean golfers, their shared nationality was the key factor.
An experiment shows how this motivation works. Students had to work on math puzzles they could not solve. Before this, they read a story about a made-up, very successful math student. If this student’s birthday was the same as the test subjects’, they thought about the puzzle 65% longer on average. This was longer than those who had no link to the successful student. The random similarity made them believe their math skills could be similar. This gave them more motivation to solve the task.
Other very normal or random things can also increase our motivation. For example, many top athletes remember small events that sparked the fire in them. These events made them want to achieve amazing things. It could be an insult, a story, or a special task.
For example, for professional soccer player Mia Hamm, one situation was key. Her coach told her that she had to “switch on” her will to play at the top every single day. He showed this by turning on a light.
Blink 6 – Believing in success pushes us to perform our best.
Many top athletes have rituals. They use them to prepare for a competition and believe they will win. From the outside, this might seem illogical, especially after many losses. But being realistic about the situation should not matter for motivation. In competition, it is not about chances. It is about stopping self-doubt that can hold you back.
During a competition, even the smallest doubt makes failure more likely. Doubts create nervousness. They make muscles shake or cramp. This can make a golfer miss the hole or a gymnast fall from the bar.
Also, doubts take up valuable focus that is needed elsewhere. For example, a top football player like David Beckham might miss important signals from his teammates or make a bad pass. This can happen if self-doubt bothers him for some reason.
Nervousness can also cause you to forget things for a short time. Many people who get stage fright before public speaking know this.
Only those who approach a challenge with the right mindset can perform at their best. This is because our mind can strongly affect our body’s condition. Think about the placebo effect. In this, a person gets better after a treatment that doctors say does not work. This happens only because the patient believes it will help. Seriously injured soldiers in war, who were given salt water instead of medicine, felt less pain. This was as long as they thought they were getting morphine.
It works in a similar way in sports. Believing you are in top shape makes it easier for your body to perform. Top athletes can use this to improve their focus. They can stay calm during a competition and control their movements more surely.
So, a good athlete must make their brain believe they will win. Only then can the body use its full power.
Blink 7 – Fear of mistakes makes us act very carefully and consciously.
Imagine you are at a party. You are carrying two full glasses of red wine. To get to your friends across the room, you need to walk over a very expensive Persian rug. How would you do it? You would probably move very slowly, taking tiny steps. Your eyes would be fixed on the wine shaking dangerously in the glasses.
Our brain has two systems. The explicit brain system is linked to our awareness and language. It works quite slowly. It is active when you need to control a movement consciously, for example, because it is new. A beginner in tap dancing, for instance, must try to remember the order of steps. They have to consciously check each one so they do not make a mistake.
The implicit brain system, on the other hand, is active when we do something automatically. It allows us to make movements faster and smoother. It can also manage several tasks at the same time.
Once we learn a certain skill, it becomes implicit. This means it is controlled automatically. When we do an automated process, we can also focus on other things. For example, Fred Astaire could sing or play the piano while doing a tap dance routine.
However, if we are under mental pressure – for example, fear or the pressure to succeed – the explicit system often takes over again. We then consciously think about every step we make.
Difficult tasks can create such pressure. This is especially true if we want to do them perfectly and failure would have bad results. So, while you balance the wine glasses over the rug, you probably imagine the host’s anger about his ruined Persian rug. The fear of failing makes you act as if you were carrying wine glasses through a room for the first time in your life.
So, when we do an important task that must not fail, we act like someone with no experience at all, even for things we know well.
Blink 8 – Pressure goes away when you believe an event is not important.
Almost all top athletes know this nightmare: There is a competition that will decide their career. They are very well prepared. But at the important moment, they suddenly only have the skills of a beginner.
A professional athlete has practiced enough to use their implicit brain system for difficult tasks. But if they have to show their skill under too much pressure, the brain gives the task to the explicit part. This leads to choking – a type of blackout. The athlete then consciously controls their actions again. They lose the ability to do several tasks at once. This way, a top favorite can quickly end up in last place.
To avoid this, professional athletes must trick themselves. They tell themselves that the competition is not important at all. The less this is true, the more important it is for this strategy to work. This is because choking risk increases with more pressure.
The more the athlete believes the outcome is not important, the less pressure they feel. To do this, it is good to think of something much more important than the competition. For example, the people you love, your family, or your own health are much more serious. By thinking about these things, the competition becomes less important, and the pressure disappears.
Then, the implicit brain system can take over again. And nothing stops the athlete from performing at their expected best.
To become an outstanding athlete, sport must be a priority, of course – week after week, month after month, year after year. But strangely, sometimes the best advice at a key moment in a career is to protect yourself from failing by saying, “It’s just sport, it’s not that important.”
Summary
The main message of these Blinks is:
Success does not come from fate. It comes from hard training and the right mindset. To achieve top performance, you must train in a way that changes your brain and makes your body fit. On the path to being excellent, you also need a strong will to aim high. You also need the strength to deal with losses and learn from mistakes.
What you can do:
Talk to yourself positively.
If you feel nervous about a task, talk to yourself positively. This will help you make sure you reach your goal. To fight strong fears, it helps to remember how unimportant the challenge is compared to the most important things in life.
Praise your child for trying to complete a task.
If you want to motivate your child to achieve great things, you should praise their effort. This makes them believe they can improve through hard work. But do not praise them for their talent.
Do you have feedback?
We are keen to hear what you think of our Blinks! Just send an email to [email protected] with this book’s title as the subject. Share your thoughts with us.
For further reading: Wie Berührung hilft by Werner Bartens
This carefully researched book clearly and entertainingly shows how important physical touch is. The author uses real research and clear examples. He shows how positively touch and tenderness affect our physical and mental health. This is true from the very first stages of life in the womb up to old age.
Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/de/books/was-heisst-schon-talent-de