Talent Is Overrated (27 page)

Other extrinsic motivators were also important, and while their effect was to help kids persevere through the challenges of deliberate practice, they were entirely consistent with the effective extrinsic motivators specified by Amabile for creativity. Feedback from coaches and teachers focused on the task and doing it better. Several teachers kept track of the child's performance, giving evidence to the child that he or she was making progress and could keep making progress. Recitals and contests were motivating because winning or doing well resulted in praise. Attention and acclaim, as a result of performing well, were significant motivators.

With time, however, “the students increasingly became responsible for their own motivation,” Bloom reports. They set their own goals. Extrinsic motivators still played a role; students wanted to do well in public performances or competitions. But in part that was because doing so confirmed that they were making progress toward their goals, which is what they really cared about. These events also brought the students together with other top-level performers, so each student could figure out “what he or she must still do to reach the highest level of attainment possible.” That is, the motivation wasn't just acclaim for performing well, but, increasingly, the inner drive to be the best.

It must be noted that, on this subject, as with the other findings on great performance, most organizations seem to be managed brilliantly for preventing people from performing at high levels. Since intrinsic drives are strongest, people will work most passionately and effectively on projects they choose for themselves. How many companies allow that? A few do, as noted in the previous chapter, and those companies have produced outstanding results. Yet most other companies steadfastly refuse to learn from them. Executives may protest that they have a business to manage and can't let employees run around working on who-knows-what. Fine; but those executives mustn't complain when their company's ideas are no better than the competition's. Nor should they claim to be mystified when employees lack passion and engagement.

How often is feedback at most companies constructive, nonthreatening, and work-focused rather than person-focused? Evaluations at most companies are exactly the opposite: telling the hapless employee what he did wrong, not how to do better, and specifying personal traits (attitude, personality) that must be changed, all under the unspoken looming threat of getting fired. This is so precisely unlike the way effective teachers and coaches help students persist in the demanding work of getting better that one can only gaze in wonder. A more potent system for discouraging people from the rigors of day-to-day improvement would be hard to design. As for rewards, at most companies they almost always entail more responsibilities and less freedom. Extra responsibilities are always part of rising higher in an organization, but if they don't come with the potential for more self-direction, the promotion will feel more like a burden than a reward. Extrinsic motivators may be, by definition, the only type that a company can offer employees, but most companies do it about as poorly as they can.

The weight of the evidence is that the drive to persist in the difficult job of improving, especially in adults, comes mostly from inside. Next question: How does it arise—that is, where does the passion come from? What determines who has it and who doesn't? Some researchers have argued that at least in some cases it's truly innate, present at birth. Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, years ago coined the wonderful term “the rage to master” to describe the overwhelming drive felt by some children, starting at extremely early ages, to work in a particular field. She has described, for example, the case of Peter, who started drawing at the age of ten months (versus two years for the average child) and before long “was waking up in the mornings and bellowing for paper and markers before getting out of bed.” He drew obsessively virtually all day every day for years thereafter, and his drawings were very advanced, far beyond what the average child of his age could produce.

There are precocious children like Peter in many fields in addition to art, including music, chess, and math, and their stories are quite amazing. While most children have to be made to practice, these children can scarcely be restrained from it, and their performance is far beyond their years. What do these very powerful stories tell us?

One possible explanation is that these kids are somehow born with a compulsion to work in a particular domain. In keeping with the principles of great performance, they become very accomplished because they're practicing for huge numbers of hours. This explanation does not depend on any miracles, nor does it violate the ten-year rule; while these kids perform far in advance of other kids their age, they're still nowhere near world-class levels of achievement. That would have to wait much longer. In this theory, exactly why they were born with their specific compulsion remains a mystery. So far in the decoding of the human genome, no one has found a gene that compels a person to draw compulsively, or play the guitar or read or play chess, to name a few other fields in which precocity has turned up.

A different explanation, favored by Winner and some other researchers, is the reverse: Instead of compulsive practice producing high ability, high ability leads to compulsive practice. In this explanation, these kids are born not with a compulsion to practice but with an ability to learn far more quickly than average in a particular domain. They practice all the time, setting new goals for themselves and increasing their skill, because their ability to learn makes it so rewarding for them. This explanation would not seem to cover all cases; it seems extremely unlikely, for example, that Peter was drawing compulsively at ten months because of the progress he was making.

Note that this explanation is not merely a separate proposal for how the mechanism of deliberate practice gets set in motion. Winner argues that these precocious children are not just more diligent but also qualitatively different from others. Besides their higher ability to learn in their field, they also, in the case of artists, are more likely than average to be left-handed or ambidextrous and to be weak at verbal skills. In this theory, as in the previous one, exactly where the innate factor comes from—in this case, how a child is born with a superability to learn in a specific field—remains a mystery.

If neither of these explanations seems totally satisfying, they become even less so when we take a step back and consider the possibility that maybe the focus isn't quite right in either case. The drive we're looking for seems to be largely intrinsic, and that fact leads us to wonder what traits great performers are born with. But maybe that isn't as important as most of us assume it is. Intrinsic doesn't necessarily mean innate, that is, inborn. The idea that many of our traits and behaviors develop over time as a result of our experiences is noncontroversial, and everyone's life is an example. Possibly the intrinsic drive we're seeking also develops over time. It's tempting to focus on child prodigies because they clearly possess some kind of drive from such an early age that it seems it must be innate. Perhaps in some of those cases it is, though in some of them it may not be. Winner cites the case of Yani, a Chinese girl who by age five was producing paintings in the Chinese tradition that were strikingly skillful. Yani's father was an artist, and Winner reports that the young girl “spent many hours a day in her father's art studio painting alongside her father.” Yani was a prodigy for sure, but from available evidence it would be hard to conclude that she was driven by anything truly inborn, either a compulsion to practice or an ability to learn, as distinct from the effects of spending all those hours with her artist father.

Even in those cases of child prodigies with proclivities that appear to be innate, studying them doesn't get us very far in understanding the passion behind great performance. That's because the large majority of these prodigies, as far as we can tell, don't grow up to be great performers. A few do, but most don't maintain the intensely focused daily work for the many years necessary to achieve at the highest levels. Whatever it is they bring into this world, it seems to be a star that shines brilliantly for a time and then usually fades. Josh Waitzkin, the child prodigy chess player whose story was told in the movie
Searching for Bobby Fischer,
suggested an explanation when he once told
Psychology Today,
“The most gifted kids in chess fall apart. They are told that they are winners, and when they inevitably run into a wall, they get stuck and think they must be losers.”

Conversely, the people who do become top-level achievers are rarely child prodigies. That is certainly true in business; the early lives of the Welches, Ogilvies, and Rockefellers almost never hint at the success to come. Looking at more scientific research, this is one of the most notable findings in Bloom's large study, which examined performers at the highest level—people who had achieved national or international recognition before age forty. For example, all of the twenty-four pianists studied—each a finalist in at least one major international competition, such as the Van Cliburn or the Levintritt—had had lessons “forced upon them,” in the words of the study, just the opposite of the kids who seemed driven to sit at the piano as toddlers. Similarly, in no case did the parents of the future champion swimmers foresee their child's eventual achievements. Time and again the story is the same: Even by age eleven or twelve it would have been difficult to predict who the future exceptional performers would be.

Even more important for our purposes, another common theme is that at some point not long past that age, these future achievers experienced an almost palpable shift in their stance toward their field. Their drive
became
intrinsic. One of the pianists recalled the life-changing experience at age fifteen of sitting just three feet away as a great pianist performed: “I remember feeling inundated and overwhelmed with the dynamic range, with the expressive potential, with hearing the real bite of the sound, the real softness of the sound. . . . at that point I became serious like I never had before. I cut out horsing around at the piano. I cut out sightreading for two hours a day just for the pleasure of it. I worked.” Like all the pianists in the study, he had been forced to take lessons. It seems safe to say he had not been born with any kind of innate drive or rapid learning ability. But at that point he developed the intrinsic drive that would keep him going.

In our search for the source of the motivation that sustains people through the trials of getting better, the evidence is pushing in a clear direction. The passion doesn't accompany us into this world, but rather, like high-level skills themselves, it develops. That finding fits well with what we observe in real life. World-class achievers are driven to improve, but most of them didn't start out that way. We've already seen that in domains where it's possible to start work at an early age, such as music and sports, most future great performers need to be pushed at first. In domains where building the knowledge foundation takes many years before specific domain-related work can begin, such as business and high-level science, we commonly see that future stars may be decidedly undriven even as young adults. That was obviously the case with Steven Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt sitting in their cubicle at Procter & Gamble. Both young men went on to business school (Ballmer to Stanford, Immelt to Harvard) and over time developed the drive to work prodigiously hard, not just in general, but specifically at building the particular skills that brought them to the top of the corporate world. Both men became famously focused workers. But they obviously did not possess that drive from day one.

If the drive to excel develops, rather than appearing fully formed, then how does it develop? Several researchers have separately proposed a mechanism that suggests an answer. Part of its appeal is that it helps explain why some people but not others develop high-level skills and at the same time develop the increasing motivation needed to do ever more advanced work. Stephen J. Ceci, Susan M. Barnett, and Tomoe Kanaya of Cornell University have called it the multiplier effect.

The concept is simple. A very small advantage in some field can spark a series of events that produce far larger advantages. For example, they say, imagine someone who is just slightly above average in

It's easy to imagine the same process playing out in any other domain. As these researchers describe the general effect, “Each increase in competence is matched to a better environment, and, in turn, the better environment will be expected to further enhance their competence.”

Note that this multiplier effect accounts not just for improvement of skills over time but also for the motivation that drives the improvement, as the young baseball player's satisfaction leads him to practice more. The sequence proposed by these researchers is strikingly similar to the actual experiences of future achievers reported in Bloom's research. He observed, “In all the fields most of these young students were regarded as fast learners by their first teachers. . . . Whether or not they were really faster learners than others is not known. . . . However, the attribution of ‘fast learner' to them by the initial teacher was one major source of motivation. The teacher soon regarded and treated them as ‘special' learners, and the students came to prize this very much.”