Some Thoughts On The Case Of “Talent v Hard-Work”

Both because of a debate that I’ve been watching unfold recently and my long standing interest in this topic, I thought I would offer what is hopefully a bit of a different take on the age-old case of “Talent v Hard-Work.” Before we get to the alternative model definition that I want to share in this piece for another way of looking at the issue, I’d like to illustrate a bit the lens I’m seeing this through, so you can better understand my thought process. For more or less the entirety of my thinking existence, I have been interested in pursuing effortlessness, as evidenced by the piece I wrote on the topic some time ago. I suspect, although I’m not exactly sure, that this was at least in part a consequence of my super early exposure to meditation and tangential to that, the power of intuition and the unconscious parts of ourselves. I’ve personally experienced and seen from others, as well as heard many high-performers speak on the central nature of understanding and accessing what is colloquially called a “flow state” to achieve many of their greatest moments and often ultimate success. As you can probably guess, my interest in effortlessness and flow states and the like is anchored to my interest in achieving a more optimized improvement curve and figuring out how to achieve high performance for myself and also how to export the tools for use by basically anyone.

So how does all of this relate to the topic at hand? Since my starting point is essentially the sense that variance in levels of achievement between people often comes down to their connection with their unconscious selves, I think this discussion may benefit from a redefining of the terms. If we define variance between people as being determined by differences in input, than we can redefine talent as being “achieving more optimal inputs unintentionally,” while hard-work would be “developing more optimal inputs intentionally.” This may seem like a mere semantic difference at first but this is important because it buys us the ability to recognize all difference as not being magical in some way, but essentially as difference in input, with the debate being moved to how much you did on purpose vs not. So what’s really special about this seemingly minor change in the model? The difference, to my way of thinking, is that it puts more emphasis on what the inputs are that create the better results, rather than on whether or not someone “deserves”, in some subjective sense, the success that they have. If two people have seemingly superhuman reactions in some domain, and one of them earned it through effort and the other has always, to their recollection had amazing reflexes, we can now focus on why each is effective and move away from a credit conversation. It’s really important to point out that just because someone isn’t capable of articulating how they are good at something, or chooses not to, doesn’t mean we have no way of assessing what they might be doing differently, unconsciously or otherwise, that allows them to be so good. This is something that we tend to ignore when we discuss talent versus hard-work. We tend to merely look at what a person says about themselves, which is subjective, varies based on when you catch them and is imprecise. A person might not be good at articulating their process as stated earlier, yet it might still be obvious given a deeper look at their training that they put in tons of effort, while we often assume if someone says “I don’t know” to some “how do you do x” question, the unearned, gifted definition of talent, when that is not necessarily in play.

The punchline of everything discussed so far is that if we focus on the differences between the processes of various people, and less on the morality of their status or performance let’s say, I think we stand to gain a greatly enhanced ability to extrapolate and distribute great processes. This is particularly to the benefit of people with fewer resources and untapped potential or people starting out in some field. Given that the potential for having a shit process is incredibly high, particularly when you start out for obvious reasons, we should perhaps look to return to the original debate of how much do “uncontrollables” matter, when everyone is perfectly optimized in everything within their control. To my eyes however, we are incredibly far from such a universe and waste a tremendous amount of energy trying to diminish people who progress quickly, rather than focusing on accessing better tools that can be distributed to people to help them improve more optimally. To say one last thing that is of some significance, none of this is to say that genes, or nutrition or finances or certain factors are easily changed or have no influence. Of course they do, hence why I invoked the term “uncontrollables.” My point, to clarify, is merely that many things, particularly fields of the mind rather than the body, are way less clear cut about how “fast a runner” someone can be. Obviously the ability to sprint 30mph is not evenly distributed among people, but it’s harder to say something analogous about various types of mental abilities when speaking generally.

There is likely a tremendous amount more that could be said on the topic but I think I will leave it here for now. I hope that this was useful in some way and provided some good food for thought, and I hope that you will be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEyeBlog author