Talent vs Effort

Recently I’ve just finished Grit by Angela Duckworth, really a powerful book indeed. Angela is simply a brilliant person and must be listed on my role model list. This book describe the qualities of Grit. In essence, Grit is passion and perseverance to pursue long-term and meaningful goal. The book starts with describing Grit in cases, examining the characteristics of Grit, and explaining how to nurture it in our self. In this book, we’re not going to simply learn about Grit, but various phenomenon and variables that could affect Grit. One particular topic that catch my attention in this book is Talent vs Effort. 

Talent vs effort is quite a relate able topic in our day to day life. It is even relate able to children fable about the tortoise and the hare. If you're not familiar with the fable, I recommend you to look for it and read it. It's a classic story that reflected how the value of talent is challenged by effort. It's also a simple way of understanding how this

In her book, Angela describe talent as how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. For over a hundred years, we’ve believed that talent is the most important thing to have when it comes to performing well. This reflected on how we place a big importance on IQ scores and particular talent to predict someone’s performance. This is not wrong, talent have a portion on shaping someone’s ability to grow in certain field. But, when we put too much weight on talent, we tend to overlook other factors that could affect performance.

One of the key factors of performance is how much effort we put into it. Unlike talent, which supposed to be something that is given, effort is something that everyone have an access to. Effort is a vigorous or determined attempt. It referes to how many hours you spend to master something. No matter how talented you are, if you’re not putting any effort on something, you won’t go anywhere. This is how powerful effort are. Refering back to Angela, in so far as talent counts, effort counts twice.

To get a clearer view on this matter, Angela wrote this formula about talent, effort, skill, and achievement on her book:

Talent * Effort = Skill

Skill * Effort = Achievement

To put it in a simple way, when you put effort on your talent, you gain skill. When you further enhance those skill with an effort, you get achievement. In this formula, we can see that Talent definitely have a part on shaping skills and achievement. It is the baseline of the formula, but it wont go anywhere if there is no effort given. Everything that you multiply by zero will actually equals zero. This also apply to this formula.

How much effort matter actually reflected on many high achiever's interview session. As a common people we might see Olympic Gold Medalist runner as someone who is just talented. They can run that fast just because it is the gift that being given to them by the time they're born. But, what we did not see is the countless effort and hours that they spend in order to get into that point. If we take a closer look on the interview for this gold medalist, we might see that the thing that they talk about is the countless hours, countless training sessions, and countless that they spend for practicing. In other words, efforts have that much impact on their overall performance.

Referring back to my earlier example of talent vs effort, the story of the tortoise and the hare is quite a great example. The hare clearly have a bigger advantage when it comes to talent, but the tortoise put so much more effort that the hare could imagine. The hare, on the other hand, put so little effort just because he felt that he has so much more talent than the tortoise. The result speaks for itself, the tortoise wins the race regardless of how much talent he have.

I think there is no person with no talent, no matter how small or how big it is they must've possess some degree of talent. But, not everyone are willing to put an effort to enhance their skill. We often give up on putting an effort just because we felt that other people are just so talented from us. What we don't understand is that effort matters more. If other people are just happened to be more talented than us, than all we have to do is put an extra effort.

Remember, it might be easier to believe that talent is one driving factor in excellence, but so far as talent counts, effort counts twice.

Reference:

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Toronto, Ontario, Canada