Mon
18-Sep-2006

genius and talent

There's an interesting field of scholarship recently crystallised in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson (2006). This field applies psychology and cognitive science to "expertise and expert performance", what could be called "talent" or "genius", and attempts to understand and explain extraordinary performance across many different fields of human endeavour.

One of the overall lessons from the study of expertise confirms something I have long believed, which is that talent is not some kind of innate quality, bestowed by genetics and birth, but is something that can be cultivated in pretty much anyone, given good instruction and supportive mentoring, and a lot of hard work. Elite performers, artists, scientists, musicians and athletes generally have to work a lot harder, obsessively in fact, to gain this kind of mastery. Scholars of elite performance say you have to put in about a decade of focused work to bring greatness within reach.