Does Technique Beat Talent?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:06.400 | All right, we got a question here from Thiego. He says, Does working smarter beat talent?

00:00:13.360 | I'm a data scientist and researcher, so I know the value of good work. But you really think an

00:00:20.160 | average person who follows this path can achieve a PhD from MIT and make breakthroughs in science?

00:00:27.520 | Yeah, it's a complicated question, Thiego. It's a complicated question in part because talent is

00:00:33.920 | very vague exactly what that means. But I do think, yeah, it's realistic to say, no, not every

00:00:41.200 | professional objective, ambitious professional objective you have is necessarily achievable.

00:00:48.480 | Right? And this might be because of talent. My personal view is that talent is a complicated

00:00:55.920 | picture because it involves a lot of training. And it involves the circumstances for training.

00:01:03.760 | It might involve maybe your personality is well-suited to stick with certain types of training.

00:01:09.120 | I'm not a big believer in this, just you have this talent that makes it doing really complicated,

00:01:14.720 | high-level work easy for you. High-level complicated work requires a lot of training.

00:01:19.040 | But some people end up, now you're 20 years old, and for whatever reason, you've been exposed to

00:01:24.240 | and have done a lot of that training. And someone who hasn't, you're in two different places. So I

00:01:27.600 | find talent to be a vague issue. So I don't typically use that term. But I do think it's true.

00:01:32.560 | Yeah, not every objective is open to everyone. So for example, I'm going to first be,

00:01:40.160 | what would you call it, sort of braggadocious. And then I'm going to humble myself. Right? I'll

00:01:46.160 | use myself as an example. Because you mentioned PhD from MIT. All right. So when I was in college,

00:01:53.120 | for whatever reason, I found the computer science work, especially the mathematical

00:01:57.760 | or theoretical computer science work, pretty easy. Right? And I always used to think, well,

00:02:05.120 | that must be because I had good study habits. I managed my time well, or this or that. But I

00:02:10.000 | received an email like a year or two ago from the fellow student who I used to work with on my theory

00:02:17.280 | and algorithms problem sets. And this was the student I like to work with because he was very

00:02:21.520 | sharp and we would be very efficient together. And I guess he saw one of my articles or something.

00:02:26.480 | And he sent me a message and said, oh, it was cool to see whatever some article he saw of mine.

00:02:30.640 | And he said, my memory from Dartmouth was working with you on some of these problem sets or whatever

00:02:39.280 | we'd working on was, oh, I can't do that. I know now I'm not going to be a professor, this or that.

00:02:48.160 | I guess that's what it looks like when someone has a really strong aptitude for something. So

00:02:53.760 | that was his memory, is that it caught his attention and tempered his ambition, seeing

00:02:59.680 | me working on these problem sets. So I guess there was some sort of thing there that made

00:03:04.720 | me good at that. But then I go to MIT and it became clear after a while of, oh, the top people

00:03:10.800 | here, the people who are going to be at the top of the theoretical computer science field,

00:03:14.720 | I'm never going to be that. So there's things you can do, things you can't do. So for whatever

00:03:22.080 | reason, I was pretty good at this stuff, but also not the best in the world. And I'm not sure if I

00:03:27.840 | would have been able to get to the best of the world. So I don't know, I'm sort of wandering

00:03:31.280 | here, which is my way of saying of like, yeah, there are some limits to what you can do. It's

00:03:34.640 | more obvious with physical stuff. I'm not going to play professional sports. I'm still holding

00:03:38.880 | out hope I'm going to play professional baseball, but I think that window is closing pretty rapidly

00:03:43.600 | here. So it's more obvious there than with intellectual stuff. I think people have more

00:03:49.040 | gives and they realize, but some of this stuff gets baked in over a decade of training. It's

00:03:53.520 | really hard to say, but all right, let's put that all aside then and say, so what do we do about it?

00:03:57.280 | I say, let's forget about that. Let's forget about talent. Let's forget about, can I do anything I

00:04:03.120 | want to do? And ask the better question. What is the real advantage you get from working smarter

00:04:10.400 | and deeper? So being really intentional about how you work and what you work on and how you organize

00:04:14.800 | your life. The goal there is not to enable the accomplishment of arbitrarily elite professional

00:04:21.920 | accomplishment. The goal is to give yourself the best shot of living a deep life. If you're

00:04:29.440 | intentional, if you're deep, if you're organized, you're making the most of your current circumstances,

00:04:35.760 | that is the leverage you need to shape your life into something you can control. That's the leverage

00:04:40.800 | you need that when you do lifestyle centered career planning, you can push your life towards

00:04:44.080 | the lifestyle that resonates and away from the things that don't. That's what you need to feel

00:04:48.560 | engaged and meaningful and competent and efficacious. That is more important than I think

00:04:54.160 | hitting some arbitrary professional goal. I'm not going to be a MacArthur Genius Grant winning

00:05:01.840 | top in the world theoretician, but it doesn't mean that I can't use the skills I do have that I am

00:05:06.400 | carefully developing to try to build a really cool life. And that friend of mine, who's was very,

00:05:12.160 | very smart, he might be saying, okay, I guess I wasn't going to be a professional academic to do

00:05:16.400 | theoretical computer science, but I'm sure he's doing something really cool and interesting with

00:05:19.680 | his life because he was very sharp and focused and was working with what he wanted to do. And so

00:05:23.760 | that's what I would say, Thiego, who cares about this debate? About how much is, are you born with?

00:05:30.560 | How much is it life circumstances that trains you? How much of it can you just change now through

00:05:35.280 | deliberate practice? I don't know. Possible to answer. So why don't we just focus on what we

00:05:40.320 | can control and try to build the deepest, most interesting life possible, each one that's going

00:05:45.520 | to look different. That's a good question.

Does Technique Beat Talent?

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