Talent: The great paradox.

Paradox in that it exists and equally it is something of a myth.

But how can something both be real and fake at the same time?

Well, it is not really fake, I believe we just have a very fake understanding of talent that is widely accepted as truth but infact is false and has dire consequences
Lets take Persons A and B for example who do the same task. A does a fairly good job while B produces magnificent results.

In the situation where both were largely unknown, the general interpretation is that B is a huge talent! Or B is a genius or some other related narration
This narration is flawed in that it takes into no account how both A and B came to arrive at the point of said task so how could their performance be accurately ascribed to just 'talent?

Perhaps B had a great teacher and A had a poor one?
Perhaps B was introduced to said task at age 5 and had 10 years of accumulated experience before A was introduced to said task?

Perhaps B just put in more effort into honing their craft than A?
Why then are we so quick to ascribe excellence in performance to talent?

In the 'mundanity of excellence' (a paper released on researching swimmers), the author argues basically that excellence isn't just one thing, it is a combination of little factors here and there
These factors are somehow simple and most of us can actually do a lot of these simple things if we tried. Herein lies what I believe is our wont to ascribe excellence in performance to talent, if we did agree that it was these little things then the question would be why not me?
This places responsibility on us as individuals to actually pursue this excellence through mundane daily routines but we rather hide our inadequacy under the guise of 'its talent!' rather than pursue the possibility of our being excellent through our own work
When we see only the final performance, the final product, we are fooled into believing its excellence comes out of genius, out of talent. But when we observe the growth process of these outstandingly excellent performances or products, we see a bigger picture.....
.......we see that ascribing the eventual result to just talent is an insult to the effort that was put into creating such. That it is an insult to the time they spend honing their skill and developing their competence.
In conclusion, while people do genuinely have biological, mental and spiritual characteristics that predispose them to potential excellence in certain areas, those dispositions are only made manifest through passion, work and discipline.
So while talent could be the starting point, there is an even larger journey to be undertaken if ever we were to produce anything worthy of being 'genius'.

Simple things that add up into big things over time
Finally, it must be said that the average person already knows what they must do......

Yes you already know what you should be doing if indeed you wanted to be 'excellent' in your craft........

The question is will we do it?

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Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.