Practically every man or woman who triumphs against the odds is, on closer inspection, a beneficiary of unusual circumstances. The delusion lies in focusing on the individuality of their triumph without perceiving—or bothering to look for—the powerful opportunities stacked in their favor.
The idea that natural talent determines success and failure is, today, so powerful that it is accepted without demur. It seems indisputable. When we watch Roger Federer caressing a cross-court forehand winner or a chess grandmaster playing twenty games simultaneously while blindfolded or Tiger Woods launching a 350-yard fade, we are irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that they possess special gifts not shared by the rest of us.
The skills are so qualitatively different, so detached from our own lives and experience, that the very idea that we could achieve similar results if given the same opportunities seems nothing less than ridiculous.
Now think about how often you have heard people dismiss their own potential with statements like “I am not a natural linguist” or “I don’t have the brain for numbers” or “I lack the coordination for sports.” Where is the evidence for such pessimism? Often it is based upon nothing more than a few weeks or a few months of halfhearted effort.
If, on the other hand, we believe that talent is not (or is only marginally) implicated in our future achievements, we are likely to persevere. Moreover, we will be inclined to move heaven and earth to get the right opportunities for ourselves and our families: the right teacher, access to decent facilities; the entire coalition of factors that leads to the top. And, if we are right, we will eventually excel. What we decide about the nature of talent, then, could scarcely be more important.
This punctures many of the myths that cling to elite performers. It shows that those who make it to the top, at least in certain sports, are not necessarily more talented or dedicated than those left behind
Once the opportunity for practice is in place, the prospects of high achievement take off. And if practice is denied or diminished, no amount of talent is going to get you there.
This is what Ericsson calls the iceberg illusion. When we witness extraordinary feats of memory (or of sporting or artistic prowess), we are witnessing the end product of a process measured in years. What is invisible to us—the submerged evidence, as it were—is the countless hours of practice that have gone into the making of the virtuoso performance: the relentless drills, the mastery of technique and form, the solitary concentration that have, literally, altered the anatomical and neurological structures of the master performer. What we do not see is what we might call the hidden logic of success.
Sure, clocking up thousands of hours of purposeful practice ultimately determines how far we make it along the path to excellence: but it is only those who care about the destination, whose motivation (to use the phrase in chapter 2) is “internalized,” who are ever going to get there.
That is partly why the stories are so compelling: they are individual, inimitable, highly specific to a given person at a given point in time. The sparks are, in a very real sense, mysterious, sometimes even to the people ignited by them. So how, then, to arrive at a theory of motivation?
What we are seeing at work here might be called motivation by association: a small, barely noticed connection searing deep into the subconscious and sparking a motivational response. In the case of the Yale students, the connection was a shared birthday, triggering a powerful jolt along the lines of: “I am similar to this guy; he has achieved really good things in math; I want to achieve those things, too!”
Enron recruited big talent, mostly people with fancy degrees, which is not in itself bad. It paid them big money, which is not that terrible. But by putting complete faith in talent, Enron did a fatal thing: it created a culture that worshipped talent, thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented. Basically, it forced them into the fixed mindset. And we know a lot about that. We know that people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.