Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin Read Free Book Online Page A

illustrates the point. He grew up as a poor, pious boy, hardworking, notable mainly for his seriousness and maturity. But as his most distinguished biographer, Ron Chernow, observes, “In many respects John was forgettable and indistinguishable from many other boys. When he later dazzled the world, many former neighbors and classmates struggled to summon up even a fuzzy image of him.” One thing many acquaintances did recall was young John’s firmly stated intention to become rich. But then, Chernow notes, “There was nothing unusual about Rockefeller’s boyhood dreams, for the times were feeding avaricious fantasies in millions of susceptible schoolboys.” The most typical assessment seems to come from a woman who tutored the Rockefeller children and later recalled, “I have no recollection of John excelling at anything. I do remember he worked hard at everything; not talking much, and studying with great industry.”
    Over and over we find these stories of the early life that tell us nothing of what’s to come, sometimes in even more extreme form. David Ogilvy, regarded by many as the greatest advertising executive of the twentieth century, was expelled from Oxford, slaved in a hotel kitchen in Paris, sold stoves in Scotland, and farmed in Pennsylvania, among many other apparently random occupations that consumed the first seventeen years of his career. Predicting that he would make his mark as an advertising legend would have been difficult, considering that he presented precious little evidence that he would make any mark at all.
    But what about Warren Buffett, yet another of the world’s richest men, quoted earlier as saying he was born to allocate capital? He showed not only early signs of interest in his eventual field of eminence, like Gates, but also precocity. As a boy, Buffett was intensely interested in learning about business and investing, and he wanted to make money. He ran several newspaper routes, and at age eleven he bought his first stock, Cities Service preferred. At fifteen, he and a friend bought a used pinball machine and installed it in a barbershop; within a few months they’d added two more machines. Buffett used his profits to buy forty acres of farmland, which he rented to farmers. He was also known as a kid who could add large numbers in his head, and he graduated from high school at sixteen. Later, in graduate school at Columbia, he studied under the famous investing authority Benjamin Graham and received the only A+ that Graham ever awarded.
    Buffett’s achievements as an investor are world famous, and his story makes it easy to understand why he and many others would say he was born to do what he did. But that explanation—an inborn ability to allocate capital—is not the only way or even the easiest way to account for his success. Buffett’s early obsessive interest in money seems unsurprising in someone growing up in the Midwest in the Depression. Similarly, his fascination with stocks and investing is not especially intriguing when one considers that his father was a stockbroker and investor whom young Warren adored. Warren went to work in his father’s office at age eleven and thus began learning about investing at a very early age. Yet there’s little if any evidence that, even into his early twenties, he was especially good at it. For a while in his teens he was an enthusiastic “chartist,” trying to predict the movements of stock prices by studying charts of past movements; research has shown this technique to be worthless as a way to beat the market (though, like many ineffective techniques, it still has believers). Later he tried to be a market timer, choosing the perfect moments to get into and out of stocks; this strategy also is a guaranteed loser over time, and Buffett couldn’t make it work.
    When Buffett graduated from Columbia Business School, he was such a devotee of his professor, Graham, that he