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

volunteered to work for Graham’s investment company for free. But, as Buffett tells the story, “Ben made his customary calculation of value to price and said no.” Buffett did go to work for Graham’s firm a couple of years later, staying for two years, and then went back to Omaha to start his first investment partnership at age twenty-five.
    So at this point we have a picture of a young man who had shown an intense interest in money and investing from an early age and who (like Rockefeller) possessed a powerful compulsion to become rich. He had worked extremely hard at learning all about the field that obsessed him. But he had not yet achieved anything even approaching extraordinary real-world performance. By the time Buffett began accumulating a world-class record of performance, he was well into his thirties—and had been working diligently in his chosen field for more than twenty years.
    Still—there were lots of stockbrokers’ sons in the Depression, and only one of them became Warren Buffett. Why? That’s a large and deep question that we’ll examine further; the key point for the moment is that the concept of innate business talent is not looking like a very promising answer to the question of how Buffett or any of the business greats became who they were.
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More generally, it seems we need to recalibrate our views on the role of specific, innate talents. We need not be absolutists about the matter. Heated arguments over whether such talents exist at all are best left to the scholarly researchers. For most of us, the critically important point is that, at the very least, these talents are much less important than we usually think. They seem not to play the crucial role that we generally assign to them, and it’s far from clear what role they do play. In chapters 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10, I will share much more evidence on this matter.
    But even if we have to admit that the case for the central role of specific talent is weak, we may still believe that great achievement requires exceptional, and inborn, general abilities. You don’t reach the high elevations of any field without an IQ that’s off the charts or an XXL memory. Or so we tend to assume. But this belief also, deep-seated though it may be, is worth closer examination.

Chapter Three
    How Smart Do You Have to Be?
    The true role of intelligence and memory in high achievement
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On July 11, 1978, in a psychology lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, an undergraduate who would become known in the scientific literature as SF sat trying to remember a list of random numbers. He was a subject in an experiment being conducted by Professor William Chase, a famous researcher in psychology, and a postdoctoral fellow named Anders Ericsson. They were testing SF and other subjects on a standard memory test known as the digit span task: A researcher reads a list of random digits at the rate of one per second; after a pause of twenty seconds, the subject then repeats as many digits, in order, as he or she can remember. Psychologists had been running this test on subjects for many years. What was so interesting about SF was the extraordinary number of digits he could recall.
    If you’re like most people, you’ll max out at around seven numbers on the digit span task. You may get to nine, but going further is rare. (It’s harder than remembering a phone number; try it.) Another of Chase and Ericsson’s subjects had been tested an hour a day for nine days and had never gone beyond nine digits; he had dropped out of the study, insisting no further improvement was possible. In a much earlier study, two subjects had managed to increase their digit span to fourteen after many hours of testing. But on this day, SF was being asked to recall twenty-two digits, a new record. The toll it was taking on him was large.
    â€œAll right, all right, all right,” he muttered after Ericsson read him the list.