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March 6, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

06:46

2105 Screw Talent!

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	I have come not to praise talent, but to bury it.
	I get emails a lot asking me, what ghostly finger of God sticks itself up my butt and tickles my language centers to produce such a torrent of vaguely comprehensible verbiage?
	There I go again. And I must say, it's nothing special.
	I was not born with any particular special abilities when it came to language.
	I think I was born with a certain kind of native potential intelligence, which I had to work very hard to develop.
	But this question came up on the message boards a few years ago.
	I did a calculation. I put about 30,000 hours into philosophy over the course of my life.
	Reading philosophy, going to school, and studying, and writing, and podcasting, and debating, and I would count self-knowledge as philosophy.
	Socrates says, know thyself.
	It's the first commandment. I would count the years I spent in therapy as philosophy and the pursuit of self-knowledge.
	It's nothing magic.
	It's just a horrendous amount of work.
	When I was younger, I was not noted for any particular verbal abilities.
	I just put my nose to the grindstone and worked.
	You know, in my early-mid-twenties, I would pick up a copy of Voltaire, and I would go out for dinner, and I only had enough money to order an appetizer and a salad, and that's what I would do.
	And I would sit there while everyone was chit-chatting with a romantic candlelit dinner with a Frenchman 300 Years Dead.
	And so this is the kind of stuff that I have been doing for years.
	And I started debating when I was in college, which is almost a quarter century ago.
	And I've just worked really, really hard at it.
	It's not that it's just a weird question to be asked.
	I mean, you wouldn't look at a, I don't know, a successful gymnast and say, wow, that's weird.
	I mean, how can you do that?
	How can I do that? It's like, well, it's not working.
	I'm not a fan of talent.
	I think talent is a great cop-out.
	I think talent is a great excuse.
	And I think talent is a fiery moat of monopoly that the rulers set up to lure us with the idea that if we don't have the talent, you see, we just can't compete.
	You can read books by Malcolm Gladwell.
	There are other books out there dispelling the myth of talent very briefly.
	There seems to be no such thing.
	There seems to be no such thing as talent or innate ability.
	They've done studies on people who end up as soloists who are musicians or people who end up in the orchestra or people who end up as music teachers.
	And the only difference is that the people who end up as soloists practice more.
	That's it. That's all they did. 10,000 hours it takes to become really good at something.
	So with 30,000 hours for me, I guess the only talent I have is for overkill.
	But yeah, the people who were music teachers ended up as music teachers.
	They practiced for about 6,000 hours.
	And the people who ended up in the orchestra practiced for 8,000 hours.
	And the people who became soloists practiced for 10,000 hours.
	That's the only difference. The only difference is the degree of intelligent, coached talent...
	Sorry. Intelligent, coached practice that you perform in order to be able to achieve your goals.
	You know, this is the myth you see in movies all the time.
	It's the goose bumpy myth. You know, like somebody comes in and they...
	Some scout, you know, just wants to play ball locally and he says to some kid out in the outfield, hey kid, throw me the ball.
	You know, this bobsled of rocket hell comes into his glove and he's like, whoa, takes off his hat.
	Kid, throw that to me again. It almost took my finger off.
	And there's a movie out at the moment, sorry, a TV show out at the moment, a Spielberg production.
	I watched a few minutes of it about how to...
	They're putting together a musical about Marilyn Monroe, and Catherine McPhee plays this young ingenue.
	She doesn't have much experience, you see, but she just walks in, and she opens up her mouth, and she blows away the people, and she's like, oh, they give her goosebumps, and she's amazing how talented.
	But she's told her resume is thin, that she doesn't really have much experience, and this is...
	Nonsense. Of course, Catherine McPhee has been singing since she was five years old.
	She was, I don't know, she was in American Idol.
	She did, I don't know, she obviously came out pretty close to on top.
	So they're having someone play an inexperienced person who has had decades of experience in the field.
	But this is the great myth that you can just sort of step in there, open up your mouth, and blow everyone away.
	And you don't need practice, you don't need vocal coaching, you don't need talent.
	It's all nonsense.
	And Mozart, His father was a famous musician and composer who drilled him the way that Tiger Woods' parents drilled him on golfing from the age of two.
	From the age of two! And yeah, okay, he was writing stuff.
	It was mostly derivative when he was younger.
	The only stuff that he began to write that was really creative and considered to be very special was in his early 20s.
	Hey, that's 20 years after you start.
	And so it really is just a matter.
	And the myth, of course, is put out in the movie Amadeus by Salieri.
	He did not recompose his material.
	It all came from God and so on.
	Nonsense. Mozart rewrote his material feverishly and repetitively.
	So, of course, people like the idea.
	It gives a sense of mysticism, of higher purpose, of deification, of godhood, to imagine that there's some kind of magic talent out there.
	But there really isn't. People want you to believe in talent so you don't compete with them.
	So that you'll think, well, you know, I don't have that talent and therefore I can't do that.
	That's nonsense. I mean, there are physical limitations.
	I'm not going to be a hair model anytime soon.
	Neither am I going to be a coloratura singer.
	There are physical limitations that we have.
	Of course, I'm too old to start the ballet, but that's pretty much immaterial.
	What people have is a preference for certain things, but don't be deluded about what you need to actually go and achieve your goals.
	You've just got to work like a son of a bitch.
	You've got to work hard, you've got to work intelligently, you've got to confront your limitations, you've got to get coaching, and you've just got to practice intelligently and repetitively, and that's how you achieve the nirvana called competence.
	Same thing with Andre Agassi.
	His dad strapped ping pong paddles to his hands when he was 18 months old and started him down the road at tennis.
	There's some guy in Russia who said, I'll make all of my kids grandmasters in chess.
	And he had, I think, three daughters and he made them all excellent chess players simply by grilling and repeating them.
	When you see a particular ability that you admire, don't look for the talent.
	The talent is a red herring.
	Look for the work. And if you want to achieve that talent, work yourself and you will get there.

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