I read this article recently which made a claim that looked like it would be fun to shoot down. They looked at a bunch of different things that people are generally considered talented in and concluded that the experts are made, not born. The arguement is that experts in a given field aren’t much better than laymen, they just spend more time with the material, set specific goals to obtain, and pay more attention to feedback and improvement. In short, any inherent talent in a person is highly overrated; these people are just doing a lot more practice than everyone else and, evidently, not telling anyone.

Unfortunately, with something such as this, the only thing you need to bring it down in flames is one undeniable counter example. Fortuitously, I happen to have one. Me.

Initially, what I’m saying might seem to validate the author’s ideas, but this is not the case, so stick with me. Those of you who know me personally (which is everyone reading this, I know, but I’m stating this for the record) know that I went to college for art. It would make sense, then, that I would be good at drawing. In fact I did improve in drawing ability while I was in college, but this comes with two cavats, both of which I believe go to show that the “no talent” arguement is wrong.

1. Although I never practiced outside of class, I never got worse. This is not the sort of thing I generally admitted while paying money to be in college, but the truth is, I rarely did work outside of class. For example, every year they told us to do sketchbooks over the summer, keep up with it, don’t fall out of practice, etc. I never did and, conveniently, I found that the next year after three or four months of no practice that I picked up exactly where I left off with no loss of ability.

2. More importantly, while I improved somewhat over four years of college, some of my classmates didn’t. (It was a small school, so I had the same 15 or so people in my class each year.) The good thing about using myself as a baseline for this comparison is that, while people could have practiced more than me, they could not have practiced less. I did the minimum amount of work possible; there was nothing I did on my own, just for fun. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it; I just didn’t do it. Everyone else in the class did at least the same amount of drawing, otherwise they wouldn’t have passed the class. We were in studio sessions together, we had the same assignments, required to be the same size with the same media, etc.

According to Dubner and Levitt, since expertise is built on goals, immediate feedback, and concentraition on technique as much as final product, if these things are made equal, one would expect that the amount of improvement would be equal. That’s not to say everyone would draw equally well, but that we should see roughly the same level of improvement regardless of “ability”—which, after all, is overrated. Problem? There were some people in my class who did not improve at all. Same amount of work, less improvement. In fact, so little improvement that even if it were there, it was undetctable. Furthermore, the people who didn’t improve were generally also the ones who couldn’t draw in the first place.

Summary: the goals were the same, the feedback was immediate and the same, the same amount of time was spent practicing—everything the authors say affects expert-ness was equal—yet some people became more expert and others did not. Why?

The answer is obvious to most people: talent. All other things being equal, some people will excel at a task faster and further than others, and some will not excel at all, regardless of effort. The difference is talent, and if you still think it’s overrated, take a look at it from another angle.

In some cases, the difference between “talent” and “no talent” is the differnce between intuitive knowledge and external knowledge. I’ll try to explain this without delving too much into left-brain/right-brain nonsense.

When I draw from life, my brain is pretty good at shutting off the part which recognizes symbols and just using the part that recognizes shapes and values. The biggest thing I have problem with is proportions, but again that just requires practice until you get to the point where you can block out major areas and have them be relatively the correct size on the canvas.

But some people—including some of those I mentioned previously who didn’t improve their art skills by going to art college—can’t manage this on their own. No matter where they’re sitting, the model’s eye is always a football with a circle in it or (if they’re looking at a profile) a sideways chevron with an arc closing the open end.

These people can still learn to draw to a decent degree, if they take photos and turn them upside down. This is usually sufficient to confuse the symbol part of the brain and just let the information be processed by the shapes part of the brain. The pictures aren’t awesomely perfect, but they’re better than the person can draw right-side up.

But here’s the thing: no one can use this “crutch”, so to speak, to become an expert. They might be decent, but it’s not practical for a portrait artist to work standing on his head all the time. It’s not a matter of pratice; it has nothing to do with “evaluating outcomes” and “setting goals” and all this other psychobabble. It has to do with talent, specifically the way one’s brain is wired.

Another example is perspective. Nowadays, even people who don’t do anything with art often know the basics of perspective. Everyone who goes to art college learns about perspective because it’s such a fundemental topic. Anyone should be able to tell you what it means and how to apply it. Despite having this knowledge, there are people who still cannot draw in proper perspective. They do not have an intuitive grasp of the laws; they know them externally but cannot apply them. On the other hand, the person with the intuitive knowledge of perspective—with the talent—picks this up immediately and moves on to more complicated problems.

And here’s a third example, using me again, this time focusing on my lack of talent. I happen to be tone deaf. I only know this because 1) people have told me so with enough groaning and repeated punches to the face that I figured it out eventually, and 2) I recorded myself singing and it’s terrible. However, the bones in my head are such that when I sing, it sounds perfect to me.

Could I ever become a professional singer? Well, maybe. But compare me and my tone deafness to someone with perfect pitch and who can sing naturally. In order to get to be even passable, I need to learn how to sing what sounds wrong to me, which would require a rather sophisticated setup of microphones and monitors and other crutches for me to get anywhere. This is because if I set for myself the goal of singing well, I’ve already hit it as far as I can tell. I can’t improve my craptastic singing ability without major help.

But the perfect pitch singer is good without doing much of anything. That’s talent, people.

Everything I’ve said, while it may be interesting and while you may be inclined to agree with it, really doesn’t disprove what Dubner and Levitt said. Their claim is that talent is highly overrated, not necessarily that it doesn’t exist. Still, the word “overrated” subjective and vague. Based on what I said, let’s quantify it.

How many hours would I have to invest in order to learn to sing professionally? I will put aside the possibility that it may not be physically possible for me to learn to sing and assume that if I work hard enough it will happen. I can pick pretty much any number, but more telling is: how many hours less would a talented singer need to invest in order to learn to sing professionally?

Despite having no concrete numbers, the point is clear. If I spent the same amount of time practicing as a talented singer, I might be better than I am now, but I would still be nowhere near their level of competency. How much harder would I have to work? Twice as hard? Say, I practice for two hours for every hour they practice?

And take the other example: how long must someone practice before they can draw as well as I? (And I’m by no means a professional illustrator.) It’s already obvious that just being in art college for four years (and thousands of dollars) will not get you there. How much harder do non-artists have to work to become artists? Again, setting aside the possibility that their brain might not be physically wired to draw realistically, the amount of time they would need to put in additionally would be pretty high.

Let’s say someone bad at drawing or someone bad at singing needs to work twice as hard to get as good. This means what the professional can accomplish in four years, the layman would need eight. We can even assume that after, say, ten years, the amount of improvement would taper off. To get there, the layman would still need twenty years.

Highly overrated!?

There are only so many hours a day. Obviously people are going to spend it doing things they’re better at. Despite some evidences to the contrary, people aren’t that dumb. You can’t point at talented people and say they’re talented because they work harder, and then say they work harder at something because they’re talented at it. This disregards the fact that the talented people are starting way out ahead with innate ability. This sort of “pat everyone on the back”/”rah rah rah”/”you can do it” crap isn’t helping anybody. Some people are better at things than others. This difference is talent. It is not insignificant.

-Ted