What's the difference?
Roman Matveyev
"Every child is an artist. The challenge is to remain an artist after you grow up."
-Pablo Picasso
What do children do different from average adults, which in general makes them more creative? They explore, experiment and certainly do not let ideas of how things ought to be stand in their way. This pretty muchsums up what the most successful and creative people from Da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin to Picasso and Einstein (and the lot of them baby geniuses) have been doing for centuries. It is the combination of a lack of fear for making mistakes along with the ability to discern what is good and what is not, and a good helping of hard work that separates great from average talent.
My professor and dear friend, Robert Mabro always emphasized that in any profession most people are just ok at what they do; a small percentage are terrible, and a tiny portion are truly superior at their craft. This equation is shaped like a bell curve (standard deviation) - minus the racial genetic implications. We refer to it as the Mabro Talent Curve.The question still remains why are some people better at what they do than others? It seems that the greatest difference between a profound talent and a mediocre one is the ability to comprehend differences in quality. A mediocre talent has the ability to create superior work or achieve great things occasionally. However, when people of mediocre caliber create things which are bad...sometimes very very bad (we all know or met some of these people) they cannot in the least comprehend that it belongs in the trash. A profound talent also produces sub-par work from time to time but has the ability to recognize rubbish for what it is and to discard it rather swiftly. Or as John Cleese put it: "In order to know how good you are at something requires the same exact skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place (John Cleese on Stupidity).
To be a great chef you must truly love good food and understand what good food tastes like. You must be able to close your eyes and separate all the different flavors, aromas and textures on your palette and understand why they work so well together. It is having the ability to then say ahh a bit more celery and a few dashes more of paprika will take this stew from the ordinary to the celestial. You must be enthusiastic about the craft itself and all of its minute mundane bits, and appreciate its greatness manifested in other talented individuals. The reason why the likes of Eminem, Jay-Z, Aesop Rock, Ghostface Killah and a few others are really good at what they do is because they really are wordsmiths. They have read and studied dictionaries, consumed language tirelessly (Eminem and Jay-Z) and they constantly come up with their own sophisticated slang or cryptic idioms to express their vivid thoughts (Aesop Rock and Ghostface - please try to decipher Nutmeg on the fly). This honing of skills through hours of practice (building up the mental Rolodex - the mind palace) is what allows the greats to perform at the highest of levels with the greatest of ease. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman explains this phenomenon in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Professionals build up their skills until they become intuitive to a point where a chess master can walk past a match and without breaking stride call white checkmate in 3 (Daniel Kahneman - Explorations of the Mind).
A very popular explanation for excellence in performance in recent times has been the 10,000 hour rule. However, we disagree (and so do a lot of experts). Practice on its own makes permanent, not perfect. Successful people do not just practice a lot, they pay attention to their mistakes and tweak their methods to improve. This takes a combination of talent (ability to improve quickly) and discern-ability (understanding what to change). We have come up with a formula to explain success and excellence. It is the average of raw talent and hustle (hard work, persistence, and ability to socialize - network), along with the necessary element of luck.
Original version of Success Formula
Tweedles Success Formula
Raw genius level talent in idle hands will always be trumped by decent level talent that hustles hard. The secret of the best is that they do not take their talents for granted but work tirelessly to be the best (Michael Jordan - Maybe You Should Rise).
The truly gifted are finally not afraid of failure or setbacks. "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless" (Thomas Edison). Sometimes the best ideas come about by accident. Alexander Fleming noticed something odd about a contaminated petri dish in his bacteria experiment. Instead of just tossing it out, he investigated what was happening and discovered penicillin. From weatherproof rubber for car tires to pacemakers - mistakes have been instrumental in countless discoveries. Many of our best ideas and breakthroughs were certainly unintentional. The creative mind must, however, be receptive to pick up the relevance of these seemingly irrelevant errors and to make something useful out of them. One must operate in the open mode - the inquisitive childlike mode - the whooaaa how did this happen?! mode (John Cleese - On Creativity). (Please note - not all mistakes lead to brilliant outcomes). So go ahead take chances, do not be afraid to make mistakes - you will make them anyway, work until your feet collapse under you, and please do yourself a favor - pay attention to your abilities. Do not be that 40 year old battle DJ making a fool of himself with the same routine from 1992.