Gentle Reader,
How are you? I hope this Substack finds you very well. This week, I am writing about…talent and coaching. As a topic, the subject of innate ability can get a little heated, because its existence implies that it may not be worth trying at something, if you don’t naturally excel at it, which of course isn’t true. This belief comes from the flawed position of conflating our worth with our abilities, a thought structure which, when perpetuated, makes us all feel bad about ourselves in the long run.
Here is a short overview of what I will cover:
Nature vs nurture
Greatness: born or made?
Coaching: how it can be good or bad
Nature and Nurture
The debate about whether certain characteristics of the human arise from our genetics or our environment has been raging ever since Francis Galton coined the term ‘nature vs nurture’ one hundred and fifty years ago, and thus the field of behavioural genetics was born.
Since then, many have weighed in. In recent times, Malcolm Gladwell’s noteable book, Outliers: The Story of Success, advocates for the importance of the 10,000 hour rule as a key factor in greatness. Stated simply: to become great, one must practice an awful lot, in a very specific way. Another book, The Talent Code, does exactly what it says on the tin, and espouses the role of deliberate practice as the most important factor for success.
It seems obvious that the greats must practice exhaustively. But can anyone become great, simply by exhaustive training?
Hmm. I don’t think so. As an avid boxing fan, I spent many hundreds of hours watching great fighters over the years. The real greats, like Muhammad Ali, dispatched their opponents with such frightening ease, that it seemed to belie the importance of preparation. All the guys he fought had basically spent their whole lives training, and yet he was able to dance around them in the most humiliating fashion – he had something different, unteachable.
Similarly, in the realm of basketball, a man who is five foot five, or about 1.65m for our metric friends, will never make it to the NBA, no matter how many hours he spends practicing. The limitation here is physical, rather than cerebral, but can similar conclusions be drawn?
In terms of mental capacities, I learned chess as a kid, but I never really excelled at it. I had no intuitive feel for it. I could reason my way to a few victories, but my felt sense was that if I spent 10,000 hours studying it, I could probably get good, maybe even very good at a stretch…but despite all that, I knew I would still get soundly beaten by some run-of-the-mill prepubescent Slavic chess prodigy, in less than seven moves.
It seems a little uncool to say it but: some people are just good at stuff.
Greatness: born or made?
“Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.”
The above quote is from a letter written by James Joyce to his wife Nora. The beauty of the writing is self-evident, but what is also noteworthy is that such a marvellous passage was written casually, in a private letter, rather than reserved for some very fine work of literature.
Since we’re on the topic, let’s look at some more James Joyce quotes, this time from the first chapter of his novel Ulysses, describing the scene observed by Stephen as he looks out to sea, at the lightshod hurrying feet of the waves.
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the
stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of
water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the
dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings,
merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the
dim tide.
Next, moving forward to chapter eight, known as Lestrygonians, we read a description of Leopold Bloom’s feelings when he thinks of women, of faraway exotic lands.
A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.
Finally, a simple yet entrancing sentence from Ithica, the second last chapter of Ulysses, during which Stephen, in the midst of sobering up late at night, stares up at the sky in the garden of Leopold Bloom’s home.
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit
Delectable.
I am not certain, here, that even after 10,000 hours of writing, that many people could produce writing of this kind of quality. It seems to me that the true greats have….a certain je ne sais quoi.
At the very highest level of any activity, the ability to perform becomes more or less unteachable. There is no point in asking Tiger Woods how he did what he did at the Masters in 1997, or in asking Messi about how to score a goal like he did against Getafe in 2007.
If you asked him how he scored that goal, he wouldn’t be able to tell you, because he doesn’t know. He has no idea. It is simply an emergent property of all of his capacities. Could he have scored that goal without spending half his life training? No. Could I have scored that goal if I spent half my life training? No.
A metaphor, is perhaps in order.
Three archers go to the shooting range. Archer A has no talent and has never tried archery before. Archer B has some talent and has practiced for 10,000 hours. Archer C is very naturally talented and has practiced for 10,000 hours.
There is a target in the distance, 200 metres away.
Archer A shoots…and misses.
Archer B shoots…and hits the bullseye.
Archer C shoots….and goes over the target. You think he has missed, until you hear the resounding thunk of an arrow hitting a target that the other two couldn’t even see.
Coaching
It does not follow, however, that there is no point in getting coaching. Coaching, to me, is often more about perspective than pure instruction. This is why even Tiger Woods, who I mentioned above, had a coach. The coach wasn’t responsible for Tiger’s greatness, but he had the advantage of perspective, of being a third person, and he could offer fine atunements to the system in the same way that a good mechanic could keep both a Ferrari and a Ford on the road, but could not make the Ford outrun the Ferrari.
I am extremely bullish on coaching for the more subjective, squishy things in life. Life coaching, business coaching, voice coaching, relationship coaching, money coaching, emotional coaching…hook it to my veins. Even writing coaching, as long as you don’t expect it to turn you into James Joyce.
The problem with coaching however is that it can also go wrong. There are essentially two kinds of coaching: one is basically advice. It goes like this:
Write shorter sentences
Don’t waste the reader’s time
Use simple words
Have one simple and clear point in every essay
This advice is not bad, per se. In fact, it is good for very many people. It also has the effect of correcting many common mistakes by watering them down and making them less unpalatable, but this also waters down the strengths of the writer. On the whole, it is often a net positive, as many who are starting out have more weaknesses than strengths.
Where it becomes destructive is in the assumption that everybody should write in the same way, and that we are all writing non-fiction, and that reader must be pandered to….and then everybody sort of does end up writing in the same way. I love this platform, but there is a sort of Substackification of writing styles going on, which I would say is a natural reaction to the form, just as my grandparents who wrote letters in a certain style, ended up writing everything else in that style.
Let’s look at a quote from Marcel Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time, Book 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower:
If I did not understand the sonata, it enchanted me to hear Mme. Swann play. Her touch appeared to me (like her wrappers, like the scent of her staircase, her cloaks, her chrysanthemums) to form part of an individual and mysterious whole, in a world infinitely superior to that in which the mind is capable of analysing talent. "Attractive, isn't it, that Vinteuil sonata?" Swann asked me. "The moment when night is darkening among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling dew upon the earth. You must admit that it is rather charming; it shews all the static side of moonlight, which is the essential part…”
This is the kind of writing I enjoy, which however breaks every rule in the recent rule book. The sentences are long, contain many clauses, and the reader is not protected from complex language, nor is Proust is not 'afraid to waste the reader’s time with details, with brackets, with quotations. There is no point here, only beauty.
This, to me, is literature: beauty on the sentence level. It is a little unfair, it must be admitted, to compare this kind of writing, from a famous novel, to the style guidelines which many apply to modern non-fiction writing. However, these implicit stylistic guidelines have sort of spread into the fiction realm, in what I think of as the Sally Rooneyification of literature, a sort of flat, muted, faux unpretentious style which has become the preferred way of writing.
(If I were to guess, I would say this style originated with The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, a novel which I really liked.)
To come back to coaching: Proust would not have benefited from the modern style guide, as it would have made him less himself. The best coaching does not provide rules or guidelines, but it pulls out the strongest parts of you, and makes them shine, rather than nullifying your individuality.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this week’s edition wasn’t too cranky. If you want to read more, click below to get similar diatribes straight to your inbox.
I worked with a person who played professional ice hockey but realized that he would never get any better, no matter how many hours he put in. He quit and became an investment banker. I enjoy the odd round of golf and was invited to a corporate golf outing with some famous golf pros and coaches. I earnestly took all of their advice and diligently kept s notebook. After all that, my workmanlike game was destroyed and I could barely hit the ball off the tee.
Awesome post Edward! I always find the nature vs. nurture argument intriguing. There is a book called "innate" which I think you would enjoy. Cheers!