Silence.
Then he crossed his arms, frowned, and said: “You can do all kinds of fancy statistics. You
somehow get every parent in a school to return their consent form. You’ve made a few insightful
observations. But you don’t have a theory. You don’t have a theory for the psychology of
achievement.”
Silence.
“What’s a theory?” I finally asked, having absolutely no clue as to what he was talking about.
Silence.
“Stop reading so much and go think.”
I left his office, went into mine, and cried. At home with my husband, I cried more. I cursed Marty
under my breath—and aloud as well—for being such a jerk. Why was he telling me what I was doing
wrong? Why wasn’t he praising me for what I was doing right?
You don’t have a theory. . . .
Those words rattled around in my mind for days. Finally, I dried my tears, stopped my cursing, and
sat down at my computer. I opened the word processor and stared at the blinking cursor, realizing I
hadn’t gotten far beyond the basic observation that talent was not enough to succeed in life. I hadn’t
worked out how, exactly, talent and effort and skill and achievement all fit together.
A theory is an explanation. A theory takes a blizzard of facts and observations and explains, in the
most basic terms, what the heck is going on. By necessity, a theory is incomplete. It oversimplifies.
But in doing so, it helps us understand.
If talent falls short of explaining achievement, what’s missing?
I have been working on a theory of the psychology of achievement since Marty scolded me for not
having one. I have pages and pages of diagrams, filling more than a dozen lab notebooks. After more
than a decade of thinking about it, sometimes alone, and sometimes in partnership with close
colleagues, I finally published an article in which I lay down two simple equations that explain how
you get from talent to achievement.
Here they are:
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens
when you take your acquired skills and use them. Of course, your opportunities—for example, having
a great coach or teacher—matter tremendously, too, and maybe more than anything about the
individual. My theory doesn’t address these outside forces, nor does it include luck. It’s about the
psychology of achievement, but because psychology isn’t all that matters, it’s incomplete.
Still, I think it’s useful. What this theory says is that when you consider individuals in identical
circumstances, what each achieves depends on just two things, talent and effort. Talent—how fast we
improve in skill—absolutely matters. But effort factors into the calculations
twice
, not once. Effort
builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill
productive
. Let me give you a few examples.
There’s a celebrated potter named Warren MacKenzie who lives in Minnesota. Now ninety-two years
old, he has been at his craft, without interruption, for nearly his entire adult life. Early on, he and his
late wife, also an artist, tried a lot of different things: “You know, when you’re young, you think you
can do anything, and we thought, oh, we’ll be potters, we’ll be painters, we’ll be textile designers,
we’ll be jewelers, we’ll be a little of this, a little of that. We were going to be the renaissance
people.”
It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an
amateur at many different things: “Eventually both of us gave up the drawing and painting, gave up the
silk-screening, gave up the textile design, and concentrated on ceramic work, because that was where
we felt our true interest lay.”
MacKenzie told me “a good potter can make forty or fifty pots in a day.” Out of these, “some of
them are good and some of them are mediocre and some of them are bad.” Only a few will be worth
selling, and of those, even fewer “will continue to engage the senses after daily use.”
Of course, it’s not just the number of good pots MacKenzie makes that has brought the art world to
his door. It’s the beauty and form of the pots: “I’m striving to make things which are the most exciting
things I can make that will fit in people’s homes.” Still, as a simplification, you might say that the
number of enduringly beautiful, exquisitely useful pots MacKenzie is able to produce, in total, will be
what he accomplishes as an artist. It would not satisfy him to be among the most masterful potters but
only produce, say, one or two pieces in his lifetime.
MacKenzie still throws clay on the wheel every day, and with effort his skill has improved: “I
think back to some of the pots we made when we first started our pottery, and they were pretty awful
pots. We thought at the time they were good; they were the best we could make, but our thinking was
so elemental that the pots had that quality also, and so they don’t have a richness about them which I
look for in my work today.”
“The first 10,000 pots are difficult,” he has said, “and then it gets a little bit easier.”
As things got easier, and as MacKenzie improved, he produced more good pots a day:
talent x
effort
= skill
At the same time, the number of good pots he’s brought into the world increased:
skill x
effort
= achievement
With effort, MacKenzie has gotten better and better at making “the most exciting things I can make
that will fit in people’s homes.” At the same time, with the same invested effort, he has become more
accomplished.
“Garp was a natural storyteller.”
This is a line from John Irving’s fourth novel,
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