The greatness myth – can we all teach ourselves to be talented? Jeroen De Flander

It’s the summer of 1763. Seven-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his family embark on a European tour. His life will never be the same again. From that moment on, Mozart will be known as a musical genius.

The greatness myth – can we all teach ourselves to be talented? Jeroen De Flander

By Professor Jeroen De Flander

Around 250 years later, researcher Ayako Sakakibara from the Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo, also embarked on a journey. He wanted to unravel the mysterious talent that had made Amadeus Mozart so special. Books had been written about Mozart’s life and his unique gift called “absolute pitch” or “perfect pitch”. It’s that amazing ability to recognize, name, and even reproduce a tone, without any context at all. Just hit any note on a piano, a guitar, or even a random object like a glass or bell, and someone with perfect pitch knows instantly what it is. It’s extremely rare. Less than 0.1 percent of the population has perfect pitch. Just imagine the advantage to a musician.

The greatness myth

For over 2 centuries, Mozart’s greatness was linked to this unique gift, a talent he shared with very few others. But the overarching explanation didn’t satisfy Sakakibara. There were other great musicians out there who didn’t have this unique talent and still reached the top of their field. He set out on a fascinating multi-year study, convincing the parents of 24 ordinary toddlers between the ages of 2 and 6 to join a unique experiment. None of these 24 children had Mozart’s unique gift. He explored how much they could develop their hearing using a new technique called the “Chord Identification Method.”

The toddlers trained daily  on a piano with a family member. Sakakibara asked the parents to send him regular recordings of daily practice and a progress report once every 2 weeks. The results were amazing. Two children dropped out for personal reasons unrelated to the study. The other 22 all developed perfect pitch after practicing diligently for 14 months and 2 weeks on average. They all developed the talent that was the basis for Mozart’s success.

Anywhere you look, from competitive sports and entrepreneurship to science, music, and leadership, there always seems to be a few extraordinary individuals in a league of their own. When we are confronted with this reality, we think this person is born with something extra—“He is so talented”. But is that really so? If we look at Sakakibara’s research, we should at least have some doubt.

Why are some people so amazingly good at what they do?  I have always been fascinated by great performance. As a young boy, I was really into the Olympics Games. I recall when the 1984 Summer Olympics took place in Los Angeles and I convinced my parents to let me watch the 100-meter final at 4am. Later in life, I became equally passionate about business performance, wondering what makes one company successful and the other unsuccessful. Why do some people achieve greatness and others don’t? The answer turned out to be something unexpected.

Most of us haven’t caught up to the underlying elements that drive individual performance and still operate from the assumption that greatness is driven by talent, IQ, and luck. But greatness isn’t born, it’s grown!

And that’s great news. Because if great performance isn’t the result of nature but rather nurture, we can all influence it. Great performance gets a different meaning. It isn’t a lottery ticket that we didn’t win at birth. It becomes an interesting journey. And researchers have found that this journey is governed by principles that are surprisingly similar no matter what field we want to excel in. Whether we want to become a great leader, a successful writer, a top athlete, or a musician, we all travel along the same performance curve—from novice all the way to world-class expert. And we can all take advantage of these performance engines that researchers have uncovered.

The Art of Performance: The Surprising Science Behind Greatness by strategy execution expert Professor Jeroen De Flander is out now (UK £18 / US $22). Follow his popular blog (50K weekly readers): jeroen-de-flander.com

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