What is greatness and how do people get there? Is greatness born or made? Is greatness the result of talent or practice? Few other questions have caused such intense debate, controversy, and diversity of opinions. The heights of human accomplishment have always fascinated us, and for good reason.
The striving for greatness is a fundamental human drive, and without it we would be bereft of some of our most valuable cultural products. How we conceptualize greatness and its developmental trajectory has important implications for education, business, and society— which makes it all the more important that we make an effort to understand all the many complex, nuanced factors contributing to its emergence.
Greatness eludes precise definition, and historically it has been approached in different ways. In ancient times, greatness had spiritual connotations, and geniuses were viewed as divine. Kant thought talent was an integral ingredient of the emergence of greatness, as geniuses use their natural talents to produce something original and exemplary (Kant, 1790/1952). According to Kant, since genius was inborn, it cannot be taught; it can only be imitated by inspired non-geniuses. The English dramatist John Dryden echoed Kant’s sentiment, declaring, “genius must be born, and never can be taught” (Dryden, 1693/1885, p. 60).
Since the beginning of this debate, both extremes have been represented. Sir Joshua Reynolds, an influential 18th century British painter, warned his students at the Royal Academy that
You must have no dependence on your genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well directed labour; nothing is to be obtained without it. Not to enter into metaphysical discussions on the nature or essence of genius, I will venture to assert, that assiduity unabated by difficulty, and a dispo- sition eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit, will produce effects similar to those which some call the result of natural powers. (Reynolds, 1966, p. 37)
While it seemed everyone had an opinion, the topic started receiving scientific treatment with the publication of Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius in 1869. Based on his analysis of eminent lineages, Galton, who was Charles Darwin’s cousin and was greatly influenced by Darwin’s ideas, argued that genius is primarily born. While Galton acknowledged the importance of passion, zeal, and persistence, he argued that regardless of environment, those with exemplary natural abilities inevitably rise to the top (Galton, 1874). This idea didn’t go unchallenged. Alphonse de Candolle (1873) showed evidence for the importance of environmental factors, finding that eminent scientists from Western civilization tended to do their best work under particular political, economic, social, cultural, and religious circumstances. However, while de Candolle’s results showed the importance of environmental conditions on the average population, his data did little to explain individual differences within a population.
The early behaviorists, including B. F. Skinner and John Watson, emphasized conditioning. No doubt biased by his particular theoretical position on learning and behavior, Watson made the following bold claim: Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. (Watson, 1930, p. 82)
Regardless of the veracity of this bold assertion, at least Watson was honest that more data were needed on this topic! The advent of cognitive psychology brought an emphasis on expertise acquisition as the main factor underlying differences in elite performance. Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon and William Chase suggested that a decade of intense work and apprenticeship is required to become an expert in chess (Chase & Simon, 1973). This has become known as “the 10-year rule.” K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues have extended this research in a number of domains, including medicine, professional writing, music, art, math, and sports (Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006). Researchers operating under the expertise performance framework argue that greatness is largely the result of a large amount of domain-specific knowledge, acquired through many thousands of hours of deliberate practice where one is constantly striving to learn from feedback and push beyond his or her limits (Colvin, 2010; Coyle, 2009; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993; Syed, 2010).
While deliberate practice is certainly important, it’s unlikely to be the whole story. Even though the most cited and well-known philosophers and psychologists of all time were those who took extreme views on key debates of their time, including the nature–nurture debate, more moderate, integrative stances are more likely to be correct (Simonton, 1976, 2000a). In only the past quarter century, scientists across numerous fields—such as behavioral genetics, neuroscience, developmental psychology, personality psychology, and positive psychology— have amassed a large body of empirical findings that suggest the origins of greatness are far more complex than any single approach will capture (Marcus, 2012; Shenk, 2011; Kaufman, 2013). Things are often not what they seem.
Take the practice side of the debate. Many studies looking at experts suffer from a restricted range: Those without the requisite abilities have already been weeded out of the competition, so those skills will no longer be predictive of performance. What happens when you look at a random selection of the population? While deliberate practice may be an important contributor to expertise, is it also sufficient to carry just anyone all the way to greatness?
Recent research suggests it's not. David Z. Hambrick and colleagues found that deliberate practice explained about 30% of the variation in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research-- chess and music (Hambrick et al., 2013). On the one hand, this is a very impressive amount of variation explained. Clearly, deliberate practice matters a lot, perhaps trumping any other single personal characteristic. But at the same time, most of the variation was left unexplained by other personal and environmental factors.
But if we dig even deeper, we can see more complications. What is the genetic contribution to the willingness to practice in the first place? While passion and persistence are certainly important for greatness, where do these characteristics come from (Cordova & Lepper, 1996; Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, Michael, & Kelly, 2007; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Kaufman, 2009, Vallerand et al., 2003)? Behavioral geneticists have discovered that virtually all psychological dispositions have a heritable basis (Turkheimer, 2000). Therefore, motivation and the ability to persevere and persist in the face of obstacles are likely influenced (although not completely determined) by genetic factors, which are always interacting with environmental factors.
Another complication is that there seem to be notable exceptions to the 10-year rule (Simonton, 1994, 2009a). For one, there exist prodigies and savants who seem to display extraordinary ability, even at an expert level, well before the requisite 10 years (Feldman & Goldsmith, 1991; Feldman & Morelock, 2011; Rutsatz & Urbach, 2012; Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, & Worrell, 2011; Treffert, 2011; Winner, 1997). In some cases, such as the savant who sits down at the piano and starts playing tunes, talent seems to emerge without any deliberate practice whatsoever!
What has become clear is that the 10-year rule is not actually a rule, but an average with significant variation around the mean. In fact, in some domains within the arts and sciences, those with the greatest lifetime productivity and highest levels of achieved eminence required the least amount of time to acquire the requisite expertise (Simonton, 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1997, 1999). However, there are some fields, such as creative writing, where there doesn’t appear to be an early advantage to achieving greatness (Kaufman & Gentile, 2002), and if anything there may require on average an additional 10 years after professional-level expertise is acquired to achieve greatness (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2007). An even further complication is that too much expertise can be detrimental to greatness. Research shows that experts are at risk of becoming overly specialized and inflexible in their thinking (Frensch & Sternberg, 1992), although the disadvantages of over-training can be overcome by acquiring expertise across numerous, diverse domains (Simonton, 2000a).
Now consider the talent side of the debate. Many popular writers on this topic treat talent as if it means that some people are born with a skill, fully formed at birth. While psychologists acknowledge that many different traits such as IQ, creativity, talents, interests, and personality dimensions influence greatness, no sensible scientist claims that any of these traits are completely deterministic. Scientists will be the first to admit that no trait comes fully formed at birth, and there is plenty of variation unaccounted for to leave room for late bloomers and prodigies who burn out fast (Kaufman, 2008; Protzko & Kaufman, 2010). Also, no sensible scientist would argue that just because a trait has a genetic contribution, it is immutable. Something can have a very large heritability coefficient and still be very amenable to change. As it turns out, the way genes influence greatness is much more nuanced and fascinating.
For one, the many traits that make up greatness, such as creativity and leadership, don’t appear to operate in an additive manner, but appear to require the full configuration of many interacting genes for their manifestation (Simonton, 1999a; Lykken, 1982; Waller et al., 1993). Also, the pathway from genes to talent to greatness is often very nuanced and complex. Some of the most well-known behavioral geneticists recognize that it’s time to go beyond heritability estimates. A currently active area of research is the study of epigenetics, and how the many interacting genes that make up any trait are differentially activated depending on the environment (Johnson, 2007; Turkheimer, 2012; Johnson, Turkheimer, Gottesman, & Bouchard, 2009; Moore, 2003; Ridley, 2003).
Genes pull us subtly, and not so subtly, in various directions and influence our decisions. The “multiplier effect”—in which initially small, genetic advantages can compound into large, observed differences—can operate in a multitude of ways (Ceci, Barnett, & Kanaya, 2003). The environment can cause exaggerated differences, such as when children pick the taller kid for the basketball team in elementary school, but the slightly more talented and passionate musician can also make decisions throughout his or her life that compound into larger differences down the road.
Also, many seemingly environmental effects, such as parenting style, have turned out to have large genetic components. As one example, the direct influence of parenting has been shown to be overrated, as the apparent association between parental phenotype and offspring phenotype is often the result of shared parent–child geno- type rather than a direct effect of parenting causing their children’s behaviors (Harris, 1999; Pinker, 2003). Certainly parenting matters. Water still has an essential influence on fish, even if it doesn’t explain any of the differences between fish. It turns out that parenting is important for child development in ways different than originally assumed. Genes influence parenting because, like any other behavior, parenting behaviors are influenced by genes.
Parents play a crucial role in supporting the expression of genes, as do peers and teachers. The importance of environmental support is most striking in the context of disadvantaged homes, where genes account for substantially less variation in cognitive ability compared to socioeconomically advantaged homes (Tucker-Drob, Rhemtulia, Harden, Turkheimer, & Fask, 2010).
Further nuance is introduced when one looks across domains of greatness. Many different traits contribute to greatness, in differing degrees and combinations depending on the domain (Simonton, 2009b). Athletic greatness surely draws on a different set of skills, dispositions, and cognitive abilities than academic/scientific greatness. And both forms of greatness differ from what is required for artistic and performance/ entertainment-related greatness. Even within domains there are different skills and dispositions required. Think about the difference between poets and science writers— both are writers but seem to come from a different species sometimes!
The complexities don’t stop there. By definition, very few people reach excellence in a domain, and no two paths are exactly the same. Some people actually invent a whole new path of deliberate practice for others to follow! The fact that two people can obtain the same result through a very different route opens up a new can of questions. Do all domains require creativity for greatness? Can someone, such as the gold-medal winner of the 100-meter dash, be great simply by running faster than all other competitors that year? Likewise, some domains (such as mathematics) may demand more domain-specific talent, whereas for others (such as dart throwing), intense deliberate practice may play more of a role. Must all paths to greatness require extraordinary talent? Also, it can be tricky differentiating expert performance from great performance. What’s the dividing line? Is greatness reserved only for the gold-medal winner of the 100-meter dash, or is the runner-up great as well?
And that’s just talent and practice. What about the full range of life experiences and early developmental experiences— many of which are quite harsh and traumatic —that shapes drive and passion (Ludwig, 2003; Simonton, 2000b, 2009a, 2009b)? Where does inspiration come from (Thrash & Elliot, 2003)? What’s the influence of mindset, stress, and stereotype threat on cognition and performance (Aronson & Juarez, 2012; Beilock, 2011; Dweck, 2007)? What about so-called learning disabilities, mental illnesses, and all different kinds of minds—can’t they be an advantage (Grandin, 2010; Kaufman, 2013)? What about opportunities and just sheer luck (Gladwell, 2008)? How do all those factors contribute to greatness? Lots of questions. These are all thorny issues that must be dealt with when scientifically studying greatness.
The topic of greatness is one of the most fascinating in all of psychology and has relevance for every single human being on this planet. As it turns out, the truth is far more nuanced, complex, and fascinating than any one viewpoint or paradigm can possibly reveal. It’s time to go beyond talent or practice. Greatness is much, much more.
Which was the spirit behind my edited volume, The Complexity of Greatness: Beyond Talent or Practice, now available for purchase on Amazon. The volume doesn’t include all the answers, but at least points out the many complexities when scientifically investigating this topic. My aim in assembling the stellar list of contributors was to put together a well-balanced review of the latest research and thinking on greatness that could serve as a valuable resource, not just for scientists but for anyone who wants to get a broader, more complete understanding of greatness. Hopefully this volume also stimulates thought and leads to new, testable hypotheses and research programs.
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