Talent, or ability, by itself, is overrated. So is pure intelligence. Over the years, I have seen so many people with great talents, and others with incredible intellectual brilliance, fail, sometimes catastrophically, in a range of fields and occupations. I’ve seen executives who not only knew their market, their customers, and their products, but who could explain and sell, stall in dead-end positions. I’ve seen brilliant attorneys crash and burn, and literally destroy their lives and themselves. I’ve known talented writers who flamed out, never to be heard of again. I’ve met singers with incredible voices, good looks, and great stage presence who never even made the lowest rungs of an operatic career.
A failing I’ve seen far too often over the years is the tendency of people with great natural ability or intelligence to reach for “short-cuts” of various sorts. From what I’ve seen, the tendency to want to shortcut the path to success is, for some reason, highly linked to people with great natural abilities, almost as if they have the feeling that, because of their talents, they really don’t have to learn what other people do. That’s exactly why most of those who try the short-cut route fail… because the shortcutters don’t learn enough to handle the situations in which they find themselves as a result of their initial – and often short-lived – success in obtaining what they sought.
Yes, every once in a great while a short-cut succeeds, or someone reaches great heights in their field on pure ability, and little else – and manages to hold on, but the odds are a hundred to one against either.
Talent, ability, intellectual capability… these are absolutely necessary components of success, but in today’s highly competitive society, where almost half the work force in the United States possesses a college degree, and close to fifteen percent has a graduate degree, and in a world economy, those are far from enough to assure success in any field, let alone outstanding achievement.
As I’ve mentioned before, dependability is a vital necessity, as is a modicum of congeniality, or at least moderate sociability… and, of course, the understanding that, no matter what the field, there is always a certain amount of just plain hard work involved, often nit-picking drudgery. I started out as a low-level economist, long before computers provided neat and nifty analyses of numbers and statistical patterns. I had to calculate the statistics from raw data, and I learned a great deal about statistics and numbers. From what I’ve seen over the years, as computers can do more and more, most “analysts” seem to know less and less what the numbers and computer-generated statistics actually mean… and what they represent.
I’ve watched with amusement as politicians, executives, writers, and business people delegate more and more of that “drudgery” to computers, subordinates, or consultants, and then discover that somehow their position, success, power, are slowly slipping away.
While some delegation is necessary, especially the higher one gets in an organization, every delegation results in a greater removal from the world, and that reduces one’s understanding of that world.
There are no good short-cuts, only short-run expedient short-cuts with longer-term and higher costs.