Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

leadership development: identify high-potential people, and then provide them with the mentoring,
support, and resources needed to grow to achieve their potential. To identify these high-potential
future leaders, each year companies spend billions of dollars assessing and evaluating talent. Despite
the popularity of this model, givers recognize that it is fatally flawed in one respect. The
identification of talent may be the wrong place to start.
For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and
motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the
right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like
Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it’s only natural to start by screening candidates for
leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this
approach may be backward.
In the 1960s, a pioneering psychologist named Raymond Cattell developed an investment theory
of intelligence. He proposed that interest is what drives people to invest their time and energy in
developing particular skills and bases of knowledge. Today, we have compelling evidence that
interest precedes the development of talent. It turns out that motivation is the reason that people
develop talent in the first place.
In the 1980s, the psychologist Benjamin Bloom led a landmark study of world-class musicians,
scientists, and athletes. Bloom’s team interviewed twenty-one concert pianists who were finalists in
major international competitions. When the researchers began to dig into the eminent pianists’ early
experiences with music, they discovered an unexpected absence of raw talent. The study showed that
early on most of the star pianists seemed “special only when comparing one child with others in the
family or neighborhood.” They didn’t stand out on a local, regional, or national level—and they
didn’t win many early competitions.
When Bloom’s team interviewed the world-class pianists and their parents, they stumbled upon
another surprise. The pianists didn’t start out learning from piano teachers who were experts. They
typically took their first piano lessons with a teacher who lived nearby in their neighborhoods. In The
Talent Code, Daniel Coyle writes that “From a scientific perspective, it was as if the researchers had
traced the lineage of the world’s most beautiful swans back to a scruffy flock of barnyard chickens.”
Over time, even without an expert teacher at the outset, the pianists managed to become the best
musicians in the world. The pianists gained their advantage by practicing many more hours than their
peers. As Malcolm Gladwell showed us in Outliers, research led by psychologist Anders Ericsson
reveals that attaining expertise in a domain typically requires ten thousand hours of deliberate
practice. But what motivates people to practice at such length in the first place? This is where givers
often enter the picture.
When the pianists and their parents talked about their first piano teachers, they consistently
focused on one theme: the teachers were caring, kind, and patient. The pianists looked forward to
piano lessons because their first teachers made music interesting and fun. “The children had very
positive experiences with their first lessons. They made contact with another adult, outside their
home, who was warm, supportive, and loving,” Bloom’s team explains. The world-class pianists had
their initial interest sparked by teachers who were givers. The teachers looked for ways to make
piano lessons enjoyable, which served as an early catalyst for the intense practice necessary to
develop expertise. “Exploring possibilities and engaging in a wide variety of musical activities took
precedence” over factors such as “right or wrong or good or bad.”