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Tóm tắt nội dung (trích từ tài liệu gốc): The Talent Code Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. here's how. Daniel Coyle Bantam Books the talent code A Bantam Book / May 2009 Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York All rights reserved. Copyright � 2009 by Daniel Coyle Book design by Glen M. Edelstein Bantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coyle, Daniel. The talent code : Greatness isn't born. It's grown. Here 's how. / Daniel Coyle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-553-80684
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The Talent Code
Greatness Isn't Born.
It's Grown. here's how.
Daniel Coyle
Bantam Books
the talent code
A Bantam Book / May 2009
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved.
Copyright � 2009 by Daniel Coyle
Book design by Glen M. Edelstein
Bantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coyle, Daniel.
The talent code : Greatness isn't born.
It's grown. Here 's how. / Daniel Coyle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-553-80684-7 (hardcover)--ISBN 978-0-553-90649-3 (ebook)
1. Ability. 2. Motivation (Psychology) I. Title.
BF431.C69 2009
153.9--dc22 2008047674
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
randomhousebooks.com
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23
BVG
Chapter 5
Primal Cues
Every great and commanding moment in the annals
of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"IF SHE CAN DO IT, WHY CAN'T I?"
Growing skill, as we 've seen, requires deep practice. But deep
practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion,
and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel,
the second element of the talent code. In this section we'll
see how motivation is created and sustained through a pro-
cess I call ignition. Ignition and deep practice work together
to produce skill in exactly the same way that a gas tank com-
bines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile.
Ignition supplies the energy, while deep practice translates
that energy over time into forward progress, a.k.a. wraps of
myelin.
When I visited the talent hotbeds, I saw a lot of passion. It
showed in the way people carried their violins, cradled their
soccer balls, and sharpened their pencils. It showed in the way
98 The Talent Code
they treated bare-bones practice areas as if they were cathe-
drals; in the alert, respectful gazes that followed a coach. The
feeling wasn't always shiny and happy--sometimes it was
dark and obsessive, and sometimes it was like the quiet, abid-
ing love you see in old married couples. But the passion was
always there, providing the emotional rocket fuel that kept
them firing their circuits, honing skills, getting better.
When I asked people in the hotbeds about the source of
their passion for violin/singing/soccer/math, the question
struck most of them as faintly ridiculous, as if I were inquir-
ing when they first learned to enjoy oxygen. The universal re-
sponse was to shrug and say something like "I dunno, I've just
always felt this way."
Faced with these responses, it's tempting to return the
shrug, to chalk up their burning motivation to the unknown
depths of the human heart. But this would not be accurate.
Because in many cases it is possible to pinpoint the instant that
passion ignited.
For South Korea's golfers, it was the afternoon of May 18,
1998, when a twenty-year-old named Se Ri Pak won the
McDonald's LPGA Championship and became a national
icon. (As one Seoul newspaper put it, "Se Ri Pak is not the
female Tiger Woods; Tiger Woods is the male Se Ri Pak.")
Before her, no South Korean had succeeded in golf. Flash-
forward to ten years later, and Pak's countrywomen had es-
sentially colonized the LPGA Tour, with forty-five players
who collectively won about one-third of the events.
For Russia's tennis players, the moment came later that
same summer when seventeen-year-old Anna Kournikova
reached the Wimbledon semifinals and, thanks to her super-
model looks, gained the status of the world's most downloaded
Primal Cues 99
athlete. By 2004 Russian women were showing up regularly in
major finals; by 2007 they occupied five of the top ten rank-
ings and twelve of the top fifty. "They're like the goddamned
Russian Army," said Nick Bollettieri, founder of his epony-
mous tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida. "They just keep
on coming."
Year South Koreans on Russians in WTA
LPGA Tour Top 100
1998 1 3
1999 2 5
2000 5 6
2001 5 8
2002 8 10
2003 12 11
2004 16 12
2005 24 15
2006 25 16
2007 33 15
Other hotbeds follow the same pattern: a breakthrough
success is followed by a massive bloom of talent. Note that in
each case the bloom grew relatively slowly at first, requiring
five or six years to reach a dozen players. This is not because
the inspiration was weaker at the start and got progressively
stronger, but for a more fundamental reason: deep practice
takes time (ten thousand hours, as the refrain goes). Talent is
100 The Talent Code
spreading through this group in the same pattern that dande-
lions spread through suburban yards. One puff, given time,
brings many flowers.*
A different example of this phenomenon began on a blus-
tery day in May 1954, when a skinny Oxford medical student
named Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile
in less than four minutes. The broad outlines of his achieve-
ment are well known: how physiologists and athletes alike re-
garded the four-minute mile as an unbreakable physiological
barrier; how Bannister systematically attacked the record;
how he broke the mark by a fraction of a second, earning
headlines around the world and lasting fame for what Sports
Illustrated later called the single greatest athletic accomplish-
ment of the twentieth century.
Less well known is what happened in the weeks after
Bannister's feat: another runner, an Australian named John
Landy, also broke the four-minute barrier. The next season a
few more runners did too. Then they started breaking it in
* One of the useful things about this breakthrough-then-bloom pattern is that it makes
it possible to forecast the rise of future talent hotbeds. I predict that one of them will be
Venezuelan classical musicians. Gustavo Dudamel, a.k.a. El Dude, is the twenty-six-
year-old wunderkind who now directs the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Most stories
about him mention his off-the-chart skills, his signature curly hair, his charm. They
don't mention the fact that Venezuela is producing lots of El Dudes through a program
called the Fundaci�n del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e
Infantiles de Venezuela, known by its handier nickname of El Sistema (the system). The
program enrolls poor kids into classical-training programs (250,000 kids at last count),
brings the best players back as teachers, sends orchestras all over the world, and in gen-
eral is starting to bear a striking resemblance to Venezuela's equally successful baseball
academies. Another future hotbed will be Chinese novelists. Ha Jin (Waiting) looks to
be the breakthrough performer of what might be a rather large contingent, including
Ma Jian, Li Yiyun, Fan Wu, and Dai Sijie, which should arrive around the same time as
the Chinese basketballers ignited by Yao Ming. Lastly, moviegoers should brace them-
selves for a wave of Romanian filmmakers, an unlikely group sparked by the four major
prizes won at the Cannes Film Festival by that nation's directors over the last three
years, as well as by the famously rigorous teaching at the Bucharest National University
of Drama and Film.
Primal Cues 101
droves. Within three years no fewer than seventeen runners
had matched the greatest sporting accomplishment of the
twentieth century. Nothing profound had changed. The track
surfaces were the same, the training was the same, the genes
were the same. To chalk it up to self-belief or positive think-
ing is to miss the point. The change didn't come from inside
the athletes: they were responding to something outside them.
The seventeen runners had received a clear signal--you can
do this too--and the four-minute mark, once an insurmount-
able wall, was instantly recast as a stepping-stone.
This is how ignition works. Where deep practice is a cool,
conscious act, ignition is a hot, mysterious burst, an awakening.
Where deep practice is an incremental wrapping, ignition works
through lightning flashes of image and emotion, evolution-
built neural programs that tap into the mind's vast reserves
of energy and attention. Where deep practice is all about
staggering-baby steps, ignition is about the set of signals and
subconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that
lead us to say that is who I want to be. We usually think of pas-
sion as an inner quality. But the more I visited hotbeds, the
more I saw it as something that came first from the outside
world. In the hotbeds the right butterfly wingflap was causing
talent hurricanes.
"I remember watching [Pak] on TV," said Christina Kim,
a South Korean�American golfer. "She wasn't blond or blue-
eyed, and we were of the same blood . . . You say to yourself,
`If she can do it, why can't I?'" Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, the
Spartak coach, remembers the moment when the spark
caught. "All the little girls started wearing their hair in pony-
tails and grunting when they hit," she said. "They were all lit-
tle Annas."
Ignition is a strange concept because it burns just out of
102 The Talent Code
our awareness, largely within our unconscious mind. But that
doesn't mean it can't be captured, understood, and used to
produce useful heat. In the next few chapters we'll see how
our built-in ignition system works, and how tiny, seemingly
insignificant cues can, over time, create gigantic differences in
skill. We'll visit some places that have ignited, even though
they might not know it, and we'll see how myelin is really
made out of love. Let's begin by taking a closer look at the ig-
nition process.
THE TINY, POWERFUL IDEA
In 1997 Gary McPherson set out to investigate a mystery that
has puzzled parents and music teachers since time immemo-
rial: why certain children progress quickly at music lessons
and others don't. He undertook a long-term study that sought
to analyze the musical development of 157 randomly selected
children. (This was the study that would generate the footage
of Clarissa practicing the clarinet.) McPherson took a uniquely
comprehensive approach, following the children from a few
weeks before they picked out their instrument (at age seven or
eight in most cases) through to high school graduation, track-
ing their progress through a detailed battery of interviews,
biometric tests, and videotaped practice sessions.
After the first nine months of lessons the kids were a typi-
cal mixed bag: a few had zoomed off like rockets; a few had
barely budged; most were somewhere in the middle. Skill was
scattered along a bell curve of what we'd intuitively consider
to be musical aptitude. The question was, what caused the
curve? Was it inevitable, just a descriptive chart of what happens
Primal Cues 103
among any randomly chosen population who are striving to
master a skill? Or was there some hidden X factor that ex-
plained and predicted each child's success and failure?
McPherson started analyzing his data to try to find the rea-
son. Was the X factor IQ? Nope. Was it aural sensitivity?
Nope. Was it math skills or sense of rhythm? Sensorimotor
skills? Income level? Nope, nope, nope, nope.
Then McPherson tested a new factor: the children's an-
swers to a simple question that he'd asked them before they
had even started their first lesson. The question was, how long
do you think you'll play your new instrument?
"They mostly say `Uh, I dunno' at first ," McPherson said.
"But then when you keep digging and ask them a few times,
eventually they will give you a real solid answer. They have
an idea, even then. They've picked up something in their en-
vironment that's made them say, yes, that's for me."
The children were asked to identify how long they planned
to play (the options were: through this year, through primary
school, through high school, all my life), and their answers
were condensed into three categories:
Short-term commitment
Medium-term commitment
Long-term commitment
McPherson then measured how much each child practiced
per week: low (20 minutes per week); medium (45 minutes per
week); and high (90 minutes per week). He plotted the results
against their performance on a skill test. The resulting graph
looked like this:
104 The Talent Code
WATKINS FARNUM PERFORMANCE SCALE35
(Courtesy
Dr. Gary McPherson)30
25 Short-term
Commitment
20
Medium-term
Commitment
Long-term
commitment
15
10
5 1 2 3
LOW MODERATE HIGH
AVERAGE WEEKLY PRACTICE
When McPherson saw the graph, he was stunned. "I couldn't
believe my eyes," he said. Progress was determined not by any
measurable aptitude or trait, but by a tiny, powerful idea
the child had before even starting lessons. The differences
were staggering. With the same amount of practice, the long-
term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-
commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment
group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, pro-
gressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an
hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with
high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.
"We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate,
but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far
more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount
of practice," McPherson said. "It's all about their perception
of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing
experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a
musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill."
To illustrate how this snowball works, McPherson used the
Primal Cues 105
example of Clarissa. The day before her high-velocity prac-
tice, Clarissa's teacher had been trying to teach her a new song
called "La Cinquantaine." As usual with Clarissa, the lesson
had not gone well. Out of frustration, the teacher decided to
play a jazz version of "La Cinquantaine"--"Golden Wedding."
He played a few bars, and the whole thing took perhaps a
minute. But a minute was enough.
"When he played that, at that moment, something hap-
pened," McPherson said. "Clarissa was awestruck by the jazz
version. Entranced. She saw the teacher play it, and he must
have played with some style, because she got an image of her-
self as a performer. The teacher didn't realize it then, but
everything came together, and all of a sudden while hardly
knowing it, she 's on fire, desperate to learn."
Note the process McPherson is describing here. The teacher's
playing caused Clarissa to experience an intense emotional re-
sponse. That response--call it fascination, rapture, or love--
instantly connected Clarissa to a high-octane fuel tank of
motivation, which powered her deep practice. It's the same
thing that happened to the South Korean golfers and the
Russian tennis players. In their case, they used that fuel, over
a decade 's time, to dominate two sports; in Clarissa's case, she
used that energy to accomplish a month's worth of practice in
six minutes.
McPherson's graph, like the table showing the rise of South
Korean golfers and Russian tennis players, is not a picture of
aptitude. It is a picture of ignition. What ignited the progress
wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet
powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that
oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that origi-
nated in the outside world. After all, these kids weren't born
wanting to be musicians. Their wanting, like Clarissa's, came
106 The Talent Code
from a distinct signal, from something in their family, their
homes, their teachers, the set of images and people they en-
countered in their short lives. That signal sparked an intense,
nearly unconscious response that manifested itself as an idea: I
want to be like them. It wasn't necessarily a logical idea for them
to have. (Recall that it didn't correlate with any aural, rhythmic,
or mathematic skills they possessed.) Perhaps the idea came
about purely by accident. But accidents have consequences, and
the consequence of this one was that they started out ignited,
and that made all the difference.*
FLIPPING THE TRIGGER
Being highly motivated, when you think about it, is a slightly
irrational state. One forgoes comfort now in order to work
toward some bigger prospective benefit later on. It's not as
simple as saying I want X. It's saying something far more
complicated: I want X later, so I better do Y like crazy right now.
We speak of motivation as if it's a rational assessment of
cause and effect, but in fact it's closer to a bet, and a highly un-
certain one at that. (What if the future benefits don't come?)
This paradox is made plain in a scene in Mark Twain's Tom
Sawyer.
Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence under strict orders
* At Meadowmount Music School I met a dozen kids who, when I asked them how they
came to play, were vague, saying things like "I just always liked the violin/cello/
piano." Then when I inquired what their parents did, it turned out that they played in
symphony orchestras. In other words, these kids had spent hundreds of hours of their
childhood watching the person they loved most in the world practice and perform clas-
sical music. In light of McPherson's study, this is ignition in excelsis. Speaking of
parental cues, Meadowmount's roster included three Gabriels, named after the angel of
music.
Primal Cues 107
from his Aunt Polly. A neighborhood kid named Ben saunters
past, teasingly informing Tom of his afternoon plans.
[Ben] "Say--I'm going in a-swimming, I am. Don't
you wish you could? But of course you'd druther
work--wouldn't you? Course you would!"
Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said:
"What do you call work?"
"Why, ain't that work?"
Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered
carelessly:
"Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know is,
it suits Tom Sawyer."
"Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you
like it?"
The brush continued to move.
"Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it.
Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling
his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and
forth--stepped back to note the effect--added a touch
here and there--criticized the effect again--Ben watching
every move and getting more and more interested, more
and more absorbed. Presently he said:
"Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little."
Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered
his mind:
"No--no--I reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You
see, Aunt Polly's awful particular about this fence--right
here on the street, you know--but if it was the back fence
I wouldn't mind and she wouldn't. Yes, she's awful
particular about this fence; it's got to be done very careful;
108 The Talent Code
I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two
thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done."
We all know what happens next: Ben is ignited, setting off
a contagion of motivation that ends with Tom happily ob-
serving as the neighborhood kids barter and beg for the
chance to whitewash the fence in his stead. Fiction though it
may be, the passage suggests the sorts of signals that work
best to ignite people.
The previous section contained three examples of igni-
tion: South Korean/Russian athletes, mile runners, and be-
ginner musicians. In each case, their ignition was reactive.
It may have felt like it originated within them, but in fact it
did not. In each case it was a response to a signal that arrived
in the form of an image: the victory of an older country-
woman, the barrier-smashing accomplishment of a fellow
runner, the unexpectedly captivating performance of a
teacher. The question is, what do these signals have in
common?
The answer is, each has to do with identity and groups, and
the links that form between them. Each signal is the motiva-
tional equivalent of a flashing red light: those people over there
are doing something terrifically worthwhile. Each signal, in
short, is about future belonging.
Future belonging is a primal cue: a simple, direct signal
that activates our built-in motivational triggers, funneling our
energy and attention toward a goal. The idea makes intuitive
sense--after all, we've all felt motivated by the desire to con-
nect ourselves to high-achieving groups. What's interesting,
however, is just how powerful and unconscious those triggers
can be.
Primal Cues 109
"We're the most social creatures on the planet," says Dr.
Geoff Cohen of the University of Colorado. "Everything de-
pends on collective effort and cooperation. When we get a cue
that we ought to connect our identity with a group, it's like a
hair trigger, like turning on a light switch. The ability to
achieve is already there, but the energy put into that ability
goes through the roof."
Cohen is one of a growing group of psychologists who
specialize in uncovering the unconscious mechanisms that
quietly govern our choices, motivations, and goals. Officially
this area of study is called automaticity, but for our purposes
Cohen and his colleagues are like the garage mechanics of ig-
nition, tracing the invisible connections between our motiva-
tions and the environmental signals that quietly activate them.
One of the rudimentary truths that the automaticity experts
like to point out is that our motivational wiring isn't exactly
new. In fact, most of the motivational circuits in our brains go
back millions of years and are located in the area of the mind
called the reptilian brain.
"Pursuing a goal, having motivation--all of that predates
consciousness," said John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale
University who pioneered automaticity studies in the mid-
1980s. "Our brains are always looking for a cue as to where to
spend energy now. Now? Now? We 're swimming in an ocean
of cues, constantly responding to them, but like fish in water,
we just don't see it."
I asked Bargh about a curious pattern I'd observed at the
talent hotbeds: they tended to be junky, unattractive places. If
the training grounds of all the talent hotbeds I visited were
magically assembled into a single facility--a mega-hotbed, as
it were--that place would resemble a shantytown. Its buildings
110 The Talent Code
would be makeshift, corrugated-roofed affairs, its walls paint-
bald, its fields weedy and uneven. So many hotbeds shared
this disheveled ambience that I began to sense a link between
the dented, beat-up state of the incubators and the sleek talent
they produced. Which, in Bargh's opinion, was precisely the
case, and for a reason he readily explained.
"If we're in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we natu-
rally shut off effort," Bargh said. "Why work? But if people
get the signal that it's rough, they get motivated now. A
nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future
right now--of course they'd be demotivated. They can't
help it."
The research of Bargh and his colleagues adds up to a the-
orem that might be dubbed the Scrooge Principle, which goes
as follows: our unconscious mind is a stingy banker of energy
reserves, keeping its wealth locked in a vault. Direct pleas to
open the vault often don't work; Scrooge can't be fooled that
easily. But when he 's hit with the right combination of primal
cues--when he 's visited by a series of primal-cue ghosts, you
might say--the tumblers click, the vault of energy flies open,
and suddenly it's Christmas Day.
A few years ago Cohen and his colleague Gregory Walton
tried to start their own motivation explosion. They took a
group of Yale freshmen and gave them an innocuous mix of
magazine articles to read. Included was a one-page first-
person account of a student named Nathan Jackson. Jackson's
story was brief: he had arrived at college not knowing what
career to pursue, had developed a liking for math, and now
had a happy career in a math department of a university. The
story included a small biographical profile about Jackson:
hometown, education, birth date. The article, like the others,
Primal Cues 111
was utterly forgettable--except for one microscopic detail:
for half the students, Nathan Jackson's birth date was altered
to exactly match the students' own. After they read the article,
Cohen and Walton tested the students' attitudes toward math
and measured their persistence; i.e., how long they were will-
ing to work on an insoluble math problem.
When the results came in, Cohen and Walton found that
the birthday-matched group had significantly more positive
attitudes about math, and persisted a whopping 65 percent
longer on the insoluble problem. What's more, those students
did not feel any conscious change. The coincidence of the
birthday, in Walton's phrase, "got underneath them."
"They were in a room by themselves taking the test. The
door was shut; they were socially isolated; and yet [the birth-
day connection] had meaning for them," Walton said. "They
weren't alone. The love and interest in math became part of
them. They had no idea why. Suddenly it was us doing this,
not just me.
"Our suspicion is that these events are powerful because
they are small and indirect," Walton continued. "If we had
told them this same information directly, if they had noticed
it, it would have had less effect. It's not strategic; we don't
think of it as being useful because we're not even thinking of
it at all. It's automatic."
If the conceptual model for deep practice is a circuit being
slowly wrapped with insulation, then the model for ignition is
a hair trigger connected to a high-voltage power plant.
Accordingly, ignition is determined by simple if/then propo-
sitions, with the then part always the same--better get busy.
See someone you want to become? Better get busy. Want to
catch up with a desirable group? Better get busy. Bargh and
112 The Talent Code
his colleagues have performed a number of similarly magical-
seeming experiments, where they use tiny environmental cues
(such as inspirational words hidden in a crossword puzzle) to
manipulate motivation and effort among unknowing experi-
mental subjects. They possess piles of supportive data to ex-
plain why this is so effective--for instance, the fact that the
unconscious mind is able to process 11 million pieces of infor-
mation per second, while the conscious mind can manage a
mere 40. This disproportion points to the efficiency and ne-
cessity of relegating mental activities to the unconscious--
and helps us to understand why appeals to the unconscious
can be so effective.
One of the better demonstrations of the power of primal
cues, however, came about by accident. In the 1970s, a clinical
psychologist from Long Island named Martin Eisenstadt
tracked the parental histories of every person who was emi-
nent enough to have earned a half-page-long entry in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica--a roster of 573 subjects, spanning
Homer to John F. Kennedy, a rich mix of writers, scientists,
political leaders, composers, soldiers, philosophers, and ex-
plorers. Eisenstadt wasn't interested in motivation per se; in
fact, he was testing a theory he'd developed relating genius
and psychosis to the loss of a parent or parents at an early age.
But he wound up constructing an elegant demonstration of
the relationship between motivation and primal cues.
Within this accomplished group the parental-loss club
turned out to be standing room only. Political leaders who lost
a parent at an early age include Julius Caesar (father, 15),
Napoleon (father, 15), fifteen British prime ministers, Wash-
ington (father, 11), Jefferson (father, 14), Lincoln (mother, 9),
Lenin (father, 15), Hitler (father, 13), Gandhi (father, 15),
Primal Cues 113
Stalin (father, 11), and (we reflexively paste in) Bill Clinton
(father, infant). Scientists and artists on the list include
Copernicus (father, 10), Newton (father, before birth), Dar-
win (mother, 8), Dante (mother, 6), Michelangelo (mother, 6),
Bach (mother and father, 9), Handel (father, 11), Dostoyev-
sky (mother, 15), Keats (father, 8; mother, 14), Byron (father,
3), Emerson (father, 8), Melville (father, 12), Wordsworth
(mother, 7; father, 13), Nietzsche (father, 4), Charlotte,
Emily, and Anne Bront� (mother at 5, 3, and 1, respectively),
Woolf (mother, 13), and Twain (father, 11). On average, the
eminent group lost their first parent at an average age of 13.9,
compared with 19.6 for a control group. All in all, it's a list
deep and broad enough to justify the question posed by a 1978
French study: do orphans rule the world?*
The genetic explanation for world-class achievement is
useless in this case, because the people on this list are linked by
* For the sake of updating Eisenstadt, here's a partial list of show business stars who
lost a parent before the age of eighteen: Comedy: Steve Allen (1, father), Tim Allen
(11, father), Lucille Ball (3, father), Mel Brooks (2, father), Drew Carey (8, father),
Charlie Chaplin (12, father), Stephen Colbert (10, father), Billy Crystal (15, father),
Eric Idle (6, father), Eddie Izzard (6, father), Bernie Mac (16, mother), Eddie Murphy
(8, father), Rosie O'Donnell (11, mother), Molly Shannon (4, mother), Martin Short
(17, mother), Red Skelton (infant, father), Tom and Dick Smothers (7 and 8, father),
Tracey Ullman (6, father), Fred Willard (11, father). Music: Louis Armstrong, Tony
Bennett, 50 Cent, Aretha Franklin, Bob Geldof, Robert Goulet, Isaac Hayes, Jimi
Hendrix, Madonna, Charlie Parker. The ignition effect seems to be present in the
Beatles (Paul McCartney, 14, mother, and John Lennon, 17, mother) and U2 (Bono, 14,
mother, and Larry Mullen, 15, mother). Movies: Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Mia
Farrow, Jane Fonda, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sir Ian McKellen, Robert Redford, Julia
Roberts, Martin Sheen, Barbra Streisand, Charlize Theron, Billy Bob Thornton,
Benicio del Toro, James Woods. This list doesn't, of course, include those who lost con-
tact with a parent as the result of divorce, illness, or some other factor, a list that would
fill a book in itself. One of the clearest expressions of the way loss causes ignition comes
from composer-producer Quincy Jones, whose mother suffered from schizophrenia. "I
never felt like I had a mother," he said. "I used to sit in the closet and say, `If I don't have
a mother, I don't need one. I'm going to make music and creativity my mother.' It never
let me down. Never."
114 The Talent Code
shared life events that have nothing to do with chromosomes.
But when we look at parental loss as a signal hitting a motiva-
tional trigger, the connection becomes clearer. Losing a par-
ent is a primal cue: you are not safe. You don't have to be a
psychologist to appreciate the massive outpouring of energy
that can be created by a lack of safety; nor do you have to
be a Darwinian theorist to appreciate how such a response
might have evolved. This signal can alter the child's relation-
ship to the world, redefine his identity, and energize and orient
his mind to address the dangers and possibilities of life--a re-
sponse Eisenstadt summed up as "a springboard of immense
compensatory energy." Or as Dean Keith Simonton wrote of
parental loss in Origins of Genius, "[S]uch adverse events nur-
ture the development of a personality robust enough to over-
come the many obstacles and frustrations standing in the path
of achievement."
If we take it one step further and presume that many of
the world-class scientists, artists, and writers on Eisenstadt's
list accomplished the requisite ten thousand hours of deep
practice, the mechanism of their ignition becomes more ap-
parent. Losing a parent at a young age was not what gave
them talent; rather, it was the primal cue--you are not safe--
that, by tripping the ancient self-preserving evolutionary
switch, provided energy for their efforts, so that they built
their various talents over the course of years, step by step,
wrap by wrap. Seen this way, the superstars on Eisenstadt's
list are not uniquely gifted exceptions, but rather the logical
extensions of the same universal principles that govern all
of us: (1) talent requires deep practice; (2) deep practice re-
quires vast amounts of energy; (3) primal cues trigger huge
outpourings of energy. And as George Bartzokis might point
out, the eminent people, on average, received this signal as
Primal Cues 115
young teens, during the brain's key development period, in
which information-processing pathways are particularly re-
ceptive to myelin.*
The second example of ignition originates a little closer to
home. In our family of six, our daughter Zoe is the youngest
and, for her age (seven), the speediest. Her foot speed seems
perfectly natural, and yet since I started learning about
myelin, I began to wonder how much of Zoe's foot speed is
innate, and how much of it stems from the combination of
practice and motivation she gets from being the youngest?
I undertook a highly unscientific survey of my friends'
children. The pattern seemed to hold: the youngest kids were
frequently the fastest runners. It became more interesting
when I broadened the sample group slightly. Here are the
birth-order ranks of the world-record progression in the 100-
meter dash, with the most recently set world record first, the
previous world record second, and so on.
1. Usain Bolt (second of three children)
2. Asafa Powell (sixth of six)
3. Justin Gatlin (fourth of four)
4. Maurice Greene (fourth of four)
5. Donovan Bailey (third of three)
6. Leroy Burrell (fourth of five)
7. Carl Lewis (third of four)
* Of course, a parent's death or absence doesn't always lead to talent or achievement.
The same event can be debilitating--hence Eisenstadt's link to psychosis--or, in cases
where the deceased parent was abusive, an improvement in the child's life. The point of
Eisenstadt's list is proportion: that people who lose a parent at a young age, on the
whole, have more opportunity, means, and motive to use that immense compensatory
energy to grow myelin and skill. Whether they use it to become John Lennon or John
Wilkes Booth is a matter of fate and circumstance.
118 The Talent Code
at about the same time and happened to be taught by the same
instructor, David Burnett of the Harlem School for the Arts.
They also make a useful comparison because one of the pro-
grams succeeded and the other did not.
To predict beforehand which program would succeed
might seem easy. Wadleigh enjoyed numerous advantages
over PS 233, including an arts-focused curriculum, parents
who had, by enrolling their child, expressed a belief in the
value of art education, students who presumably had a real in-
terest in music, a brand-new auditorium, and a budget that
permitted the school to purchase violins for every student
who wanted to play. PS 233, on the other hand, was an arche-
typal urban public school. The students had no apparent incli-
nation toward violins or arts in general. What's more, the
foundation that funded the program could afford only fifty vi-
olins, most of which were too small, forcing Burnett to hold
an Opus 118�style lottery to determine who got in. As the
programs got under way, the result seemed preordained:
Wadleigh would succeed, and PS 233 would fail.
And yet, a year later, it was the Wadleigh program that was
sputtering and the PS 233 program that was going strong. The
Wadleigh program was beset with discipline problems, and
the PS 233 group was well behaved. The Wadleigh students
teased the good players and discouraged them from continu-
ing, and the PS 233 students did their practice and got steadily
better. When asked to explain, Burnett can only say that the
Wadleigh program "just failed to take off."
Why? I believe part of the answer can be found in Small
Wonders, the documentary film on Opus 118. Early in the film,
its makers capture the scene of Tzavaras visiting a first-grade
class to perform music and tell them about a group to which
they might someday belong--if they are fortunate. As she ex-
Primal Cues 119
plains how the lottery works, the kids bounce up and down
nervously; they clamor for applications to take home to their
parents. A week or two goes by; a sense of anticipation builds.
Tzavaras returns to the classroom carrying a stack of winning
applications. Then, to rapt silence, she proceeds to announce
the winners' names. On hearing their names, the kids react as
if they'd just received an electric shock. They dance. They
scream. They flail their arms in joy. They race home to tell
their parents the thrilling news: they won! They don't know
the A string from the A train, but it doesn't matter in the least.
Like the long-term-commitment group in Gary McPherson's
study, they are ignited, and it makes all the difference.
If talent is a gift sprinkled randomly through the world's
children, we would naturally expect Wadleigh's program to
be the one to succeed. But if talent is a process that can be ig-
nited by primal cues, then the reason for PS 233's success is
clear. The genetic potential in both schools was the same; the
teaching was the same; the difference was, the students at
Wadleigh received the motivational equivalent of a gentle
nudge, while the PS 233 students were ignited by primal cues
of scarcity and belonging. In each case the kids reacted the
same way any of us would.
Let's return to the question that started the previous sec-
tion. Why was Tom Sawyer able to persuade Ben to help
him whitewash the fence? The answer is that Tom flung
primal cues at Ben with the speed and accuracy of a circus
knife-thrower. In the space of a few sentences, he managed
to hit bull's-eyes of exclusivity ("All I know is, it suits Tom
Sawyer . . . I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand . . .") and
scarcity ("Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every
day? . . . Aunt Polly's awful particular about this fence"). His
gestures and body language echoed the same messages: he
120 The Talent Code
"contemplated the boy a bit," and "stepped back to note the
effect--added a touch here and there--criticized the effect
again," as though engaged in a work of the greatest impor-
tance. If Tom had only sent one or two of these signals, or if
they'd been spaced over the course of a leisurely hour, his
cues would have had no effect; Ben's trigger would have re-
mained untouched. But the rich combination of cues, pepper-
ing Ben's ignition switch one after another, succeeded in
cracking open his vault of motivational energy.
We usually regard this passage as an example of a sophisti-
cated con job: clever Tom Sawyer hoodwinking gullible yokels
into doing unsavory work. Primal-cue psychology allows us
to see it in a slightly different way. Tom's signals worked not
because Ben was some thoughtless dupe. (Indeed, a thought-
less dupe would have shrugged and trudged on to the swim-
ming hole.) Tom's signals worked because Ben, as Twain wrote,
was "watching every move" and was "absorbed." Ben's was
the response of an attentive kid who saw in Tom Sawyer's
work something attractive and who was ignited--not unlike
the response of attentive kids in South Korea or Russia, or of
Zoe watching her siblings run ahead of her. Ignition doesn't
follow normal rules because it's not designed to follow rules.
It's designed only to work, to give us energy for whatever
tasks we choose--or, as we 'll see next, for whatever tasks fate
chooses for us.