Malcolm Gladwell: prediction

Transcript context

…Human potential and talent: that’s a key theme running throughout a lot of your work. Let me ask you two or three questions on that. Do you think that today we’re actually working too hard to measure and spot talent very early, and thus we’re branding and marking people and actually telling a lot of people they shouldn’t do activity X because they’re measured too quickly? Yeah. My friend David Epstein, who wrote The Sports Gene, is really, really interesting on this subject, with respect to sports, and points out that what really makes for successful, elite athletes is a broad early base. The last thing you want to do is to overspecialize too soon with a kid, for a number of reasons. One is the phenomenon of baseball pitchers having all kinds of arm problems in their teens, a product of kids simply pitching too much, too soon. But you can generalize from that: We think that an awful lot of injuries that elite athletes are suffering in their late adolescence are due to the fact that they have been doing the same repetitive motions from an early age. We think that burnout is also a function of this. But there also is a very interesting argument beyond those to say that there is a body of skills that you only learn if you have a broad early base. So the basketball analogy would be Hakeem Olajuwon being a soccer player, or Steve Nash being a soccer player, or in tennis, [Roger] Federer being a soccer player. There are extremely valuable things about basketball that are most usefully learned on a soccer pitch when you’re very young. That is a beautiful analogy for academic work as well, or for any sort of intellectual work: that the best preparation for something over here when you’re very young may be something over here. And then the third thing is the most important and the thing you’re alluding to, that we do a really bad job of spotting early talent simply because you can’t. I’m a runner and every runner knows this. The kids who are the great runners in their early teens, and I was one of them, are not the ones who end up being the world-class athletes. Sometimes they are, but there’s a huge changeover in the ranking of runners between 12 and 18. At least — when I look at the ranks of world-class runners and you look at their times — at least half of them had mediocre times. I was, at the age of 13, the fastest miler for my age in Canada. By 21, I was useless and washed up and no longer . . . [laughter] There was a kid who I used to destroy when I was 13. He went on to be essentially world class, right on the fringes of world class. I used to kill him. I mean it was just not even close. Anyone looking at the two of us at 13 would say, “Gladwell’s the talent. This other guy, well he should take up . . .” He was terrible. He ended up running 3:35 for 1500 meters. Let’s say you’re giving advice to the parents and grandparents in the room. You can’t reshape the system, you can’t even control Harvard, but you can tell them what to do for their children. What’s your advice, given all of what you just said?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.