The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (16 page)

—Edmund Morris,
Beethoven
, 2005

He was four years old. Nearly twenty years later, Beethoven emerged as an extraordinary performer and a promising composer. But to assert that either he or Mozart could “always just play” is like saying that a circus clown could always just juggle.

And yet the myth of innate giftedness will live on as long as human beings do.
Today, talk of giftedness still pervades our language, even among scientists who know better
. It transcends age, class, geography, and religion.

Why? Because we rely on the myth. A belief in inborn gifts and limits is much gentler on the psyche:
The reason you aren’t a great opera singer is because you can’t be one. That’s simply the way you were wired
. Thinking of talent as innate makes our world more manageable, more comfortable. It relieves a person of the burden of expectation. It also relieves us of distressing comparisons. If Tiger Woods is innately great, we can feel casually jealous of his genetic luck while avoiding disappointment in ourselves. If, on the other hand, each one of us truly believed ourselves capable of Tiger-like achievement, the burden of expectation and disappointment could be profound.
Did I blow my chance to be a brilliant tennis player? What would I have to do right now to become a great painter?
In the GxE world, these are not only difficult questions to answer, they can be painful to ask.

Our new developmental paradigm will therefore require not just a new intellectual leap, but also a moral, psychological, and spiritual leap. It begins with a much wider consideration of our true assets and liabilities, which are not just biological but also economic, cultural, nutritional, parental, and ecological. The consideration of what we
inherit
as opposed to what we
choose
will also require a radical revision. According to the old nature/nurture paradigm, biology (nature) is thrust upon us, while we choose our environment (nurture). In the new paradigm, we recognize the folly of these hard-and-fast distinctions.

Heredity, it turns out, is not as straightforward as we have been taught. Parents do pass on unaltered DNA to children, but they also pass on additional instructional material—known as epigenetic material—which helps guide how the genes will be expressed.
⁴
While genes themselves do not change (by and large) from generation to generation, the epigenetic instructions
can
change. This means that we
can
impact our genetic legacy.

So much for the old black-and-white view of “nature.”

Meanwhile, we don’t really have the control over our environment that we have so long assumed. To begin with a simple example: food. We theoretically choose what we eat, but in reality almost all of us conform to established cultural norms—we eat what our family eats, what our friends and neighbors eat, what our local community eats, what our nation eats. The same principle applies to our language and idioms, to the information and entertainment we consume, our kids’ schools and activities, the art and aesthetics we’re surrounded by, the people we spend our time with, the basic philosophical notions we subscribe to, and even the air, water, and physical environment that surround us.
Even in a land of free choice, we are mostly shaped by habits, messages, schedules, expectations, social infrastructure, and natural surroundings that are not exclusively our own
. Many of these elements are passed down from generation to generation with little or no change and are difficult or impossible to alter.

Nothing in this book, therefore, is meant to suggest that any of us have complete control over our lives or abilities—or that we are anything close to a blank slate. Rather, our task now is to replace the simplistic notions of “giftedness” and “nature/nurture” with a new landscape: a vast array of influences, many of which are largely out of our control but some of which we can hope to influence as we increase our understanding.

This is a difficult notion and must be allowed to sink in gently. The strong temptation will always be to revert back to the nature/nurture paradigm: if it’s not nature, it must be nurture. If it’s not genes, it must be environment. If it’s not DNA, it must be parenting. But these either/or dichotomies are as misleading as saying that if a person isn’t white he must be black. We cannot allow ourselves to think that way anymore.

So, for example, while there’s no evidence at all that musical talent sprouts from genes, it does not follow that every person has the necessary resources and tools at any age to accrue prodigious musical skills. There could be any number of limiting factors: inadequate early exposure to music, lackluster early brain development, inhospitable family and peer attitudes, poor music education, lack of practice time, lack of motivation, mediocre listening habits, lack of suitable mentor, and so on. These are just some of the actual reasons why each five-year-old has a different level of apparent musical “talent.” Same for every ten-year-old and every thirty-five-year-old. Freedom from genetic oppression doesn’t make us all equal, or truly free.

In sum, while our genes may not keep us from greatness, so many other factors can—some of which we unwittingly contribute to, and many of which may be entirely outside of our awareness and/or control.

What about you: Can
you
be a musical genius? A great poet? A world-class chef? It’s easy to look at yourself and say, “Impossible.” But the simple truth is, no one can make such a judgment early in the process. “The most reasonable assumption seems to be that
talent is much more widely distributed than its manifestation would suggest
,” wrote talent experts Mihály Csikszentmihályi, Kevin Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen in a 1993 study.

Some guiding principles for the ambitious:

FIND YOUR MOTIVATION.

The single greatest lesson from past ultra-achievers is not how easily things came to them, but how irrepressible and resilient they were. You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation (people may—probably will—come to think of you as odd). You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it. It’s impossible to say for how long you will have to do these things. You cannot know the results in advance. Uncommon achievement requires an uncommon level of personal motivation and a massive amount of faith.

The source of motivation is often mysterious, but not always
. One of the quirks of human emotion and psychology is that deep motivation can have more than one possible origin. A person can become joyfully inspired, spiritually devoted, or deeply resentful; motivation can be selfish or vengeful, or arise out of a desperation to prove someone right or wrong; it can be conscious or unconscious.

The 1981 movie
Chariots of Fire
highlights the very different motivations of two Olympic runners in the 1920s, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams. The devout Christian Liddell runs for the glory of God. “I believe that God made me for a purpose,” he says, “but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

Meanwhile, his rival Abrahams, a Jew resentful of anti-Semitic European culture, runs to prove himself to the Christian society and to get revenge. “So what now? Grin and bear it?” one of Abrahams’s friends asks him.

“No, Aubrey. I’m going to take them on. All of them. One by one—and run them off their feet.”

Inspiration may spout after six weeks of life, or sixty years, or never. Where will
yours
come from? A sibling rivalry? A desire to impress your parents or children? An insatiable hunger to be loved? A straightforward fear of failure?

Perhaps you will find it, even more simply, in something you love to do.

Or perhaps you will find it in the anticipation of future regret. Regret turned out to be the final legacy of Lewis Terman’s ill-named Genetic Studies of Genius project. In 1995, three Cornell psychologists did an extensive study of Terman’s now-elderly participants. They titled their paper “Failing to Act: Regrets of Terman’s Geniuses.” The profound lesson was that, at the end of their lives, Terman’s group had exactly the same sorts of regrets as the rest of the elderly population.
They wish they had done more
: gotten more education, worked harder, persevered.

That’s one Lewis Terman lesson that we can all learn from.

BE YOUR OWN TOUGHEST CRITIC.

Recall the resonant words of Nietzsche: “All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.” His observation was dead-on, and timeless.

Hollywood movies suggest that genius is a series of
Eureka!
moments, that true greatness flows effortlessly. We live under the great myth of the perfect first draft. While moments of inspiration do exist, great work is, for the most part, painstaking and cannot happen without the most severe (and constructive) self-criticism.
⁵

BEWARE THE DARK SIDE (BITTERNESS AND BLAME).

Just as practitioners of judo turn an opponent’s attacking energy and momentum into weakness, those with high ambition must constantly turn failure to opportunity. If left to fester into humiliation or bitterness, defeat can take a powerful toll.
“I wake up sometimes and say, ‘What the heck happened to me?’ It’s like a nightmare,” American runner Abel Kiviat told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1990 about his disappointing silver medal in the 1,500-meter Olympic run
. Kiviat was ninety-one when he made this statement—his performance had occurred more than seventy years earlier!

Unless they somehow fuel motivation, feelings of regret and blame dangerously distract from the task at hand, which is to focus constantly on how to improve.

The worst kind of blame, and the most common, is on one’s own biology. This is the great final irony of genetic determinism: the very belief of possessing inferior genes is perhaps our greatest obstacle to success.

IDENTIFY YOUR LIMITATIONS—AND THEN IGNORE THEM.

The pursuit of greatness never makes logical, “kitchen table” sense. Any possible achievements are years off, far from certain, and often difficult even to envision. The practical distance between your current ability and your desired ability is so enormous that your goal will appear to you and anyone near you as simply unattainable. You are obviously not quick enough, tall enough, strong enough; your intonation isn’t true enough; your strokes aren’t smooth enough; your material isn’t funny enough or sad enough or deep enough; you are
mediocre
. How could you possibly expect to be great?

And that’s exactly the point. Greatness isn’t just one step beyond mediocrity; it transcends mediocrity, and it does so by taking one step beyond, then another step beyond, then another step beyond—hundreds of thousands of tiny steps until the distance can neither be measured nor even fathomed. The only way to get there is to go farther, harder, longer than almost everyone else, to push well past the point of logic or reason. If it looked easy or even attainable to most, then many more would get there.

That is why ultra-achievers (of whatever age) are also dreamers. They must have part of their heads stuck in the clouds in order to imagine the unimaginable. They have to ignore obvious shortcomings and what may often look like immovable obstacles. To defer to impediments would amount to instant defeat.

In some respects, committing to this pursuit will make even less practical sense as you get older. With every year, you have less time, less schedule flexibility, less energy, and less brain and muscle plasticity. Given the short-term and long-term commitments involved, it is obviously far more possible for an unmarried twenty-year-old to practice deliberately and intensively for hours every day than a married forty-five-year-old with two young kids and a jumbo mortgage. But thousands of extraordinarily successful achievers will attest that there is no age of impossibility. And in some fields, the wisdom that sometimes accompanies age is an asset that cannot be accrued any other way. “You know, it’s interesting,” says a veteran New York magazine and book editor. “The best writers at age twenty-five are very rarely among the best writers at age fifty. Just staying in the game is difficult, and for those that do, there’s a process of quiet, incremental improvement over time that has no substitute. I’ve found that time is a crucial input into excellence.”

DELAY GRATIFICATION AND RESIST CONTENTEDNESS.

In consumer culture, we are constantly conditioned to gratify our impulses immediately: buy, eat, watch, click—
now
. High achievers transcend these impulses.

Like the Buddha who waits patiently at the gates of heaven until all others have entered before him, young Kenyans are content to run for many years before they can even dream of competing in a major international contest. The tiny violinist screeches out earsplitting sounds not because he thinks a dazzling concerto is right around the corner, but because there is something satisfying in the struggle and in the tiny improvements made along the way. The big prize is envisioned and appreciated as a far-off goal—it is not lusted after. Small accomplishments along the way provide more than enough satisfaction to continue.