Talent isn’t a gift we're born with – it’s a signal we’ve been reading completely wrong. Author Daniel Coyle breaks down the common traits shared by successful people, and why environment, not innate ability, is the variable that ties them all together. Daniel Coyle on where talent really comes from, how great cultures are built, and what it means to flourish I'm Daniel Coyle.
I write about the science of human potential. I'm the author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and my new book, Flourish. Today on Big Think, we're going to be talking about talent, highly successful groups, and thriving communities.
We live at a really interesting moment in history. Unlike all of our ancestors, we live in this moment of peak individualism. And so whenever we see achievement, we focus on that individual.
We focus on what makes them special. We focus on their habits, their behaviors. But like all matters of focus, focus makes you a little bit blind.
There's all kinds of other currents, connections, and more ecological powers that are making someone improve. If you were to ask Hemingway, if you were to look at Hemingway and look at him through the lens of individualism, you would say, well, what makes you great and it would be about his hard work. It would be about his particular gift, his talent.
And that's a very sexy story to tell. It's a very beautiful story to tell that he's sort of a magical person and that Steve Jobs is a magical person, that Michael Jordan is a magical person, and that Baryshnikov is a magical person. We get kind of addicted looking at through this individualistic lens.
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