What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.

What does that mean? Well, I did write that and I think I believe it. So if you look at the

history of great talent, we tend to see people at their peak and we assume that they were just naturals.

Steph Curry could always drain three-pointers.

Mozart was, you know, a natural musician.

And in some cases, if you trace back, these people were child prodigies.

And Mozart, I think, was a great example. But for every Mozart,

it turns out that there are multiple box in Beethoven's who actually bloomed late and took a

long time to improve. And I guess the study that really opened my eyes to this was Benjamin Bloom

looked at world class athletes,

musicians, scientists, artists, and he went back to their childhoods and wanted to know,

were they innately just brilliant at these skills from day one? And the consistent answer was no,

that very often their early teachers and coaches,

even their own parents, had no idea how great they were going to become. And when they did stand

out, it wasn't for natural ability. It was because they were unusually passionate. They love to

learn. And they had early opportunities to get lots of practice in. And I think what that suggests to me is that

sometimes we overestimate the importance of raw talent and we underestimate the importance of

creating opportunities that open doors for people and then giving them a chance to actually showcase

their enthusiasm. What about motivation? Why does that, where does that come from in this context?

I think in a lot of the cases, if you look at the Bloom study at least, the world-class performers

tended to have an early teacher or coach who made learning fun. And I think that's not common

for a lot of us, right? Like learning to do scales if you're a musician, doing drills if you're an athlete,

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