Talent is overrated
Distilling Books - Number 34
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The following letter is part of our “Distilling Books” collection, in which we extract the most revealing ideas from literature.
🏷️ Categories: Continuous improvement, Deliberate practice.
The biggest obstacle to becoming extraordinary is believing in talent.
Talent is perhaps one of the most overrated qualities of all, because as long as you keep giving this high value to something innate that the best were born with, you will never feel compelled to build yourself differently and rise up.
It is a comfortable belief.
It allows you to explain why some move forward in leaps and bounds while others remain in the same place year after year. And yes, there are those who have a better predisposition to develop a skill, but from there to that being a definitive, undeniable advantage, there is an abysmal and hardly believable difference.
That is what I understood when I finished reading Talent Is Overrated (2010).
Most will read this book as just another title on “productivity.” I think it is much more dangerous than that. Because, if you truly apply what it explains, it gives you the weapons to move forward with an overwhelming advantage in almost any area.
And it doesn’t talk about working harder. Nor does it talk about motivation.
It talks about the complete system that determines why a few people improve throughout their entire lives while others repeat the same pattern year after year. After studying decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, learning sciences, practical philosophy, and systems theory, the book gives us the ultimate conclusion.
The 21st-century advantage consists of 5 skills to elevate yourself in any field.
In this deep guide, we are going to dismantle them one by one.
SKILL 1 — Metacognition
Thinking about thinking
If you could only develop one of these five skills, it would have to be this one, because the other four depend on it to be activated. Metacognition is the ability to observe the workings of your own mind. It is a second level of consciousness superimposed on the first, like a camera rising above the scene to film yourself acting within it.
At level one, you simply think: you feel anger, you act with anger due to the brain activation of the amygdala region, and you don’t even realize that anger was steering the wheel.
At level two, you observe how you think: you notice the anger, identify its source, and consciously choose to stop for 1 minute to face it instead of being dragged away by its current. The same happens with confirmation bias—you anticipate it by purposely looking for opposing evidence.
John Flavell, the psychologist who formally coined the term in 1979, described three components that shape it: metacognitive knowledge (knowing how your own mind works), monitoring (observing it in real time), and regulation (adjusting the process based on what is observed). In reality, most people never develop even the first component.
Years later, the prestigious psychologist Daniel Kahneman formalized it differently in his distinction between System 1 and System 2 (2012).
System 1 is automatic, fast, intuitive, and governs the vast majority of our daily decisions without us even noticing.
System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful, and only activates when something forces it to. Metacognition is, literally, the mechanism that activates System 2. It is the switch that takes you out of autopilot.
And it is not a modern discovery.
Socrates said it twenty-five centuries ago when he stated that the unexamined life is not worth living. Marcus Aurelius, in turn, wrote reflections called “meditations” precisely to observe his own thought patterns before reacting to them, and Buddhism built an entire contemplative tradition around a single principle: meditation as a form of inner analysis.
Everyone, regardless of time or place, reached the same conclusion.
You need metacognition.
Without metacognition: Stimulus → Reaction
With metacognition: Stimulus → Observation → Evaluation → Response
Metacognitive Action Plan
Every night, spend about 10 minutes answering these questions based on your day:
What repetitive thought from today deserves to be examined?
Why did I react the way I did today in that situation?
What balance of arguments did I weigh in today’s important decision?
What biases might have affected me?
What was I assuming without having verified it?
What other explanation, equally plausible, did I not consider?
The tool is a simple journal with space for metacognition.
A maximum of just 10 minutes will be enough.
SKILL 2 — Feedback
Excellence depends on the quality of the data you collect about your actions.
Many receive tons of results, keys, and clues about their performance in certain areas, but they overlook all this information only to do the same thing tomorrow or, at best, be guided by the intuition of experience.
Performance cannot be high-quality if the analysis was that poor.
Some will say, “I won the match because I was sharper.” Experts look for specific, pragmatic information: “I won because I improved my anticipation ability in the second half of the match, and I lost ground in the first half because my reading of the opponent was incorrect in the initial 20 minutes.”
Do you see the difference?
The result tells you if you passed the exam. We don’t care about that. What matters to us is precise, pragmatic information about what we need to adjust in our study technique and approach to the exam in order to improve.
Scientific Foundations
Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, explained back in a 1943 article (Behavior, Purpose and Teleology) a principle that applies to both rockets and human beings: every system improves only through feedback.
A rocket that does not receive continuous information about its deviation from the trajectory never reaches its destination, no matter how much fuel it has.
A human being who does not receive continuous information about their deviation from their goals will never get there, no matter how many hours they work.
And years later, performance expert and psychologist Anders Ericsson confirmed it with his theory of deliberate practice: you can make ten thousand attempts at something and learn nothing if you never know precisely what you did wrong in each failure.
Imagine two basketball players practicing their shot for 1 hour:
Player A takes 50 shots, records how many they miss, records themselves on video while shooting to check their technique, and after each session, analyzes what they did wrong and adjusts their shot.
Player B takes 50 shots, takes long breaks, and chats with friends between shots. They don’t record themselves shooting to see how they do it, nor do they keep any records.
It is obvious who will improve more.
Full process: Action → Result → Analysis → Hypothesis → New test
Daily Plan
After the activity you plan to improve, answer:
What went well, and why specifically did it go well?
What went wrong, and what concrete mechanism caused it?
What am I going to repeat tomorrow because it worked?
What am I going to eliminate because it contributed nothing?
What am I going to experiment with tomorrow that I hadn’t tried before?
To do this, you must know all the key factors that determine your performance in that activity and keep a continuous record of each of them. Never end a day without having extracted at least one piece of useful information from it.
SKILL 3 — Internal Locus
This is, perhaps, the most unknown psychological shift.
The idea is that you must stop facing life’s outcomes as if you were a passive spectator. Don’t ask yourself “why did this happen?”, ask yourself “what part of this depended on me?” This modifies your locus of control. It has been proven that people with an internal locus of control are luckier in life because they act with the belief that they can influence situations (Rotter, 1966).
When you perceive that you can influence outcomes, your initiative changes, and therefore, statistics begin to play in your favor in the long run as you accumulate more and more proactive interactions. That is how luck works.
Pure mathematics.
The Stoics had been training this for over two thousand years. Epictetus summarized it in his idea of separating what is under your control from what is not, and dedicating all your energy exclusively to the former. The weather is not under your control. Your preparation for the weather is. Another person’s opinion of your work is not under your control. The quality of your work is.
That is the key.
Full process: Error → Analyze your influence → Modify your behavior.
For a long time, I stressed out over a common mistake that I want you to avoid. Do not blame yourself for everything, but do take responsibility. Blame is a dead end; taking responsibility means thinking about corrective actions for what does depend on you.
Remember it. If it doesn’t depend on you under any circumstances, forget it.
If it does depend on you, reflect.
Daily Plan
In the face of any major failure, write three columns on a piece of paper:
What I control completely.
What I partially influence.
What I do not control at all.
Work exclusively on the first column. Ignore the third. The second deserves attention, but never at the expense of neglecting the first. The discomfort of the misplaced guilt I used to feel lived in the third column. Don’t fall into that.
This simple practice, repeated over months, reconfigures your vital attitude.
SKILL 4 — Mental Models
The book never says it explicitly, but it underpins everything.
Why do the best find solutions where others only see unsolvable problems?
Because they possess better and more varied tools to view reality.
The theory of mental models describes how we store knowledge. When an expert chess player looks at a board, they don’t see thirty-two individual pieces. What they see are patterns, setups, stories they have already seen thousands of times before, compressed into units of meaning. You don’t see that.
One of the pioneers in seeing this was Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics.
Herbert called it chunking (1974): experts see patterns where beginners see cluttered data. This is the reason why an expert can make a decision in seconds that would take a beginner hours of analysis. It isn’t magic or intuition; it is the direct consequence of having a superior mental map.
Here is the complete list of mental models explained in Jardín Mental so you can dive as deep as possible: [Mental Models]
Action Plan
Build a mental library.
Learn continuously in domains like economics, psychology, biology, physics, history, and statistics, even if your profession has no apparent connection to them. Especially if it doesn’t. In any complex situation, ask yourself: What universal principle, coming from any discipline, explains what I am observing here?
That is the question.
The more models you possess, the fewer times your mind will go blank when faced with a new problem, because almost no problem is new—it is only new to you. In essence, it is a variation of something that has already happened in another context.
SKILL 5 — Exponential Improvement
We could say that this point connects everything mentioned before into a single mechanism.
The best improve iteratively and modify the iteration based on the new information received so they never fall into stagnation. Japanese philosophy popularized this concept under the name of kaizen: continuous improvement through small, constant changes, rather than drastic ones. The industrial world discovered the enormous potential of the idea, and it is what led Japanese companies like Toyota to be among the most efficient on the planet.
The key lies in exponential growth.
A 1% improvement every day implies that each gain builds upon the previous one.
Daily Plan
If you want to write more, measure your actual output. Did you write 300 words a day last week? Then try to reach 325 this week.
If you want to save money, look at your expenses. Did you spend 120 euros on meals out last week? Try to drop to 110 this week.
If you want to walk more, measure your steps. Did you average 6,000 daily steps last week? Step it up to 6,200 this week.
If you want to study consistently, review your focus time. Did you only study 4 hours in total last week? Aim to hit 4.5 this week.
If you want to improve your diet, observe a behavior. Did you eat vegetables in only 3 meals last week? Try to include them in 4 this week.
If you want to read more, review your recent pace. Did you read 10 pages a day last week? Aim to read 11 this week.
Measure backward and improve so subtly that the change produces no friction.
The question you must never stop asking yourself is: What aspect can I improve by 1% compared to last week? Obsess over answering this, do not stop researching, training, and looking for new possibilities.
Improvement is infinite; there is no ceiling.
Nobody is going to force you to do this.
That is precisely why most will never do it, and it gives you such an advantage.
The 99% accumulate experience; the 1% study mental models, make increasingly better decisions, and accumulate learning cycles of exponential growth. Talent is just one more factor in the equation, but not the decisive one if you add all of these.
It is a matter of a system.
Repeat the process long enough, and results will come. It is inevitable.
— Álvaro
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to dive deeper:
P.S. I also offer 1:1 consulting to help you grow on Substack.
If you’re just starting out and don’t know how it works, or if you’ve been at it for a while but are stuck, this will help you. I’ll help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your niche, and build a system tailored to your needs for sustainable growth.
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References
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. URL
Kahneman, D. (2012). Pensar rápido, pensar despacio.
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. URL
Simon, H. A. (1974). How big is a chunk? Science, 183(4124), 482–488. URL
Wiener N., Rosenblueth A., Bigelow J. Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. Philosophy of Science. 1943;10(1):18-24. URL
Watching today's futbol game between France and England was a perfect example of the first points. At half-time, they got the feedback from their coach that they were spread out too much, failed to engage aggressively to obtain and keep the ball in their control, and basically sleep-walked through that portion of the game. Too much vino at lunch. The second half was phenomenal. They played the game, solving their problems, when they woke up and took charge of the ball. WOW! I wish I could watch the Spain-Argentina game. Good luck on that one, Alvaro. I'll be rooting for Spain, hopign they'll kick Argentina's arrogant posterior.