dorkitude

Photo

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:27:11 -0700

Photo

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:11:39 -0700

How to Identify Talent

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:54:00 -0700

I’m blessed with a huge and growing network of people with extremely high levels of talent. This explains how I identify them. My current endeavor is an experiment with six such people, and I must say it’s working extremely well.

In 2009, Paul Graham (aka PG) wrote an essay called The Anatomy of Determination. The essay was republished in the book Hackers and Painters. Like pretty much all of PG’s essays, this one is extremely thought-provoking. Before reading on, you should go read it if you haven’t already done so.

I love this essay, and I frequently cite it in conversation. There are, however, a few statements in it that I would respond to.

Here’s one:

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

PG’s point is well-taken, but I don’t think the italicized bit is necessarily a part of the reason.

It’s not that “determination starts to look like talent”, but rather that talent is not commonly observable. Everyone knows that talent exists, but to most it’s an invisible hand that contributes to a person’s observable outcomes.

Some people are extremely good at identifying talent intuitively (PG himself comes to mind, as do folks like Brad Feld, Steve Jobs, and Bill “Coach” Campbell). But how do we solve this problem for everyone else?

I have some idea of how we might.

Something that everyone can observe is Effectiveness, which is obviously related to Talent. I believe the relationship between Effort and Talent looks like this:

Effectiveness = Effort * Talent

And it makes sense for Effectiveness to get mistaken for Talent, because the two are directly related.

Even if the ability to detect Talent is rare, everyone on earth can observe Effectiveness and Effort. So in theory, it should be possible for anyone to deduce a person’s level of Talent by observing the other two.

To re-frame PG’s point in this framework, we would need to rewrite the relationship like this:

Effectiveness = Effort^X * Talent^Y

PG is essentially saying that, in most domains, the public tends to overestimate Y and underestimate X.

This certainly helps explain my little corner of the world. Over the last decade, I’ve noticed that many of (in my estimation) the smartest and most talented people I know didn’t get the best grades in school. About 90% of them earned a B or lower GPA in college. However, they barely had to do any work to get those grades. Their Effort was very low compared to their Effectiveness — a phenomenon that could only be explained by high Talent.

I believe if you could take people like that, and then somehow inspire them to produce high levels of Effort, their Effectiveness would be off the charts.

On the other hand, people with insanely high Effectiveness must also have high Talent, because Effort can only explain so much, and has a clear ceiling — with the exception of Hermione Grainger, we’re each stuck with the limits of 7 days/week, 24 hours/day.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this stuff, you should follow me on Twitter here.

-Kyle Wild

Comments welcome below, or on Hacker News.

"In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 22:07:00 -0700

“In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.”

- Paul Graham’s essay, The Anatomy of Determination

"As far as the iOS library integration process, your SDK is quite easy to use. I don’t have any..."

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:21:27 -0700

“

As far as the iOS library integration process, your SDK is quite easy to use. I don’t have any problem and issue. It just works.

Probably you are looking for some other feedback, but I just don’t have any at this moment.

”

- an early keen.io user (via keenio)

Proof that it’s totally worth your time to develop a...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:09:00 -0700

Proof that it’s totally worth your time to develop a cohesive @AngelList strategy.

Photo

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:26:21 -0700

"3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs. … 5. Never write more than two pages..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:26:04 -0700

“3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
…
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.”

- David Ogilvy, 10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy

"Small but consistent investments in transparency, relationship development and team development are..."

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:37:26 -0700

“Small but consistent investments in transparency, relationship development and team development are the foundational work of creating scale in your organization… the depth of knowledge, accuracy of understanding and intensity of relationships that this kind transparency can bring will far outweigh the tactical value of the checks your investors have written to fund your business.”

- Chris Devore, What does transparency buy you?

"If you are a startup building a SaaS product, you have two paths. On one side, you can replicate..."

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:33:45 -0700

“If you are a startup building a SaaS product, you have two paths. On one side, you can replicate the Oracle’s and SAP’s of the world that force a sales process that is difficult and opaque. On the other hand, you can be super transparent.”

- Mark Birch, Vendor Transparency and Future of Enterprise SaaS Sales

If you're an oddball, be genuine

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:26:00 -0700

If you’re an oddball, be genuine, because there are people out there who believe in oddballs, and you don’t want to camouflage yourself from them!

I’m one of them. And if I believe in you, I want to help you succeed - and if I’m being honest, it’s not just out of personal loyalty or altruism, but because your success will serve as vindication of my faith that the future both depends on and belongs to the oddballs - to the eccentrics, rebels, misfits, and polyglots among us.

I suspect everyone else’s incentive structure works a bit like that as well. So be genuine and let your freak flag fly.

"Replication of code sequences isn’t life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but..."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:28:21 -0700

“Replication of code sequences isn’t life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life.”

- George Dyson

How to uninstall all ruby gems from your environment (or current rvm)

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:35:00 -0800

I found a nice little ‘nix command for uninstalling all gems in your ruby environment (nice if you’re gem building and want to test dependency resolution):

gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

Exactly! BigCo CMO’s: Spend more of your marketing...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:12:00 -0800

Exactly!

BigCo CMO’s: Spend more of your marketing budget on building high-quality mobile apps, and less of it on stupid crap. And when you get serious about analyzing user engagement to prove out ROI, come talk to us at Keen.

"Culture is not just the immune system for your company—it is the basis of how you build, function..."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 08:57:55 -0800

“Culture is not just the immune system for your company—it is the basis of how you build, function and evolve as a producer of products. It should be omnipresent on your roadmap, given attention and never thought of as an option or afterthought when resources get constrained.”

- “Culture is a Product” by Ethan Kaplan (via marksbirch)

"I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether..."

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:28:00 -0800

“I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.”

- Ray Dalio (as quoted in the New Yorker)

Photo

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:31:39 -0800

Photo

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:15:47 -0800

keenio: “Identify critical market pain as early as possible and...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:18:48 -0800

keenio:

“Identify critical market pain as early as possible and don’t overbuild.” -Jason Cronkhite

keen io: Don't just make a technology, make a business.

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:56:40 -0800

keen io: Don't just make a technology, make a business.:

keenio:

A common struggle faced by founding teams is understanding the distinction between creating a technology and creating a business. History’s entrepreneurial graveyard is ripe with brilliant, unappreciated inventions — technologies created by talented engineers who, sadly, didn’t know how (or…