I’ve always liked the word “talent.” It rolls from the tongue and snaps back to a hard consonant, forming the phonetic equivalent of a whip. This is fitting, since there’s an image of talent being whip-like. We have phrases like “whip smart” and “smart as a whip” to describe the snappy qualities of talented people. In fact, meeting a truly talented person is like hearing the crack of a whip. It jolts you. You sit up straighter.
Whip-like talent makes most peoples’ lives easier. When a whip walks in the door, you know they’re good. You can extend an offer, email the term sheet, make the introduction, and rest easy knowing you’ve made the ex-ante correct decision.
If your talent-search strategy is simply to wait for obvious whips to walk through the door, Cowen and Gross have words for you. You’re leaving value on the table. Not only are you unlikely to close a whip (unless you have the deepest pockets or the flashiest brand), but you’re also going to miss the non-obvious talent. How we see a per
son’s abilities is distorted by culture, communication mediums, race, gender, supposed disabilities, idiosyncrasies, our own biases, and the bad questions we ask interviewees. Finding people with the “creative spark” — as Cowen and Gross call it — which can transform your organization requires digging.
Fortunately, Cowen and Gross wrote a book to help you dig. It's called Talent and it covers tips on interviewing, how to evaluate talent online, and the role of intelligence in job performance. It also discusses five-factor personality theory as a starting point for evaluating talent, and even suggest their own more “exotic” personality categories. To top it off, they meditate on the links between so-called disabilities and talent, how one might accurately rate female and minority talent, and how to persuade talent to join your cause. Rob Henderson provides a more detailed summary here. It’s the type of book you wish every interviewer you’ve ever had had read.
What Talent doesn’t do is provide a general theory of talent. I finished the book more confident I could identify top talent, but still confused on the essential qualities of a talented person. To be clear, Cowen and Gross aren’t trying to give a detailed explanation of what talent is. It’s enough to know what traits are associated with talent to find it in the world. If we know talented people and only talented people tend to have X bundle of traits, we can find the talent by looking for the X bundles. This attitude is useful, but not satisfying.
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I think there’s a connection between talent and bullshit. The most talented people I know are bullshit repulsers. They have extreme clarity in their domain(s) of expertise. Professionally, they understand what the situation calls for, and ignore everything else. Personally, they know what their values are, and ignore everything else. Within a specific discipline, be it biology, or management, they cut to the heart of the problem and ignore everything else. The product of perspicuity across all (or most) domains of your life is likely to be talent.
Some might call what I’m describing focus, with a healthy dose of intelligence and self-knowledge thrown in. It’s a fair characterization, but I think it’s insufficient. It doesn’t capture the contempt for mediocrity talented people feel. Bezos and Jobs were famous for their caustic remarks. If Bezos heard a bad idea, he’d ask employees if they were “lazy or incompetent” and claim he’d “kill himself” if he heard it again. Job’s antics are well-documented, so I won’t repeat them here. Still, that’s why I think something more acerbic than “focus and intelligence and self-knowledge” is essential to talent. I’m going to, flippantly, call it a violent bullshit allergy.
A violent bullshit allergy seems to account for other aspects of talent as well. Talented people tend to be forthright, ignoring what they might see as illegitimate social conventions. For instance, the most talented person I’ve met so far opened our first conversation with “what are your dreams?” They also tend to be ambitious, which may be a consequence of realizing how arguments for why something “isn’t possible” are often bullshit. They are also independent-minded, which makes sense, given they’re not susceptible to consensus-based arguments. Talented people are also more energetic on average, which makes sense, given they need to work hard to repulse BS all day. They’re also not preoccupied with status, popularity, or social jockeying, unless it serves some greater, bullshitless goal. Talented people, in my experience, also don’t like politics.
I admit, there’s a curious sort of talent a violent bullshit allergy doesn’t address well. Individuals with it are sensitive to bullshit, but aren’t exactly allergic to it. In fact, they wield it like a weapon. They can overpower their opponents with a sheer volume of bullshit, or create sweet-smelling BS that they place strategically to achieve their own ends. There is at least one study connecting bullshitting ability with intelligence.
These people are clearly talented, but more so as navigators of the social world. I call the skill they have “bullshit bending,” and it has powerful practitioners. LBJ was one of them. By many accounts, he was full of strategic bullshit. Robert Kennedy said LBJ “lie[d] continually about everything. He lie[d] even when he didn’t have to lie.” Perhaps it’s true these people are allergic to BS, just not their own. Or, they have an extreme BS sensitivity, which allows them to identify bullshit out in the world, and where theirs can do the most good (call this a sort of taste in bullshit?).
At the least, one’s relationship with bullshit is at the heart of a certain sort of talent. BS, then, becomes a unifying concept we can use to understand the rest of Talent.
An indicator Cowen and Gross have bullshit on their minds comes in the first chapter. In addition to just teaching you how to identify talent, the authors point to broader ambitions:
“Most of all, we oppose and seek to revise the bureaucratic approach to talent search […]. The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else. It demands that everyone play by a set of overly rigid rules, that individualism be hidden or maybe even stamped out, and that there is never any hurry, so another set of procedures can be applied, virtually without end. At the end of all this you have a hiring process full of “kludge” and “sludge” […] and you will attract candidates of comparable temperament” (8).
“Kludge” and “sludge” look and smell a lot like bullshit. A reading here can be if you make your hiring process BS-less, you’ll attract people unencumbered with bullshit. These people, on our model of talent, are much more likely to be high performers. This pushes me towards viewing Talent as an exercise in hygiene. Cowen and Gross may be showing us how to scrub ourselves of bullshit with the eye towards becoming a clean and shining beacon to the talented.
They start the cleanse with interview questions. This is fitting, since the dynamics of an interview breed BS. The interviewer is trying to evaluate the interviewee. The interviewee knows this, and so he wants to impress. Attempting to cultivate someone else’s impression of you is a common catalyst for bullshit. The interviewer can also be bringing BS to the table for a variety of reasons. Her job is to judge people, but it’s normally rude to act like one is judging another, so she has to act like she’s not, although it’s common knowledge that’s the point of the conversation. She also might want to garnish her image, or the image of her employer, which can create BS. A third possibility has to do with talent-evaluation as a discipline. It’s very hard and the cost of error can be high. Often, this leads people to mimic successful, or seemingly successful, peers. The interviewer then can be spouting interview questions she learned from others, but hasn’t thought much about.
Cowen and Gross put it nicely in the following quote. Although, I’d emphasize this applies to both the interviewer and interviewee.
“The interview is fundamentally about how to engage with people, and if you cannot engage with people, you cannot break through the combination of bravado, nerves and possibly even deceit that people bring to their interviews.” (23)
How, then, do you engage with people? This involves being friendly, trustworthy, and unladen with bullshit. Here is a brief list of bullshit-eliminating interview tips contained in Talent. You can (and should!):
Retire “classic” interview questions. Everyone likely has a rehearsed and robotic answer to these.
Ask the same question again and again (i.e. “what’s you best idea?”) until the interviewee runs out of answers
Get out of the “interview mode” and into the conversational mode.
Ask “meta-questions.” These are questions about the interview you’re having right now. Examples include “how did you prepare for this interview?” and “how do you think this conversation is going?”
Cowen and Gross don’t present them as such, but each of these can be interpreted as whittling away the bullshit that lies between you and the interviewee. When you retire “classic” questions, you’re not allowing the interviewee to come to you with some prepared BS about their greatest weakness or a time they went above and beyond. When you ask a question over and over again, you’re trying to get beyond whatever canned answer an interviewee may have prepared. “Meta-questions” ideally force the interviewee out of “impress mode” and into a more authentic “reflect and evaluate mode.”
Large chunks of the rest of the book can be reinterpreted as a crusade against bullshit. The chapter on intelligence dispels some of the BS surrounding how we rate cognitive skills in evaluating general, creative talent. The chapter on Five-Factor personality theory gives us an outline of the abilities, and limitations of the model in evaluating talent. In other words, it tells us when Five-Factor descends into bullshit. The chapters on disabilities, women, and minorities suggest theories on how to identify talent within these groups, rather than resort to preconceived notions (bullshit), commentary from less sophisticated authors (probably bullshit) or not giving this area much thought (a sort of bullshit-by-omission).
Bullshit also makes an appearance when Cowen and Gross mention scouting as a way to identify talent. Scouts work best when it’s relatively transparent if someone has the foundations for the talent in question. For instance, potential models look, well, model-like. There aren’t many barriers to determining at a glance whether someone is tall or has killer cheekbones. The same is true, to a lesser extent, in Venture Capital. It can be simple to learn whether someone is generally sharp and also working on a startup. In other words, there’s not much bullshit between you and the features that indicate talent. In contrast, it’s more difficult to tell at a glance whether someone is a skilled tuba player or ballroom dancer.
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At this point, you might be disappointed by the review. I haven’t recited all the useful parts of the book so you don’t have to read it yourself. I’ve also said what makes talented people talented is a severe bullshit allergy. Under the hood, this amounts to saying “talented people do what matters and don’t do what doesn’t matter.” I didn’t reproduce the book’s insights and, apparently, provided no substantive ones of my own. What gives?
I think my contribution is in strengthening the connection between “things that don’t matter” and “bullshit.” The former is a sterile, abstract phrase. The latter is excrement. Tightening the connection should remind us the things that don’t matter are real, they smell, and we should heave and groan when we step in them. Revive your sense of metaphor and graft all the properties of real bullshit onto the figurative sort. Once you see the flies buzzing, once the smell of steamy waste floods your nose, exhort yourself to shovel shit out of your life. It’s easier to focus on what does matter when what doesn’t is an assault on your senses.
And your sensitivity to talent may increase. It can be to others' or even your own.