One thing I really liked about Outliers is how it demystified the process of getting to a state where one person is vastly better at something than another. It's not *just* that it takes 10,000 hours (say!); that's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. What's interesting is the way that even a small initial advantage prompts spending more time, which prompts a bigger advantage, which prompts spending more time. Given enough bits of luck to allow that process to continue - it was Outliers, wasn't it, that laid out a long list of points at which Bill Gates was through sheer luck able to keep working with computers - by the point at which the time spent reaches 10,000 hours, the advantage may be huge. It's not just the 10,000 hours, but the whole process that led to the doing of the 10,000 hours. My feeling is that the "talent" element shows itself not so much in the initial advantage but in the repeated choice to keep going with the process of spending the extra time and going to the next level.

E.g. maybe you take two rather musical 5yos and they both start piano, and for a few years they are both keen and they practise more (with or without parental insistence) as they get better, and they take up the musical opportunities that come their way as the result of their early promise. They get to 8 and you can't tell the difference yet. But from here on Child A gets more and more keen on piano and maintains the process of working harder, getting more opportunities, etc., while Child B gets interested in Egyptology and gradually puts less energy into piano. We could also through in a Child C who is just as keen a Child A but gets stymied through living somewhere remote where there isn't a good enough teacher to take her to the next level. We rejoin them at age 16, by which time Child A is thinking about being a professional pianist and B and C have more or less given up. It's easy to say that Child A is "more talented" at piano than Child B - but remember it didn't show for the first three years. And we might twitch a bit at saying that Child A is more talented than Child C, but claiming to know that it isn't so would be silly - we don't *know* that Child C would have continued on a path like Child A rather than like Child B.

Moral: talent is what you have now and can demonstrate. It isn't a fixed innate quantity. It makes sense to ask of a small child "I wonder how much talent at X he will eventually have?" but it doesn't really make sense to ask "I wonder how much talent at X he has?" - he doesn't have it yet.

Indeed this makes sense to me close to home. In DS's first term at school, he was mildly ahead in maths; doing simple sums rather than cementing his ability to count. What got him to being seriously ahead was a self-reinforcing combination of his choice to spend vast quantities of time doing maths, and his parents' willingness and ability to talk about maths, provide resources, etc. etc. At his age I had the impulse to spend the time but I hadn't had the support. He's more talented at maths than I was. Whether he's more talented than I would have been under different circumstances is fortunately unanswerable! (Why yes, I am envious, regardless of how little sense that makes!)

I'm tempted also to make a distinction between "talented" where someone may need to push you up the first few steps - e.g., we remind DS to do his piano practice - and "seriously talented" where you don't need that - nobody has ever needed to remind him to do maths! I don't know how much that holds water; there are certainly musicians who recall being made to practise when young. It may be more about the difference between music and maths. (That said, for my DS, it does seem clear that his maths talent is of a different order from his music talent, and it
was interesting to talk to another mother who has an older DS also into music and maths but the other way round. One thing I noticed was that, if her recollection can be trusted, her DS's early progress in piano was much faster than my DS's, although it doesn't sound as though he practised much more. IOW in that, my guess is he already had a noticeable advantage within weeks of starting. That happens too.)

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