5/30/2023 0 Comments Scala dei turchi(You haven’t had your ego truly tested until an eight-year-old takes pity on you on the tennis court.)īut that was only half of the time. For that half of the time, being in a talent hotbed felt like standing amid a herd of running deer: everything moved faster and more fluently than in everyday life. Those expectations were met and exceeded-about half the time. I expected to witness world-class speed, power, and grace. When I started visiting talent hotbeds, I expected to be dazzled. The first clue arrived in the form of an unexpected pattern. Each was a statistical impossibility, a mouse that had not only roared but that had somehow come to rule the forest. The nine hotbeds I visited shared almost nothing except the happy unlikeliness of their existence. “You know, like at a birthday party.”Ī treasure hunt, a birthday-actually that wasn’t too far off. “Daddy’s going on a treasure hunt,” I overheard my ten-year-old daughter Katie patiently explain to her younger sisters. These explanations seemed to work-at least for a moment. I made straight-faced comparisons between my trip and Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle I sagely expounded how small, isolated places magnify larger patterns and forces, sort of like petri dishes. So I decided to frame it as a Great Expedition, sort of like those undertaken by nineteenth-century naturalists. Undertaking the journey presented me with a few challenges, the first of which was to explain it to my wife and four young kids in as logical (read: un-harebrained) a way as possible. In December 2006 I began visiting tiny places that produce Everest-size amounts of talent.* My journey began at a ramshackle tennis court in Moscow, and over the next fourteen months it took me to a soccer field in São Paolo, Brazil, a vocal studio in Dallas, Texas, an inner-city school in San Jose, California, a run-down music academy in New York’s Adirondacks, a baseball-mad island in the Caribbean, and a handful of other places so small, humble, and titanically accomplished that a friend dubbed them “the chicken-wire Harvards.” You will become clever through your mistakes. An Excerpt from The Talent Code Chapter 1: The Sweet Spot
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