 Why do the best middle-distance runners in the world grow up in the same village in Ethiopia with 30,000 inhabitants? How come that 35 of the world's 100 best female golfers come from South Korea? How did one village with 500 people in the middle of nowhere in Sweden manage to produce the best skills in history and why do the world's best sprinters the fastest people on this planet? Come from the exact same athletic club in Kingston, Jamaica As a writer and as an ex-footballer today just injured and forgotten However, I became obsessed answering these questions and a year ago. I decided to quit my job I spent my last money booking flight tickets and for the following six months I traveled around the world to crack the coat of these gold mines I lived and I trained with the world's best athletes and their coaches So this is a picture of me training with the famous running tribe of Kenya and as you can see Unfortunately, I'm running back of the pace again Honestly, if you really want to know how it feels to get your ego massively destroyed by 14 year old teenage boys and girls Go to it and in Kenya go for a run and you will quickly understand So this is how the gold mine expedition looked like and some of you might be thinking now that the Secret behind these gold mines and why they outperform everybody else comes down to a genetic advantage The problem with that theory is it's totally wrong This is Yanis pizilades Who and here's the back of these two? Yanis pizilades who is a leading research researcher in the world on the genetics relation to high-performance? His conclusion after decades of research is crystal clear There is no direct correlation between specific races and high-performance genes and That sounds interesting and what does that really mean? It really means that talent is not race linked talent is everywhere because if talent was not everywhere How can Paul a Radcliffe to the left? British long-distance runner outperform the Kenyan women again and again and sometimes even the men and How can that skinny French dude to the right Christophe Lemaitre at the age of 20 run faster than Usain Bolt did when he was 20? So I'm going to tell you two stories from the gold mines About what they taught me about the science of human capital and the first story is about Steven Francis who is without doubt the world's most successful sprint coach and the head coach of MVP track and field club in Jamaica and As you can see Steven Francis doesn't really look like a sprinter The true first he never sprinted himself. He graduated in statistics at the University of Michigan Coming back to Jamaica. He founded MVP track and field club, which is basically nothing but a diesel Scots grass track in Kingston However, the most interesting part of this story is that Steven Francis has refinked talent identification He didn't recruit the most talented athletes. He took second third and fourth level athletes made them world-class Nobody heard of the athletes he took in today their world champions and Olympic champions and his methodology is based on one simple principle What you see is not what you get So imagine you have two sprinters you have one running ten point two under one hundred meter and you have another one running ten point six So who's the most talented here? 98% of the world's athletic coaches would bet their money on the 10-2 guy because he's obviously the fastest and therefore the most talented That's not how Steven Francis thinks. He said you got to look beyond what you see So imagine that the 10-2 guy did have the best coaches the best training environments and the best Opportunities for developing while the 10-6 guy Basically train on his own and not in a structured way at all in other words a Raw 10-6 Can be better than a train 10-2 This was how Francis found a Saffa Powell who was just a Jamaican teenager training on his own running ten point six Rejected by almost all colleges in Jamaica Francis took him in he became the world record holder on the 100 meter My second story is about heart rate monitors Training with the East African runners for three weeks only once I saw a heart rate monitor And I was surprised because you would expect the best runners on earth to train with the most modern Technological equipment available But they didn't actually did actually they used the strap of that heart rate monitor as a washing line and It stands in direct contrast to our very rational and analytical approach in the West Here we have scientists telling us we need to have slim calves a big view to max and Some special muscle fiber type otherwise forget about becoming a good runner, but nobody tells you that in Kenya Actually, they think view to max is a flavor of a new Pepsi Here you just look at your cousin or your neighbor who probably won a big competition last year and then you think if he can do it then why not me and then you act with belief and They all this got me thinking that sometimes too much information About what's possible how you should look like to become good and what it takes It can narrow our perceptions about what's possible. It can kill this irrational Optimism which characterizes the East African runners as well as any other person who pushed the limits for what's possible in his or her field So the East African runners leave us with the paradox of expertise Which is that sometimes the ones who know the most can be the ones who know the least We love this story about the lonely genius living in his ivory tower Isolated from the rest of the world, but I don't believe that the lonely genius does exist Geniuses are grown in a context in gold mines and gold mines like these are not accidents They were not suddenly more genius and super athletes born in a certain place. I love this quote from T.S. Eliot he says the great ages did not contain more talent, but they wasted less and That's a very powerful message because it suggests that talent is really everywhere and Our job as a society and as a culture is to waste less genius One way of doing that is to really understand the secrets of these gold mines if we do that I believe we can learn how to build our own gold mines of talent. Thank you so much