 Have you ever looked at someone and thought, wow, this person is talented. I'll never be like him. Many of us believe that talent is the game changer, and you either have it or you don't. This, in a way, becomes a reason for many not to even try too hard, since, no matter how hard it'll try, I'll never be like the talented people. You are either a genius or you're not. But what if I would tell you that talent is actually a myth, and that many scientists and authors have already figured out and proven that this idea is indeed a myth, but most of us are still stuck with an old, common belief that is based on the wrong assumptions. In this idea, by presenting various knowledge and scientific studies, I will prove to you that talent is indeed a myth, and that each one of us are capable of much more than we allow ourselves to, as long as we know how to develop our skills properly, and if we are ready to put in the work. First of all, many of us relate talent to IQ, which is a number that is capable of change, yet generally, based on various factors, it is a difficult one to change dramatically. Based on the norms, people at the bottom of the scale with an IQ below 70 are considered mentally disabled. A score of 100 is average, where you probably need to be just above that mark to be able to handle college. To get into and succeed in a reasonably competitive graduate program, you probably need an IQ of at least 115. In general, the higher your score, the more education you'll get, the more money you're likely to make, and believe it or not, the longer you live. The belief that our IQ is the game changer is a strong and long-standing And a lot of it goes back to Louis Terman. At the time, a young professor of psychology at Stanford University, who shortly after World War I decided to make his whole life's mission to show and prove to the world the significance of high IQ. Terman tracked down and discovered 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the termites, and they were the subject of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman tracked, tested, measured, and analyzed these individuals and recorded his fighting in thick red volumes entitled, Genetic Studies of Genius. During his early stages of the study he went on to say, there's nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals. And it was to those with a very high IQ, he believed that we must look for protection of leaders who advance science, art, government, education, and social welfare generally. Little did he know, though, that he would no longer be able to say these same words by the end of his research. When Terman's young subjects eventually reached adulthood, his era became plain to see. Some of his child geniuses had grown up to publish books and scholarly articles and thriving business. Several ran for public office, there were two superior court justices, as well as one prominent state official. But few of his geniuses were nationally known figures. They tended to earn good incomes, but not that good. The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a surprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures. Nor were there any noble prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses. His field workers actually even tested to elementary students who went on to be noble laureates and rejected them both, because their IQs weren't high enough to fit in the Terman's study. In a devastating critique, the sociologist Petrion Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kind of family backgrounds as his selected geniuses, and dispensed with IQs altogether, he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his selected group of geniuses. Knowledge of the story already starts to shake and shatter our belief in the importance of IQ, yet you would then say, what about the geniuses that were globally recognized? Well, for example, Albert Einstein's IQ during his adult life was 150, which is more than of a regular person's, but at the same time, there were certainly scientists with higher IQs than Einstein's yet who made much less significant achievements. An even stronger example providing the idea of the superior importance of talent to be a false one is the example of Mozart, where we move away from our examination of IQ and into the realm of hard and consistent work. If I would ask you to name a handful of talented geniuses that walked on the face of earth, Mozart would definitely be on many people's lists. Widely recognized as one of the greatest composers in the history of western music, Mozart is also considered to have been a prodigy as he wrote many of his masterpieces at a young age. Yet what history likes to speak less of is, as Michael Hoby writes in his book Genius Explained, by the standards of mature composers, Mozart's early works are not that outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father and perhaps improved in the process. Of those concertos that only contained music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterpiece was not composed until he was 21. That is still an impressive age to write a masterpiece at, but what is more important is how he got there. What truly matters in this example is that Mozart, by the time of writing his first masterpiece, had already been composing concertos for 10 years, and even more so that he started writing music at the early age of six. Not only that, he constantly spent his time and energy investing into music, which by the age of 21 led him to have been practicing writing and music for thousands of hours, which is by no means a coincidence when speaking of genius. Many of us have probably heard that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. Little did most know, though, is that it's not just any number made up for the sound of it. In fact, it is a number that was inspired by a study done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two of his colleagues at Berlin's Elite Academy of Music. During this study, with the help of the Academy's professor, the school's violinists were divided into three groups. In the first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. In the second were those judged to be merely good. In the third were students who were unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended to be music teachers in the public school system. All of the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your entire career, ever since you first packed up the violin, how many hours have you practiced? Everyone from all three groups started playing at roughly the same age, around five years old. In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than anyone else, six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age 12, 16 hours a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practicing, that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better, well over 30 hours a week. In fact, by the age of 20, the elite performers had each totaled 10,000 hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over 4,000 hours. The principle of invested time into practice also came up in later studies again and again in various fields, such as composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, and even master criminals. The striking thing about Erickson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any naturals, musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did, nor could they find any grinds, people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. There are also other factors that play a role in someone becoming a quote unquote genius, which I will be discussing in future videos. But I hope that these two stories of proving that IQ is not as important as it first appears, and that geniuses become so not just because they were born so, but because they have indeed put in the hard, hard work will inspire you to look at yourself differently too, and to stop using a lack of talent as a reason to work less hard. Instead, beginning to believe that if you will put in the hard, hard work, it may very well be a game changer. Subscribe to this channel if you're interested in mastery and the subject of banking talent, as I'm planning to release more in-depth videos about it. Also, if you liked this video, make sure to check out the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, where much of this information is presented. This is Rokas, and I wish you to keep grinding purposefully.