Good News for the Rest of Us! Talent is Over-Rated

So as it turns out, talent is over-rated.

Last week I was hanging out with my former pastor from Richmond, Steve Shelby. Steve planted the church that I started attending week one and continued attending for all nine years. The church was still in near start-up mode when I started there. Now, it's over fifteen years old.

Steve was telling me about the evaluation process that he went through to be a planter. They ranked the potential planners on a scale from 1-5. The fives were the rock-stars, and many of them knew it. In many of their minds, they were going through the screening perfunctorily--they were shoo-ins.

The one's were told they should never even imagine getting near a church-plant, much less attempt to start one themselves.

Many years later, the denomination did a survey of what happened to the planters. And across the board, the 3's did the best. Steve, sitting in his well-established, thriving church, was one of them.

The 3's, as it turned out, knew that they couldn't do it all by themselves. They knew they couldn't just get by on natural skill and charisma. They knew they needed help in the form of shared leadership with staff and lay leaders. And they knew that they needed help in the form of any resources that were available to them.

5's tried to do it all themselves and crashed and burned. Talent is over-rated.

Malcolm Gladwell (that's him below with the cool hair) talks about this in his book "Outliers." The freakishly talented outliers in our society (Bill Gates, for example, or The Beatles) are not simply freakishly talented. They are freakishly obsessive about practicing. Gladwell posits the "10,000 Hour Rule." He proposes that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an outlier in just about anything.

As a culture, we are obsessed with prodigies and we are obsessed with "effortless perfection" as a Dook (er, Duke) administrator once said. We are enamored with the romantic idea that what comes from following our hearts and doing whatever seems to be "true to ourselves" without any genuine thought or training is somehow more "free" or "natural."

But, as NT Wright argues in the podcast from Fuller entitled "Learning the Language of Life," the Biblical route for growing up into true life is transformation by the renewing of our minds (see Romans 12). We do not come by a life truly worth living without a full-life engagement.

We over-estimate what people can do (or get by with) by way of "talent" and we under-estimate the power of training and study and preparation. Sometimes in Christian circles we baptize this over-romanticized fantasy by wrapping it in language of "grace." But grace, as Dallas Willard argues, is opposed to earning, it is not opposed to effort.

And so the good news for those of us who are not born as freakishly talented people is that hard and good work trumps talent. The 3's surpass the 5's--especially if they can embrace the grace of being a 3 and lean into the people and the resources and particularly the Lord who is over all of it.

And all of it makes me wonder if I'll live long enough to put in 10,000 hours worth of blogging...then, perhaps, I'll have reached the golden Promised Land: "Blogger Outlier."