Talent is overrated. Look for toughness.
What makes someone a good athlete? A good leader? A good parent? A good investor?
The 1989 Grand Final between Hawthorn and Geelong Football club was a historic game. In an opening act of retribution, Mark Yeates blindsided Hawthorn's Dermott Brereton. It was a premeditated strategy to remove the opposition's champion player. And a brutal tactic.
Yeates' hit Brereton so hard he broke two of his ribs, ruptured his kidney, and caused internal bleeding.
From the team medic: what struck me was how bad he was when I got there. He'd lost all the colour in his face and was vomiting...he was doubled over, dry-retching and his colour was grey...there was no way he could stay out there.
Breathing with a broken rib is pure agony. But despite the insistence of the club doctors and trainers, Brereton refused to leave the field. An inspirational player, he was instead helped to the forward position near the goals:
“The first step I took, I howled; the second step, I roared and screamed with pain. I started running, and it was just an endless scream, and in the end, I ran out of breath. I knew if I had gone off, I would have been mentally shot and wouldn’t have been able to go back on."
It was a game so brutal that Scottish soccer player Ray Stewart remarked on the day: "I would not play this game for a million dollars".
Even though the clash happened as soon as the game began, Brereton only missed 3 seconds of playing time in the entire eighty-minute match. He kicked a goal a few minutes after his collision with Yeates. Then went on to kick two more goals to cement his place as one of the mentally toughest players in the game's history.
Hawthorn won the final by six points.
Why do some people achieve their goals? Why do others fail? What makes the difference? What is the marginal difference between these two? We gravitate towards an answer such as they must be the smartest; fastest; most brilliant person within their cadre.
But there is more to the story than this.
Talent and intelligence don’t play as big of a role as you might think. In fact, intelligence only accounts for 30% of your achievement. And that’s at the extreme upper end based on research studies I have found.
So what has a bigger impact; bigger than talent or intelligence?
Mental toughness.
Grit is it. It plays a more important role than anything else in achieving your goals in health, business, and life.
That’s good news. You can’t do much about the genes you were born with. But you can do a lot to develop mental toughness.
The military stands alone as the masters of identifying mental toughness. Each year, several hundred candidates try out for the special forces selection course. This is for the right to operate as a Commando or a Special Air Service trooper.
The selection experience strips candidates bare. It takes participants to complete exhaustion and fatigue, regardless of how fit they were on day one.
Once the selection process commences, they receive neither positive nor negative reinforcement to push them forward. Neutral faces stare at them, judging, recording, noting their failings. It is a live experiment in mental fatigue and toughness. Push-ups, pull-ups - constant physical exertion designed to strip out candidates’ so those watching can see what’s left. As the days unfold, the numbers shrink. Either self-selected to required to leave. Food intake is restricted; sleep is reduced; the mind is set to wrestle while the body struggles under heavy packs and rifle. It stretches on for weeks, as feet blister and bodies break. Candidates march for up to 20 hours, wading through swamps, fighting their way up sand dunes, in full pack and extraneous gear.
In the words of researchers and physiologists who have studied the process over time, selection is deliberately engineered to test the very limits of physical, emotional, and mental capacities.
You might imagine the successful candidates as bigger, stronger, or more intelligent than their peers. But Angela Duckworth, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, found something different when she began tracking the candidates.
Duckworth studies achievement, and more specifically, how your mental toughness and perseverance impact your ability to achieve goals.
She tracked a total of 2,441 candidates spread across multiple selections. She recorded their high school rank, Leadership Potential Score (which reflects participation in extracurricular activities), Physical Aptitude Exam (a standardised physical exercise evaluation), and Grit Scale (which measures perseverance and passion for long-term goals).
It wasn’t strength or smarts or leadership potential that accurately predicted whether or not a candidate would finish selection.
Instead, it was grit — the perseverance to achieve long-term goals — that made the difference.
Candidates who were one standard deviation higher on the Grit Scale were 60% more likely to pass than their peers. It was mental toughness that predicted whether or not a candidate would be successful, not their talent, intelligence, or genetics.
Our hypothesis that grit is essential to high achievement evolved during interviews with professionals in investment banking, medicine, and law. Asked what quality distinguishes star performers in their respective fields, these individuals cited grit or a close synonym as often as talent. In fact, many were awed by the achievements of peers who did not at first seem as gifted as others, but whose sustained commitment to their ambitions was exceptional.
Likewise, many noted with surprise that prodigiously gifted peers did not end up in the upper echelons of their field.
In every area of life — from your education to your work to your health — it is your amount of grit, mental toughness, and perseverance predicts your level of success more than any other factor we can find.
In other words, talent is overrated.
It’s great to talk about mental toughness, grit, and perseverance, but what do those things actually look like in the real world?
Toughness and grit are closely linked with consistency.
- Mentally tough athletes are more consistent than others. They don’t miss workouts. They always have their teammates back.
- Mentally tough leaders are more consistent than their peers. They have a clear goal that they work towards each day. They don’t let short-term profits, negative feedback, or hectic schedules prevent them from continuing the march towards their vision. They make a habit of building up the people around them — not just once, but over and over and over again.
- Mentally tough employees deliver on a more consistent basis than most. They work on a schedule, not just when they feel motivated. They approach their work like a pro, not an amateur. They do the most important thing first and don’t shirk responsibilities.
