G-Factor? Genetics - out of our control?

[Guest guest]

Coyle recently wrote the following on his blog (talentcode.com).

Pertinent to the recent discussion.

So I recently returned from a London sports-science conference where the

discussion revolved around the mystery of talent identification. All over the

world, in everything from academics to sports to music, millions of dollars and

thousands of hours are being spent on singling out high-potential performers

early on. And the plain truth is, most of these talent-ID programs are little

better than rolling dice.

Take the NFL, for instance, which represents the zenith of talent-identification

science. At the pre-draft NFL combine, teams exhaustively test every physical

and mental capacity known to science: strength, agility, explosiveness,

intelligence. They look at miles of game film. They analyze every piece of

available data. And each year, NFL teams manage get it absolutely wrong. In

fact, out of the 40 top-rated combine performers over the past four years, only

half are still in the league.

A lot of smart people have been thinking about this, and what they've decided is

this: the problem not that the measures are wrong. The problem is that measuring

performance the wrong way to approach the question.

According to much of this new work, what matters is not current performance, but

rather growth potential – what you might call the G-Factor — the complex,

multi-faceted qualities that help someone learn and keep on learning, to work

past inevitable plateaus; to adapt and be resourceful and keep improving.

Thing is, G-Factor can't be measured with a stopwatch or a tape measure. It's

more subtle and complex. Which means that instead of looking at performance, you

look for signs, subtle indicators — what a poker player might call tells. In

other words, to locate the G-Factor you have to close your eyes, ignore the

dazzle of current performance and instead try to detect the presence of a few

key characteristics. Sort of like Moneyball, with character traits.

So what are the tells for the G-Factor? Here are two:

One is early ownership. As Marjie Elferink-Gemser's work shows, one pattern of

successful athletes happens when they're 13 or so, when they develop a sense of

ownership of their training. For the ones who succeed, this age is when they

decide that it's not enough to simply be an obedient cog in the development

machine — they begin to go farther, reaching beyond the program, deciding for

themselves what their workouts will be, augmenting and customizing and

addressing their weaknesses on their own.

Another tell is grit. This quality, investigated by the pioneering work of

Duckworth, refers to that signature combination of stubbornness,

resourcefulness, creativity and adaptability that helps someone make the tough

climb toward a longterm goal. Duckworth has come up with a simple questionnaire

that measures the responder's grit. It has only 17 questions, and the respondent

self-assesses their ability to stick with a project, see a goal to the end, etc.

(You can take it online here.)

Duckworth gave her grit test to 1,200 first-year West Point cadets before they

began a brutal summer training course called the " Beast Barracks. " It turned out

that this test (which takes only a few minutes to complete) was eerily accurate

at predicting whether or not a cadet succeeded, exceeding the predictions of

West Point's exhaustive battery of NFL-combine-esque measures, which included

tests of IQ, psychological profile, GPA, and physical fitness. Duckworth's grit

test has been applied to other settings – academic ones, including KIPP schools

— with similar levels of success. (Here's a good story about grit.)

It's fascinating stuff, in part because it leads so many good questions: what

other elements are part of the G Factor? And perhaps most important, is it

possible to teach it?

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Carruthers

Wakefield, UK