Talent Trumps Resume, Persistence Trumps Talent

Posted by Polly - April 30th, 2008

In putting together an ongoing series on the “New Rules of Success” for my CNN gig (”new” being a loose term to describe what happens when a new generation stumbles upon eternal truths—or when the times catch up to those timeless truths), I’ve encountered two seemingly contradictory pieces of wisdom about talent that add up to a powerful lesson about sustainable success.

The first comes from Jeffrey Kalmikoff, chief creative officer of Threadless—a remarkable platform not just for selling t-shirts on the Web, but for providing individuals from all over the world an outlet, rewards, and recognition for their talent. Bill’s written about their powerful approach to customer community and their powerhouse business model here. Here’s how it works: the site receives some 800 usable t-shirt designs from a worldwide pool of customers, amateurs, and designers around the world every week. Those get scored by some portion of the site’s 725,000 registered users and then about a dozen get chosen for sale every week. The winning designers get $2000 in cash and $500 in gift certificates.

In its few years in existence, Threadless has minted many mini-celebrities and design darlings (one of whom, Glenn Jones, just left his day job to set up his own t-shirt emporium). But the point isn’t to celebrate stars so much as to keep the playing field level, says Kalmikoff. He reports receiving submissions from “a world famous design superstar” and “a 15-year-old kid from Japan” in the same week. The design diva’s submission didn’t even make it to the scoring phase, while the kid’s design rose to the top. In other words, Threadless’ founders have designed a t-shirt talent-ocracy, where “it doesn’t matter what’s on your resume—it’s how relevant your art is to the moment you submit it,” says Kalmikoff. Talent trumps resume. (What’s more, the focus on talent-above-all isn’t just a management mantra. The top Threadless designers routinely shake off their celebrity to post under new aliases, just to make sure they’re still getting by on their merits and not their reputation.)

But wait a minute, isn’t this notion that “talent is the ultimate currency” responsible for spawning a generation of twenty-somethings who show up at work thinking they can do anything (and deserve everything) on Day One? This is the crowd (along with their doting and anxious parents) my friend Dan Pink addresses in his lively new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need (and the first career guide to serve up profound wisdom in cartoon thought bubbles, or Japanese manga form).

Among the six spot-on lessons about the nature of success and career Dan highlights via the adventures of a hot-chick genie type and a Keanu Reeves-esque young office drone (and yes, there are pictures!), is one that seems to contradict the primacy of talent. Instead, says Dan: Persistence trumps talent. It’s an old-fashioned lesson whose time has come (again). “There are massive returns to doggedness,” Dan writes. “The people who achieve the most are often the ones who stick with it when others don’t. . . They show up. They practice and practice and practice some more. . .” (Or, as the Post-It attached to my computer monitor lo these many years has been reminding me, in the inimitable words of Dorothy Parker, “Writing is the art of applying ass to seat.”) “The world is littered with talented people who didn’t persist, who didn’t put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone.”

So which is true? Talent trumps resume or persistence trumps talent? Luckily, we won’t have to host an aphorism smack-down, because it turns out, both are true. In fact, it all ties up rather nicely. There’s a certain paradoxical psychology behind the pursuit of success: if you’re pursuing success for its own sake (for the reward, the promotion, the fame), you’re less likely to succeed than if you’re pursuing something deeper, following a genuine passion, doing something you like (or even love). As Dan puts it, “the more intrinsic motivation you have, the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.” You can see this principle in operation at Threadless. The best designers on the site aren’t looking for fame or acclaim so much as a chance to exercise their talents and mix it up with like-minded peers—and the community is set up to give them endless opportunity to do so. The level playing field allows for talent to come from the most unlikely places—the winners are most likely to come from a place of persistently and enthusiastically practicing their craft.

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