Me and the O.1%

This week I read an interesting NY Times story on tennis phenom Frances Tiafoe. Now, some of you may wonder why I post about top athletes to an audience with no particular interest in sports. But there is a reason, which is that I wonder a lot about talent, work, and excellence. This stuff is easiest to see in sports because we have quantifiable measures of excellence. Tennis, for example, has a ranked list of the top 100 players in the world, which is something you're never going to get for artists, writers, or politicians. And in sports, the very best are decisively better than the merely good. Someone like Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan is on a different plane of ability than the average professional athlete. If you measured the statistical difference between, say, the number 1 tennis player and the number 100 tennis player it might not be very large, but in practice it is decisive. I find that fascinating, and I wonder how much this sort of thing applies to every human activity. Maybe history or song-writing is completely different, but maybe not.

One thing to ponder is that in sports ability almost always shows very early. When Lionel Messi was six he was playing in the league for eight- and nine-year-olds and scoring three goals a game. People who knew him at 14 appear in documentaries about his career saying, "we all knew he was going to be the best player in the world." There's a lot of blaph out there about hard work or putting in 10,000 hours but at least in sports that is all baloney, and if you haven't shown your potential by puberty you're never going to be great.

The same is true in classical music, and in dance; I know a woman who had a professional career as a modern dancer and her teachers singled her out when she was four years old.

Other professions follow different trajectories, but there are few areas of life in which people suddenly become extraordinary in middle age. Sometimes middle aged novelists do burst onto the scene, but when you look into their lives you usually find that they have been writing in some form or another since they were young children.

But back to Frances Tiafoe. The author of the Times piece saw Tiafoe at the age of 11 and thought he was lazy and lacked focus, but his teachers were already predicting that he would one day be a top ten player. When Tiafoe emerged as a star the author went back to talk to those teachers and find out what they saw that he did not. What they saw in Tiafoe was desire. “He moved well because he wanted it more than other kids, he wanted so badly to get to the ball. He loved everything about the game, the smell of the new tennis balls, how the ball sounds on the racket.” Tiafoe is a gifted natural athlete with a strong, graceful body, but I suppose top tennis trainers see a lot of kids like that. He stood out because of his passion. 

An interesting thing to contemplate. 

Another thing that strikes me as interesting about top athletes is that only a few remain excellent for a decade or more; many rise to the heights and then gradually lose motivation after that. I mean, what really is the point of winning more championships after you've already won your first? But there are some people who always want more and keep grinding on until their bodies force them to stop.

Which brings me to myself and my comfortably middling intellectual career. How did I end up here? 

First, a story. As an undergraduate I took ancient Greek history together with a good friend of mine. I was a good student back then and studied more than the average Yalie, but he was in a different category. I think he put in twice as much time as I did. At the end of the course our grades were something like 92 for me and 96 for him, and we shared a laugh about how many hours he put in to get those four extra points. But here's the thing: he ended up as an eminent professor of ancient history and the author of brilliant books, and I did not. The difference between being the best student in the class and being merely excellent turned out to make a huge difference in our careers.

And while ability of various kinds might be part of this, especially with languages, the factor I would point to is the one singled out by Frances Tiafoe's coaches: desire.

I have never had any burning desire to be great. The things I imagined for myself were always pleasantly second-tier: author of paperback fantasy novels, professor at a small-town college. If I had extravagant hopes they were more focused on love and parenthood, and I eventually gave up my academic pretensions to focus on those.

Imagine people climbing up the World Tree, which gets steadily narrower as it rises. At each branch fewer will pass on, and more will stay where they are; a few will fall off and plummet. The ones who rise high have some combination of ability and desire that sets them apart. At the very top many have a level of drive that seems to me downright insane – I have said this several times here about the people who want to be president.

This is, perhaps, a matter of no great importance for most of us. Most people don't want to be great, and it may be that in some areas of life the pursuit of greatness is beside the point. On the whole it is better to be happy with what you have than to always burn for more. 

But the very best – Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, Dickens, Paul McCartney, add whoever you want – bring wonder and joy to the rest of us. I find this fascinating, the way some climb so far and shine so bright. Sometimes when I read a line of Shakespeare or Tolkien or Emily Dickinson and know that I could never have written it, my wonder is tinged with a little sadness; I am not and will never be one of them. But mostly I marvel that the world contains such people and am happy when I feel that I know enough to understand that they are great.