The secret is not a secret

‘If I had a million dollars I would close this discussion once and for all. I would lay the idea of “natural” black athletes to rest. That is not the same as saying that genes are not important, but there is no evidence that exclusive genes have been dished out to specific races.’

Dr Yannis Pitsiladis, University of Glasgow

A rotund little man stands waiting for me on the red gravel in front of St Patrick’s High School. He is wearing a dark knitted jumper even though the midday sun is beating down on us and it’s over 30°C. With his ruddy cheeks and a green baseball cap that barely covers the crown of his head, he looks anything but how I had imagined the world’s most successful athletics coach might. Colm O’Connell has agreed to meet me here at the legendary St Patrick’s High School in Iten, where everything began for him 35 years previously. In those days he was just a young Irishman whose main enjoyment in life up to that point had been ‘getting pissed at Skeffington pub’ while he was a student in Galway. It was certainly not on the cards that he would play a central role in the development of the planet’s very best middle- and long-distance runners.

When Colm left Ireland for Kenya in February 1976 to teach at an isolated boarding school 2,800 metres up in the Rift Valley, he knew absolutely nothing about running. In fact, he had never attended an athletics meet in his life.

‘I was just a geography teacher,’ he says with a shrug as we sit in the St Patrick’s school yard chatting in the shade.

Colm O’Connell speaking with the 1,500 metres runner Augustine Kiprono Choge

An entirely new world welcomed Colm O’Connell when he arrived in Kenya. There was no electricity, no telephone service, no tarmac roads and, back then, no reliable running water system. A far cry from the way things had been back in Ireland. By pure chance he became involved in the school’s newly initiated athletics programme as an assistant coach, although he was in no way qualified in this regard. ‘I would never have been given the opportunity to become an athletics coach in England or Ireland,’ he is happy to admit.

St Patrick’s High School already had proud sporting traditions, especially in volleyball. The school’s volleyball team did not lose a single match between 1973 and 1988. It took a few years before the school’s athletics team began to perform properly but when they did, they ran fast. So fast in fact, that managed by Colm O’Connell, they won nineteen out of 21 disciplines at a national athletics meet in 1985. They did not compete in the last two disciplines.

‘I learned how to coach through trial and error,’ says Colm. ‘Because the boys were boarders at the school I had them at my disposal 24 hours a day. This provided me with excellent conditions when it came to finding out what it took to get them to run fast.’

The entrance to St Patrick’s High School in Iten

Colm’s boys were superbly motivated. They had all heard of their countryman, Kipchoge Keino, the first African athlete ever to win the Olympic 1,500 metres gold. (He did so in Mexico in 1968.) Athletics had become professionalised, and the smell of dollars had wafted its way to the Rift Valley. Over the next ten years, Colm O’Connell and St Patrick’s High School would pump out one world superstar after the other.

The school yard of legends

Colm points to a tree in the school yard. On it there is a plaque embossed with the name Ibrahim Hussein.

‘He was my first really good athlete,’ he says.

Ibrahim Hussein was a thin lad from the Nandi tribe who came to St Patrick’s at the age of fourteen. He later ended up winning the Boston Marathon three times, and was the first African ever to win the New York Marathon.

Three-times Boston Marathon champion, Ibrahim Hussein, has got his own tree at St Patrick’s

The whole school yard is full of similar trees with small plaques on their trunks, each bearing the name of a great athlete who started their career at St Patrick’s High School. To begin with, they planted a tree every time one of their boys won a medal at the World Championships or the Olympics. However, they soon started to run out of room, and so decided to plant just a single tree for each of the greatest winners.

A couple of metres from Ibrahim Hussein’s tree stands the Birir tree. One of O’Connell’s Olympic winners, Matthew Birir, brought home gold in the steeplechase at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. As we walk through the school grounds looking at each tree in turn, I am struck by how unique the environment of St Patrick’s must have been in its heyday.

‘It wasn’t just dominance. It was another planet,’ Colm recalls, as he tells me one gripping story after another about his boys. You have to look long and hard to find a prize-winning Kenyan middle-distance runner who has not come into contact with ‘Brother’ O’Connell during their career. Wilson Kipketer (who, until August 2010, was 800 metres world record holder), Daniel Komen (current 3,000 metres world record holder), Asbel Kiprop, Lydia Cheromei, Susan Chepkemei, Isaac Songok, Linet Masai, Mercy Cherono, Janeth Jepkosgei, David Rudisha – you name them, Colm has trained them.

As I talk to Colm I have questions queuing up inside my head. I want to understand how it can be that this boarding school with no extraordinary facilities can achieve such staggering results. And the success of St Patrick’s High School isn’t where the astonishing facts end. The school is in the part of the Rift Valley that is home to the Kalenjin tribe. They make up 10 per cent of the Kenyan population. Since 1968, when Kenya began to completely dominate the Olympic steeplechase event, only a single non-Kalenjin runner has won the Olympic gold. When this sole non-Kalenjin winner, Julius Kariuki of Nyahururu, also a Kenyan, was asked about this phenomenon he said, ‘It is likely that my relatives came from the Kalenjin.’

But that’s not all. One of the ethnic groups under the Kalenjin tribe is the Nandi people, consisting of some 80,000 individuals. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Nandi runners won the gold in both the men’s and the women’s 800 metres – they also won two silvers and two bronzes! What are the chances of this happening for a tribe consisting of just 80,000 people when competing against the whole of the rest of the world?

The athletic Gold Mine in the Rift Valley is one of the most sensational phenomena in the whole history of sport. We’re not talking about ice hockey, rugby or baseball, all of which are regionally based sports. We are talking about a global sport, pursued professionally in almost every country in the world, and yet continually conquered by a tiny group of people all living in a 100 kilometre radius.

The running genes myth

The domination of the Kenyan runners is intimidating. In 2011 alone you find a Kenyan beside nineteen of the twenty fastest marathon times. That list includes a new world record, the winning performances from every major city marathon in 2011, and the World Championship marathon win. Not only were all the major city marathons won by Kenyans, but the course records at each were broken in the process.

More than 258 Kenyan marathon runners ran the 44.2 km race in under two hours and fifteen minutes. Britain, with a population twice the size of Kenya’s, delivered only a single performance under that time. The number of top runners in Kenya seems endless, and running is not even the national sport. The runners come from a very small portion of the country where the internal competition is ruthless. This is clearly demonstrated by the case of Luke Kibet – although four months earlier he had run the eighth fastest time ever in a marathon, and was the defending world champion, he did not qualify for the Kenyan Olympic team for Beijing in 2008. (Though during the very last week before the competition he was taken on as a reserve.)

The kind of world supremacy in running that the Kenyan’s enjoy strongly suggests that something more than just hard work is at play. Surely they would not be able to continually deliver the kind of performances they do without some kind of natural genetic advantage?

The same would seem to apply to Ethiopian men, who have won every single gold medal in the 10,000 metres since 1993 or, for that matter, to the West Africans sprinters responsible for 494 of the best 500 100-metre times ever run. For many years, athletes, scientists and coaches in the West have clung to the explanation that these groups of people must be equipped with special genes, perfectly designed for the specific sport in which they consistently excel.

In their attempt to explain the success of the East African medium- and long-distance runners, scientists have focused, among other things, on the Kenyans’ and Ethiopians’ slim calves, which they believe may be advantageous over long distances. But is this enough of an explanation? It certainly isn’t as far as the Jalou people are concerned. The Jalou are a tribe in Tanzania, which borders on Kenya, and their body types and build are largely identical to their Kenyan neighbours. However, the Jalou have never produced a single top runner. This fact (along with a number of others) has raised doubts as to whether slim calves play a decisive role in the Kenyans’ success at all.

Another theory is that East Africans are equipped from birth with top-of-the-line running hardware in the form of their maximum oxygen uptake, which enables them to absorb more oxygen than other people and thus work longer and harder.

But this argument also begins to waver under close inspection – Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin has studied the physiology of East African runners and concluded that is largely identical with that of European athletes, saying, ‘There is no marked disparity between the maximum oxygen uptake of an East African and a Caucasian.’

Despite these conclusions, theories about the advantages possessed by East African runners keep on popping up. Some people have tried to argue for the existence of good genes for long-distance running in the population by pointing to the absence of results in sprint events. In other words, they argue that a predisposition for long-distance running is the opposite of being predisposed to sprinting. However, when exposed to a pressure test this observation also proves untrue. As Toby Tanser writes in his book More Fire about Kenyan runners: ‘In the fourteenth session of the men’s 4×400 metre relay at the African Championships, Kenya had five male gold medallists. In ten of the Commonwealth Games, the Kenyans have won four golds. These records remain unmatched.’

An entirely different attempt to explain the East Africans’ dominance relates to the thin air 2,500 metres above sea level, the environment in which they grow up and train. Exposure to these conditions naturally increases their production of red blood corpuscles.

But if thin air is the whole explanation, why have Nepal and Mexico not produced any world-class long-distance runners?

And why is the national marathon record in Malawi more than fourteen minutes slower than the Kenyan record, when the population grows up in exactly the same type of environment as the Kalenjin people, with the Ethiopian runners training in the highlands around Addis Ababa?

A genetic explanation model of Kenyan running success has started to seem less and less plausible over time. It does not explain, for instance, why Sweden, which dominated world long-distance running in the 1940s, suddenly won the gold in the heptathlon, high jump and triple jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics. At the time not a single Swede was represented on the IAAF list of the world’s 50 best long-distance runners. Are we supposed to conclude that the Swedes, in a little more than 60 years, exchanged their long-distance genes for jumping genes?

It’s also not hard to see why people might get the impression that East African runners have excelled in the sport ever since it began, given their incredible performance recently. But this is simply not the case. Take, for example, the list of the top five at the marathon World Cup championships in 1999. Four of them are Europeans. The first East African comes in ninth, even though there was no shortage of runners in Kenya and Ethiopia at the time.

Ranking	Athlete	Country	Mark
1	Antón Abel	ESP	2:13:36
2	Modica Vincenzo	ITA	2:14:03
3	Sato Nobuyuki	JPN	2:14:07
4	Novo Luis	POR	2:14:27	(SR)
5	Goffi Danilo	ITA	2:14:50

Just ten years later at the 2009 World Championships the picture is completely different. The top five has been totally taken over by Kenya and Ethiopia.

Ranking	Athlete	Country	Mark
1	Abel Kirui	KEN	2:06:54	(CR)
2	Emmanuel Kipchirchir Mutai	KEN	2:07:48
3	Tsegay Kebede	ETH	2:08:35
4	Yemane Tsegay	ETH	2:08:42
5	Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot	KEN

So the burning question is this: what happened during those ten years? Did the good running genes manage to emigrate from Europe, via the Mediterranean and down through the Sahara to East Africa? Unlikely. And apart from that, what has happened to the British, who used to churn out middle-distance stars such as legends David Bedford, Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe?

These days, British men do not even manage to run into the top ten in their very own London Marathon. It was last won by a Briton in 1993 when Eamonn Martin crossed the finishing line with a time of 2:10:50. In 1985, 102 British male runners ran under the elite time of 2 hours 20 minutes for the marathon, only five managed this same feat twenty years later. British male distance running had all but disappeared. But why? Have previously efficient British genes got lost in evolution? Did British men, or other Europeans too, for that matter, suddenly start accumulating lactic acid in their muscles? Of course not. The genes of the British are as good as they ever have been.

Evidence of the fact that they can still put the Kenyans and Ethiopians in their place is to be found in Cheshire, the birthplace of Paula Radcliffe, British Queen of long-distance running and women’s world Marathon record holder. If the East Africans have a perfect genetic disposition to the discipline, how can it be that a white British woman, who grew up on fish and chips, surrounded by pubs in the British lowlands, has repeatedly thrashed the Kenyans?

Yannis Pitsiladis of the University of Glasgow is one of the leading researchers in sport science. He has dedicated his career to studying the secret behind the East African long-distance runners and the West African sprinters. He is very clear indeed on his conclusions: ‘There is no more evidence of a connection between specific races and specific top performance genes than there is of a connection between specific races and high intelligence. That is to say, there is no correlation whatsoever,’ says Pitsiladis.

In other words: the East Africans’ achievements, it transpires, are in fact much less predetermined than even the most optimistic scientists imagine.

Talent exists, but it exists everywhere

My mission here is not to close my eyes to the significance of genetics or to claim that all people on the planet have the potential to become the next Usain Bolt, Paula Radcliffe or Haile Gebrselassie. Genes are significant.

As recently as 2011, the geneticist and exercise physiologist Claude Bouchard from Laval University in Québec proved that our responsiveness to training is strongly influence by genes. Bouchard put 470 untrained volunteers through five months of training and measured their fitness levels before and after. As expected, the degree by which most people improved fell within a fairly close average range. But interestingly, in addition to these ‘typical responses’ Bouchard discovered considerable disparity between the level of response at the top and bottom ends. The ‘low responders’, the bottom 5 per cent of the sample, improved their VO2max (maximal oxygen uptake) by less than 4 per cent. By contrast the high responders – the top 5 per cent – improved by 40 per cent. A difference this big is obviously crucial and it is not difficult to decide which group it would be best to recruit long-distance runners from. Some individuals simply demonstrate much greater ability to adapt to training and improve much quicker than others.

The same is true in any field. Success often lies in acknowledging that we have natural strengths and abilities that make us better equipped to excel at some things than others. Some people might be extremely extroverted and have great social skills, while others might be more introverted but have a greater potential for careful, analytical thinking. Achieving great performance is about maximising these strengths and giving people opportunities based on their natural abilities.

Back to sport. Just how crucial genetic factors are for creating world-class performers depends to a large degree on the character of the particular discipline you are looking at. Sometimes, specific genetic characteristics are particularly important. If, for instance, you are born with a lot of slow muscle fibres and very few fast ones, you will never become a world-class sprinter, no matter how hard you train. Sure, studies have shown that to a certain extent we can change slow muscle fibres to fast ones, but dramatic changes cannot be achieved. However, as long as you have a certain amount of fast muscle fibre in your basic package you still have a chance of performing competitively in this area.

The twenty-year-old French sprinter Christophe Lemaitre who, with a time of 9.92 seconds, ran his way into the exclusive club of sprinters who have done the hundred metres in under ten seconds. He ran faster than Usain Bolt did when he was twenty. Lemaitre is not a West African, but there is no doubt that his genetic profile has given him a lot of fast muscle fibres, perfectly suited to sprinting. So there are genetic profiles that match certain sports better than others, but there is no scientific evidence to suggest that there are more of the genetic profiles advantageous for sprinting among Jamaica’s population of 2.8 million than anywhere else in the world.

This is precisely the conclusion that Bengt Saltin arrived at in his studies in the 1980s. When he compared some of the best Kenyan runners with some of the best Scandinavian runners, he didn’t just find that the Kenyans had a smaller, lighter and slimmer leg structure. He also discovered larger amounts of haemoglobin in the blood of the Kenyans (which would enhance their endurance). The Kenyans also accumulated less lactic acid in their muscles, meaning they would succumb to fatigue more slowly. So initially, at least, one might be tempted to conclude that Kenyans as a group do have a genetic advantage in running. But that is a hasty conclusion. Although Saltin’s studies confirm the hypothesis that those athletes who perform best have certain genetic advantages, this is not the same as proving that these advantages occur more frequently in Kenyans than in, for example, Swedes or Britons.

As Saltin puts it, ‘We have no idea whether a specific “running gene” exists, but what we do know is that the athletes who perform the best have a genetic advantage and that training of the body is a key factor. What is crucial is the activation of these genes. However, we also know that genetic advantages cannot be traced to specific ethnic groups.’

In other words, if we randomly selected 100 people on the street in Kingston, Jamaica, and took them to a laboratory to examine their muscle fibre type and genetic profile, we would not find more people with the potential to become super-sprinters then we would if we gathered 100 people off the street in Birmingham in England which has about the same population as Kingston. To put it another way, although innate talent exists, it does so everywhere.

The concept of ‘good enough’

Unfortunately, the debate about innate talent and the significance of genetics in top performance is often highly theoretical and difficult to get to grips with. The real question therefore is this: how can we use the insight that innate talent exists, but that it exists everywhere, in a hands-on, practical way?

As far as I can see there is one crucial lesson to be learnt for all managers, coaches and teachers who try to identify and release talent: genetics cannot predict who will become an Olympic medallist. All it can do is predict who is certain to never win a medal.

Usain Bolt was born with enough fast muscle fibres to become a world-class sprinter. Haile Gebrselassie was certainly a ‘high responder’ to training. Both men have genetic profiles that have allowed them to achieve high levels of performance. The raw material was there – they were ‘good enough’. There are bound to have been an awful lot of other people who could have emulated their achievements; the reason these unknown others never became as good as Usain and Haile does not have anything to do with their genes, but with a whole series of other factors such as motivation, their coaches and the quality of their training.

Eddie Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin, has thoroughly tested the seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong since he was twenty years old, both physiologically and biologically. He draws the same conclusions: ‘To be the best cyclist on the planet, you don’t have to be superhuman in any of the necessary genetic components, but you can’t be weak in any of them.’

In this way, innate talent becomes a sort of primary sorting mechanism. Or, to put it another way, being 2.10 metres tall doesn’t necessarily mean you can become an NBA player, but it is helpful. If, on the other hand, you’re 1.75 metres tall your chances are dramatically decreased. However, the shortest man to ever play in the NBA is Tyrone Bogues, at only 1.60 metres tall. He used his height to his advantage, gaining a reputation as a great passer, ball-stealer and one of the fastest players on the court. So Bogues demonstrates that being ‘good enough’ to play in the NBA is probably not as closely related to height as we might assume. At the same time we have to admit that in many respects, he is exceptional.

What being ‘good enough’ means depends on the nature and the demands of the discipline in question. Take a business leader, for example. You’ll have a hard time becoming a great leader without a strong sense of empathy and the ability to deal with other people psychologically. Without those skills you might become a good administrator, but you’ll never excel as a leader. In any discipline there is a minimum of natural skill you must have in order to be able to become really, really good. Talent is the access ticket to the game, though it’s not the decisive factor.

As a general rule of thumb, in the world of sport we can conclude that the simpler the sport, the greater the role played by genes. Sprinting, which is a relatively simple discipline, has only limited genetic requirements (you have to have a lot of fast muscle fibres), while football, a relatively complex discipline, opens the way for many more genetic variations (you can, for instance, have a lot of slow muscle fibres but still reach the top because you think quickly or have good technique: you can compensate).

Reaching the minimum requirements to excel is considerably more difficult in sprinting than in football because it’s harder to compensate for not having a critical mass of fast twitch muscle fibres. This is not the same as saying that you can’t improve if you don’t meet the minimum requirements. You can. But you will never be world class without meeting them.

If you don’t have enough stretch in your foot joints and rotation in your hips at age seven you will never become a talented ballet dancer. You will never become a competent counsellor if you do not possess a certain amount of emotional intelligence. If you score less than 100 in an IQ test it is highly unlikely you will ever be admitted to Harvard. That is not to say that you cannot become a better dancer, more empathetic or a more rigourous thinker, but you will never be among the very best at what you do. Innate talent is not the decisive factor, but it is the entry ticket to the game.

As Dennis Johnson, the former 100 metre world record holder and Jamaican sprint coach, told me one night at a hotel in Kingston: ‘To be a good sprinter you have got to have been born with a certain amount of fast muscle fibres. In that sense great sprinters are born. But a lot of people meet these minimum requirements. If you selected a group of sixteen-year-old British boys with enough fast muscle fibres, I could get them to run the hundred metres in ten seconds flat within four years. It’s very simple. Even if you don’t have the necessary fast muscle fibres you can improve enormously. You won’t become world class, but you’ll be good.’

The concept of capitalisation

It is here that the brilliant American scientist James Flynn comes into the picture. Flynn has developed the concept of ‘capitalisation’, which describes the percentage of human potential in a given community that is successfully unlocked. In other words, the percentage of people capable of achieving something who actually end up achieving it. One can call it a kind of TQ (talent quotient). Any society, organisation or individual has a TQ, which is an expression of the ability to realise existing potential. Unlike IQ, which is a static intelligence, TQ is a dynamic – it does not concern itself with whether or not talent exists. It does, and is found everywhere. Instead, TQ measures the ability to bring it into play, to capitalise on it and to convert it into actual results.

James Flynn has looked at the capitalisation rates of various occupations in the US. He has assessed, for example, what percentage of American men intellectually capable of holding top-tier managerial jobs actually end up getting those kinds of jobs. The number is surprisingly low, around 60 per cent. This is an expression of quite a low TQ, indicating a lot of room for improvement.

TQ is what company executives, teachers and sports coaches who want to develop top performance should measure themselves by. It is not a question of whether talent exists or not. There is a lot of talent out there, and it is frequently standing in front of your very eyes. The question is how good we are at capitalising on that potential. How many people who can be really good at what they do actually get that good?

We have seen that Jamaica, for example, is obviously outstanding in capitalising on people’s potential for sprinting. Again, it’s not that you will find more people in Kingston per 100 inhabitants with the potential to become world-class sprinters than you will find per 100 people anywhere else. It’s just that the percentage of those people who actually end up as sprinters is much higher in Jamaica because they have a system that identifies potential and grows it.

There are formal elements to this system – Jamaican children start competing in athletics at the age of two or three. Several kindergartens even have an athletics coach and from the age of six. The kids have the opportunity to run at the National Stadium in Kingston in front of a large crowd. Sprinting is on the school curriculum. Everybody runs for their school, and this means that every Jamaican boy and girl is tested for their potential as a sprinter.

I met the sprint coach Glen Mills – known as the architect of Usain Bolt’s success – after a training session at the University of West India. He explained: ‘People tend to underrate the fact that those who have the potential to become a good sprinter end up actually being good sprinters in Jamaica. In other countries they might study technology or play another sport. If Usain Bolt had grown up in the United States he would probably not have become a sprinter, but a basketball player or perhaps even a wide receiver in American football. He would have gone in an entirely different direction.’

Exactly the same applies to the runners in Kenya. Iten in Kenya has an extremely low TQ when it comes to developing software engineers, but an enormously high TQ as far as the development of long-distance runners is concerned. This is not because there is more innate running talent there than in any other country, but because the system there rounds up all the potential world stars and gives them a unique training environment in which to flourish. Think about it: here we have 1,000 athletes, all of whom grew up at least 2,500 metres above sea level. They push each other every day to the extreme and are ultra-motivated by the desire to create a better life for themselves and their families. They have all run ever since they were small, and are able to train side-by-side with the very best runners in the world, surrounded by running culture and running legends. They basically do nothing but run, eat and sleep. Where else in the world could you find those conditions?

Gold Mines must be created, not discovered

The deeper I reached into the six Gold Mines, the more it became clear to me that success cannot be traced back to an exclusive genetic design. As Dennis Johnson expressed it: ‘I would like to tell the whole world that there is no magic. No special nose or long ears, it’s just normal people that run fast.’

The evidence that invalidates the exclusive gene theory is convincing in practical as well as scientific terms. It sends a crystal clear, motivating message to anyone who wants to create a Gold Mine of high performance: this is achievable. It has more to do with your ability to capitalise on the talent that indisputably exists than anything else. To put it another way, Gold Mines are not going to be discovered. They are going to be uncovered. Ninety-nine per cent of the resources you need to succeed are already in your building.

This is the same message that the Godfather of Kenyan running, Colm O’Connell, serves up in his own peculiar way at Iten’s only cafe, the Keryo View, where we had agreed to meet a couple of hours before I boarded the plane to head home to Europe.

‘So, have you discovered what the secret is?’ asks Colm, taking a sip of his coffee.

‘The question is whether there is a secret at all,’ I respond. Colm O’Connell sits there silently for a few seconds, looking out over the rolling green landscape of the Rift Valley.

‘The secret is that there is no secret. And we won’t tell you what it is because there is none. But we’ll keep pushing you to make you think there is,’ he says. Then he laughs out loud, before concluding: ‘People make a big mistake when they believe that the discussion is about good and bad genes. In reality it’s all about belief. What do you think is possible? There is no more running talent in Kenya than in Britain, but the British believe there is. And if you believe you are limited by your genes you will probably never invest what it takes to become good. You’ve excluded yourself. Here in Iten nobody is in doubt, because if you don’t believe in yourself in Kenya, nobody else will, and belief doesn’t cost you anything. Everybody can afford it.’

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What your should never forget about
TALENT

1. Talent is not race-linked. It is everywhere. And I really mean everywhere!

2. Genetics can’t tell us who will be a star performer. At best it can tell us who will certainly never be. Good genes might be the entry ticket to the game of world-class performance, but they not the decisive factor for who will win. Don’t overrate the importance of in-born talent.

3. Talent is not something static; it’s not something that you either have or you don’t, and if you don’t you’re out of the game. It must be understood dynamically. For example, many women in the world sing better than Madonna. Plenty of women are better looking as well. But Madonna has managed to administer what she has at her disposal and to put it into action. This is what constitutes true talent.

4. Leave it to the scientists to discuss what percentage of world-class performance is dependent on genetics. Your job is to believe that nothing is impossible and to act as if in-born talent doesn’t play a role at all. In other words: stop crying and wishing for better genes. Start dealing with what you’ve got!

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