This book started with a conversation.
We search for talent—obsessively—as part of our jobs. After we met a few years ago, we started to talk about our approaches to hiring, and how, for both of us, the search for rare, transformative talent is so important. This started as a workplace fascination, but over time it morphed into a way of seeing the world—we were constantly searching for hidden talents in people we met in all parts of our lives.
During that first meeting we quickly began to trade tips and generate new hypotheses. We set up a WhatsApp channel to pursue the dialogue, which was punctuated by periodic visits and a few joint trips, all motivated by a mixture of fun, obsessive mischievousness, and the desire to learn something of practical value. What happens if you take two very opinionated people, both working on talent search, and let them tease each other, prod each other, hack away at each other, challenge each other’s prejudices, and bicker with each other for a few years, all on how to spot talent?
This book is the product of those exchanges.
Tyler remembers one of his early chats with Daniel. Daniel stressed the importance of hobbyists and “weirdos,” noting that many major mainstream internet revolutions started with products that appeared to be niche. It is the people who work intently on pleasing a narrow fan base, but pleasing them intensely, who end up with the skills and networks to market the product to broader audiences. So very often, if you are looking for a start-up that will hit it big, do something counterintuitive by seeking out people aiming, at least at first, to please smaller and weirder audiences.
Daniel recalls that he first learned from Tyler this question for prospective hires: “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?” You learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement, and perhaps you can judge its efficacy or even learn something from it. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond their particular habits. If a person doesn’t practice much, they still might be a good hire, but then you are much more in the world of “what you see is what you get,” which is valuable information on its own. If the person does engage in daily, intensive self-improvement, perhaps eschewing more typical and more social pursuits, there is a greater chance they are the kind of creative obsessive who can make a big difference.
If those two anecdotes focus on outsiders, it is because we are each outsiders in our own ways. Daniel started with gaming and did not pursue higher education, while Tyler began his career ascent in the early days of blogging. Both of us think of ourselves as examples of initially hidden talent, and that is part of the reason we wish to help you find other outsiders for your ventures.
Daniel Gross once wrote a self-description starting with “I spent most of my youth feeling like an outsider looking in.” Before his foray into the tech world Daniel was an obsessive gamer, but he decided to bring his competitive experience from gaming to address bigger and more socially relevant problems. He began his tech career with a company called Cue, which he ended up selling to Apple when he was twenty-three, becoming a director at Apple at a time when Apple experienced some of its most dynamic growth. Daniel next served as a partner and founder at Y Combinator, an esteemed Silicon Valley start-up incubator with an aggregate market cap of over $100 million. There he helped build and then institutionalize what is perhaps the most influential systematic approach to venture capital and talent search in the world. He also became an angel investor, seeking out promising companies and creators in their very early stages, an exercise in talent search, of course.1
In 2018 Daniel founded Pioneer, an upstart venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Pioneer is devoted to finding new talent around the world, using online methods and gaming in addition to the usual techniques of referrals and interviews. Daniel and Pioneer are committed to the view that there is much more talent to be found out there, including in new and unusual places. They want to find the creators that everyone else is failing to see in the first place. Daniel mostly is looking to find and fund company founders, but of course he hires for Pioneer as well, for a variety of roles at all levels of the company. But don’t think of Daniel as a practitioner alone: in his spare time he cruises Google Scholar for research articles on talent, and then sends them to Tyler.
Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University, where he has been involved in academic hiring and graduate admissions for over thirty years. He is the head of the Mercatus Center, a research center with nearly two hundred employees. Within Mercatus he directs a philanthropic fund devoted to spotting and funding talent—typically young talent—called Emergent Ventures. He has written a daily blog, Marginal Revolution, for eighteen years, runs an online economics education site, Marginal Revolution University, and hosts a podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Tyler remains an academic, but he is involved in personnel selection and project management almost every day.
One of his blog commentators, Alastair, described him as follows: “Tyler is contrarian in method. His superfast reading speed, various professional roles, constant podcasting and networking, obsessive learning, perpetual travel, and sheer stamina enable him to take in many more and different inputs, which allows him to have many more and different outputs. But it’s what’s in between where he shines. He sees the world as an economist, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, liberal and conservative, globalist and nationalist, foreigner and native, art critic and artist, employer/administrator and employee, grant provider and grant recipient, interviewer and interviewee, teacher and student. There is almost no one who views the world like Tyler because almost no one has a comparable number or variety of inputs or mental models. Even if his conclusions were conventional, his reasoning and perspectives wouldn’t be.”2
We might seem pretty different based on our jobs; furthermore, Daniel is in his late twenties and Tyler is in his late fifties. Daniel was born in Israel (to American parents) and moved to San Francisco, and Tyler was born in New Jersey and ended up in northern Virginia. Daniel can come across as a little grumpy, while Tyler seems detached. Daniel seems surprised each time that Tyler actually teases him. Daniel goes scuba diving and listens to EDM, while Tyler plays basketball and listens to Beethoven and Indian classical music. Daniel hated high school and rebelled against it, but Tyler mostly ignored it. Still, we share a stubborn curiosity, a love for ideas, and the willingness to persist in hacking away at tough problems. Thus, once we started talking we never stopped.
This dynamic started right away when Daniel and Tyler first met on February 1, 2018, at a group dinner, a kind of informal salon in a private room at a San Francisco restaurant. Tyler was visiting friends, and he was invited along to an event that was fascinating in its own right for its insights into British politics. But Tyler also noticed Daniel, whom he had not previously met. Daniel was sitting in a corner seat at a large table and was reasonably quiet, but Tyler perceived immediately just how quickly and thoroughly Daniel was taking everything in. “Who is this young guy?” he was thinking. “What should I be making of that wry smile?” Tyler also noticed right away how much the other people at the dinner, some of them eminent Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists, listened carefully whenever Daniel did speak.
One of the first things Daniel noticed about Tyler was his now-iconic tote bag. This simple accoutrement, filled with an iPad and a few books, speaks to the aesthetic of Mr. Cowen: whimsical, down-to-earth, and nontraditional. People from “old money” do not lug around such things. After everyone was seated, the game of dinner discussion began. Events like this, in which ideas are shotgunned out at a rapid pace, often provide a quick window into whether a person’s true interests lie in status or in ideas. They allow you to catch a glimpse into a person’s creative talents. Status-seekers focus on maximizing attention from the perceived elite. Idea-seekers, on the other hand, want to advance knowledge and stimulate curiosity, speaking to the entire room and holding the attention of the group. Intrigue is their reserve currency, and conjectures are often framed as questions, not statements. Daniel felt Tyler embodied the latter kind of creative spark. In group conversations the two usually managed to catch each other’s attention and to follow up on each other’s points and themes, a good sign they ought to be talking further. By the end of the evening, each felt the other had understood the ongoing dialogue in the same general terms.
Each meeting led to another, and it was while having lunch at a San Francisco Chinese restaurant in 2019 that we decided to write this book. The plan flowed quickly, and we both agreed that the key was to get started and to allow the gains from intellectual trade to flow. Tyler recalls feeling very guilty during this conversation, as he had to report to Daniel that he could not start work on the project for several months because he first had marketing obligations for his previous book (Tyler hates it when people cannot start on their work right away). Still, Daniel noticed that Tyler hated this fact, and that pleased him just enough to keep the momentum going.
We then discussed how such a book should offer (among other topics) a high-level treatment of intelligence, personality traits, and how to interview, blending the oral lore of the venture capital tradition with newer perspectives on how to search for diverse talents. Such a book should apply those insights to both start-ups and to the plain ol’ regular economy.
It is evident that a lot of people want to find talent, but they do not always succeed. According to the Conference Board Annual Survey, hiring talent is the top concern of CEOs and other senior business executives. Furthermore, the unavailability of needed skills and talent is judged to be the number one threat to businesses. When we speak to CEOs, nonprofit directors, or venture capitalists, lack of proper talent—and how to go about finding more of it—is an obsessive concern of theirs.3
That is all the more true today as individuals have been leaving jobs in record numbers and reevaluating their futures, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are entering a brave new world where remote work is far more common, which means a great deal of talent needs to be repriced for a world where connections and meetings so often are made over Zoom.
Of course, talent search isn’t just about jobs and business. It’s about handing out scholarships, allocating auditions, choosing the right athlete in the draft, opting for the right co-author, and even choosing your friends and partners. Talent search is one of the most important activities in virtually all human lives. Elon Musk personally interviewed the first three thousand employees at SpaceX because he wanted to make sure the company was hiring the right people.4
Don’t just think of talent search as a problem faced by “the boss” or by human resource departments. If you are hoping to be discovered, one of the most valuable things you can learn is how other people are thinking about talent (or how they should be thinking about talent), in case you can showcase exciting and valuable traits that potential employers otherwise might miss. You have to worry about talent judgments at least as much as the boss does.
Just about everyone is on a quest to find talent in others or to show off their own. Surely you care about how talented your boss and co-workers are, as you want to work with the most talented people possible, especially if they are your bosses. That is one good way to grow more talented yourself. The decision to take a job or pursue an opportunity is almost always a decision about other people—namely, those you will be working with and answering to, no matter what your place in the hierarchy.
The practical value is that identifying underrated talent is one of the most potent ways to give yourself a personal or an organizational edge. Large companies can afford to overbid for the “obvious” talent, but if you are in a smaller institution you might not be in a comparable position. Screening correctly for the overlooked late-career woman, the non-obvious misfit producer, or the hidden genius is your best bet at building a unique, motivated, and loyal team. If you work for an established large institution, perhaps you have seen a descent into excess credentialism and highly bureaucratic hiring procedures rather than the quest for inspired talent that made the company great in the first place. You might like to get your institution taking more chances again—good chances, of course.
Most of all, we oppose and seek to revise the bureaucratic approach to talent search, which is poorly serving the American economy—and many American and global citizens. The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else. It demands that everyone play by a set of overly rigid rules, that individualism be hidden or maybe even stamped out, and that there is never any hurry, so another set of procedures can be applied, virtually without end. At the end of all this you have a hiring process full of “kludge” and “sludge,” to cite two terms coming into fashion in political science, and you will attract candidates of comparable temperament. Virtually all of you are familiar with the standard bureaucratic interview setup. A bunch of people show up in a room, armed with scripted questions (and answers), often bored by the process and hoping for the best; they are trying to find someone who seems “good enough” and capable of commanding consensus by being decent but most of all sufficiently unobjectionable.
We are realists, and we recognize the world is never going to eliminate these approaches, if only because bureaucracy is so widespread. Still, we are revolutionaries when it comes to hiring, and we think that a lot of you really can do much better than the typical approach. When it comes to talent, we will try to teach you how to think past the bureaucracy.
We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly. In referring to the creative spark, we mean people who generate new ideas, start new institutions, develop new methods for executing on known products, lead intellectual or charitable movements, or inspire others by their very presence, leadership, and charisma, regardless of the context. Those are all people who have the gift of improving the world by reimagining the future as a different and better place. And because they are often hard to spot, such people can turn up at all levels of an organization. It might be the CEO or a high-level executive, but it might just as well be a new marketing director who overturns your longtime approach to advertising or even an intern who wonders whether you should start a new kind of podcast. If you are trying to hire talent “on the way up”—as we think you should be—you will need to hone your skills to find that creative spark, rather than just looking for people with a long track record of achievement.
Doing better on the talent question really is critical. When we—Daniel and Tyler—read the project proposals that cross our respective desks, so often we see that talent and not money is the truly scarce variable. Tyler reads a proposal for a think tank in Indonesia, but who exactly will be the director and fundraiser? Daniel sees a company pitch asteroid mining in outer space, but rarely does one meet an individual with the perfect mixture of chutzpah and gravitas to execute on such an interplanetary idea. “Who is going to be the project driver on this one?” is a question that recurs again and again, and perhaps you see it in your work as well. Far too often there is no really good answer, not because the talent doesn’t exist somewhere, but because it is hard to find and mobilize. There is a shortage of workers and leaders who can make things happen. That is true whether the question is building a new church, writing a hit pop song, or starting a successful company, thereby creating sustainable jobs for many other talented workers.
The scarcity and importance of talent are such major issues that they show up at the level of the macroeconomy. In essence there is a scarcity of talented labor relative to capital, as evidenced by the relative plenty of venture capital and what economists call “the savings glut.” The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, with its stash of billions, has become the world’s largest venture capital firm, but it can’t always find the right opportunities, and it has made many mistakes, such as funding WeWork and its CEO and founder, Adam Neumann. Sovereign wealth funds, in nations as diverse as Singapore, Norway, and Qatar, are looking for new and ever broader ways to invest their growing surpluses. They have the money and are looking for the always-scarce talent.5
If we look at the growth in U.S. output since 1960, by the best available estimates at least 20 to 40 percent of that growth has stemmed from the better allocation of talent. Circa 1960, the United States was doing a stunningly bad job at allocating talent, in part due to sheer prejudice and misconception. For instance, 94 percent of doctors and lawyers were white men. In 1952, when Sandra Day O’Connor graduated third in her class from Stanford Law School, she could only get a job as a legal secretary. In earlier times, and still today, we are not always putting the most productive people into the jobs they would best be suited for; in other words, we were and are underusing, indeed wasting, human talent. This is bad for our economy, but it is also a human tragedy for those who cannot rise, and it harms our national spirit and morale.6
When we think of discrimination, we often think in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Those remain very real problems, and the issue is so deeply rooted that there are many other areas in which American society has made mistakes in allocating talent. Circa 1970, were we really using nerds and introverts to the greatest and most productive degree possible? How about people with disabilities, or recent immigrant arrivals, or short individuals? Prejudices were—and still are—distorting many of our talent allocation decisions.
The data on American incomes reflects how talent is increasingly the binding constraint. If you look at the years 1980–2000, the main driver of rising income differences—which explains 75 percent of the variation—is whether a person has a college degree, no degree, or a graduate degree. But for 2000 to 2017, when we look at the rise in income inequality, amount of education explains only 38 percent of the variation. (For the time being it suffices to know that explaining 100 percent of the variation is explaining all of it, while lower numbers indicate a weaker connection, zero percent being no connection at all. The contrast between 75 and 38 percent is a big drop in explanatory power.) In the latter period, most of the increases in income inequality are seen in people within the same educational groupings. In other words, simply being educated only gets you so far; the real returns are to your talent above and beyond your educational level.7
Globalization also has boosted the relevance of the talent question, because there is more talent to be found than ever before. Take Nigeria. Thirty or forty years ago, rates of malnutrition in that country were so high and school systems were so bad that most of the talent and potential talent there didn’t have much of a chance. Today, Nigerian living conditions are highly uneven and often miserable, but there is nonetheless a sizable middle (and upper) class. Nigerian entrepreneurs are starting businesses at a rapid clip, both in Africa and in the larger global community, and there is plenty more to come. In England, many of the kids with the strongest math scores have Nigerian backgrounds, and in the United States, Nigerian Americans are climbing the income ladder. Yet by no means have all Nigerians found their proper place in the world—again, a sign that talent search and evaluation could do far better, and furthermore, that you as a talent searcher have some very real opportunities.
Excess credentialism, one of the worst instantiations of the bureaucratic approach to hiring, is also a problem of talent search. Many jobs that decades ago required only a high school education now require a bachelor’s or even an advanced degree. The New York Times has reported that the master’s degree has become the new bachelor’s. Does a worker in law enforcement or construction management really need to have a master’s degree, as is currently a trend? Another way of asking the question: By requiring a master’s degree for those positions, are we potentially overlooking people with more relevant skills and talents who might be better for the job? Credentialism plays an important role in helping us narrow down who is best for the job. But when it misses the mark, it hurts the candidate and employer, limits the economic and social mobility of those who can’t afford an advanced degree, and encourages overinvestment in formal education. If we wish to combat excess credentialism and restore America as a land of true opportunity, we have to get better at talent search.8
Keep in mind that the venture capital or “Silicon Valley” approach to talent search worries much more about “sins of omission” than “sins of commission.” That is, if you’re a venture capitalist and miss one of the year’s big founders, you are out a lot of money and possibly out of your job as well. Thousands of people are trying to climb the heap with their start-ups, yet only seven or eight will truly hit it big, and in a given year, perhaps only one or two of those hits will be transformative companies. So missing out on the next big thing is a surefire way to lose money. By no means do venture capital or tech dominate our economy, but we can glean from them some useful ways to look beyond credentials and find hidden sources of transformative talent.
Talent search is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor, based on the premise that there is always more value to be found in our world. But finding this talent is itself a creative skill, akin to music or art appreciation. It cannot be done by boilerplate interviews, groupthink, algorithms, studying PowerPoints, or simple formulas.
Everyone talks about being impressed by a candidate. But in venture, one odd emotion Daniel focuses on is fear—specifically those moments when a founder launches their pitch and Daniel begins to feel a subtle fear, brought on by the person’s brazen ambition and drive, that they will do anything to succeed. It’s not that the founder is trying to scare him; rather, they ooze ambition, and Daniel picks up on that. If Daniel feels subtly afraid of them, he will pay attention. The twenty-first-century founder is akin to the pirate of the sixteenth century—an outsider overflowing with energy and brazen charisma. Sometimes Daniel anchors his investment conviction in the market: it was easy to see how Opendoor could become a large business. But sometimes he anchors it in the founder: Instacart, Cruise, and Embark come to mind as extremely profitable investments with non-obvious paths to profitability but very fearsome founders.
For all the importance of talent, we find it striking that there is not a single go-to book on talent search akin to, say, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People for sales, Andy Grove’s High Output Management for CEOs, or Robert Cialdini’s Influence for marketing and personal relationships. There are, however, extensive literatures on talent and talent search in psychometrics, management, economics, sociology, education, art and music history, and sports, among other areas. We will give you the best of these insights, as filtered through our judgment and practical experience, in easy-to-digest, readily interpretable form.
Any book on discovering this kind of talent must fundamentally engage with larger questions about humanity and human behavior—specifically, which traits are correlated with creativity and predict a person’s ability to use their creativity to make a difference in whatever sphere they operate in. Which traits make people good or bad at working with others or at coming up with new ideas? To what extent can we predict human creativity with correlated personality traits and intelligence quotients? Or is human creativity irreducible, perhaps something we can glimpse through intuition but is unique each time it appears? Which kinds of people actually can get things done? The art and science of talent search get at those questions and thus offer a new way to understand the world around us.
In our many conversations, we have come to see the world’s inability to find and mobilize enough talent as one of the most significant failures of our time, and so this is also a book about how to fight for social justice. A world of rampant inequality and insufficient opportunity is, among other things, a world failing to recognize and mobilize talent. At the end of the day, too many potentially highly productive individuals are underutilized, to their detriment and to the loss of society as a whole. The idea that “talent search is one of the main things we are bad at” is a radical reconceptualization of the way so many parts of our world have gone astray. The traditional bureaucratic approach to finding talent doesn’t typically intend to be discriminatory, but the focus on credentials, hierarchies, and consensus is far from ideal for giving better chances to outsiders. Therefore, we will focus on how you, within current structures, can make the world better at giving other people—the otherwise overlooked ones—their justly deserved opportunities. It is now commonly recognized that diversity and inclusion efforts are based on structural failures in our institutions, so improving your ability to spot talent is another way to have a direct and positive impact.
Before proceeding, we’d like to lay out four core perspectives that inform our approaches. You will find these themes recurring throughout the book, and they are general lessons worth carrying through any talent search problem, and indeed they apply to many other life dilemmas as well.
Performing better at talent search really is possible if you put in enough study and practice, just as the experienced basketball watcher understands a game better than does a novice, and just as music and art and cinema appreciation repay careful study even if you don’t always find fixed rules for quality. You invest in skills of pattern recognition that come in handy in the field, even though most of your individual decisions cannot be boiled down to a simple principle. “Red paintings are always good” is a silly rule, but if you study how Titian and Mondrian deployed the color red, it will help you recognize other artistic talents and other effective ways of painting with red. And the same is true of talent spotting more generally. One must understand both the science and the art of talent spotting, and the art side means looking for general regularities that are not rules and seeing how they manifest themselves in particular instances of individual talent. This helps you develop your intuitions so that you can spot yet another individual with potential.
The most famous and successful talent spotters process a phenomenal amount of data, but they also inject their intuition into the process. Peter Thiel found and helped to mobilize the talents of Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Mark Zuckerberg, and others, including Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim (all behind YouTube), and Jeremy Stoppelman and Russell Simmons (behind Yelp). His approach is not well described by any kind of mechanical formula, and Peter’s own background is in the humanities—philosophy and law—rather than science or tech. Many of his current interests concern religion, as he studied the Bible under French anthropologist and philosopher René Girard, who was a professor of Peter’s at Stanford. We understand Peter as applying a very serious philosophical and indeed even moral test to people. This isn’t a point about whether you agree with Peter’s approach to politics or, for that matter, with his morality. In a venture capital context, Peter realizes that our moral judgments are some of our most penetrating and motivated sources of insight, and that helps him bring extra faculties to bear on talent judgment issues. In our view, Peter actually asks whether you deserve to succeed, as he understands that concept, and he derives additional information from that interior and indeed deeply emotional line of inquiry. It is often moral judgments that call forth our deepest and most energetic intuitions.
Michael Moritz is another remarkable judge of talent. From Stripe to Google to PayPal, Mike has had a remarkable eye for talent and is regarded by many in the industry as the best. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital, he spent his whole career as a journalist, and we believe this helps him suss out who has talent and who does not. Whereas we understand Thiel’s mind to be more philosophical, Moritz seeks a story of authentic, raw energy in the individual, and his art is in spotting such backgrounds. A tale of exceptional endurance, especially during childhood, will spark Moritz’s interest. People who have had to endure hardships have a chip on their shoulder and thus a need to prove themselves, and he has found this to be correlated with success. It is no accident that Moritz worked with famous soccer manager Alex Ferguson on the latter’s autobiography, and in that book Ferguson explains how the very top players in the game, such as Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, have an extra obsession with self-improvement that puts them above the rest. Moritz realizes that the most important prospects do not always arrive with big successes under their belts, but rather are determined to work harder than anyone else to reach the top.
The scientific side of talent search is most relevant when you have lots of data on preexisting performance capabilities. Sports has seen a lot of progress in identifying and recruiting talent, mostly through measurement. Are you trying to evaluate a young baseball pitcher? Well, you can start with the speed of the kid’s fastball, but these days you also should measure his spin rate and the kind of rotation he imparts to the ball.
The revolution Billy Beane brought to baseball, documented in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball and then in a hit movie starring Brad Pitt, started with the Oakland Athletics early in this millennium, and it brought that initially mediocre team to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003. The Moneyball philosophy, in a nutshell, uses statistics to spot players and strategies that are being undervalued by the baseball establishment. At least for a while, the Oakland Athletics were able to find and develop talented players that other teams could not. A similar emphasis on data followed in most of the other major sports—for example, the NBA moved to more three-point shots, and teams began drafting and then playing more good three-point shooters. Numbers are great when you can use them, but we also recognize they aren’t relevant in many cases.9
We hope to spark your interest and curiosity in talent in all parts of your own life, and that you will think and talk about talent as much as you possibly can, not just at work. Try to figure out the people you encounter and to analyze the situations you find yourself in, even when there is no evident practical value to that obsession. Pay attention to talent in fields unrelated to your job, such as sports, entertainment, politics, or even celebrity gossip, and try to figure out who really has it and who does not. When you happen to meet other talent evaluators, take advantage of it by striking up conversations about talent. Getting better at talent evaluation really does require continuously testing and honing your skills by observing the natural experiment that is everyday life. Make talent evaluation one of your hobbies.
We have learned a great deal from the academic research on talent search, but we’ve also found that some writers make overly strong claims. Many results cannot be replicated, or they are not convincing in the first place, or they apply only to a very particular context. For instance, we will see that the quality called “grit” matters, but when you look at the numbers, perseverance is a personality feature that matters much more than passion taken alone. We have made a pact to not rely on the mere possibility of an academic footnote to leap to a conclusion—we look carefully at the methods, the depth of the surrounding literature, the quality and specificity of the data, and whether it accords with the testimony of practitioners, among other issues. There are times when we rely primarily on our intuition and experience rather than research results, and we also make this clear.
Similarly, we encourage you to be skeptical of the hyperbolic pronouncements in many management and tech books, particularly those that claim to have identified the one (or three) things that will make you better. Always ask: In which areas might this work? Might this not work? When does this work or not work? We call that last question “looking for the cross-sectional variation.” If you don’t understand when and where a particular claim is wrong, you probably don’t understand the claim in the first place, and you probably shouldn’t be relying on it so heavily. It is the understanding of context that breeds alertness to talent.
We are both “fallibilists,” to use a term that has been revived by Irish tech entrepreneur and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. That means we’re also going to tell you about things you might think you know but that aren’t true. For instance, for a large swath of jobs, intelligence and IQ are far less important than many smart people believe. Discarding faulty knowledge and being open to surprise are two of the most important things you can do to discover previously unknown talent.
Finally, we recognize that spotting talent can be a morally uneasy enterprise. For most jobs or posts, there are many more applicants than winners, and so often you are making only one person feel good about the outcome. Most of the time, you are saying no to most of the people. Furthermore, to the extent you are a good assessor of talent, you’re essentially saying to people, “No, we are not rejecting you because of your bad shoes or the school you went to. The real problem is you.” It is hard to feel entirely comfortable with issuing that kind of judgment, even if it is your responsibility and even if it is better in the long run for those who are rejected.
If your goal is to found or lead a company, you will need to get over any potential butterflies and lean into that. What is the practical alternative? Not everyone can be a CEO, and, both practically and morally, it is better to judge individuals as individuals than to rely on group stereotypes, even if that means a brutal pinpointing of a person’s weaknesses. You can help the world a great deal by being a better judge of talent. That said, we are not going to pretend that this is only a feel-good book. Any move to become a better appreciator of the talents and virtues of others probably also will improve your skills at ruthlessly identifying the causes of human failure. Such is the burden of knowledge.
Proper use of this book thus requires you to deploy a kind of dialectical perspective. You should try to hold in your mind, at the same time, both the marvels of human achievement and the causes of human failure, without fear of contradiction. The marvels should come through more strongly (the world is on net a very good thing), but with this balance you will be able to deploy multiple perspectives on talent to maximum positive effect. You will then be able to simultaneously find people who can help you further your mission, help those people take the next step to wherever they are trying to go, and avoid doing them the harm of taking them down the wrong path only for them to have to go back and start again.