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HOW TO CONVINCE TALENT TO JOIN YOUR CAUSE
We have focused on finding talent, but in reality, finding talent is not completely separate from helping to create talent. “Being found” is a big part of what encourages individuals to take the next step toward achievement and excellence. You will do best at finding people and making the most of your discoveries if you understand how these two features are related. And that will make you better—reputationally and in practice—at attracting that talent to come and work for your cause or your organization.
It is well known that venture capital gives people money if they are starting a new company with promise, and also that venture capital gives them a business network and a lot of hands-on advice and training. It is less well known that the very act of being selected by a good venture capital firm raises people’s confidence and aspirations and encourages their ambitions. Much of the value of venture capital comes from that latter effect—helping to create and improve talent rather than just finding it. Toward this end, many venture capital firms (and nonprofits) have an air of self-importance surrounding them, in part to radiate status, motivate their affiliates, and raise everyone’s aspirations.
Raising the aspirations of other people is one of the most beneficial things you can do with your time. At critical moments, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something more important and ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, can be enormous.
As George Eliot put it in Daniel Deronda: “It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.”1
Once you understand the power of raising people’s aspirations in this manner, you will realize that the value of talent search is that much higher. There is a large payoff to finding the right people to encourage.
So often potentially talented people just don’t see that they could be doing something different and better than what they are currently engaged in. Barack Obama had no plans to run for president until he found himself surprised by the positive media reaction to a speech he delivered at the 2004 Democratic National Convention; only a few years later he won the presidential election.2
Don’t underestimate how little people, including your employees and applicants, may think of themselves. There is an ongoing crisis of confidence in many human beings, even in the best of times, and that means high returns from nudging talent in the proper direction. If you are able to spot people who are having a confidence crisis and if you understand the nature of those crises, you’re all the better placed to give them the right kind of positive nudge.
Sometimes employees may come to you with job offers or potential offers from other quarters. It is striking how some people will consider offers that are inferior or unsuited to their skills and work ethic. “I want to see you leave this institution for a better offer than that—and you will!” is sometimes the message you need to send them. That too is an instance of raising their aspirations. Don’t assume that your best and most productive workers actually know what they are capable of, because very often they do not and need nudging in the right direction to realize their full potential.
When you raise the aspirations of an individual, in essence you are bending upward the curve of that person’s achievement for the rest of his or her life. There is a powerful multiplier effect of compounding returns that can continue for many decades. Actually, the full net impact can be longer yet, if that individual in turn works to later raise the aspirations of others. If you are helping to create an individual who raises the aspirations of many others, the return on your initial aspiration-raising activity can be that much higher. It may even turn out that aspiration raising is a kind of eternally growing, never-ending source of plenty, giving us ongoing compound returns without end—a concept Tyler discussed in his earlier book Stubborn Attachments.
If you have any doubts about the power of environment and the framing of aspirations, consider just how much genius and achievement have been clustered in time and space throughout history. The statistician David Banks wrote a paper on this phenomenon called “The Problem of Excess Genius.” Ancient Athens in its time had Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sappho, Aristophanes, and many other notable figures. It wasn’t “something in the water”; rather, Athens had the right ethos and cultural self-confidence, combined with institutional structures for learning, debating philosophy, and writing for the theater, all of which identified and mobilized this talent. That allowed those individuals to learn and draw inspiration from each other as well as to develop rivalries for excellence, friendly or otherwise.
The Florentine Renaissance produced a long string of first-rate artists, culminating in Leonardo and Michelangelo, even though Renaissance Florence had a population of only about sixty thousand plus the surrounding area. The Venetian Renaissance, another powerful cluster built on a limited base, is associated with Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and others; since the end of the eighteenth century, however, Venetian art has produced little of note. In Germanic classical music, the era 1700–1900 brought the Bach family, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and many others, even though the Germany of that time had much lower population and wealth than the Germany of today. There is some genetic luck behind these outcomes (what if Beethoven’s parents never had met?), but still, those eras did an amazing job of identifying and then inspiring the available talent at hand.
Closer to the present day, the Bay Area has been a major petri dish for attracting, cultivating, and mobilizing talent for tech, software, start-ups, and much more—think of the region’s role in hippie culture, alternative and psychedelic cultures, and gay liberation.
The bottom line is that environment, ethos, and competitive rivalry really matter, and to the extent you can create the proper conditions in your local ecosystem, you can have a major impact on talent mobilization.
Methods for Raising Aspirations
The key theme here is to raise personal and career and creative trajectories—in other words, to boost the entire slope of possible future achievement. Those interventions offer by far the highest potential boost. You can think of them as you, on a modest scale, trying to create the next Florence, Venice, or Vienna.
There is an old saying (with many variants): “Give a man a fish, and feed him for a meal; teach him how to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.” We think that is remarkably unambitious! The value of learning how to fish is not that high, as reflected by the only so-so wages earned by fisherfolk. Furthermore, knowing how to fish still doesn’t, on its own, get you a job with the most successful and highest-paying fishing ventures.
We say instead: “Boost the rate of productivity growth in that person’s fishing company.” Or better yet: “Teach a person how to start a fishing company that will feed millions. Teach a person how to hire talented people to make a better fishing company.” Those are increases in trajectory, and along the way they will teach many thousands of employees how to fish or how to contribute to the fishing process. Always look to take it one step higher and to teach other people how to do the same.
If you’ve ever found yourself saying that silly fishing maxim to yourself in your head or to others, purge it from your thoughts. Upgrade it. Imagine a future company that will replace fishing altogether, instead producing a superior foodstuff at lower prices that is also better for the environment. Teach a person how to replace fishing. Now we’re getting somewhere.
So many interventions to benefit others provide them only with one-time benefits. We don’t mean to discourage you from performing these acts of kindness, which are essential to interpersonal benevolence and also for the smooth functioning of civilization. But also realize their limitations. A one-off benefit for someone looks like this:
Raising the slope of their trajectory can look like this:
In the very short run, the benefits from those two activities may be virtually identical. But over time, the benefits of the steeper slope are much, much greater, and those benefits will include everyone who is learning from that person along the way.
You might wonder: If the benefits from a higher slope are so great, why isn’t the higher, steeper slope chosen in the first place? Arguably this is one of the mysteries of human nature, but we think it springs from the nature of choice. When making decisions, people do not usually have a complete map of the options and their probabilities before them. In fact, many of the options can be difficult to imagine. For instance, a talented young person may not take seriously the notion that he or she someday could be a major CEO. That person has heard of CEOs, and maybe has not actively dismissed the possibility of being one. But if it’s going to influence the young person’s behavior, that possibility needs to be brought to mind as a live, vivid alternative. Once the alternative is properly, mentally real and alive in the person’s mind, then perhaps it will raise ambition and in some cases lead to a trajectory that culminates in a CEO position. The default has been shifted for that option to move from unconsidered to being on the table, whether or not it ultimately happens.
Making those alternatives vivid is the role of the mentor, the talent scout, and the role model. Just as America’s entertainment sector makes action or romance scenarios vivid, so must the mentor and talent scout perform a similar function. In this regard, the mentor is drawing upon expertise in the humanities, either explicitly or implicitly, even if he or she imagines the enterprise to be involved in tech, STEM, or something else rigorous and distinct. A key role here is for the mentor or talent scout to shape and present him- or herself so that he or she embodies an alternative and inspiring vision of what the mentee’s life might be like.3
If you are going to raise the aspirations of others, they should view their affiliation with you as a matter of pride. They should feel selected in some manner. They should feel like they have gone through trials and tribulations to get to their current point. They should feel like members of some exclusive club where they can look around and feel good about their affiliations with the other club members.
The easiest way to create these feelings is to have them be true. Create institutions and designations that reward those you consider to be talented. This can be a venture capital firm, a named scholarship series, a prize, or many other things. Focus on the substance, but also understand that the substance is working in part because of the theater surrounding it. You will then do a better job of raising the aspirations of those you consider to be talented, and you will be a partial co-creator in their rise to the top.
One of the seminal cultural takes on mentorship is the 2014 movie Whiplash, about a drumming teacher who pushes his students as far as they can go. Daniel has been struck by how many of the people he has interviewed at Pioneer cite this film as an influence. Perhaps the film is appealing because it describes the pursuit of excellence and validation through hard work. Great people want to be great. They want to be pushed to become the best version of themselves. They’re also equally uncertain, often searching for recognition as to where they stand in the world. The story of a young drummer clamoring for his teacher’s approval resonates with them. No, we don’t argue for throwing drumsticks at your charges, but still, your approval has to be seen as something worth earning.
You should also help your awardees see that what may appear to be distant is partly familiar (though not easy to reach). It is striking how much evidence has accumulated in the social sciences in recent years about the value of role models, especially for women and minority groups but also for virtually everyone. If you see “someone like you”—which can be defined in various ways—doing something, that something then has a greater chance of becoming a live, vivid alternative, and it is in turn more likely to be chosen.4
So you, as a talent scout, employer, mentor, friend, or role model, can have a staggering amount of influence. You can open doors for other people at relatively low cost (perhaps zero cost) to yourself just by making some options more vivid to them. You can do that through your writing, your YouTube presence, your friendship and mentoring, and just meeting people and being yourself. You embody something, and that something will stir some others into action.
Use those powers wisely!
This mentorship effect has been measured, by the way, and it seems to be powerful. In 2019 Tyler had a podcast interview with Abhijit Banerjee, co-winner of that year’s Nobel Prize in economics. Banerjee and co-authors (including his wife and co-laureate, Esther Duflo) published a 2015 paper that showed very high returns to making cash transfers to the very poor when those transfers were combined with coaching. In a series of six countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan, and Peru), cash transfers with coaching yielded net returns of over 100 percent, sometimes ranging up to 433 percent—a remarkably successful aid program. Yet the same cash transfers without coaching had only a modest positive impact. When Tyler asked Banerjee why the coaching made such a difference, he explained that the recipients of these cash transfers had grown up expecting very little of themselves and had virtually no confidence. The main function of the coaching was not transmission of any particular kind of expertise but simply to show the recipients that another way of life, another destiny, was possible for them.5
Here is his explanation:
And for them, I think confidence is an enormous issue because they’ve never actually done anything in their life successfully. They’ve been living hand-to-mouth, usually begging from people, getting some help. What that does to your self-confidence, your sense of who you are—I think those things, we haven’t even documented how brutal it is. People will treat you with a little bit of contempt. They might help you, but they treat you with a little bit of contempt as well.
This is the kind of people—at least the one that I was a big part of studying was the one in India and also one in Ghana. Especially the one in Bengal. These women—they were living in places where nobody should live. One said, “Oh, we get snakes all the time.” Another one said, “I’m now vending knickknacks in the village,” basically kind of cheap jewelry, that cheap stone jewelry or plastic jewelry.
“Before the people from this NGO showed me where the market was to buy wholesale, I had never taken a bus, so I had no idea how to go there. They had to literally put me on a bus, show me where to get off. And it took a couple of times because I had never taken a bus. I couldn’t read, so if it’s a number X bus number, I don’t know what X is, so how would I know I’m getting on the right bus?”
All of these things are new. If you start from a place where you really never had a chance, I think it’s useful to have some confidence building. You can do it too. There’s nothing difficult about it.…
[The coaching is] also saying, “You can do it, and here are the steps.” Turning things into a set of processes is important. Otherwise, it looks like an unlikely proposition that I can do it. I’ve never done it. I’ve never bought and sold things. In fact, I’ve never sold anything, and how do I do it?
It’s a bit more than that. Turning things into process is important also, that here is how you get on a bus. You go there, you pay this much money, they give you something, you bring it back. One of the things they are doing is also turning it into a set of procedural steps, which is very different from saying, “Go do that.”
Returning to the wealthier countries: Daniel in his online memoir gives another example of how to bend aspiration curves in an upward, steeper direction:
Lastly, there was this pretty remarkable paper. Two researchers in the US reported that an extraordinarily cheap intervention ($6 per student) targeted at high-achieving, low-income students—basically, just encouraging them to apply to top-tier colleges—had a marked impact on their propensity to do so. (Students who simply saw their notice were, on average, admitted to colleges whose median SAT score was 53 points higher and that spent 34% more on their students.)6
Once again, help others dare to think in terms of higher career trajectories.
The Travel Grant
One of our core views is that potential top achievers should be exposed to the highest levels of talent in their area as early as possible. This is much of the value of having a very talented tutor or mentor, or going to a top university such as Harvard, Stanford, or MIT. It is not that the classes or instruction are so much better than elsewhere (often they are worse); rather, at those schools students have the chance to see what the very top minds in a field are like. (Those top minds are sometimes the other students, not just the faculty.) That includes taking in how they think, how they talk, how they evaluate problems, how they decide what to work on, and even getting a sense of what their work habits are like, especially if the students serve as a research assistant for them or perhaps write a paper with them. Students even get to see what their possible failings and blind spots might be, why they have succeeded nonetheless, and just how strong their strengths are.
That kind of experience is invaluable, and it’s usually more important than mere book learning because book learning can be acquired on one’s own. Receiving such exposure is one of the biggest arguments for going to a famous major research university rather than the instructionally superior smaller liberal arts colleges such as, say, Middlebury or Claremont. At those latter institutions, the professors are very smart and more dedicated to their students, but typically they are not world-class research talents.
Given those realities, one way to invest in talent is to find highly promising young individuals and expose them to a higher level of achievement than what they have seen to date. Send them somewhere, and if you can, arrange meetings for them. Not everyone can get to meet with Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but do the best you can. Show them a higher level of talent, achievement, and aspiration than they have experienced previously in their lives. If they have real ambition, that will be not merely a one-time gain but a more fundamental steepening of their entire trajectory of future achievement.
For many talented young people, the travel grant means a trip to Manhattan or the Bay Area, which host amazing clusters of talent. But for someone working in entertainment it could be Los Angeles; for the biomedical sciences it could be Cambridge, Massachusetts (or Cambridge, England); for culinary skills it could be Paris or Tokyo. Nonetheless, it is striking how few places make sense for most of the people who might be getting travel grants, since most places do not have clusters of world-class talent in any significant amount. In fact, we view the scarcity of appropriate travel destinations as one sign among many that the world is not doing a good job at discovering and mobilizing top-tier talent. Since most people never get their chance to see “the big time” in their preferred field or avocation, their full potential is never realized.
Better yet than a travel grant—but also more costly—is living in the preferred area of clustered talent for a year or more. Money aside, however, a lot of people aren’t ready to take that step yet, and so the travel grant is one way of introducing them to the area where they properly ought to be.
Finally, a small percentage of travel grants should be directed away from geographic clusters of particular expertise. Some people are too embedded in a particular world or community, too stuck in its presuppositions and conformities, and they simply need to get away, perhaps to an isolated or highly idiosyncratic locale. We don’t view this as the main case, but it is worth keeping in mind if you are wondering what kind of travel grant to give somebody who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Six months in rural Ethiopia might be exactly the right prescription (keeping in mind a lot of rural Ethiopia still does not have reliable connections to the internet). And if the visitor comes to learn that many rural Ethiopians have amazing expertise in teff farming or in particular kinds of icon painting, so much the better.
Send Them to an Event (or Create an Event)
One advantage of an event is that it may expose the attendee to top achievers and performers and help make those trajectories vivid alternatives. In those regards the event is similar to a travel grant, except you are sending them to a location that is important only temporarily.
But event attendance may serve other purposes as well. An event may convince the attendee that a social or tech movement is real, or that it is benevolent, or that it is popular and desirable to belong to, or that it is not crazy. Events make that knowledge vivid in a way that reading about a movement does not: “Look, here are all the other people interested in nuclear fusion!”—or cryptocurrency, or venture capital. For exactly the same reason, events are risky, as they may scare some people off (“Hey, those people are crazy!”). Usually, though, the scared-off individuals were not going to make major contributions to that cause anyway, and so event attendance speeds up their possible reallocation to another cause or venture, one that might prove a better match. Or maybe those people really are crazy; if so, it’s better to find that out sooner rather than later. Events are an accelerated test of cultural fit.
Creating your own event is costly in terms of time and money, but it can be an ideal way of raising the aspirations of those you consider talented. You get to control everything, from the invitees to the program to what they will eat for breakfast. Daniel has organized successful events for Pioneer winners, and Tyler has done the same for Emergent Ventures.
But here is the important thing to understand about organizing your own event: the group has to gel. You can raise their aspirations a bit, but the group itself creates most of its own dynamic and its own theater. The members of the group will raise each other’s aspirations, at least if you have selected well and structured your event to give them enough interaction with each other. When the leader (you) and the peers are pushing in a common direction—the raising of aspirations—the effect can be very powerful indeed. But you will need to give them the freedom of letting them contribute to defining what the group is all about.
Write a Book? Read a Book?
Finally, to close our journey, we note that writing a book is yet another way to make talent and talent search vivid. Not everyone can go to a select event, or move to the Bay Area and hang out with venture capitalists, or run a venture capital firm. But most people can read a book. Even if you’ve been everywhere and met everyone, you want a book as a touchstone for what you have been thinking about—a kind of memento, even if you do not agree with all of the contents, to keep your mind fixed on the topic, and to help you discuss the topic with other people you know.
If nothing else, we have written this volume to make the idea of talent search more vivid to you. We are certain that many of the empirical results will change over time and be updated with new studies, new learning, and new information. But the vision that talent search is “a thing,” that it is an art that can be learned and improved upon, and that it can be taught and communicated to others—that is the fundamental point of this presentation.
Go and do it! And please communicate back to us what you have learned.