Monktoberfest Series – What You Know about Talent is All Wrong

transcribed by Bill Cushard (@billcush) from a presentation by Paul Ford (@ftrain)

When Paul Ford stepped to the podium at Redmonk’s Monktoberfest 2013 to give his talk, The Web and the Quest for the Perfect Document, he had a change of heart. He did not want to give his standard, canned talk. Considering the audience, he didn’t think that would be the best way to go.

Instead, he decided to take a note from comedians, who work out new material in clubs all over the country, and read excerpts from a new book he is writing. At first, I thought, “Really? He’s gonna read his book? Aren’t I supposed to hate it when people read their slides? Shouldn’t I hate it even more if someone reads a book as his presentation? Especially an unfinished book? I should. I should hate that.”

But I didn’t. Actually, Ford’s talk was quite interesting.

In fact, I learned something new. Something profound. And now, I look at talent in an entirely new way.

Talent Is Not What You Think It Is

Up until now, I looked at talent mostly as a person with a specific set of skills, experience with certain tools, and an ability to use those skills and tools to do a job. As Ford says, “We think of talent as a set of skills and tools when we know that it is not.”

We know that it is not? We do? What do you mean we know? I don’t.

“Github and Other Object-Oriented Programming Languages”

Yes, skills and tools are important, and talented people have skills and experience with tools, but that is not talent. This view of talent, as skills and tools, is manifested in a recruiting call that Ford once received on which the recruiter said he wanted to talk to Ford because he “used GitHub and other object-oriented languages.”

Amusing, yes. But still, not talent.

Talent = Absence, Huh?

As Ford described it so well, talent is the ability to see a gap, an absence, or an emptiness and take steps to cross that gap. In other words, talent is the ability to solve problems. Ford gives an example of why he learned Python. He did not learn Python to learn a specific programming language. He wanted to do something, and it just so happened that Python was the thing he needed to do it. In all likelihood, if what Ford wanted to do required two sticks and some yarn, he would have learned macrame.

Described another way, talent is an incredible ability to be annoyed; to be annoyed by a gap of some kind, and then take steps to fill that gap. I know it seems obvious now, but when you look at talent, it is easy to see skills people have and tools they use. “Oh...you know Node.js?” But our ability to find and assess talent rests on whether we can figure out if a person knows how to find emptiness and fill it with something beautiful.

I now look at Linkedin Skill Endorsements in an entirely new way!

How do you assess talent? Do you just know it when you see it? Or do you consciously seek to discover if someone has a knack for finding absence and filling it? How do you do that? Comment below.