by Benjamin Bloom (published 1985). Ordered 2025-11-30.
Review via Justin Skycak:
Everyone seems to have their own opinion about how talented people become talented and what roles working hard, working smart, and getting lucky play in that process. But Bloom, being a scientist, didn’t want to settle for subjective opinions. He wanted to formulate conclusions based on real data.
So, Bloom studied the training backgrounds of 120 world-class talented individuals across 6 talent domains: piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, & neurology. And what he discovered was that talent development occurs through a similar general process, no matter what talent domain. In other words, loosely speaking, there is a “formula” for developing talent — though executing it is a lot harder than simply understanding it.
What’s great about this book is the level of detail presented. This is not one of those corny pamphlets where someone tells you about their “3 keys to success” framework and all the information is obvious and too abstracted to be useful. Each chapter covers a different talent domain and goes into extreme depth making heavy use of direct quotes from interviews with the world-class individuals and their parents.
Instead of handing you some kind of abstract framework and expecting you to accept it at face value, the book walks you through the process of starting with first principles — detailed interviews and backstories — and zooming out to identify general trends. You go from micro-structure to macro-structure.
The big conclusion is that talent development occurs through a similar general process no matter what talent domain:
- first fun & exciting playtime,
- then intense & strenuous skill development, and
- finally developing one’s individual style while pushing the boundaries of the field.