Objetivo: Generar talento

José Antonio Marina

Fragmento

cap-1

 

Introduction

 

In which it is made clear why I have written yet another book when there are so many already in the bookshops.

 

‘Talent’ is in fashion. The number of books about it grows continuously. Surprisingly, these do not tend to be works of psychology, but rather books about management. Psychologists tend to abandon the concept because they don’t think it rigorous enough. At best they connect it with being ‘gifted’ or possessed of ‘special abilities’, which doesn’t throw enough light on the subject at all. Several years ago, The Economist mentioned that the world of business was using the word ‘talent’ a great deal, but did not know how to define it. They didn’t want to know about it, simply to use it.[1] You must admit that it is difficult to manage something without really knowing what it is. It’s like saying that you organise ghosts, sell auras, or think about smoke.

In spite of these difficulties, I believe that we need to use the concept of ‘talent’, whether we call it as such or by a different name, because the term ‘intelligence’ is now both insufficient and static. We talk about it as though it were a faculty we were born with and which all we can do is administer as best we can. Science tells us otherwise. Intelligence brings us into a world which is constantly redesigning itself, building itself up or breaking itself down. Human intelligence is transformed into talent once it widens its horizons, once it begins to enact its creative project on itself, once it starts to grow. This is the story I want to tell in this book.

Simultaneously, I need to tell you a part of the story of contemporary psychology, which has, with various advances and retreats, explored this complicated territory. For centuries psychologists connected intelligence and knowledge. This is what ‘cognitive psychology’ or even ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are still doing today. ‘Reason’ (in its broadest sense) and science are the archetypes for this kind of thinking. It is an attitude that has pushed the worlds of motivation and emotion to one side, seeing them as a hindrance to intelligence, rather than some of its fundamental components. But it is easy to see that emotion without reason is blind, and reason without emotion is paralysed. This is something that Hume knew, but it was actually proved by the Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. People who, after an accident or surgery, have the neuronal links severed between the cognitive and emotional areas of their brain are perfectly capable of reason, but they are unable to take decisions.[2] It is as though they lacked the energy to take the final step towards action. The idea of ‘emotional intelligence’ tried to fill this gap, but it was not able to provide an integrated vision of the human mind. Now we know that we can only create such a picture if we consider that the function of intelligence—the function of the brain itself—is not to know things, or to feel, but to direct our actions. And everything else revolves around this objective.

Action—rather than knowledge—is the unifying element of psychology. Robert Sternberg, a great psychologist, edited a book called Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid.[3] And it is true: an extremely intelligent person can behave in ways that are particularly unintelligent. And in such a case, how should we label this individual? This was a question which interested me so much that I wrote a book, La inteligencia fracasada (Failed Intelligence: The Theory and Practice of Stupidity), in an attempt to explain it to myself and to interested readers.[4] What remained after this was to study the other side of the coin: La inteligencia triunfante (Intelligence Triumphant), by which I meant the kind of intelligence that does not limit itself to understanding and processing information, and managing emotions, but rather takes the best decisions it can and puts them effectively into practice. The main axis of psychology is the movement from knowledge into action, which is the definitive test of its processes. What this shows is that, beyond cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence, the new model which is emerging and which combines everything else is that of executive intelligence,[5] intelligence in action and geared towards action. We do not think in order to gain knowledge. We think in order to act. And talent is intelligence, acting in a way that is suitable, brilliant, efficient. This is a concept that combines both activity and the assessment of that activity. And so, alongside the idea of studying how intelligence functions, we should also create a practical science aimed at developing talent. This is a major idea of the day. Thomas Homer-Dixon, from the University of Toronto, asks in alarm: ‘Are we going to be capable of generating the talent we need to resolve the colossal problems that now face us?’[6] There is a universal interest in improving the methods employed to create talent, and this book wants to be a contribution to this act of creation.

In order to begin putting things in order, we need to know how intelligence can transform itself into talent, because this is a question of vital importance. How can we think better, feel better, take better decisions, carry them out more effectively? We are starting to understand the untiring and unseen looms where our desires, ideas, projects and feelings are woven. And this is the journey we will make in this book. We will discover the surprising truth that an understanding of how the human subject is structured allows us better to understand how organizations, companies, even society, all function. But we should not be surprised, because the brain, as Marvin Minsky shows in The Society of Mind, is a society, the most complex society we know, composed of one hundred billion active members (the neurons), which organises itself in the most efficient of ways.

And it does this via a particular activity which we carry out so easily and spontaneously that we find it hard to see how important it is: learning. The brain, an organism which is very similar in all humans, continuously modifies itself on the basis of experience, to the extent that apparent identity—one brain looks very like another—can in fact conceal completely different worlds. Saint Francis does not live in the same mental world as Jack the Ripper. This capacity for learning draws us ever further away from our animal ancestors. The beasts all have some capacity for memory, but our memory is wider, more flexible and above all, it has become a tool which we have learned how to manage and utilise.

Human evolution—like evolution in general—is determined by the blind game of mutations and natural selection. But also, by our capacity for learning, which is the third evolutionary force. This force is made powerful by a single decisive factor: Not only are we able to learn more than other animals, but we can decide what it is we want to learn. In physiological terms, what this means is that we can redesign our brains. We can turn the intelligence we are born with into talent, and we know how to manage our memory. Perhaps it will be strange for you to hear me say this, because our idea of memory is slightly condescending and false. False, because

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