“Talent” by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross

The ostensible aim of this book is to give advice for those in positions of power to hire better talent. However, Cowen and Gross really just give useful tips for both spotting talent, as well as cultivating more talent in yourself and in others. They begin, “For both of us, the search for rare, transformative talent is so important…. 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…. Talent search is one of the most important activities in virtually all human lives…. But finding this talent is itself a creative skill, akin to music or art appreciation…. It is the understanding of context that breeds alertness to talent.”

One of Cowen’s favorite questions to begin an interview is, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?” This is not your everyday ice breaker. He claims, “In essence, you are asking about intellectual habits, curiosity, and what a person does in his or her spare time, all at once…. The question of spare time is a critical one. The very best performers don’t stop practicing for very long, and if you hear or sense that a person doesn’t do much practicing and skill refining in his or her spare time, they probably are poorly suited to assume a top position or to meet very high expectations…. Think of practice habits as one path toward continuously compounding learning and performance…. We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.””

When conducting an interview, Cowen and Gross suggest sniffing out what motivates the candidate. “Whom is this person responding to or used to performing for? Whom do they view as important to impress? Their parents? A particular peer? High school friends? A former boss? This is revealed at moments when they disclose some angles of their past successes and failures rather than others…. Be alert for the distinction between those who are stuck in their past and those who learned from it but are moving forward and seeking to expand the sphere of people they can impress.”

Cowen and Gross suggest throwing the interviewee off balance with unique questions in a frank style. “Do not be afraid to let a question hang in the air after you ask it; hold the tension as a way of making it clear that you expect an answer, and a direct answer at that…. If you are going to ask achievement-oriented questions, avoid the ordinary by continuing to ask for successive instances of candidate success until the respondent can’t come up with any more…. Ask it again. And again. And again, until the candidate can’t come up with any more answers…. The first time you ask this question, most candidates will draw upon their preparation. Sustained repetition, however, will get the person out of prep sooner or later, usually sooner. The previously cached answers will be exhausted, leaving time for the real meat. You will then see the depth of the candidate’s intellectual resources and emotional resilience.”

The pair also suggest going meta in one’s questioning. “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about? What views do you hold almost irrationally? These questions ask the respondent to give an account of their own self-awareness…. That is what we mean by “meta”—that the person is considering their own thought world from the viewpoint one level higher, more general, and more distant. You are testing their facility with ideas and also how readily they can identify alien viewpoints…. You are pulling the person into the human mode, into the self-awareness mode, into the awkwardness mode, and into a bit of weakness.” Other questions in this vein are, “Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about? [And] the most brutal of all the meta questions is: How do you think this interview is going?”

Another field of fruitful inquiry is judging a person’s own ambition. “How successful do you want to be? [Or] how ambitious are you?” Obviously, this has a lot to do with self-awareness as well. “The degree of a person’s ambition is pretty valuable to know, and it gives you a clear sense of their potential upside. It also offers you a sense of a person’s self-knowledge and of how they present and defend that self-knowledge when they are in an unexpected situation.” They do give this caveat, “As always, be aware of your cultural context.”

Online interviews require a different skillset and expectations. “With an online interview it is much harder to use body language and eye contact to bond and establish trust…. Screen calls can be relatively impersonal…. It is likely that the interviewee will find it harder to take risks…. When interviewed, often we start an anecdote or story and rely on implicit visual feedback to encourage or discourage us from proceeding further…. So interviewees will often be more boring, risk-averse, and homogenized…. When you use distance communications you are missing out on at least three distinct sources of knowledge: social presence, information richness, and the full synchronicity of back-and-forth…. The online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly.”

Cowen and Gross spend a great deal of time parsing out the Five Factor Personality Theory and how it applies to employment success. They claim, “One of the essential skills in thinking about personality is to be able to take a claim about personality and job and realize how that claim is context-dependent rather than universal.” Another caveat, “Our main enterprise is prediction of talent, and in that sense we can learn something from correlations without always understanding the underlying causal processes.” Age matters too. “Personality traits correlate more strongly with income beginning when workers are in their early thirties, and the correlations peak in strength between the ages of forty and sixty, after which the correlations dwindle significantly.” They cite Marc Andreessen on one major hole in the personality-correlation literature, “Ethics are hard to test for. But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid. Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.” Cowen and Gross continue, “This advice is so universal because bad ethics in a workplace can spread like cancer…. In part because of the contagion effect, it seems that the costs of having a single toxic worker are greater than the benefits of replacing an average worker with a superstar worker.” In general, remember that “what predicts well for the median worker is not always what predicts well for the top performers and the stars.” Finally, they argue, “Five Factor theory is useful because it is a “sticky” language, one that your co-workers can readily adopt, share, and eventually innovate upon…. Simply having such a common language in the hiring or talent search process is most of the value in the concept.”

Stamina is one trait Cowen and Gross rate highly. “Many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career…. So if we meet an individual who exhibits stamina, we immediately upgrade the chance of that person having a major impact, and that the individual will be able to invest in compound returns to learning and improvement over time…. What you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.”

Sam Altman suggests, “The rate of improvement is often more important than the current absolute ability.” This is more and more important the younger the hire. Cowen and Gross return again and again to the relevance of compound returns. “You might think that other evaluators already understand the power of compound returns to self-improvement, but there is good evidence that most individuals do not think very effectively in terms of exponential processes…. One of your most significant skills as a talent evaluator is to develop a sense of when people are moving along a compound returns curve or not. So much of personality theory focuses on observing levels or absolute degrees of personality traits. You should instead focus on whether the person is experiencing positive rates of change for dynamism, intellect, maturity, ambition, stamina, and other relevant factors.” Another question Cowen likes to ask is, “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales? Tyler likes to think of many jobs in a way that a professional musician or athlete would find natural…. By asking this question, you learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement…. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond whatever practices they engage in.”

Finally, Cowen and Gross have their own list of personality quirks that they find predict well for success. “Sturdiness is the quality of getting work done every day, with extreme regularity and without long streaks of non-achievement. Sturdiness seems to be especially valuable in people working on longer-term projects…. Some will call it ambition, some will call it extraversion, but there’s a certain vitality to individuals that can be striking. They talk quickly, move quickly, and in general seem to be enthralled with life. They run all possible combinations of ideas through their heads, if only to better understand the possibilities. Along these lines, they tend to be high in openness as a personality trait. We call this quality “generativeness.” If you hang around people like this, you are likely to come up with new ideas from your interactions…. Generative people are valuable whether or not you agree with them…. Insecure overachievement, as we call it, is the (somewhat neurotic) quality of never quite feeling comfortable with your output, despite knowing at a deep level that it is good…. Happiness is, in our opinion, an underrated quality to look for in people, at least when it comes to predicting their success. Always having a smile and a sense of amusement can be a powerful quality, ensuring that the person is almost always invited to participate in another endeavor…. The trait of adhesiveness, which overlaps with the concept of a “team player,” is increasingly important as production grows more complex and roles become more specialized…. Social intelligence is at a premium, above and beyond whatever import you might assign to intelligence more generally…. Teams skills add as much to productivity as does the overall intelligence of the group…. One trait we would draw your attention to as especially important is the ability to perceive, understand, and climb complex hierarchies…. Too often people will stick with the tasks they feel comfortable with. If someone is good at identifying, tackling, and climbing hierarchies, it is a sign that they know how to allocate their efforts and that they don’t let their insecurities blind themselves to the larger picture…. Other individuals choose goals that are too large and too indistinct, or which do not have useful intermediate outputs, test points, and checkpoints along the way…. Knowing how to perceive and climb the right hierarchies is one of the most stringent but also most universal tests available. It requires emotional self-regulation, perceptiveness, ambition, vision, proper sequencing, and enough order in one’s activities to actually get somewhere.”

“Don’t Trust Your Gut” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Stephens-Davidowitz is a self-described nerd and data scientist, who tries to quantify all the mysteries of life. In fact, he describes this book as “Moneyball” for your whole life. He has poured over reams of collected data to tease out what the averages say make the most statistical sense—sometimes the advice is intuitive and sometimes not. On dating, he reveals, “The qualities that are most valued in the dating market, according to Big Data from online dating sites—almost perfectly overlaps with the list of traits in a partner that don’t correlate with long-term relationship happiness…. In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.” On parenting, Stephens-Davidowitz suggests, “the overall effect of most of the decisions that parents make add up to less than most people expect…. If parents face thousands of decisions and the parents who make far better decisions only have kids who turn out some 26 percent more accomplished, each of the thousands of decisions, by itself, can’t make a large difference.” However, the one decision that does make a lot of difference is what neighborhood one lives in. “Some 25 percent—and possibly more—of the overall effects of a parent are driven by where that parent raises their child…. The three biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child’s success are: >> Percent of Residents Who Are College Graduates >> Percent of Two-Parent Households >> Percent of People Who Return Their Census Forms…. The right adult role models appear to be more influential than the right schools or booming economies…. Quite simply, it makes sense to expose your kids to adults whom you would want them to emulate.”

Stephens-Davidowitz peppers his book with numerous interesting tidbits. For instance, “Each additional inch nearly doubles one’s chances of reaching the NBA.” Also, “NBA players are more likely to come from middle-class, two-parent backgrounds.” On Americans’ income levels, he notes, “Wholesale beverage distribution is among a select group of industries in which a large percentage of owners enter the top 0.1 percent of earners.” The reason, “great business fields allow for the existence of many local monopolies.” A bit of a counterintuitive notion is that entrepreneurs are often more successful the older they start, “The average age of a business founder in the United States is 41.9 years old…. A sixty-year-old start-up founder has a roughly three times higher chance of creating a valuable business than a thirty-year-old start-up founder.” In life, looking attractive is important. “The person whose face was judged as more competent by the majority of subjects won 71.6 percent of the Senate races and 66.8 percent of the House races…. The biggest predictor of [a West Point] cadets’ career success was how dominant their faces appeared.” On wealth and happiness, “Doubling your income can be expected to increase your happiness by about one-tenth of a standard deviation.” Stephens-Davidowitz concludes, “The data-driven answer to life is as follows: be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.” Simple life advice.

“The Hebrew Bible: Leviticus” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter suggests that in Leviticus, “the central concern of the book is the conduct of the cult” and that “purification is a paramount consideration in all of this.” Alter points to Mary Douglas’ conception of biblical writings as based on analogical representations. Following her lead, he posits, “Reality is conceived as an elaborate system of correspondences—correspondences between Sinai and the cosmos, on the one hand, and the Tabernacle, on the other, and between all three of these and the body segments of the sacrificial animal.” Alter claims, “there is a single verb that focuses the majors themes of Leviticus—“divide” (Hebrew, hivdil).” Finally, he puts forward a conception of the nature of biblical ontology. “Israel, in turn, by accepting these categorical divisions in the realm of appetite, sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God. This last element of imitation dei suggests that God’s holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world, a concept that sets off biblical monotheism from the worldview of antecedent polytheisms, where at least the king could serve as mediator between human and divine…. The chief instruments for protecting the separation of ontological spheres are fire, blood, oil, and water…. Fire as we have seen abundantly in Exodus and will see even more emphatically in Deuteronomy, is associated with the deity…. Blood, as Leviticus emphatically reminds us, is the very life (nefesh) of the living animal…. Oil (it is specifically olive oil) has, by contrast, an association with the quotidian and with the social and political realms in ancient culture…. Finally, the efficacy of water as a purifying agent is self-evident and universal…. Fire is linked, as we have seen, with the divine; blood courses through the veins of living creatures, animal and human; olive oil is a product of agriculture, of the land, which sets it over against water, a manifestation of nature without human intervention (it is fresh running water that must be used for purification), recalling the primordial realm that must be set apart from dry land so that the world may come into existence.”

Alter points out that much of Leviticus is prescriptive. In Leviticus 3:17, Alter relates one such command, “no fat and no blood shall you eat. The prohibition on consuming blood is grounded in the idea of the sacredness of life (see Genesis 9:4). The prohibition on eating fat seems strictly related to the fact that it is reserved for the deity alone in the sacrificial rite—and, if one follows Douglas, because it marks a barrier of exclusion in a system of analogies between body and sacred cosmos. It is instructive that when the seventeenth-century antinomian messianic leader Sabbatai Zebi wanted to demonstrate to his followers that he was empowered to abrogate the Torah, he chose to demonstrate this by the public consumption of suet—the violation of a seemingly arbitrary prohibition, and a violation that could scarcely have given him much pleasure.”

In Leviticus, allowances are often given for the poor to participate equally in the priestly blessings through sacrificial offerings. Alter comments on Leviticus 5:7, “if his hand cannot attain. The primary sense of the verb is “reach.” “Hand” in biblical idiom is often used, as here, metonymically to indicate power or capacity. The law that follows here is what the rabbis called “an ascending and descending offering” (qorban ‘oleh weyored), that is, a sliding-scale offering which is devised to accommodate people of limited means.”

The Hebrew Bible returns to similar syntactical structures repeatedly. In Leviticus 8:4, it is the envelope form, “And Moses did as the Lord had charged him. A variant of this clause recurs at the very end of the chapter, framing the whole in an envelope structure. What is noteworthy is that in this chapter the Book of Leviticus for the first time moves from lists of cultic regulations to narrative.”

Leviticus 11:7 deals with dietary prohibitions. Alter explains, “the pig. It is only later, in the Hellenic period, that the pig becomes the prohibited animal par excellence, although the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile whose words are recorded in Isaiah 66:17 brackets eaters of pig and rat as participants in some unspeakable pagan rite. Pork was a common food among the Philistines and was also sometimes eaten by Canaanites, as archaeological inspection of the bones of animals consumed has determined. Interestingly, in the high country in the eastern part of Canaan, where [the] Israelite population was concentrated toward the end of the second millennium B.C.E., the percentage of pig bones discovered is only a fraction of what it is in the Canaanite lowlands. This suggests that the taboo was already generally embraced by the Israelites at an early period (well before the composition of the Torah) and also that some Israelites chose to disregard it.”

The scapegoat and the mystery of Azazel occur in Leviticus 16:8, “one for the Lord and one for Azazel. As countless seals and other ancient inscriptions unearthed by archaeologists attest, the use of a proper name or title, prefixed by the letter lamed (“for”) as a lamed possession, was a standard form of indicating that the object in question belonged to So-and-so (as in lamelekh, “the king’s”). These words, then (in Hebrew, each is a single word, LeYHWH and la’azaz’el) are the actual texts written on the two lots. Much ink since Late Antiquity has been spilled over the identity of Azazel, but the most plausible understanding—it is a very old one—is that it is the name of a goatish demon or deity associated with the remote wilderness. The name appears to reflect ‘ez, goat.” Alter elaborates on Leviticus 16:10, “to send it off to Azazel in the wilderness. Approximate analogues to the so-called scapegoat ritual, using different animals, appear in several different Mesopotamian texts. The origins of the practice are surely in an archaic idea—that the polluting substance generated by the transgressions of the people is physically carried away by the goat. Azazel is not represented as a competing deity (or demon) rivaling YHWH, but the ritual depends upon a polarity between YHWH/the pale of human civilization and Azazel/the remote wilderness, the realm of disorder and raw formlessness…. It is as though the goat piled with impurities were being sent back to the primordial realm of “welter and waste” before the delineated world came into being, but that realm here is given an animal-or-demon tag.”

The unique nature of monotheism against the polytheistic paganism surrounding the Israelites is, again, stressed in Leviticus 18:3, “[Not like] the deeds of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled shall you do, and not like the deeds of the land of Canaan…. Egypt and Canaan are no doubt invoked because these are two pagan countries in which Israel has collectively resided…. The identification of both countries as theaters of sexual license may be attributed to a widespread reflex of projecting uncontrolled sexuality onto the cultural other…. This reflex would have been reinforced by the tendency to see the polytheistic world as a realm lacking restraint, in contradistinction to the Israelite conception of one God and one clear-cut set of binding restrictions.”

Alter notes when previously accepted translations might be in error. He suggests in Leviticus 25:10, “call a release in the land to all its inhabitants. One must regretfully forgo the grandeur of the King James Version, inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” In fact, the passage is concerned with the legal arrangements regarding property in the jubilee year, and modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated that deror does not mean “liberty” but is cognate with a technical Akkadian term, anduraru, which means a release from, or moratorium on, debts and indenture.” Alter digs deeper and goes on to explain the etymology and history of “jubilee. Though debate persists about the etymology of this word (which has entered English from the Hebrew) the noun yovel in Exodus 19:13 clearly indicates a ram’s horn (the alternate term is shofar), and thus it is plausible that the fiftieth year was called jubilee, yovel, because this was when loud blasts of the ram’s horn were sounded throughout the land.”

Finally, Alter returns to the Israelite covenant with God in Leviticus 26:25, “the avenging sword of the covenant’s vengeance. A covenant is both a promise and a threat. From those who violate the covenantal obligations, vengeance is exacted.” Referencing Leviticus 26:44, he continues, “My covenant. The envelope structure formed by the reiteration of this key term at the beginning and the end of the entire section is meant as a reassurance. God will respond in terrible wrath to Israel’s dereliction, but the commitment to the covenant He expressed at the beginning will in the end lead Him to rescue Israel from exile as He once rescued them from Egyptian slavery.”

“Last Letter to a Reader” by Gerald Murnane

This is supposedly Murnane’s last book. But he has said that before—twice. He has been writing so-called meta-fiction before that was even a term. In this book, the conceit is that he writes an essay purportedly on each of his previous books, after first rereading them. Indeed, the books often serve as jumping off points before the digressions begin. “In mid-2020, during a so-called lockdown in the state of Victoria, I wrote the first few of the pieces in this book — but only for myself and for future readers of my archives…. I had never sat down and tried to confront any book of mine as though for the first time…. I discovered early in life that the act of reading is much more complicated than most people seem to acknowledge…. I did what I’ve always preferred to do in the presence of a certain sort of text: I followed the workings of my mind…. I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind…. I learned long ago not to claim that I was talking about a book when what I was talking about were my memories or my impressions or my fantasies…. I know of no better way to appraise a work of fiction than to observe and then to report for one’s own benefit, or for others’, the extent to which the reading of the work has changed the set of one’s mind…. The reading of a work of fiction alters — sometimes briefly but sometimes permanently — the configuration of my mental landscape and augments the number of personages who are its temporary or permanent residents…. My reading — and not just the reading of fiction, but any sort of reading — is no search for facts or truths but rather an endless quest for elements in my unique mythology.”

Murnane is what his wife would call an eccentric. For decades, he has created an entire fictional world, comprised of two independent nations, where horse races are regularly run and winners randomly selected. Its history, the Antipodes, is all in his vast archives. His published fiction blends his real life, his past, and his imagination freely. He calls it true fiction. For him, the line between the real world and his fictional worlds is immaterial, “Each personage strides by day or broods and scribbles by night in his native city, but as though an invisible pane separates him from its other inhabitants and an invisible grip prevents him from living as they live.” Murnane views his mind as a vast physical landscape. “I often declare that I think of my mind as a place, but no place in this, the visible world, could be half so resistant to exploration as even the most familiar of mental landscapes. And if my sort of writing is a sort of mapping of mind, then my atlas should depict nothing more stable than images and feelings.” This leads to a unique process of writing. “Revelations of all kinds occur in the place that I call, for want of a better term, my mind and the benefits that I derive from these processes and from my knowing that these processes take place continually and are taking place even now as I write about them — those benefits are my true reward for writing fiction.”

Occasionally, Murnane does write something that one could almost be sure that he, the breathing author, and not he, the implied author or, he, the fictional narrator, actually believes. An example is his recollection of first reading Proust. “I myself, in that cramped room where I ate from cans and urinated into the sink and spent whole weekends talking to no one, learned from certain passages of Swann’s Way how to look out for what I later came to call the detail that winked: the one significant detail from among the many that appeared to me while I wrote.”

Murnane is not modest about his own writing. “I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages.” Finally, he concludes, “I’ve mentioned in my own writings my perception of mind as a sort of space the boundaries of which are far beyond my reach, and the image that most often occurs to me when I try to comprehend the significance of the million and more of my published words is of a vast and variegated landscape.”