The Fives Rules of Finding Talent - by Tyler Cowen

How should we cultivate talent? This is a question I spend hours a day thinking about, trying to discover an answer. And as part of my work running Emergent Ventures, an organization that makes rapid grants to qualified applicants, over the last seven years I have been holding regular conversations every week with many of the world’s smartest young people. We now have more than one thousand Emergent winners across the globe. Here are some of the lessons I have been learning: First, amazing talents are younger than ever before. Fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds can be brilliant and also well informed. Often they do not have sufficient life experience to pull off everything they wish to do, at least not yet. But please do not think of yourself as “their mentor.” They can be just as much your mentor as well. In almost any area where we can measure performance, the stars are getting younger and younger. When Bobby Fischer became world chess champion at age 29 in 1972, that was considered youn

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• Victor Truong