Exceptional predictive capability is what drives talent.
Many successful people are able to make accurate predictions about specific activities. Consider the following quotation from The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future:
“The human brain is a predictive machine. Intelligence is prediction. This is a relatively new concept in neuroscience, coalescing into broad acceptance only in the 1990s and 2000s. While the connection between prediction and general intelligence is generally understood, an even newer-and largely unexplored-idea has emerged in neuroscience: exceptional predictive capability is what drives talent. Most successful people are really good at making very accurate predictions-usually about some particular activity-just a little faster and better than everyone else….The salesman who sells more than anybody else has developed a talent for anticipating people’s reactions to his pitches, allowing him to steer the conversation before it goes off course. The teacher who seems to get the most out of her students with the least effort had developed predictive models in her head for how kids behave and respond to certain teaching methods.”
Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney. The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future – Just Enough. Crown Business, 2011.
Jeff Giampalmi