Rishi Sriram

Rishi Sriram

What is talent, where does it come from and how does one know they have it? Dr. Rishi Sriram, Associate Professor of Education Leadership in the School of Education, gave a speech on what it takes to be an expert.

The event was held on November 7, 2022. Sriram spoke on what goes into mastering a talent; he elaborated on the significant amount of time and specific practice that goes into becoming proficient at a task.

“If you want to know where talent comes from, don’t look to how you were born. Look to what started to happen to you the minute you were born. Technically even the minute you were conceived. Talent is cultivated, talent is developed, talent is learned, talent is earned,” Sriram said.

The five M’s are the framework of what lets one succeed in any role involving talent and learning: mindset, myelin, mastery, motivation and mentorship. Sriram's five M’s are what he associates with successful people who put in a tremendous amount of work to become an expert.

“We have never found one person, not one, who we admired for their talent that didn’t put in thousands of hours of practice,” Sriram said.

Sriram looks at achieving expertise in hours versus years, taking 10,000 hours before one can reach expertise. Talent is not innate; it’s learned over many hours of strenuous practice teaching your myelin to fire faster for that specific task. Neurons make up only half of the brain cells, and the other half are glial cells referencing the Latin name for glue. When the glial cells see pathways firing over and over, it creates myelin in the brain, not muscle memory making you better at a task, but your myelin working faster.

“I have definitely ridden horses for over 10,000 hours, but no, I don’t believe that you can ever be a master at that. No matter how many hours you put in, there will always be someone better than you,” Kalena Reynolds, Baylor freshman, said.

Sriram goes over the research that fixed, and growth mindsets play a role in the amount of greatness someone is able to achieve. Someone with a fixed mindset ignores feedback, avoids challenges, and sees effort as a weakness. Whereas one with a growth mindset is someone who embraces challenges, learns from feedback and sees effort as key. Talent is able to thrive under a growth mindset and those who receive feedback as a way to grow in that skill.

“We’ve actually done the work to code what great teachers say to their students, and we find that surprisingly, only 7% of what great teachers say to their students can be categorized as praise,” Sriram said.

Sriram goes over strengths are the things people are good at, the activities that make us feel strong and successful. Weaknesses are the things that are hard for us, such as activities that make us feel weak and drained.

Great mentors not only invest in their students as a person but know how to teach the task at hand, not sugarcoating the parts that might be hard for you to hear. The student's overall learning process greatly benefits from this teaching style.

“It was really encouraging to keep doing the work, especially the feedback, that is such a big part of our discipline. Doing the edits on stories, the one-on-ones where we talk about your work can be very time-consuming, but he reiterated how important that is to grow,” Amber Adamson, senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism, Public Relations and New Media, said.

Sriram measures progress by what one learns rather than what is taught, doing so with relevant and measurable feedback. Smart goals and receiving smart feedback put one in the direction of success, not looking at what one person says to another but more at what they have learned in the end.

“We have to work really had to develop what we are born with, here I am saying I don’t buy it. I don’t think the research backs it up, I don’t think there is such thing as inherent talent,” Sriram said.