Dominic Lawson: There's a divine spark to genius as well as hard graft

It's a bit disconcerting when your wife tells you that she has enjoyed dinner with "the most fascinating man I have ever met". I was reassured when it turned out that she had been placed next to Sir Isaiah Berlin, not just one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, but also noted as one of the most dazzling conversationalists of the age.

At one point their table-talk had turned to the question of genius and what defines it. Sir Isaiah, in his very deep, mellifluous voice, said that he would sum up genius with reference to the ballet dancer Nijinsky: "He was once asked how he managed to leap so high. He replied that he saw no great problem with this. Most people when they leapt in the air, then came down at once. 'Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?'" "Now that," Sir Isaiah intoned, "is genius".

Not surprisingly, this made a great impact on my wife. Yet was old Isaiah right? To put it more bluntly, was the great Nijinsky lying about his technique – is it really possible for a human to hover at will in the air, like a hummingbird?

Part of the attraction of the late Isaiah Berlin's definition is that it defines the apparent effortlessness of genius, something so far removed from our own existence and talents that it speaks of the divine. This is why we frequently refer to genius as "God-given".

Now the American author Malcolm Gladwell has written a book, The Outliers, which, among other things, attempts to debunk the concept of the effortless genius; Gladwell looks at various examples of freakish achievement, such as Bill Gates and the Beatles, and answers the question "gift or hard graft?" with a resounding vote for the latter.

Borrowing openly from the psychologist K Anders Ericsson – Gladwell is a most assiduous intellectual magpie – the book takes as gospel Ericsson's assertion that it is impossible for anyone, no matter how talented, to achieve mastery in any field without having put in at least 10,000 hours of very hard work and practice.

Ericsson had developed his theory by looking at the achievements of very talented young musicians who had been picked out at the age of five. He discovered that those who "made it" could not be identified at the outset – but what all those who later achieved great prominence had in common was that they practiced much, much more than those who failed to reach stardom. The 10,000-hour students, without exception, outdid those who managed to total "only" 8,000 hours.

Now, you would be quite right to say that even Prof Ericsson was only demonstrating by means of detailed surveys what every schoolboy knows about Thomas Edison. The great inventor had declared that "genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work". This is enormously encouraging for the rest of us – perhaps forgetting that without the one per cent of inspiration, no amount of perspiration would produce an invention to change the world.

The subtitle of Gladwell's book is The Story of Success – indicating to the American public that if they read it they might discover how they too could make a stupendous fortune. This, indeed, is where genius is not enough. Thomas Edison was as much a businessman as an inventor. Similarly, while Bill Gates is hailed as a uniquely talented computer program-writing geek, what set him apart from the other uber-nerds was that he also had a business vision, which he carried out with single-minded ruthlessness.

Gates understood, for example, that it made sense to offer his programs at extremely low cost early on, wiping out the competition, so that when businesses were hooked on his software packages they would later have to pay a much higher price for newer versions. In this sense, Gates definitely falls within the Gladwell theory – or rather Ericsson's – that sheer hard work and perseverance is often confused with genius.

What though, of the purest areas of human endeavour, where commerce plays no role and abstract thought is everything? The touchstone for such theories is chess, a pursuit of limitless complexity and yet utterly divorced from the real world where sheer chance can play a key role in success or failure. Gladwell claims that this too fits the theory: "To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years – only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that time: it took him nine years. And what's 10 years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice."

Here, Malcolm Gladwell is behind the curve. In 2002, the Ukrainian prodigy Sergei Karjakin became a Grandmaster at the age of 12, after playing the game for seven years, while in 2004 the Norwegian phenomenon Magnus Carlsen became a Grandmaster at 13, barely five years after taking up the game. I suppose it's possible that Carlsen might have put in 10,000 hours of chess practice between the ages of eight and 13, but since he has gone to a normal school and is also keen on such alternative pursuits as kicking a football around, that seems most unlikely.

It is true that Magnus Carlsen is fantastically highly motivated – he has stated his clear intention to be world champion. Yet my own experience in chess tournaments early on taught me that there was a strangely tangible gulf between those with an innate special gift and those – like myself – without.

When I was at Oxford I played in college matches against Dr John Nunn. Nunn was a prodigious mathematician, the youngest Oxford undergraduate for five hundred years. He was also the European Junior Chess champion, and later became not just a leading Grandmaster but on a number of occasions won the World Chess Problem Solving Championships. Any ambition I might have had to become a professional chess player was (fortunately) dashed by analysing with Dr Nunn. I recognised that no matter how much I studied, I could never begin to compete on level terms with a mind such as his. John himself lacked the necessary competitiveness and all-consuming desire to get to the very top of world championship chess, which in a way backs up Prof Ericsson's theories; but I still had no doubt that he fulfilled the criteria we demand when calling someone a "genius".

Nijinsky, by contrast, was a man consumed with a burning passion to develop his gifts to the uttermost. Far from being effortless, his apparently gravity-defying leaps would have been the result of endless practice far away from gaze of the public, who would witness only the finished product.

So when my wife breathlessly reported Sir Isaiah Berlin's reminiscences of Nijinsky, I could have replied that the Russian-born philosopher had completely misunderstood what was going on. On the other hand, it's almost a crime to deconstruct the magic we call genius.

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