The Amadeus Effect
From an early age, most of us are taught to believe that you’re either good at something, or you’re not.
Implicitly or explicitly, well-meaning teachers and parents let us know that there are good writers and bad writers, good musicians and bad musicians, athletes and benchwarmers, the creative and the rest of us.
In the arts, talent often seems to have been doled out according to a pyramid in which the great artists are on top and the rest of us toil below. Or, as Mama Rose sings in Gypsy, “You either have it, or you’ve had it!”
For me, this way of thinking crystallized when, as a college freshman, I saw Amadeus, a fictional movie about the legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his arch-rival Antonio Salieri.
Mozart is portrayed as a brilliant but wild genius. He drinks, gambles, flirts, rarely does much work, yet spins out some of the most sublime music ever written. Salieri is Mozart’s foil. Hardworking and pious, he sees Mozart’s genius yet is unable to match it. Tormented by his mediocrity, Salieri complains to God:
You choose for your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy…and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation.
This movie hit home for me, perhaps because my best friend in high school had been an incredibly talented musician. No matter how hard I worked, next to him I felt like (and was sometimes told by adults that I was) a merely average musician, while he was “special,” chosen, elect — touched by some divine spirit.
Like Salieri, I often found myself despairing that I was no more than a mediocrity. In time a came to think of this phenomenon as the “Amadeus Effect:” the sense of shame, despair, and futility that arises when we believe that we are not capable of creating anything with meaning and value.
The “Amadeus Effect:” the sense of shame, despair, and futility that arises when we believe that we are not capable of creating anything with meaning and value.
It’s no surprise that this way of thinking had devastating effects on my self-confidence and sense of self-worth. This belief and the hopelessness that accompanies it have the capacity to deeply wound anyone: artists, students, really any person who seeks to write, create, or build something new.
Yet over time I’ve come to see how the core beliefs that create the Amadeus Effect — and the assumptions Salieri’s character makes in the movie — are incorrect.
It took me a while to see this, in part because the fallacious notion that everyone is either a genius or a mediocrity is sticky. It is, after all, based around these binaries of “creative vs. non-creative,” “talented vs. untalented” that most of us were taught as children.
Those binaries, however, bear no relation to what I’ve seen over my twenty years as an artist and educator. Instead, I’ve come to believe that everyone is capable of creating work with meaning and value, and that this is true for three reasons.
First, when you peel back the shiny veneer of “genius” you find that, while the most successful creatives in any field are talented, they also work extraordinarily hard.
Trisha Brown, a choreographer I assisted in the early 2000s, spent hours in the studio creating bits of movement that ranged from the brilliant to the mediocre and even awkward, yet her labor-intensive process led to masterpieces that won her a MacArthur Genius Grant and established her as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance.
Composer Igor Stravinsky was famous for keeping “banker’s hours;” he showed up at his piano early each morning. (He also reportedly opened a bottle of port when the day’s work was done and went to bed whenever it was empty.) Most professional authors and composers I know typically write for several hours a day, five or more days a week, often first thing in the morning.
Even Mozart — the real one, not the fictionalized movie character — worked very hard. When an audience member commented on how easy his virtuosity looked, Mozart famously replied, “I too had to work hard, so as not to have to work hard any longer.” And although I didn’t know it at the time, it turned out that when I wasn’t around, my high school best friend was practicing the piano 3 to 4 hours a day! (I wasn’t.)
Second, it turns out that talent is not distributed in a binary system where “You either have it, or you’ve had it.” It’s not equitably distributed, either; each of us is better at some things than others. But rather than the two-tiered pyramid suggested by Amadeus, recent research suggests that talent may be more normally distributed, i.e along a bell curve where some of us have very little, some of us have a lot, and most of us have an “average” amount
Third, it’s important to realize that unlike in the movies, in the real world talent is not a silver bullet that magically creates works of staggering genius. Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at Penn who is well known for her work on the concept of grit, has a much more nuanced definition of talent:
“Talent — when I use the word, I mean it as the rate at which you get better with effort. The rate at which you get better at soccer is your soccer talent. The rate at which you get better at math is your math talent. You know, given that you are putting forth a certain amount of effort. And I absolutely believe — and not everyone does, but I think most people do — that there are differences in talent among us: that we are not all equally talented.” (econtalk.org)
Talent, in other words, is simply your ability to improve with effort. Mozart may have had more talent than Salieri, but that didn’t mean that Salieri was untalented – or that without substantial effort, Mozart would have written anything of note.
Taken together, these three ideas resonate strongly with what I’ve seen as a teacher and artist. Every student I’ve worked with has made some improvement when she or he applied consistent effort — although the degree of improvement varied widely from student to student. The most successful and productive artists I’ve encountered are talented, yet they work very hard; grit is a necessary component of what we call “genius.”
These days I still have my moments of intense self-doubt — I don’t think those ever go away —but I’m grateful to be more confident about my own abilities today than I was as a teenager watching Amadeus. I’m also more curious about the people I work with, both students and colleagues, and eager to see what talents and abilities might be lying dormant just beneath the surface.
Each of us has a voice, and all of us are creative. The people who told you otherwise may have meant well, but they were wrong. You may not be the next Mozart or Alicia Keys — but you might be, and you’ll never know unless you start creating.
That thing you’ve been wanting to write or perform or sculpt or compose…you can do it! Each of us has gold inside. As creatives of all stripes, both amateur and professional, we need to let go of false binaries and learn to see our own capacities in a more nuanced, realistic, and empowered way. Only then can we reclaim our artistic voices and put our hearts into work that matters.
