Chapter 3 - The Question of How Talent Develops

Summary

Chapter 3 addresses the question of how TD takes place. Two driving forces emerge as individuals move from early spontaneous actions and reactions to environmental opportunities and challenges to more purposive real and projected actions. One driving force emerging in a personal context of surviving-thriving adaptation is individual niche-picking, which influences the direction and strengths of personal strivings, and the other driving force is cultural selection based on cultural norms and distinction, which determines what is culturally worth supporting given its priorities. These two “invisible hands” jointly regulate one’s characteristic adaptation (CA) in the exploratory stage of talent development, and maximal adaptation (MA) in the systematic developmental stage. Both CA and MA are seen by ECT as self-organizing motivational forces for long-term development. CA allows the person to explore their horizon of possibilities and identify a pathway to success that is most rewarding as well as most achievable, and MA allows the person to seek inner and outer resources to maximize their chance of success. Consequently, a developing person has to show patterns of CA and MA conducive to reaching the highest level of self-organization: building a personal enterprise.