WHO DO YOU TRUST WHEN EVERYTHING MATTERS
Talent and the invisible mathematics that took humanity into space
“Get the girl to check the numbers. If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.”
In the early 1960s, technology was rudimentary even by the standards of its time. Computers filled entire rooms, ran on punch cards, and failed frequently. Many calculations were still done by hand, with pencil, paper, and slide rules. And yet, in that context of radical uncertainty, someone made a decision that today seems almost inconceivable — to send human beings into space.
The space race was not merely a political competition. It was an extreme technical gamble, with no reliable precedents, no complete simulations, and virtually no margin for error. Every decision mattered. Every number mattered. A small mistake could mean not coming back. When the first IBM computers began to be introduced at NASA, the promise was enormous, but confidence was not. Technology was advancing faster than certainty.
Before the launch of Mercury-Atlas 6 (Friendship 7), one of the most critical missions of the Mercury program, astronaut John Glenn was about to become the first American to orbit the Earth. The mission involved liftoff, completing three full orbits around the planet, and returning alive — something that, until then, only the Soviets had achieved, and always at enormous technical risk. Everything had to work with absolute precision — the orbital insertion angle, velocity, re-entry trajectory, and exact splashdown point — because even a small error in the calculations could send the capsule drifting into space or cause it to disintegrate upon re-entry.
Before liftoff, Glenn asked for something very specific. He did not request more computing power or greater automation. He asked that a person check the numbers. If she said they were correct, he would fly. If not, he would not. That person was Katherine Johnson.
Katherine Johnson was neither an executive nor a public figure. She did not appear in official photographs or occupy positions of institutional power. She was a brilliant mathematician working in a segregated environment, at a time when neither her gender nor her skin colour worked in her favour. And yet, when everything was at stake, real trust was placed in her judgement, in her talent. She was not alone. Dorothy Vaughan understood earlier than most that computers were not a threat, but a new language. She learned to program when few even knew what programming meant, and she made sure her entire team learned alongside her. Mary Jackson broke legal and educational barriers to become an engineer in a system that was not designed for her to succeed and later gave up formal positions of power to pursue something less visible but more profound — opening paths for others.
These three women do not fit easily into the romantic narrative of talent. They were not eccentric geniuses or charismatic figures, and they were not seeking the spotlight. They did their work with rigour, consistency, and a deep sense of responsibility. Their talent did not shine — it held things together, allowing a fragile system to function precisely when it needed it most. And this scene — a human life depending on numbers checked by one specific person — forces the central question of this dimension: what is talent, really?
For a long time, talent has been treated as a mysterious gift, something one either has or does not have. Contemporary psychology dismantled that simplistic view decades ago. Howard Gardner was one of the first to challenge the idea of a single, unitary intelligence, showing instead that human capacity is plural and that different contexts value different kinds of competence. Talent ceases to be a universal hierarchy and becomes an alignment between a person and a type of problem, a relationship rather than an essence.
This idea was refined by Robert Sternberg, who distinguished between analytical, creative, and practical intelligence, highlighting an uncomfortable truth for many educational and professional systems — reasoning well does not guarantee acting well. Talent is not just understanding; it is solving real problems under imperfect conditions, exactly what Katherine Johnson was doing when models were still incomplete and there were no manuals to consult.
Cognitive psychology took this further. Herbert A. Simon formulated a decisive insight: expert intuition is not magic, it is organised memory. Experts do not think faster; they see differently. They recognise patterns because they have lived through thousands of similar situations. Decades later, Anders Ericsson showed that this difference does not depend merely on time spent, but on the quality of experience accumulated. Talent is nourished by practice, yes — but not by just any practice. It grows through deliberate practice, with feedback, correction, and increasing difficulty. Practising is not enough; one must learn how to see better.
Neuroscience added another essential layer. Stanislas Dehaene explained how learning depends on brain architecture and plasticity, but also on real constraints. Not all brains process information in the same way or at the same pace. These differences do not determine destiny, but they do influence which tasks feel more natural or more demanding for each individual. A further key insight came from affective neuroscience. Antonio Damasio showed that human judgement is not purely rational — emotions and the body actively participate in decision-making. Talent is not cold calculation; it is sensitivity refined by experience, a form of embodied judgement that allows us to respond when there is no time to think step by step.
Yet no capacity develops without a reason to do so. Here, the work of Teresa Amabile was decisive. Her research demonstrated that creativity and sustained performance depend primarily on intrinsic motivation. When an activity has meaning for the person performing it, prolonged effort becomes viable. When it does not, even great capacities are abandoned. Talent rarely burns out due to difficulty; it withers due to lack of meaning.
All of this unfolds within a social framework. Talent does not flourish in a vacuum. It requires language, opportunities, role models, and a minimum level of recognition. Robert K. Merton showed how social expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies — when little is expected of someone, fewer opportunities are offered for them to prove otherwise. Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated how access to cultural capital — language, codes, institutions — determines which talents develop and which remain invisible. From this perspective, a recurring historical pattern becomes clear: talent is not evenly distributed; it concentrates.
Classical Greece, ancient India, ancient China, the medieval Islamic world, the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution. These were not cultural miracles or expressions of collective genetic superiority. They were ecosystems. In each case, certain conditions repeated themselves — urgent real problems, shared languages that enabled collective thinking, institutions that connected bodies of knowledge, and a high tolerance for crossing disciplines. Many of the great advances were not the work of narrow specialists but of polymaths, individuals capable of moving across fields. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi captured this succinctly: talent does not reside solely in the individual, but in the interaction between person, domain, and social field.
NASA in the 1960s was, for a brief period, one such ecosystem — an extreme technical frontier under constant pressure, with a shared mission and real consequences. In that context, the system could not afford to ignore talent, even when it did not fit its own prejudices. That is why figures like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson emerged — not because the system was fair, but because it needed them.
When these conditions do not exist, even extraordinary talent can remain blocked. Helen Keller was born with her intellectual capacity intact but became deaf and blind at a very young age. For years she lived without access to language; the talent was there, but it had no interface with the world. When she finally understood that the signs traced into her hand represented something real, her first word was “water.” Talent did not appear that day; the channel did.
This extreme case does not prove that everyone can be a genius. It proves something more unsettling — talent can exist without manifesting if the right conditions are absent. It does not always fail due to lack of ability; sometimes it fails due to lack of access, language, or trust.
The question therefore changes. It is not whether you have talent, but what you do with it. Not everyone will reach excellence in the same way, and not everyone will be extraordinary. But almost everyone has some zone of high potential, some capacity that could be developed far beyond its current state. Exploring it requires time, effort, and renunciation; it also involves risk. And here lies a truth that is rarely stated openly — choosing not to develop one’s talent is a legitimate option.
But that choice has consequences, for both the individual and the environment. Talent is not neutral. It amplifies. It can serve progress or harm, the common good or narrow interest. That is why speaking about talent without speaking about responsibility is only half the story. The three women at NASA were not trying to be exceptional. They wanted the numbers to be correct, the missions to work, and the systems that depended on them not to fail. And without intending to, they sustained one of the greatest technological leaps of the twentieth century.
When everything matters, the question is not who shines brightest or who occupies the centre of the stage. The question is who you trust. Talent, in its most mature form, does not promise fame or brilliance; it promises reliability. And in decisive moments, that changes everything. Your talent is not an abstract promise, nor a label imposed by others. It is a real capacity that may remain latent, waiting for context, language, and meaning. You can ignore it, postpone it, or never touch it at all — or you can choose to nurture it, shape it, and assume the responsibility it entails. Because when the moment arrives — when everything truly matters — you will not be asked to shine, but to respond.
