“Talent is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin challenges the traditional belief that innate talent is the primary determinant of success in various fields, including sports, music, and business. Colvin argues that deliberate practice, combined with focused effort and feedback, plays a far greater role in achieving mastery and excellence than innate talent alone. Through extensive research and real-life examples, he demonstrates how individuals can develop exceptional skills and expertise through deliberate practice.
Colvin begins by debunking the myth of innate talent, citing numerous studies that show little to no correlation between natural ability and high levels of achievement. He argues that what truly sets top performers apart is not innate talent, but rather their commitment to deliberate practice, which involves focused, repetitive, and goal-oriented efforts to improve specific skills.
The author explores the concept of deliberate practice, highlighting its key characteristics, including setting specific goals, receiving immediate feedback, and pushing beyond one’s comfort zone. He emphasizes the importance of deliberate practice in cultivating expertise and achieving peak performance in any field.
Colvin examines the role of motivation and mindset in sustaining deliberate practice over the long term. He argues that intrinsic motivation, fueled by a genuine passion for the activity, is essential for maintaining the focus and perseverance necessary for deliberate practice.
The author discusses the importance of feedback in the learning process, emphasizing the need for timely and constructive feedback to identify areas for improvement and refine one’s skills. He explores various methods of obtaining feedback, including self-assessment, coaching, and peer evaluation.
Colvin examines the concept of “flow” or being in the zone, where individuals are fully immersed in their activities and experience a state of heightened focus and performance. He argues that deliberate practice is essential for achieving flow and reaching peak performance levels.
The author explores the role of mental representations or mental models in mastering complex skills. He discusses how top performers develop mental representations that allow them to anticipate and respond effectively to various situations, resulting in faster and more accurate decision-making.
Colvin examines the importance of practice intensity and duration in achieving expertise. He argues that deliberate practice requires sustained effort over extended periods, often spanning years or even decades, to achieve mastery in a particular domain.
The author discusses the role of genetics and heredity in determining individual differences in abilities and aptitudes. While acknowledging that genetic factors may play a role in shaping certain traits, he emphasizes that deliberate practice is the primary driver of exceptional performance.
In conclusion, “Talent is Overrated” provides a compelling argument against the notion of innate talent as the sole determinant of success. Colvin’s research and insights into the power of deliberate practice offer a practical framework for individuals seeking to develop their skills and achieve excellence in any field. By emphasizing the importance of focused effort, feedback, motivation, mental representations, practice intensity, and duration, Colvin demonstrates how deliberate practice can unlock human potential and lead to extraordinary achievement.
Look around you.
Look at your friends, your relatives, your coworkers, the people you meet when you shop or go to a party. How do they spend their days? Most of them work. They all do many other things as well, playing sports, performing music, pursuing hobbies, doing public service. Now ask yourself honestly: How well do they do what they do?
The most likely answer is that they do it fine. They do it well enough to keep doing it. At work they don’t get fired and probably get promoted a number of times. They play sports or pursue their other interests well enough to enjoy them. But the odds are that few if any of the people around you are truly great at what they do — awesomely, amazingly, world-class excellent.
Why aren’t they? In some cases we can give plausible explanations, saying that we’re less than terrific at hobbies and games because we don’t take them all that seriously. But what about our work? We prepare for it through years of education and devote most of our waking hours to it. Most of us would be embarrassed to add up the total hours we’ve spent on our jobs and then compare that number with the hours we’ve given to other priorities that we claim are more important, like our families; the figures would show that work is our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most people are just okay at what they do.
Contemporary athletes are superior not because they’re somehow different but because they train themselves more effectively.
The cash held by US companies is hitting all-time records. Companies are using this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a companies does this, it’s saying to its investors: We don’t have any good ideas for what to do with this, so here — maybe you do.
These are all manifestations of a much larger phenomenon. Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.
“You don’t just walk out on the street and hire an Exxon Mobil engineer or geoscientist or researcher.” He could fund more projects, but he doesn’t have enough qualified people to manage them.
“World class” is a term that gets thrown around too easily. For most of history, few people had to worry about what world class was. But now that’s changing. In a global, information-based, interconnected economy, businesses and individuals are increasingly going up against the world’s best. The costs of being less than truly world class are growing, as are the rewards of being genuinely great.
He designed his practice to work on his specific needs.
Practice is so hard that doing a lot of it requires people to arrange their lives in particular ways. The two top groups of violinists did most of their practicing in the late morning or early afternoon, when they were still fairly fresh. By contrast, violinists in the third group practiced mostly in the late afternoon, when they were more likely to be tired. The two top groups differed from the third group in another way: They slept more. They not only slept more at night, they also took far more afternoon naps. All that practicing seems to demand a lot of recovery.
One of those reasons goes beyond the teacher’s knowledge. It’s his or her ability to see you in ways that you cannot see yourself.
It’s apparent why becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going. Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject’s performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible; for reasons that may be simply physical (as in sports) or deeply psychological, very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance.
While the best methods of development are constantly changing, they’re always built around a central principle: They’re meant to stretch the individual beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.
Comfort zone. Learning zone. Panic zone.
It’s designed specifically to improve performance.
It can be repeated a lot.
Feedback on results is continuously available.
It’s highly demanding mentally.
It isn’t much fun.
As the story goes, Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in one and a half hours.”
What Auer didn’t add is that it’s a good thing one and a half hours are enough, because if you’re practicing with your mind, you couldn’t possibly keep it up all day.
In fact, life at most companies seems almost intended to defeat all the principles of deliberate practice.
Most fundamentally, what we generally do at work is directly opposed to the first principle: It isn’t designed by anyone to make us better at anything. Usually it isn’t designed at all. We weren’t hired so we could spend time improving our own abilities; we were hired to produce results.
Avoiding automaticity through continual practice is another way of saying that great performers are always getting better. This is why the most devoted can stay at the top of their field for far longer than most people would think possible.
Step one, obvious yet deserving a moment’s consideration, is knowing what you want to do. The key word is not what, but knowing. Because the demands of achieving exceptional performance are so great over so many years, no one has a prayer of meeting them without utter commitment.
As you add to your knowledge of your domain, keep in mind that your objective is not just to amass information. You are building a mental model — a picture of how your domain functions as a system.
A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge of your domain.
A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information.
Most important, a mental model enables you to project what will happen next.
The greatest innovators in a wide range of fields — business, science, painting, music — all have at least one characteristic in common: they spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough.
For an adult facing the responsibilities of a family and a career, devoting that kind of time to purely develop mental activities — activities that cost money rather than earn money — would be exceedingly tough. Only in childhood and adolescence will the time typically be available.
Despite wide variations in the parents’ backgrounds, professions, and incomes, their homes tended to be child-oriented. Kids were important, and the parents were willing to do a lot — almost anything — to help them. The parents also believed in and modeled a strong work ethic. Work came before play, obligations had to be met, goals were to be pursued. To excel, to do one’s best, to work hard, and to spend one’s time constructively were emphasized over and over again. In an organization, this would be called the culture — the norms and expectations that are simply in the air.
For most of the mathematicians, the joy of discovering a new way of solving a problem was more important than a high test score, receiving a good grade, or letting the teacher’s approval for their work.
Intrinsic doesn’t necessarily mean innate, that is, in born. Possibly the intrinsic drive we’re seeking also develops over time.
The much more intriguing possibility is that events or situations having nothing to do with innate traits could also set off multiplier effects. An example that seems to occur quite often is what happens when someone begins training at an earlier age than others in their field.
A similar way to ignite the multiplier effect is to begin learning skills in a place where competition is sparse. It’s a lot easier to stand out as a math whiz when your town has only a hundred other kids your age. By the time the performers moved to a higher level of competition they had developed the drive to keep going.
So what would it take for you to accept all of that in pursuit of a goal? What would you want so much that you’d commit yourself to the necessary hard, endless work, giving up relationships and other interests, so that you might eventually get it? Whatever it is that the greatest performers want, that’s how much they must want it.
The second question is more profound. What do you really believe? Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work, properly designed, with intense focus for hours a day and years on end, your performance will grow dramatically better and eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there’s at least a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance.
But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of specific innate gift, or by a lack of general abilities at a level you think must be necessary, then there’s no chance at all that you will do the work.
That’s why this belief is tragically constraining. Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible difficulties along the way. There are no exceptions. If you believe that doing the right kind of work can overcome the problems, then you have at least a chance of moving on to ever better performance. But those who see the setbacks as evidence that they lack the necessary gift will give up — quite logically, in light of their beliefs. They will never achieve what they might have.
What you really believe about the source of great performance thus becomes the foundation of all you will ever achieve. As we noted much earlier, such beliefs can be extremely deep-seated. Regardless of where our beliefs in this matter originated, however, we all have the opportunity to base them on the evidence of reality.