Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

by Geoff Colvin

most of them are good, conscientious people, and they probably work diligently. Some of them have been at it for a very long time—twenty, thirty, forty years. Why isn’t that enough to make them great performers? It clearly isn’t. The hard truth is that virtually none of them has achieved greatness or come even close, and only a tiny few ever will.

Researchers from the INSEAD business school in France and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School call the phenomenon “the experience trap.” Their key finding: While companies typically value experienced managers, rigorous study shows that, on average, “managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes.”

When asked to explain why a few people are so excellent at what they do, most of us have two answers, and the first one is hard work. People get extremely good at something because they work hard at it. We tell our kids that if they just work hard, they’ll be fine. It turns out that this is exactly right. They’ll be fine, just like all those other people who work at something for most of their lives and get along perfectly acceptably but never become particularly good at it. The research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.

Thus it’s clear why most of us don’t dwell on the mystery of great performance. We don’t think it’s a mystery. We’ve got a couple of explanations in our head, and if it ever occurs to us that the first one is clearly wrong, well, the second one is what we really believe anyway. And the nicest thing about the second explanation is that it takes the matter of great performance out of our hands. If we were really a natural at anything, we’d know it by now. Since we’re not, we can worry about other things. The trouble with this explanation—except it isn’t trouble, it’s excellent news—is that it’s wrong. Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.

The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice. Exactly what that is and isn’t turns out to be extremely important. It definitely isn’t what most of us do on the job every day, which begins to explain the great mystery of the workplace—why we’re surrounded by so many people who have worked hard for decades but have never approached greatness. Deliberate practice is also not what most of us do when we think we’re practicing golf or the oboe or any of our other interests. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

Contemporary athletes are superior not because they’re somehow different but because they train themselves more effectively. That’s an important concept for us to remember.

For roughly five hundred years—from the explosion of commerce and wealth that accompanied the Renaissance until the late twentieth century—the scarce resource in business was financial capital. If you had it, you had the means to create more wealth, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. That world is now gone. Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.

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.

None of these works is regarded today as great music or even close. They are rarely performed or recorded except as novelties, of interest only because of Mozart’s later fame.

Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

Any divine spark that Mozart may have possessed did not enable him to produce world-class work quickly or easily, which is something we often suppose a divine spark will do.

“Ambitious parents who are currently playing the ‘Baby Mozart’ video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard.”

So here’s the situation: Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed “golf addict” who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible. Earl’s wife does not work outside the home, and they have no other children; they have decided that “Tiger would be the first priority in our relationship,” Earl wrote.

We tend to think we are forever barred from all manner of successes because of what we were or were not born with. The range of cases in which that belief is true turns out to be a great deal narrower than most of us think. The roadblocks we face seem to be mostly imaginary.

Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own. Mornings were devoted to cardiovascular work, running a hilly five-mile trail; he would reportedly run ten forty-meter wind sprints up the steepest part. In the afternoons he did equally strenuous weight training. These workouts became legendary as the most demanding in the league, and other players would sometimes join Rice just to see what it was like. Some of them got sick before the day was over.

all the violinists understood that practicing by themselves was the most important thing they could do to get better. Though they didn’t consider it easy or fun, they all had virtually unlimited time in which to do it. On those dimensions, they were all the same. The difference was that some chose to practice more, and those violinists were a great deal better.

It could be put very simply: What the authors called “deliberate practice” makes all the difference. Or as they stated it with stark clarity in their scholarly paper, “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.

The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.

Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder— these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.

Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball’s greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than thirty years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night.

you may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.

The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for very long. A finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to ninety minutes.

If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested-development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice—avoiding automaticity.

When top-level chess players look at a board, they see words, not letters. Instead of seeing twenty-five pieces, they may see just five or six groups of pieces. That’s why it’s easy for them to remember where all the pieces are.

when it comes to giving people evaluations—offering praise first, then supporting criticisms with examples—old Josiah Franklin could be a model for us all.

Significantly, he did not try to become a better essay writer by sitting down and writing essays. Instead, like a top-ranked athlete or musician, he worked over and over on those specific aspects that needed improvement.

In business we find many analogous situations, far more than you might at first think. The most obvious involve presentations and speeches, and these form the one element of corporate life that is commonly practiced. But how well? These events can be extraordinarily important—a presentation to Wall Street analysts, to the board of directors, to your boss, to a congressional committee, or just to immediate colleagues can hold large consequences for you or your organization. Yet for most people, practice consists of perhaps a few run-throughs. Think of all the ways it could be done much better. One could analyze the text of the talk and in each section determine the most important idea to be conveyed—passion, logical inevitability, common bonds with the audience, humor—and then work on each section repeatedly, constantly striving to express that key idea more effectively, with feedback after each repetition, either from a coach or by watching video. In the age of YouTube, it may be easy to find video of others giving similar types of presentations that one can then analyze and learn from, noting specifically how other speakers tried—well or badly—to convey the same key ideas that you want to put across.

If you can’t go to business school or take business classes, you can still apply the chess model ad hoc. For starters, many of the case studies used at famous business schools worldwide are for sale; you can buy them online and study them yourself. More generally, consciousness of the chess model changes the way you read the news or observe what happens in your own industry or the company where you work. The essence of the chess model is the question: What would you do? Each news event that you read about, each new development in your company or industry, is an opportunity for you to answer that question. Oil prices jump, consumer spending tanks, a rogue trader loses $7 billion, Apple introduces the iPhone—don’t just read the news, imagine how it might affect the business you’re in or want to be in, and answer the question: What would you do? Then comes a critically important step: Write your answer down and keep it. Remember, feedback is crucial to effective practice, and people have a tendency to misremember what they thought in the past; we almost always adjust our recollections flatteringly, in light of how events actually turned out. But there’s no escaping a written record. Comparing your own what-would-I-do with the results of what the protagonist really did is the only way this exercise can yield genuine learning, and that learning can be considerable.

no matter how long you’ve worked in the world of investments, you will benefit from rereading Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis, a book you probably got when you started; and I guarantee you will learn something important that you’d forgotten. For people who write and edit, the same applies to Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Every field has classic guides that will always repay study, just as linebackers will always benefit from leg presses. The difference is that every linebacker from high school on up to the NFL does leg presses, while surprisingly few people in business practice the basic conditioning that supports all they do.

Conditioning can also be practiced with new material. Analyze the basic ratios in an unfamiliar financial statement with pen and paper, even though you have software that could do it all with one click. Do a value-based analysis of a stock. Pencil-edit a magazine article. You won’t be learning new skills; you’ll be building the strengths that make all your skills possible.

In the research, the poorest performers don’t set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome—win the order; close out my positions at a profit; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. For example, instead of just winning the order, their goal might be to focus especially hard on discerning the customer’s unstated needs.

the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They’re thinking of exactly, not vaguely, how to get to where they’re going.

The best performers go into their work with a powerful belief in what researchers call their self-efficacy—their ability to perform. They also believe strongly that all their work will pay off for them.

The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.

You’ve been through some kind of work experience—a meeting with your team, a trading session, a quarterly budget review, a customer visit. You had thought about what you wanted to achieve and to improve, and it went however it went. Now: How do you respond? Odds are strong that the experience wasn’t perfect, that parts of it were unpleasant. In those cases, excellent performers respond by adapting the way they act; average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future.

It’s crazy that in most jobs and at most organizations, there’s little or no explicit education about the nature of the domain. Engineers, lawyers, accountants, and others go to school to learn the skills of their profession, but when it comes to the company, the industry, financial relationships, and how the business works, most people assume they’ll just pick up what they need to know, and most organizations agree. In reality, maybe you’ll pick up what you need to know or maybe you won’t. But in light of the critical importance of domain knowledge, it’s obvious that this offhand approach to acquiring that knowledge makes no sense.

Imagine the difference if you made domain knowledge a direct objective rather than a byproduct of work. If you set a goal of becoming an expert on your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don’t do now. You would study the history of the business, identify today’s leading experts, read everything you could find, interview people inside your organization and outside it who could provide new perspectives, track key statistics and trends. The exact steps would vary depending on your business, but it’s quickly apparent that you could make yourself impressively more knowledgeable about your business than you are today, and probably do so in short order. With time, your knowledge advantage over others would become large.

A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models. It isn’t possible to do the whole job through study alone. In many fields, much of this work must be done through deliberate practice activities or through metacognitive processes in the work itself, as we’ve discussed.

Building people through job assignments seems obvious in theory, but in practice it’s tough. Organizations tend to assign people based on what they’re already good at, not what they need to work on. The merciless competitive pressure on every company makes it difficult to pull accomplished employees out of jobs they do extremely well and put them into positions where they may struggle. That’s a tension every organization must deal with in order to become more successful.

Community leadership roles are opportunities for employees to practice skills that will be valuable at work. For example, most employees will never serve on the company’s board of directors or on any major corporate board. But many of them can serve on a local nonprofit’s board, and the experience is an excellent opportunity to develop strategic thinking, financial analysis, and many other skills. At General Mills, an explicit part of many employees’ development plans as set by their bosses is to serve on a nonprofit board.

Immelt of GE says that the people who report to him “get coaching from me every time I see them.”

After any significant action, in training or in combat, soldiers and officers meet to discuss what happened. They take off their helmets—a symbolic action indicating that “there’s no rank in the room,” as Kolditz says. “Comments are blunt. If the boss made a bad decision, often it’s a subordinate who points that out.” The session isn’t about blaming; instead, it’s “a professional discussion,” as an army training circular puts it. Part of its strength is that it yields very complete feedback.

Jack Welch was one of the great champions of putting the fish on the table—confronting reality, as he says. Often overlooked were his efforts to make doing so easier for the top team. GE’s dream team was and is the Corporate Executive Council, which used to meet at headquarters in a formal atmosphere with rehearsed presentations and little real discussion. Welch moved the meetings off-site, forbade prepared presentations, jackets, and ties, and lengthened the coffee breaks to encourage informal discussion, among other changes. At GE they call this social architecture. Business scholars believe it was a critical element in the success of Welch’s revolution.

The steam engine and cotton gin were two of the most significant business innovations ever, and the stories of how such innovations come about remain the same up until the present. From the telegraph to the airplane to the Internet, they’re all adaptations and extensions of what existed, made possible by great insights but entirely impossible without a deep knowledge of, and reliance on, past achievements.