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

by Geoff Colvin

“The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge,” wrote three eminent scientists who work on expert computer systems (Bruce G. Buchanan, Randall Davis, and Edward A. Feigenbaum). “Programs that are rich in general inference methods—some of which may even have some of the power of mathematical logic—but poor in domain-specific knowledge can behave expertly on almost no tasks.” Their conclusion: “In the knowledge resides the power.”

Part of the answer, which seems to apply in every domain, is that they had more knowledge about their field. In chess, researchers have found (using a method I’ll describe a little later) that master-level players possess more chess knowledge than good club-level players by a huge margin, a factor of ten to one hundred. Just as important, top performers in a wide range of fields have better organized and consolidated their knowledge, enabling them to approach problems in fundamentally different and more useful ways.

In general, the knowledge of top performers is integrated and connected to higher-level principles.

It’s particularly significant that many of the best-performing companies explicitly recognize the importance of deep knowledge in their specific field, as opposed to general managerial ability.

One key trait the study found was that these companies valued “domain expertise” in managers—extensive knowledge of the company’s field. Immelt has now specified “deep domain expertise” as a trait required for getting ahead at GE.

The researchers proposed what has become known as the chunk theory.

Since you would see just a bunch of letters, you’d have a hard time remembering more than the first seven or so. But in reality you recognize those letters as a word you’re familiar with—and a thirteen-letter word at that— so you can easily remember all those letters in the correct order. You wouldn’t need to study them for the full five seconds; a half-second would be plenty. Though you’d have to think a bit, you could even repeat the whole string of letters backward.

All these people have developed what we might call a memory skill, a special ability to get at long-term memory, with its vast capacity, in a fast, reliable way.

mile. He had created what’s called a retrieval structure, a way of connecting the data to concepts he already possessed.

Indeed, top performers’ deep understanding of their field becomes the structure on which they can hang the huge quantities of information they learn about it.

That finding applies generally: Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it. The best medical diagnosticians remember more about individual patients because they use the data to make higher-level inferences for diagnoses than average performers do.

In the letters-versus-words analogy, it isn’t just that novices see letters while experts see words; the experts also know the meanings of the words.

(The argument was whether women should be educated, Collins contending they were naturally unable to learn as much as men, Franklin taking the other side.)

We must note in passing that 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.

It began with his reading a Spectator article and making brief notes on the meaning of each sentence; a few days later he would take up the notes and try to express the meaning of each sentence in his own words.

One of the faults he noticed was his poor vocabulary. What could he do about that? He realized that writing poetry required an extensive “stock of words” because he might need to express any given meaning in many different ways depending on the demands of rhyme or meter. So he would rewrite Spectator essays in verse. Then, after he had forgotten them, he would take his versified essays and rewrite them in prose, again comparing his efforts with the original.

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.

And Franklin was not a student. He was then an apprentice in his brother’s printing business, a demanding job that left him little free time. He practiced writing before work in the morning, after work at night, and on Sunday, “when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone.” Raised as a Puritan, he knew he was supposed to be in church on Sunday, but “I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time” to go.

we’ll look first at what individuals can do on their own, like Ben Franklin, to become much better in their fields.

The first challenge in designing a system of deliberate practice is identifying the immediate next steps. In a few fields those steps are clear. If you want to play the piano, the exact skills you must learn and the order in which to learn them have been worked out by many generations of teachers.

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.

Web-based or downloadable simulation games in marketing, stock trading, negotiating, corporate strategizing, and many other disciplines at several levels of sophistication are widely available, with more being created every day.

With a goal set, the next prework step is planning how to reach the goal. Again, 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. So if their goal is discerning the customer’s unstated needs, their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain key words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer’s crucial issues.

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.

Most of us don’t do work with a significant physical element, but the same principle applies in purely mental work. 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.