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

by Geoff Colvin

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 virtually every company, the scarce resource today is human ability. That’s why companies are under unprecedented pressure to make sure that every employee is as highly developed as possible—and as we shall see, no one knows what the limits of development are.

By the time Buffett began accumulating a world-class record of performance, he was well into his thirties—and had been working diligently in his chosen field for more than twenty years.

So it’s definitely surprising, at least at first, to find that research doesn’t support the view that extraordinary natural general abilities— as distinct from developed abilities like SF’s memory—are necessary for high achievement. In fact, in a wide range of fields, including business, the connection between general intelligence and specific abilities is weak and in some cases apparently nonexistent.

Even when performance does match up with IQ in a way we would expect, the effect tends to be short-lived. That is, even if high-IQ people do better than low-IQ people when first trying a task that’s new to them, the relationship tends to get weaker and may eventually disappear completely as they work at the task and get better at it.

Exhibit A would be the company that corporate headhunters consistently rank number 1 as their hunting ground for business leaders, General Electric. CEO Jeff Immelt has been clear about what the company is looking for: someone who is externally focused, is a clear thinker, has imagination, is an inclusive leader, and is a confident expert.

But then one day an older partner told Rubin he could possibly play a larger role in the firm if he changed his ways and actually started to care about the people he worked with. As Rubin recalls in his memoir, “I’ve often asked myself why this advice affected me so much.” He speculates on reasons, but the bottom line is that it affected him deeply. He started listening to people better, understanding their problems, and valuing their views.

That’s about 1,000 hours a year, or 20,000 hours over his pro career. He played 303 career NFL games—the most ever by a wide receiver—and if we assume the offense had the ball half the time on average, that’s about 150 hours of playing time as measured by the game clock; this may be overstated, since Rice wasn’t on the field for every play.

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.

Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily, while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.

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.

By contrast, 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.

plateau

best players weren’t looking at the ball. They were looking at the opponent’s hips, shoulders, and arms, which foretold where they would hit the ball.

The very fastest typists achieve their advantage by looking farther ahead in the text, which enables them to keep moving their fingers into place for the next keystroke just a little bit ahead of time

accomplished performers, facing the familiar limits on response time, didn’t react any faster than the novices, but they understood what they were seeing much more quickly.

Getting information pushes at the two constraints everyone faces: It takes time and costs money. Making sound decisions fast and at low cost is a competitive advantage everywhere.

overfitting

“The most successful parts of GE are places where leaders have stayed in place a long time. Think of Brian Rowe’s long tenure in aircraft engines. Four or five big decisions he made—relying on his deep knowledge of that business—won us maybe as many as 50 years of industry leadership.

Pioneered at the Harvard Business School, it is strongly analogous to chess practice: You’re presented with a problem, and your job is to figure out a solution. Real life being the way it is, you often won’t know whether the solution chosen by the case’s protagonist was the best one possible, or whether yours was any better.

The practice of top athletes falls into two large categories. One is conditioning, building the strengths and capacities that are most useful in a given sport.

conditioning means getting stronger with the underlying cognitive skills that you probably already have—basic math and accounting in financial jobs, basic science in engineering jobs, basic language skills in editorial jobs.

The second type of practice in the sports model, specific skill development, is based on focused simulation, and that concept can be applied widely in business, though doing it by oneself may be a challenge.

Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their goal. So when things don’t turn out perfectly, they attribute the problems to vague forces outside their control. As a result, they are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time.

some research suggests that people perform more innovatively when they are offered no extrinsic rewards; offering them a reward can actually reduce their creativity. Not all the research agrees, but the point is intuitively plausible: People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money.

And instead of furnishing structure and support—meaning clear roles and responsibilities in a positive, forward-looking, build-on-successes environment— many organizations operate in a cover-your-ass culture that is mainly about avoiding blame.

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.