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

by Geoff Colvin

We still think what Homer thought: that the awesomely great, apparently superhuman performers around us came into this world with a gift for doing exactly what they ended up doing—

We still say, as Homer did, that great performers are inspired, meaning that their greatness was breathed into them by gods or muses. We still say they have a gift, which is to say their greatness was given to them, for reasons no one can explain, by someone or something apart from themselves.

Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.

Some researchers now argue that specifically targeted innate abilities are simply fiction. That is, you are not a natural-born clarinet virtuoso or car salesman or bond trader or brain surgeon—because no one is.

The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works.

if customer ignorance is a profit center for you, you’re in trouble.

Both companies are famous for the scorching intelligence of the people they hire and for the brutally rigorous tests they impose on job applicants. Bill Gates has said that if you took the twenty smartest people out of Microsoft it would be an insignificant company, and if you ask around the company what its core competency is, they don’t say anything about software. They say it’s hiring. They know what the scarce resource is.

“There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers.”

giftedness or talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all.

the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence.

It’s interesting to note that the manuscripts are not in the boy’s own hand; Leopold always “corrected” them before anyone saw them. It seems noteworthy also that Leopold stopped composing at just the time he began teaching Wolfgang.

In some cases it’s clear that the young boy’s compositions are not original. Wolfgang’s first four piano concertos, composed when he was eleven, actually contain no original music by him. He put them together out of works by other composers.

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.

Mozart did not conceive whole works in his mind, perfect and complete. Surviving manuscripts show that Mozart was constantly revising, reworking, crossing out and rewriting whole sections, jotting down fragments and putting them aside for months or years. Though it makes the results no less magnificent, he wrote music the way ordinary humans do.

The offense was suggesting that Mozart was merely a human performer with human motivations, not a demigod propelled solely by the divine spark.

Chase and Ericsson concluded, “There is apparently no limit to improvements in memory skill with practice.”

“the remarkable potential of ‘ordinary’ adults and their amazing capacity for change with practice.”

memory ability is very clearly created rather than innate.

(self-control, zeal, persistence,

“that whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning.”

Many other studies since SF have confirmed that apparently average people can achieve extraordinary memory ability by developing their own retrieval structures

they were not constrained by particular traits.

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.

But with 168 hours in a week, a person can practice by himself or herself just about without limit. In fact, no one in the study came anywhere near spending every available hour on practice.

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”—was Anders Ericsson,

“The conviction in the importance of talent appears to be based on the insufficiency of alternative hypotheses to explain the exceptional nature of expert performers.” That is, no one had a better idea. So here was their better idea.

“the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

activity designed specifically to improve performance,

repeated a lot;

feedback on results is continuous...

highly demanding ...

isn’t much fun.

It’s designed specifically to improve performance.

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.

the most effective deliberate practice activities are those that can be repeated at high volume.

You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: You won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring.

The best violinists in the Berlin study, for example, practiced about three and a half hours a day, typically in two or three sessions. Many other top-level musicians report four or five hours as their upper limit. Chess champions typically report the same amount of practice. Even elite athletes say the factor that limits their practice time is their ability to sustain concentration.

Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see—or get others to tell us—exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue that process until we’re mentally exhausted.

Telling someone what he did well or poorly on a task he completed eleven months ago is just not helpful.

the real reason you’ll never be Tiger Woods is that your father wasn’t Earl Woods. In

Practice is designed, so it can be designed well or badly.

Frequently when we see great performers doing what they do, it strikes us that they’ve practiced for so long, and done it so many times, they can just do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.

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. The

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. He

These chunks are the units of knowledge.

Researchers estimate that good club players have a “vocabulary” of about 1,000 chunks, while the highest-ranked players have a vocabulary of 10,000 to 100,000.

retrieval structure, a way of connecting the data to concepts he already possessed.

experts’ superior memory doesn’t extend beyond their field of expertise: It is a central element of their expertise and can’t be separated from it. Far from being a general ability, it is ultimately a skill that is acquired through many years of deliberate practice.

experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we’re doing. At least that’s the ideal mentor, ideally used.