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

by Geoff Colvin

opportunities to practice directly, apart from the actual use of the skill or ability, the way a musician practices a piece before performing it; and opportunities to practice as part of the work itself.

anything you write is a performance,

instead of emulating the Spectator, you would choose a superior letter to the shareholders, advertisement, blog entry, or other appropriate model.

Watch a presentation that you consider especially well done and make notes of its various points; later, after you’ve forgotten most of it, use your notes to create a talk making the same points; deliver the talk and record it; then compare your video with the original.

well-structured deliberate practice: It is designed to meet the central demands of the field,

focused on the types of moves that need to be improved; and it involves high repetition and immediate feedback.

the process of focusing on the problem and evaluating proposed solutions is powerfully instructive,

many of the case studies used at famous business schools worldwide are for sale; you can buy them online and study them yourself.

feedback is crucial to effective practice,

The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.

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 most important self-regulatory skill that top performers use during their work is self-observation.

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.

Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. Similarly, the practice opportunities that we find in work won’t do any good if we don’t evaluate them afterward.

Excellent performers judge themselves differently from the way other people do. They’re more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies.

key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits.

excellent performers respond by adapting the way they act; average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future.

deep domain knowledge is fundamental to top-level performance. You don’t have to wait for that knowledge to come your way in the course of your work. You can pursue it.

it isn’t because they have exceptional memories but because they have exceptional knowledge of their domain.

No matter how many steps on the road to great performance you choose to take, you will be better off than if you hadn’t taken them.

This is pure opportunity.

Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.

That is, the best organizations assign people to jobs in much the same way that sports coaches or music teachers choose exercises for their students—to push them just beyond their current capabilities and build the skills that are most important.

The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college. Less education than that—or more—corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity.

“Of these works, only three were composed before year ten of the composer’s career, and those three works were composed in years eight and nine.”

Professor Hayes termed the long and absolutely typical preparatory period “ten years of silence,” which seemed to be required before anything worthwhile could be produced.

great innovators aren’t burdened by knowledge; they’re nourished by it. And they acquire it through a process we’ve seen before, involving many years of demanding deliberate practice activities.

Innovation doesn’t reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who’ve mastered the domain as it exists.

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.

“the aha moments grow out of hours of thought and study,”

“The idea of epiphany is a dreamer’s paradise where people want to believe that things are easier than they are.”

In virtually every case, the supporting environment is critical.

great art was usually created amid stability; you won’t get many great statues or symphonies from residents of a city under siege. Simonton’s

home, and wide research suggests that it is by far the most important part. The

“To excel, to do one’s best, to work hard, and to spend one’s time constructively were emphasized over and over again.”

stimulation, structure, and support is not only rare but also powerful.

Yo Ma was a world-famous cellist at age twenty, but he was much better at forty.

excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise.

great performance doesn’t come from superior general abilities; it comes from specific skills that have been developed in a particular way over a long period of time. So

effortful, focused, designed practice.

This “high” is achieved when the challenge just matches the person’s skills; if it’s too easy the experience is boring, too hard and it’s frustrating. As people master tasks, they must seek greater challenges and match them with higher-level skills in order to keep experiencing flow.

“The intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.”

Other studies showed that virtually any external attempt to constrain or control the work results in less creativity. Just being watched is detrimental. Even being offered a reward for doing the work results in less creative output than being offered nothing.

“that involve more time, freedom, or resources to pursue exciting ideas.”

Even the elite performers studied by Bloom required plenty of extrinsic motivation when they were starting out in their field. Their parents made them practice, as parents have always done, though it’s interesting to note that in these cases, when push came to shove and parents had to make a direct threat, it frequently played off the student’s intrinsic motivators. So it wasn’t “If you don’t do your piano practice we’ll cancel your allowance,” but rather “we’ll sell the piano.” Not “If you don’t go to swimming practice you’ll be grounded Saturday night,” but rather “we’ll take you off the team.” If the child truly didn’t care about the piano or swimming, the threats wouldn’t have worked.

Their drive became intrinsic.

similar way to ignite the multiplier effect is to begin learning skills in a place where competition is sparse.

Instead, they developed their skills in smaller environments and then moved on to the big time.

You have to develop an independent individual

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.