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

Despite the contemporary research on talent, the definitions of talent, and the increasing importance of talent in organizations, Colvin suggests that much of the conventional wisdom on talent is wrong. Innate gifts of talent, general experience, hard work and intellect or natural skillsets are incomplete drivers of "great performance" compared to the principles of deliberate practice. This is a very specific kind of practice that is:

1.Specifically Designed to Improve Performance
2.Based on Systematic Repetition and Habit Building
3.Supported by Feedback that is Continually Available
4.Demanding in Terms of Mental Engagement and Focus
5.Significantly Less Fun Than the Alternatives

Deliberate practice encourages and reinforces a number of thought and behavior processes including perception, knowledge management, discernment, recognition, memory and self-awareness. Deliberate practice drives effective behavior.

The author suggests a series of application ideas that could be considered as prime elements in the path to performance enhancement:

1.Really Knowing Where You Want to Go ...
2.Engaging in Practice Directly and with Different Models ...
3.Building Order and Arrangement into Practice in the Work ...
4.Building Depth and Scope into Knowledge Platforms ...
5.Preparing the Foundations through Ongoing Effort ...

Each of these application ideas were explored by Colvin in terms and frames that are intrinsic to most of us who have direct responsibility for some kind of organizational performance. His explanation of motivation and passion for deliberate practice helps us become responsible for our personal engagement ... to perform with passion.

This book syncs very well with Prepared and Resolved, as well as the premises of "Capacity-Building" defined in our research on collaborative capability and performance.

Deliberate practice is hard and not particularly enjoyable because it means you are focusing on improving areas in your performance that are not satisfactory. Thus, it stretches you. The book is written by a journalist, not a scholar. And it is well written and the journalist has done a good job in doing his homework. It is full of relevant references to research. It deals with the subject matter in a nuanced and informative way. Overall, it is very convincing.

I also juiced the best from these titles:
Think And Grow Rich: The Personal Study Edition
The Master Key System: The Personal Study Edition
Path To Prosperity - Mastery Of Destiny - Acres Of Diamonds: The Personal Study Edition
The Science of Getting Rich: The Movie - 2 Disk Set

This book added some extremely solid pieces of information to a shaky mental foundation. I am glad I read it. It was well worth the money and wisdom I gained.

Highly recommended.

No regrets on purchasing this book.

This book is both an inspiration, and a challenge. It tells you that you can achieve great things...but only at the price of long, arduous and disciplined practice. Likewise if you have already got yourself to some level of performance that is good, but if you want to go further you may need to do much, much more than just redouble your efforts. In this its ideas dovetail with those of Marshall Goldsmith and his book, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How successful people become even more successful"

This book is a great corrective to views such as "it's all in the genes" or "he came from the right sort of house" or "people round here just can't do that." You cannot completely deny the power of genes and environment, but this book shows how how can make great use of both, to further your performance level at a certain task.

This book shows why truly great performance is rare- the combination of opportunity and willingness to stick to disciplined practice for long enough is actually rare. But it is also optimistic in that it shows how most of us could raise our performance level when we have a need and reason to do so.

An enjoyable book, with a useful message, and easy to read. I can recommend it to those readers who are interested in understanding and improving either their own or their colleague's performance.

A few weeks ago I wrote a review of a book by Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, which completely transformed my way of thinking about inner obstacles to pursuing our passions and making our dreams come true. Geoff Colvin's "Talent is Overrated" had a similar effect on my thinking about how exactly to go about being exceptional in one's chosen field. Drawing upon reams of psychological research from the past 30 years, Colvin patiently and thoroughly demolishes the myths that most people unthinkingly accept about talent and great performance: that talent means the ability to perform complex, demanding tasks with less effort than other people, that it is innate, that only a few people have it and that talented individuals show evidence of great potential from a very young age.

The science paints a very different picture of the prerequisites for great performance: traditional indicators of intellectual and artistic abilities do not accurately correlate with exceptional performance, there is little evidence of precocity, there does not seem to be a genetic component to great performance and great achievements do not just appear out of thin air, fully formed, overflowing from the genius's mind. What the evidence really shows is that all great performers have one thing in common: engaging in what Colvin calls 'deliberate practice' for many, many years before their peers and the general public take notice of them. This crucial concept includes the following aspects: 1) it is designed specifically to improve performance, 2) it can be repeated a lot, 3) feedback on results is continuously available, 4) it's highly demanding mentally and 5) it isn't much fun. In other words, the maxim that 'practice makes perfect' is accurate, but only if it is 'intelligently designed', supervised by expert mentors and conducted rigorously for years on end. This deliberate practice includes and has as an end result the accumulation of a vast amount of background knowledge in one's subject area. A related myth that Colvin demolishes is that creativity and innovation often benefit from not having vast knowledge of the current state of the field, of being able to 'start fresh' and look at things from a different angle. Instead, the research shows that the most innovative scholars and innovators truly 'stood on the shoulders of giants' as Newton put it, their deep knowledge of the field allowing them to see clearly the frontier of their discipline and where it could be extended.

This model of great performance can be applied with surprising consistency to many of the world's greatest artists, athletes, businessmen, musicians, intellectuals, writers and so on. To take just two examples: before achieving worldwide fame as a comedian, Chris Rock honed his stand-up routine for months at local clubs, working out by trial and error which skits elicited spontaneous laughs and which didn't. Benjamin Franklin, acknowledged to be America's 'first great man of letters' worked strenuously to master the art of prose step by step by rewriting essays from a world-renowed collection in unusual ways, each tailored to improving a specific aspect of his writing, such as sentence structure, vocabulary, etc. And he worked at it patiently for years, all the while holding down a busy printing job.

The upshot of this argument is that the prerequisites of great performance are potentially available to everyone. Of course, this has to be qualified with the understanding that in some fields, particularly sports, achievements limits are set largely by physiology. As Colvin observes, you are unlikely to become an Olympic gymnast if you are seven feet tall. Mental illness can also severely constrain one's potential for great intellectual or artistic achievement. Upbringing also has a huge role to play: nearly all the great performers were started on their path by consistent, intense input from parents or teachers from a very young age. And perhaps most importantly, many people simply do not have the immense willpower to devote decades of their life to painstakingly improving their performance in a field.

Nevertheless, those who do intensely desire to achieve greatness in a field can take heart in knowing that seemingly superhuman feats are achievable with lots and lots hard work and clear goals. As an aspiring screenwriter and teacher, desiring to excel in both fields, this book was immensely inspiring.

One drawback of the book, which is very clearly and elegantly written, is that Colvin concentrates a bit too much on the applications of this research for business and organizations, and his discussions are scattered incongruously throughout the book, interrupting the flow of the argument and diverting attention from more interesting case studies in fields like creative writing and teaching (only coincidentally the two things I am most interested in:). But on the whole it is a stunning, ground-breaking discussion of creativity and great performance that should be must-reading for anyone wanting to excel in a particular field. This book, like no other, hands you the keys to the kingdom.