Talent Is Overrated

1
Talent Is Overrated

• What Really Separates World-Class Performers from
  Everybody Else

Geoff Colvin. 2008. New York Portfolio.
2
The Mystery

• What makes Jack Welch, Tiger Woods, or Itzak
  Perlman so awesomely, amazingly, world-class
  excellent.
• Natural talent?
• Hard work?
• Years of experience?
• None of the above.
• Good news? Excellent performance is in our hands
  far more than most of us ever expected.

3
Research

• In past 30 years scientists have looked into
  top-level performance in a wide variety of
  fields. Findings
• Natural talent doesnt explain top-level
  performance if talent even exists.
• In fields such as chess, music, business, and
  medicine, high IQ doesnt necessarily correlate
  with top-level performance.
• Some chess masters have below average IQ, for
  example.
• Deliberate practice is the key.

4
Deliberate Practice

• Deliberate practice is extremely difficult.
• The chief constraint is mental.
• The required concentration is so intense that
  its exhausting.
• Why do some people have the passion to do it?
• To put themselves through it day after day,
  decade after decade?
• But they do it, and as a result, performance in
  all fields has improved dramatically in recent
  decades.

5
Research

• In England researchers studied music students.
• The only difference in the top performing group
  and other students was not talent, but the amount
  of practice.
• Talent is an innate ability to do something
  better than others.
• If it does exist, it is irrelevant to superior
  performance.
• Practice is what counts deliberate practice.

6

• Mozarts talent is a myth.
• He didnt get great until after he had 10,000
  hours of practice.
• Tiger Woods talented?
• His father gave Tiger a putter when he was seven
  months old.
• Before he was two he and his father were on a
  course practicing regularly.
• Both father and son attribute Tigers success not
  to talent but to hard work.

7
How Important Are Smarts?

• What are smarts?
• Memory?
• We arent born with good memories, they are
  developed
• With deliberate practice memory can be improved
  (102 random digits is the record).
• IQ?
• IQ is the ability to take an IQ test, nothing
  else.
• No correlation between general IQ and success.
• Domain-specific knowledge and intelligence is
  developed by years of deliberate practice.

8
Deliberate Practice

• Design practice to work on specific skills.
• Practice alone and on specific weaknesses.
• Practice is cumulative.
• Over the years it adds up.
• And if youre behind, its hard to catch up.
• Ten years or 10,000 hours.

9
Five Elements of Deliberate Practice

• Activity specifically designed to improve
  performance, often with a teachers help.
• Activity that can be repeated a lot over and
  over and over again.
• Feedback on results is continuously available.
• Its highly demanding mentally.
• Chess, business, sports
• It isnt much fun.

10
Designed

• Identify certain sharply defined elements of
  performance that need to be improved.
• High repetition is the most important difference
  between regular practice and deliberate practice.
• Deliberate practice is an effort of focused
  concentration and is mentally draining.
• No more than five hours.
• Its not fun because you do things were not good
  at so we can correct mistakes.

11
Top Performers

• They are always striving to improve.
• Not complacent.
• Never let performance become automatic.
• They understand the significance of indicators
  that average performers dont even notice.
• Intuition
• They look further ahead.
• They know more from seeing less.
• A few important indicators.
• Jack Welch concentrated on hiring people.

12
Applying the Principles

• Know where you want to go.
• Practice, practice, practice (deliberate
  practice).
• Deepen your domain knowledge.
• Build a mental model of how your domain functions
  as a system.
• A mental model forms a framework on which you
  hang your growing knowledge of your domain.
• Helps you distinguish relevant information from
  irrelevant information.
• Helps you project what will happen next.

13
Know More (Explore)

• When you know more, you innovate more.
• When you know more, you are more creative.
• When you know more, you are more successful.

14
Summary

• Know how to practice deliberately.
• Lots of repetitions
• Lots of feedback
• Lots of focus and concentration
• Become an expert in domain-specific knowledge.
• Thus, develop insightful intuition.
• Never become complacent.
• Its really hard work.