TALENT IS OVERRATED by Geoff Colvin

• Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started.
• Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
• Most organizations are terrible at applying the principles of great performance. Many companies seem arranged almost perfectly to prevent people from taking advantage of these principles for themselves or for the teams in which they work.
• 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.
• The pressure on us to keep getting better is greater than it used to be because of a historic change in the economy.
• Companies of all kinds have far more money than they need. The cash held by U.S. companies is hitting all-time records. Companies are using some of this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a company does this, it’s saying to its investors: We don’t have any good ideas for what to do with this, so here—maybe you do.
• For virtually every company, the scarce resource today is human ability.
• Processing information and moving it around costs practically nothing. For those same reasons, offshoring of manufacturing jobs is also exploding.
• The costs of being less than truly world class are growing, as are the rewards of being genuinely great.
• Being good at whatever we want to do—playing the violin, running a race, painting a picture, leading a group of people—is among the deepest sources of fulfillment we will ever know. Most of what we want to do is hard.
• In fact, the overwhelming impression that comes from examining the early lives of business greats is just the opposite—that they didn’t seem to hold any identifiable gift or give any early indication of what they would become.
• A wide range of research shows that the correlations between IQ and achievement aren’t nearly as strong as the data on broad averages would suggest, and in many cases there’s no correlation at all.
• the research tells us that intelligence as we usually think of it—a high IQ—is not a prerequisite to extraordinary achievement.
• Practice is so hard that doing a lot of it requires people to arrange their lives in particular ways.
• Yes, more total practice is very powerfully associated with better performance.
• What the authors called “deliberate practice” makes all the difference.
• “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
• Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
• Decades or centuries of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge.
• deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.
• The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.
• 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.
• High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.
• Repeating a specific activity over and over is what most of us mean by practice, yet for most of us it isn’t especially effective.
• Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent.
• More generally, 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.
• Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration.
• Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. 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.
• 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.
• Most fundamentally, what we generally do at work is directly opposed to the first principle: It isn’t designed by anyone to make us better at anything.
• Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement—real life is too complicated for that.
• While it has often been observed that those who work the hardest seem to be the luckiest, the fact remains that if a bridge collapses while you’re driving over it, nothing else matters.
• Measuring the intensity of practice may be difficult, but it’s clearly significant.
• 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.
• When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.
• The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible.
• Many years of intensive deliberate practice actually change the body and the brain.
• Top professionals do indeed have very fast reaction times, and reaction speed can be improved with practice, so professionals work on it. The problem is that improvements in reaction speed follow what scientists call a power law (because there’s an exponent in the formula) and what the rest of us call the 80-20 rule. That is, nearly all the improvement comes in the first little bit of training. After that, lots more practice yields only a little additional improvement.
• Sometimes excellent performers see more by developing better and faster understanding of what they see.
• More generally in business and other fields, nonobvious indicators may be so valuable that most of us never know about them.
• In general, regardless of whether indicators are secret, developing and using them requires extensive practice.
• Most of the indicators used by top performers require practice to be of any use.
• 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.
• Deliberate practice works by helping us acquire the specific abilities we need to excel in a given field.
• Building and developing knowledge is one of the things that deliberate practice accomplishes.
• Researchers find that excellent performers in most fields exhibit superior memory of information in their fields.
• The capacity of short-term memory doesn’t seem to vary much from person to person; virtually everyone’s short-term memory falls in the range of five to nine items.
• Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it.
• The brain’s ability to change is greatest in youth, but it doesn’t end there.
• fundamentals of great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.
• Step one, obvious yet deserving a moment’s consideration, is knowing what you want to do. The key word is not what, but knowing.
• The first challenge in designing a system of deliberate practice is identifying the immediate next steps.
• The skills and abilities one can choose to develop are infinite, but the opportunities to practice them fall into two general categories: 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.
• Remember, feedback is crucial to effective practice, and people have a tendency to misremember what they thought in the past; we almost always adjust our recollections flatteringly, in light of how events actually turned out. But there’s no escaping a written record.
• Opportunities to practice business skills directly are far more available than we usually realize, but even these aren’t the only opportunities.
• Effective self-regulation is something you do before, during, and after the work activity itself.
• Self-regulation begins with setting goals. These are not big, life-directing goals, but instead are more immediate goals for what you’re going to be doing today.
• The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.
• But within that activity, the best performers are focused on how they can get better at some specific element of the work,
• An important part of prework self-regulation centers on attitudes and beliefs.
• 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.
• The best performers observe themselves closely. 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.
• Metacognition is important because situations change as they play out.
• 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.
• A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused the errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control:
• Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors. Note that this is not just a difference of personality or attitude.
• It’s crazy that in most jobs and at most organizations, there’s little or no explicit education about the nature of the domain.
• As you add to your knowledge of your domain, keep in mind that your objective is not just to amass information. You are building a mental model—a picture of how your domain functions as a system. This is one of the defining traits of great performers: They all possess large, highly developed, intricate mental models of their domains.
• A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge of your domain.
• A mental model not only enables remarkable recall, it also helps top performers learn and understand new information better than average performers, since they see it not as an isolated bit of data but as part of a large and comprehensible picture.
• A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information.
• Most important, a mental model enables you to project what will happen next.
• Since your mental model is an understanding of how your domain functions as a system, you know how changes in the system’s inputs will affect the outputs—that is, how the events that just happened will create the events that are about to happen.
• A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models. It isn’t possible to do the whole job through study alone.
• 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.
• Few do it well, and most don’t do it at all; the sooner you start, the better.
• Not all organizations want to be great. That’s the hard truth. For those that do—that really do—the principles of great performance show quite clearly what it takes to get there.
• Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.
• Organizations tend to assign people based on what they’re already good at, not what they need to work on.
• Deliberately putting managers into stretch jobs that will require them to learn and grow is the central development technique of the most successful organizations.
• Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful.
• Find ways to develop leaders within their jobs.
• We’ve seen that great performance is built through activities that are designed specifically to improve particular skills, and that in many realms teachers and coaches are especially helpful in designing those activities.
• Most organizations are terrible at providing honest feedback.
• Identify promising performers early.
• Understand that people development works best through inspiration, not authority.
• Deliberate practice activities are so demanding that no one can sustain them for long without strong motivation.
• Invest significant time, money, and energy in developing people.
• Make leadership development part of the culture.
• Developing leaders isn’t a program, it’s a way of living.
• Develop teams, not just individuals.
• Organizations that are the most successful at building team performance are especially skilled at avoiding or addressing potential problems that are particularly toxic to the elements of deliberate practice,
• Trust is the most fundamental element of a winning team.
• Just as great individual performers possess highly developed mental models of their domains, the best teams are composed of members who share a mental model—of the domain, and of how the team will be effective.
• Applying the principles of great performance in an organization is no easier than doing anything else in an organization. It’s hard.
• The effects of deliberate practice activities are cumulative.
• In the digital age, any products that can be compared will be compared, and any directly comparable products will be commoditized.
• A product unlike any other can’t be commoditized. A service that reaches deep into the psyche of the buyer can never be purchased solely on price. Creating such products and services was always valuable; now it’s essential.
• As products and services live shorter lives, so do the business models of the companies that sell them.
• Creativity and innovation have always been important; what’s new is that they’re becoming economically more valuable by the day.
• The evidence underlying the principles of deliberate practice and great performance shows that in finding creative solutions to problems, knowledge—the more the better—is your friend, not your enemy. And it shows that creativity isn’t a lightning bolt.
• The greatest innovators in a wide range of fields—business, science, painting, music—all have at least one characteristic in common: They spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough. Creative achievement never came suddenly, even in those cases in which the creator later claimed that it did.
• Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation.
• As for what exactly is going on during those long periods of preparation, it looks a lot like the acquisition of domain knowledge that takes place during deliberate practice. It is certainly intensive and deep immersion in the domain, frequently under the direction of a teacher, but even when not, the innovator seems driven to learn as much as possible about the domain, to improve, to drive himself or herself beyond personal limits and eventually beyond the limits of the field.
• The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.
• “The idea of epiphany is a dreamer’s paradise where people want to believe that things are easier than they are.”
• One of the main reasons why the people in organizations don’t produce more innovation is that the culture isn’t friendly to it. New ideas aren’t really welcomed. Risk taking isn’t embraced.
• Culture change starts at the top.
• People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money.
• The heavy burden of the evidence is that creativity is much more available to us than we tend to think.
• No one becomes extraordinary on his or her own, and a striking feature in the lives of great performers is the valuable support they received at critical times in their development.
• Cultures encourage or discourage specific pursuits at different times.
• The greatest value of a supporting home environment is that it enables a person to start developing early.
• Starting early holds advantages that become less available later in life.
• As we have seen repeatedly, becoming world-class great at anything seems to require thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice.
• Most organizations are not intellectually stimulating, even when the field itself might seem fascinating; rather than offering opportunities to learn and rewarding curiosity, the typical organization leaves inquisitive employees to find their own ways to learn.
• The fundamental reason why there are no teenage prodigies in certain domains is that it’s impossible to accumulate enough development time by the teenage years.
• One of the best established and least surprising findings in psychology is that as we age, we slow down.
• Somehow, excellent performers manage to continue achieving at high levels well beyond the point where age-related declines would seem to make that impossible.
• Studies in a very broad range of domains—management, aircraft piloting, music, bridge, and others—show consistently that excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise.
• In general, well-designed practice, pursued for enough time, enables a person to circumvent the limitations that would otherwise hold back his or her performance, and circumventing limitations is the key to high performance at an advanced age.
• Our brains are perfectly able to add new neurons well into old age when conditions demand it, and brain plasticity doesn’t stop with age.
• Most people stop the deliberate practice necessary to sustain their performance.
• Eventually, of course, everyone’s performance declines.
• As people master tasks, they must seek greater challenges and match them with higher-level skills in order to keep experiencing flow.
• As for rewards, at most companies they almost always entail more responsibilities and less freedom. Extra responsibilities are always part of rising higher in an organization, but if they don’t come with the potential for more self-direction, the promotion will feel more like a burden than a reward.
• The weight of the evidence is that the drive to persist in the difficult job of improving, especially in adults, comes mostly from inside.
• In domains where building the knowledge foundation takes many years before specific domain-related work can begin, such as business and high-level science, we commonly see that future stars may be decidedly undriven even as young adults.
• A very small advantage in some field can spark a series of events that produce far larger advantages.
• A similar way to ignite the multiplier effect is to begin learning skills in a place where competition is sparse.
• Becoming a great performer demands the largest investment you will ever make—many years of your life devoted utterly to your goal—and only someone who wants to reach that goal with extraordinary power can make it.
• Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible difficulties along the way. There are no exceptions.