Fragments of the book, “Talent Is Overrated”, written by Geoff Colvin.
Preface
The fundamental message still stands and still needs saying. While millions of people today accept and celebrate the message, millions more still doubt it. They haven’t shaken their belief in natural gifts or in most cases their tragic conviction that they themselves don’t have one.
They have yet to learn: You don’t need one. Gifts, if they exist, don’t make anyone great. The evidence still shows overwhelmingly that better performance, even greatness, is a choice. The ability to perform at levels higher than we ever thought possible rests in our own hands.
The Mystery
For roughly five hundred years – from the explosion of commerce and wealth that accompanied the Renaissance until the late twentieth century – the scarce resource in business was financial capital. If you had it, you had the means to create more wealth, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. That world is now gone. Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.
If you think your job isn’t exportable, you may be right – but think about it hard before you relax.
How Smart Do You Have to Be?
Steve Ross, who built the Warner Communications empire before selling it to Time Inc., was known for analyzing complex deals in his head and considered this ability a personal competitive advantage. He supposedly said, “I hate calculators. They’re the equalizer.”
IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.
A 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.
What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t
- It pushes you just beyond, but not way beyond, your current limits.
- It can be repeated a lot.
- Feedback on results is constantly available.
- It’s highly demanding mentally.
- It isn’t much fun.
The great improvers are willing to get uncomfortable and make the mental and physical effort to correct a flaw, which often involves difficult “opposite-oriented” remedial learning.
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 essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible.
How Deliberate Practice Works
The difference wasn’t literally what they saw. It was what they perceived. The superior perception of top performers extends beyond the sense of sight. They hear more when they listen and feel more when they touch.
The researchers proposed what has become known as the chunk theory. Everyone in the experiment remembered more or less the same number of chunks of information. For the novices, a particular piece on a particular square was a chunk. But for the masters, who had studied real positions for years, a chunk was much larger, consisting of a whole group of pieces in a specific arrangement.
Applying the Principles in our Lives
Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their goal. So when things don’t turn out perfectly, they attribute the problems to vague forces outside their control. As a result, they are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time.
Since excellent performers go through a sharply different process from the beginning, they can make good guesses about how to adapt. That is, their ideas for how to perform better next time are likely to work. So it’s hardly surprising that they are more likely than average performers to repeat the experience rather than avoid it. And when they do repeat it, we can now understand why they go into it with some of the pre-work traits and attitudes we observed: they approach the job with more specific goals and strategies, since their previous experience was essentially a test of specific goals and strategies.
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 helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information.
- Most important, a mental model enables you to project what will happen next.
Applying the Principles in Our Organizations
Building people through job assignments seems obvious in theory, but in practice it’s tough.
He says that’s what he discovered that “you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times”.
“Put the fish on the table”, he says. It’s smelly, and cleaning it is messy work, but you get a good meal in the end.
Performing Great at Innovation
In the digital age, any product that can be compared will be compared, and any directly comparable products will be commoditized. Most brutally, this phenomen takes the form of the reverse auction.