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

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Children don’t have to deal with the responsibilities of adulthood, like work or family, so they can practice more. The typical response to this is, "but what about Mozart?" It turns out that much of what we know about Mozart was a myth or misrepresented. So not only did they have no inborn talent or capacity for greatness, they also needed just as much practice as their friends. Colvin opens the book with a great first chapter, setting the pace for the rest of the writing that was to follow. He's got a great style, and the book has a great flow. So, this one shouldn't have any problems holding the reader's attention. To win a title is one thing, defending that title is something different The majority of people don’t think that deliberate practice is so crucial

That's the very meaning of being musically talented. But it didn't happen. On the contrary: The researchers calculated the average hours of practice needed by the most elite group of students to reach each grade level, and they calculated the average hours needed by each of the other groups. There were no statistically significant differences. For students who ended up going to the elite music school as well as for students who just played casually for fun, it took an average of twelve hundred hours of practice to reach grade 5, for example. For examples, studies of world-class musicians showed that the best performers showed no particular signs of excelling earlier in life, nor any ability to acquire skills faster.Benjamin Franklin would rewrite spectator essays in verse. Then after he had forgotten them he would take his versified essays and rewrite them in prose again comparing his efforts with the original. Later on, the readers will find that Colvin somehow reveals the harsh requirements or hard practice that only a small portion of the people can master. No one can help you if you can’t undergo a hard-working tempo.

In math, science, musical composition, swimming, X-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature—no one, not even the most "talented" performers, became great without at least ten years of very hard preparation. Originally stemming from economics,for human performance it means that having a slight edge can lead to bigger motivation to practice, better coaching, more support, and a whole bunch of other external factors, that will come together to multiply that advantage. But if they all built up the same amount of experience and no one was particularly talented, how come there were such big differences in how people performed? So, drop all the negative self-talk that tells you that there are people who are more talented, and join us in exploring why “Talent is Overrated” Who Should Read “Talent is Overrated”? and Why?In fact, the best performers spent *more* time than everyone else practicing, and in particular, far more time doing deliberate practice. Extensive research shows that many people don’t improve at their work even after many years of experience; in fact, some actually get worse as they gain experience.

In his final paragraphs,Colvin states that: "Ultimately,we cannot get to the very heart of this matter; we cannot explain fully and generally why certain people put themselves through the years or decades of punishing, intensive daily work that eventually makes them world-class great. We've reached the point where we are left without guidance from the scientists and must proceed by looking in the only place we have left, which is within ourselves." Great summary. I was expecting a lot of details about deliberate practice, which of course there were, but Talent Is Overrated seems to emphasize the external factors a lot tooand spends quite some time clearing up false assumptions. Do you think that just by participating in a team practice you’ll find yourself among the world’s greatest basketball players?Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer—but we’re almost always wrong. That’s important, because if we’re wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about. Talent is Overrated” wants to enlighten all readers by explaining the fact that hard work pays off, “SUCCESS= 90% HARD WORK+ 10% TALENT”. Our insight into how it’s possible to maintain top-level performance into the later decades of life helps us understand those cases in which it doesn’t happen. Most people stop the deliberate practice necessary to sustain their performance. We can’t necessarily criticize them. It may be a completely rational decision, for example in the case of a pro athlete who has earned millions of dollars and has little to gain but much to lose, in the possibility of serious injury, by continuing to play. Businesspeople who get rich early may see no further reason to keep challenging themselves. Give your brain the right kind of training – for example by making it do 2 things at once – and plasticity will increase in the regions that normally show the greatest atrophy in years. Author Geoffrey Colvin is writer and public speaker. He is the author of the books: Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know that Brilliant Machines Never Will; this one, and The Upside of the Downturn: Management Strategies for Difficult Times. He is also a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune Magazine.

That means even when you practice the right way by meticulously analyzing your mistakes and improving in the exact areas you need to be, it’ll take you longer to achieve greatness than previous generations. This was surprising in some ways. The start of it is pretty much Gladwell’s Outliers, the end is pretty well Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and the middle is about the least interesting part of the book. So, I guess I would recommend those two books rather than this one, except that there were some things about this that made the whole thing worthwhile. Talent is Overrated was a super-interesting look into the topic. Previously taken as gospel truth, the author dismantles the conventional myth of "talent" here. The book repeats much of the content we know about on extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, and how, somewhat counter-intuitively, extrinsic motivation can reduce creativity. Dan Pink's books do a better job of presenting this content. That initial bit of satisfaction, that smug smile you get for shooting a 3-pointer, can be enough to trigger your inner drive.People who seem to possess abilities of this type do not necessarily achieve high performance, and we've seen many examples of people showing no evidence of such abilities who have produced extraordinary achievement.