Talent Is Overrated.

• Author: Zimmet, Art

Talent Is Overrated

By Geoff Colvin

Talent is a myth to be debunked in Geoff Colvin's instructive and motivating study of high-level performers, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. Colvin, editor-at-large at Fortune magazine, synthesizes extensive research on the topics of talent, learning, intelligence, and practice to distill the formula to success.

Success and world-class performance are not the result of innate or creator-given gifts. In all scientific research on the subject, talent is an apparition. This conclusion that it is not talent but something else that powers high-level performances is true across all human endeavors that Colvin addresses, from music and sports to business management and investing.

What separates high performers from the rest of us is something very specific: deliberate practice, and lots of it. Across almost every field, the more deliberate practice one engages in, the higher one rises toward being capable of world-class performance. Before Colvin describes what deliberate practice is, he debunks the myths of what we think leads to success and high performance.

Current research shows that neither talent, intelligence quotient (IQ), nor memory are responsible for high performance humans. But if there is no such thing as talent, IQ is not directly correlated with success, and memory is developed rather than innate, what exactly is this deliberate practice that Colvin points to in the scientific literature as the precursor to success and high performance?

Colvin first illustrates the difference between the typical practice most of us engage in and the deliberate practice required to advance to greatness. Then Colvin describes the five characteristics of deliberate practice. It must:

* Be specifically designed to improve performance;

* Lend itself to high numbers of repetition;

* Provide feedback;

* Be highly demanding mentally; and

* Not be much fun.

The best type of practice is designed by experts to work on very specific aspects of the overall performance. It must be tailored to stretch the student outside his or her comfort zone and skill set, but not so far that the student cannot accomplish the task...