Talent Is Overrated

by Geoff Colvin, reading notes

I picked up this book last week from my new bookshelf. The past few weeks have been hectic moving to a new place and settling down, however, it is a rare opportunity to dig out the books I bought a long while back (this book was bought in 2017)…

The book can be summarized in a line, talent is overrated, what really matters is deliberate training.

We often attribute success to “talent” or innate skills. The book provided abundant arguments to defy that. Talent is not innate, it is acquired via long demanding deliberate training.

A few takeaways:

• For many people, talent is an execuse to not practice deliberately — I don’t have this talent, so I don’t want to practice.
• It is not only about practicing, but deliberate practice, or practice with your mind.
• Deliberate practice is an 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, or heavily physical; it isn’t fun.
• Mindfulness is extremely important in improving your skills, don’t practice autonomously. Avoid automaticity.
• High performers have their ways of connecting the dots in knowledge, or designed practice, to excel with the same general abilities like everyone else. Chunk Theory: everyone remembers more or less the same number of chunks of information. Novices see smaller chunks, masters see much larger chunks.
• Great performance came not from superior knowledge but from superior reasoning methods and reasoning power.
• Develop talent and identify talent is extremely critical for an org leader..

Fun facts..

• Many of Mozart’s early pieces are likely to be composed by his father..
• Franklin has a remarkable program to read Spectator; in improve vocab, he would rewrite Spectator essays in verse, and after he had forgotten them, he would take his versified essays and rewrite them in prose, again comparing his efforts with the original.
• The all-time number 2 best-selling reprint from HBR is a 1968 article on motivation. The number 1 best seller is about time management.

Excerpts

Chapter 1. The Mystery

• While companies typically value experiened managers, rigorous study shows that, on average, managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes.
• The factor that seems to explain the most about the great performance is something the researxhers call deliberate practice.
• For virtually every company, the scarce resource today is human ability.

Chapter 2. Talent is Overrated

• One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.
• Sloboda of the University of Keele, put it: “There is absolutely no evidence of a fast track for high achievers.”

Chapter 3. How Smart Do You Have to Be?

• CEO Jeff Immelt has been clear about what the company is looking for: someone who is externally focused, is a clear thinker, has imagination, is an inclusive leader, and is a confident expert.
• Jack Welch looks for 4 E’s: energy, ability to energize, edge (which means decisiveness, but he needed a word that started with e), and ability to execute.
• We have discoverred so far what doesn’t make people excel: (1) it isn’t experience; (2) it isn’t specific inborn abilities; (3) it isn’t general abilities such as intelligence and memory.

Chapter 4. A Better Idea.

What makes Jerry Rice a great football player?

• He spent very little time playing football.
• He designed his pratice to work on his specific needs. They focused on those things and not on other goals that might have seemed generally desirable, like speed.
• While supported by others, he did much of the work onhis own.
• It wasn’t fun.
• He defied the conventional limits of age.

Though the violinists understood the importance of pratice alone, the amount of time the various groups actually spent practicing alone differeed dramatically. Best group: 24 hours a week, good group: 9 hours a week.

Chapter 5. What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t

• Deliberate practice is an 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, or heavily physical; it isn’t fun.
• Some go beyond the teacher’s knowledge. it’s his or her ability to see you in ways that you can’t see yourself.
• The best methods of development are always built aournd a central priciple: they’re meant to stretch the indiviual beyond their current abilities.
• Comfort zone -> learning zone -> panic zone. Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress.
• “Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in one and a half hours.”
• Telling someone what he did well or poorly on a task he completed eleven months ago is just not helpful.
• What they achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.
• Avoid automaticity through continual practice is another way of saying that great performaers are always getting better.

Chapter 6. How Deliberate Practice Works

• Sometimes excellent performers see more by developing better and faster understanding of what they see.
• They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don’t even notice.
• They look further ahead.
• They know more from seeing less. Jack Welch, who considered people decision the heart of his job as CEO.
• They make finer discriminations than average performers.
• Great performance came not from superior knowledge but from superior reasoning methods and reasoning power.
• The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge, in the knowledge resides the power.
• Chunk Theory: everyone remembers more or less the same number of chunks of information. For novices, a particular piece was a chunk; for masters, a chunk is much larger, consisting of a whole group of arrangement.

Chapter 7. Applying the Principles in Our Lives

• Watch a presentation that you consider especially well done and make notes of its various points; later, after you’ve forgotten most of it, use your notes to create a talk making the same points; deliver the talk and record it; then compare your video with the original.

Practicing in the Work

• Instead of just winning the order, their goal might be to focus especially hard on discerning the customer’s unstated needs.
• They also strongly believe that all their work will pay off for them.
• They’re 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 believe they are responsible for their errors.
• Deep domain knowledge is fundamental to top level performance. By setting a goal of becoming an expert in a business, you would start immediately doing all kinds of things you don’t do now. With time, your knowledge advantage over others would become large.

Great performers all possess large, highly developed, intricate mental models of their domains.

• A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge in your domain.
• A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information.
• A mental model enables you to project what will happen next.

Chapter 8. Applying Principles in Our Organizations.

• Economy is increasingly based not on financial captical but on human capital.

Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, butis 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.
• Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful.

Find ways to develop leaders within their job.

Understand the critical roles of teachers and of feedback.

• Any organization that wants a culture of true candor can have it, and there’s no execuse for not having it.

Identify promising performers early.

Understand that people development works best through inspiration, not authority.

• A favorite word at many of today’s best-performing companies is inspire.
• All chiefs evaluate executives partly on how well they’re developing people, including themselves.

Make leadership development part of the culture.
Develop teams, not just individuals

• Avoid picking the wrong team members. “I’m not looking for the best players, Craig. I’m looking for the right players” — Brooks. Trust is the most fundamental element of a winning team.
• Avoid competing agendas. The best teams are composed of members who share a mental model — of the domain, and of how the team will be effective.
• Avoid unresolved conflicts.
• Avoid unwillingness to face the real issues. The usual metaphor is the elephant in the room.

Chapter 9. Performing Great at Innovation

• Apple — the key wasn’t technology. It was creativity, design, and a deep empathy with the customer.
• Know more, innovate more.
• For a research period that was in large part prescientific, it shouldn’t be surprising that formal schooling and creative eminence in science didn’t correlate.

Chapter 10. Great Performance in Youth and Age

• The average age to make outstanding advances had increased by about 6 years during just 100 year period.
• Choose developmental assignments that continually stretch an employee’s abilities.
• A supportive environment was one with well-defined rules and jobs, without much arguing over who had to do what, and in which family members could rely on one another. The reseachers classified family environments as stimulating or not, and supporting or not.
• Most people stop the deliberate practice necessary to sustain their performance.
• It’s not their bodies stop, it’s just that they’ve decided to stop pushing it.

Chapter 11. Where Does the Passion Come?

• Studies showed that virtually any external attempt to constrain or control the work results in less creativity.
• Recognition that confirms competence turned out to be effective.

Turn drive intrinsic!

The Multiplier Effect

• The passion doesn’t accompany us into this world, it developers.
• A way to ignite the multiplier effect is to begin learning skills in a place where competition is sparse.