"Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else" by Geoff Colvin

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS PRINT: © 10/16/2008; 978-1591842248; Portfolio; 1st edition; 240 pages; unabridged. (Hardcover info from Amazon.com)
DIGITAL: © 10/4/2008; Portfolio; 9781101079003; 252 Pages; unabridged. (Kindle info from Amazon.com)
*AUDIO: © 11/26/2019; Penguin Audio; Duration: 8:14:00; unabridged. (Audio info from Amazon.com)

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: Don (hubby) added this book to our Audible library quite some time ago. I am trying to listen to these that we have purchased. It didn’t sound like a title that would interest me, but I was wrong.
ABOUT: It’s about the theory most of us believe that some people have an inborn proclivity that makes the development of a skill easier for them than for an average person approaching the activity. The author suggests that this isn’t necessarily so and sites numerous examples of people who seemed to have demonstrated an accomplished skill at an early age who actually worked much harder at developing it that is commonly known. It suggests that often the credit should be shared with the parent or other figure who has supported the interest and the devotion to development. He explains the kind of practice that develops a skill and the kind that doesn’t. What it takes, he states, to develop a “talent,” among many factors, is perseverance, a willingness to fail, and an interest that surpasses the disappointment of falling short of one’s goal.
OVERALL OPINION: Very interesting. Some of the exemplary child prodigies that I’ve long considered evidence of skills carried over from previous lifetimes, may not be that after-all. It may still at least be a carry-over of a knowing that eventually, they can be great since they were once before—but, I’m finding myself less inclined to hold onto that line of reasoning. (Mind you, I’m not abandoning reincarnation.) The good news is, for those of us who lose patience with ourselves and give up under an assumption we lack the necessary inborn talent, we can take heart that if we are willing to put in the grueling practice, we have a very good chance of easing in to greatness.

AUTHOR: Geoff (Geoffrey) Colvin: Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“Geoffrey Colvin is the author of Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (ISBN 1857886380); Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (ISBN 9781591842248); and The Upside of the Downturn: Management Strategies for Difficult Times. He is co-author of Angel Customers and Demon Customers: Discover Which is Which and Turbocharge Your Stock (ISBN 9781591840077). He is a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune Magazine.
Education: Colvin obtained a degree in economics from Harvard and received his MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.
Talent is Overrated
The thesis of Talent is Overrated is that the greatest achievers succeed through lifelong "deliberate practice." Colvin characterizes it as “activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it pushes the practicer just beyond, but not way beyond, his or her current limits; 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". "Some 40 years of research show that specific, innate gifts are not necessary for great performance.”

NARRATOR(S): Geoff Colvin. See above.

GENRE: Nonfiction; Business; Psychology

TIME FRAME: Current

SUBJECTS: Music; Sports; Skill Development; History

DEDICATION: “For my sons”

SAMPLE QUOTATION: From Chapter One
“The Mystery
Great performance is more valuable than ever—but where does it come from?”
“Look around you.
Look at your friends, your relatives, your coworkers, the people you meet when you shop or go to a party. How do they spend their days? Most of them work. They all do many other things as well, playing sports, performing music, pursuing hobbies, doing public service. Now ask yourself honestly: How well do they do what they do?
The most likely answer is that they do it fine. They do it well enough to keep doing it. At work they don’t get fired and probably get promoted a number of times. They play sports or pursue their other interests well enough to enjoy them. But the odds are that few if any of the people around you are truly great at what they do—awesomely, amazingly, world-class excellent.
Why—exactly why—aren’t they? Why don’t they manage businesses like Jack Welch or Andy Grove, or play golf like Tiger Woods, or play the violin like Itzhak Perlman? After all, most of them are good, conscientious people, and they probably work diligently. Some of them have been at it for a very long time—twenty, thirty, forty years. Why isn’t that enough to make them great performers? It clearly isn’t. The hard truth is that virtually none of them has achieved greatness or come even close, and only a tiny few ever will.
This is a mystery so commonplace that we scarcely notice it, yet it’s critically important to the success or failure of our organizations, the causes we believe in, and our own lives. In some cases we can give plausible explanations, saying that we’re less than terrific at hobbies and games because we don’t take them all that seriously. But what about our work? We prepare for it through years of education and devote most of our waking hours to it. Most of us would be embarrassed to add up the total hours we’ve spent on our jobs and then compare that number with the hours we’ve given to other priorities that we claim are more important, like our families; the figures would show that work is our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most people are just okay at what they do.
In fact the reality is more puzzling than that. 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. Auditors with years of experience were no better at detecting corporate fraud—a fairly important skill for an auditor—than were freshly trained rookies. When it comes to judging personality disorders, which is one of the things we count on clinical psychologists to do, length of clinical experience told nothing about skill—“the correlations,” concluded some of the leading researchers, “are roughly zero.” Surgeons were no better at predicting hospital stays after surgery than residents were. In field after field, when it came to centrally important skills—stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants—people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little experience.
The most recent studies of business managers confirm these results. Researchers from the INSEAD business school in France and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School call the phenomenon “the experience trap.” Their key finding: While companies typically value experienced managers, rigorous study shows that, on average, “managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes.”
Bizarre as this seems, in at least a few fields it gets one degree odder. Occasionally people actually get worse with experience. More experienced doctors reliably score lower on tests of medical knowledge than do less experienced doctors; general physicians also become less skilled over time at diagnosing heart sounds and X-rays. Auditors become less skilled at certain types of evaluations.
What is especially troubling about these findings is the way they deepen, rather than solve, the mystery of great performance. When asked to explain why a few people are so excellent at what they do, most of us have two answers, and the first one is hard work. People get extremely good at something because they work hard at it. We tell our kids that if they just work hard, they’ll be fine. It turns out that this is exactly right. They’ll be fine, just like all those other people who work at something for most of their lives and get along perfectly acceptably but never become particularly good at it. The research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.
So our instinctive first answer to the question of exceptional performance does not hold up.”

RATING: 4

STARTED-FINISHED
1/8/2024-1/13/2024 ( )

I've often been fascinated by what makes great performers, well...great. Is it talent? Genes? Hard work? A superhuman drive to succeed? Colvin argues it's none of these things, but rather the careful and disciplined application of something he calls "deliberate practice." This isn't what you or I do when we smack a tennis ball across the court. Instead, it's 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...and it isn't much fun." Does this sound like something you do for 4-5 hours a day? Yeah. Me neither.

Colvin maintains that a minimum of 10 years of deliberate practice is what differentiates regular folk from great performers. He has some good (if rather vague) ideas for applying the concepts of deliberate practice to our everyday lives and our business organizations, but what I found most interesting were the many examples and case studies. Mozart, Tiger Woods, Jerry Rice...if they weren't prodigies struck by the hand of God, then maybe there is a glimmer of hope for the rest of us mere mortals to achieve just a little more than we think we can. ( )

I have a two hour commute each day and usually listen to free podcasts about books or running, but I recently discovered that I can download audio books for free from the library via My Media Mall. I have a hard time with audio books because the reader's voice and performance can quickly kill a book for me. Its all I can do right now to restrain myself from boring you with stories of bad audio books past. I'm still traumatized by an especially horrific Moby Dick experience. Suffice it to say now that David Drummond, the reader of Talent is Overrated, is a decent reader.

Geoff Colvin takes on the age-old assumption that people who are the 'great leaders' of their field arrive on earth with an inborn talent. Greatness isn't destiny or DNA, rather it boils down to decades of intentional practice and sacrifice at the level that most of us are not willing to make. Colvin writes for Fortune magazine and points out that many people typically think about greatness in sports and music, but not business. Although we know athletes and musicians are trained and coached, we also make the assumption that they have an inborn talent for their sport or instrument when really, they don't.

Colvin identifies four factors that contribute to great performance:

1. Years of intentional practice
2. Analysis of your results
3. Learning from your mistakes
4. Coaching by progressively more advanced teachers

Two examples that Colvin discusses are Mozart and Tiger Woods. Both men are thought to have an inborn natural talent, but by looking at their histories Colvin identifies many similarities: both men were introduced to music/golf at extremely young ages, both had fathers who were teachers in their respective fields, and both spent years focused on very intentional practice before most of their peers even started to learn music/golf. By the time Mozart and Tiger Woods were teens, they already had over ten years of intense training and intentional practice and so looked like wizards compared to the other boys and girls their age.

I've read bits of Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers, which also came out in 2008, and his idea of 10,000 hours of practice to achieve greatness seems to be in line with Colvin's findings. I know this topic of greatness and how to achieve it is as old as the hills, but the big take away from Colvin's book for me is the idea of intentional practice, of really breaking things down into small bits and practicing that. For example, when hobbyist golfers practice, they'll go to the driving range and hit their standard 100-300 balls. Tiger Woods, on the other hand, goes to a sand pit, places a ball on the sand, steps on it, and then practices getting out of that situation. He may rarely find himself in that predicament during a tournament, but its those little details that can bring huge rewards.

Colvin wonders about using the Mozart/Woods model to mentor and train future business leaders, which is completely possible. He points out, however, that it might be hard to handle a leader of a large-scale business who is a teen. In that context socialization plays a huge role. We are social creatures and although leadership is found at all ages, it does take significant years of life experience to refine one's leadership ability in order to lead adults for a sustained period of time. This subject made me think about the myths surround Mozart's maturity (or lack, thereof) as well as Tiger Wood's recent interpersonal problems. It is this psycho-social aspect of greatness that I find fascinating, but it is not Colvin's focus.

Long story short: if you're not yet great, go out and find a teacher to challenge your current level of proficiency and then practice, practice, practice--intentionally--for at least ten years. Oh, and a supportive family would be nice, too. Good luck, and may The Force be with you! ( )

This book is not sure what shelf it wants to be on. It's a grab bag of behavioral psychology, business self-help, Gladwell-esque counterintuitive anecdotes. If you want a gloss of "mindset", deliberate practice, the 10,000 hour rule, and some other current pop trends, have at it. (See, I just finished this the day before yesterday and I can't even remember all the ideas jammed into it.) ( )

A thought provoking look at what it really takes to achieve excellence in any field. The answer, suprisingly, is both obvious and hard to grasp at the same time. I recommend this one! ( )