Review: Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin

An interesting read that argues that deliberate practice is the single most important factor in elite performance—far more important than genetics, “god-given” talent, or just the sheer volume of practice. Most studies I’ve seen indicate that human abilities are usually a mix of nature and nurture, and this book provides compelling evidence that, at least when it comes to world-class performance, nurture plays a much stronger role. Of course, genetics still set your limits (e.g., if you’re 5-foot-nothing, no amount of deliberate practice will get you into the NBA), and this book doesn’t tell us much about what it takes to achieve great—but not necessarily world-class—results. Nevertheless, it’s a valuable read, and I personally found it inspiring to know that even the seemingly-superhuman abilities of the world’s best performers are achieved primarily through a tremendous amount of hard work, and not just inborn ability.

Some of the key insights:

1. More practice, by itself, does not necessarily yield better performance. In fact, in some disciplines, it can actually hurt performance: e.g., doctors get worse at reading x-rays over time, auditors get worse at spotting fraud. The key to achieving elite performance is actually deliberate practice, which has the following features:

   • It’s designed specifically to stretch your abilities. Usually, you need an expert teacher or coach to do the designing.
   • It allows for a high volume of practice. This book repeats much of the content from Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers” about needing ~10,000 hours or ~10 years of deliberate practice to achieve mastery. One interesting new tidbit was the idea of “10 years of silence”: even for the world’s best-known artists, writer, musicians, and poets, it almost always took at least 10 years of producing work that was largely ignored before they were finally able to produce something that got world-wide attention.
   • It provides clear, rapid feedback. You must be able to tell if you’re improving.
   • It’s hard and typically unpleasant work. If it was easy and fun, everyone would be doing it; if you can learn to tolerate this unpleasantness, it becomes a huge competitive advantage.
   • There is task-specific practice (e.g., playing football) and general-purpose “conditioning” (e.g., weight lifting and running). People often think conditioning only applies to sports, but it’s important in all disciplines. For example, if you are an entrepreneur, doing deliberate practice with arithmetic, physics, and economics can provide general-purpose conditioning for your mind that helps you succeed at building a business.

2. Understanding the role off deliberate practice is especially important in the modern world, as the level of performance in most disciplines is higher today than ever before.

   • Sports records are constantly being broken. Just today, Eliud Kipchoge ran the marathon in under 2 hours.
   • The amount of knowledge it takes to reach the edge of a discipline (e.g., a PhD) is greater than ever before.
   • The complexity of music that top performers can play (e.g., violin concertos) and the ability of chess grand masters exceed anything that we’ve seen in the past.

3. The book presents many studies that show that in-born talent seems to play very little role in elite performance.

   • 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.
   • In fact, the best performers spent more time than everyone else practicing, and in particular, far more time doing deliberate practice.

4. 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.

   • Mozart did produce compositions at an early age, but his father was a composer who started training him at age 3, and it was the father who transcribed—and likely improved—all those early compositions.
   • Moreover, none of those early compositions are considered particularly original or great; Mozart’s 1st masterpiece (the 9th concerto) came at age 21, at which point he had been practicing for more than 18 years.
   • The famous letter where Mozart claims to come up with entire pieces purely in his head, and then merely jot them down later, was apparently a total forgery. In reality, Mozart wrote, rewrote, tinkered, and edited pieces over and over again, just like everyone else.

5. Much of world-class ability comes from building a massive body of knowledge and the ability to access that knowledge quickly. This allows experts to see the world differently than non-experts.

   • For example, chess grand masters are familiar with 10-100x more chess positions than non experts, so every time they see a board, they can efficiently catalog it in relation to all this knowledge. This is why they can play 20 chess games in parallel and remember what’s happening in each one. It’s not that their memory is better in general. In fact, studies show that while chess masters can memorize real-world chess positions far better than normal people, if you show them completely randomized chess positions, the memory of chess masters is no better than that of anyone else.
   • Tennis professionals can return 150 mph serves not because their reflexes are that much faster than normal people, but because they can guess where the serve is going based on the opponents body movement, long before the ball is hit.
   • The business world has found that general-purpose business leaders and managers don’t really work. To be successful, you typically need to hire leaders with deep domain-specific knowledge.

6. The book then moves on to discuss what motivates the world’s best performers to be able to do the intense amount of deliberate practice it takes to achieve greatness.

   • 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.
   • One new item in this book is the idea that some types of extrinsic motivation—those that reinforce intrinsic motivation—can actually bolster creativity. Examples: recognizing someone for their work and confirming their competence; constructive, non-threatening, work-focused (not person focused) feedback; rewards that provide more time or freedom to work on things you find intrinsically motivating.
   • Another new tidbit for me was the idea of the “multiplier effect.” One possibility for why elite performers are driven to do deliberate practice is that it’s genetic. But another possible explanation is the multiplier effect, where, due to more or less random chance (e.g., due to a small genetic advantage, or being slightly more mature, or better parenting), someone performs slightly better at an early stage in life; the result is that they get praise, which is motivational; this leads them to practice slightly more; which leads to an even better performance the next time; which leads to more praise; and so on. So a tiny little advantage can be the trigger for a powerful cycle that gradually grows into a habit of deliberate practice.

Rating: 4 stars