|
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else |  | Author: Geoff Colvin
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $4.41
as of 9/8/2010 18:51 CDT details
You Save: $21.54 (83%)
New (57) Used (58) from $4.41
Seller: BookHouseUSA
Rating:  102 reviews
Sales Rank: 6263
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 1591842247
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.9
EAN: 9781591842248
ASIN: 1591842247
Publication Date: October 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781591842248 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Expanding on a landmark cover story in Fortune, a top journalist debunks the myths of exceptional performance.
One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called What It Takes to Be Great. Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field--from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch--are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesnt come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.
And not just plain old hard work, like your grandmother might have advocated, but a very specific kind of work. The key is how you practice, how you analyze the results of your progress and learn from your mistakes, that enables you to achieve greatness.
Now Colvin has expanded his article with much more scientific background and real-world examples. He shows that the skills of businessnegotiating deals, evaluating financial statements, and all the restobey the principles that lead to greatness, so that anyone can get better at them with the right kind of effort. Even the hardest decisions and interactions can be systematically improved.
This new mind-set, combined with Colvins practical advice, will change the way you think about your job and careerand will inspire you to achieve more in all you do.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 102
Very, very insightful August 31, 2010
Ben Miller (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY USA)
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in studying or emulating peak performers in any field, whether it be in the arts, business, athletics, science, etc.. Author Geoffrey Colvin pretty much proves that if there is such a thing as talent, its ultimate impact on one's success is negligible. Instead, the level of one's success is determined by how often and how well one engages in "deliberate practice," a very special type of practice which requires immense focus, discipline, concentration, and is unfortunately not often pleasant. I highly recommend this book to anyone who aspires to greatness in their life and/or profession.
 Surprisingly unsophisticated August 21, 2010
Reader
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The author works for a business magazine and so one would think that he would have some basic training in elementary logic, but no. It may well be the case that 10 years of effort is a necessary precondition to becoming great in a field. It is not the case that this means that no talent is required. When all you are looking at is a group of world class pianists or chess players, to argue that because all of them have practiced 10,000 hours and those who play less well have not means that talent does not come into it, is to make an obviously erroneous post hoc ergo propter hoc leap of illogic. The author's message that you can't wait for inspiration to simply descend on you from above and that if you want something you have to work hard at it for a long time, is a useful one. But the idea that if you put in the hours of focus you will necessarily end up at the top, especially in a discipline like athletics or music or math or physics, does not follow. The use of a couple of random anecdotes (the Polgar sisters and one experiment involving practicing remembering strings of numbers) does not prove any of this. Until some study includes all the violinists who practiced three hours a day from a young age and never made it, the fact that all of the ones who did make it do practice three hours a day tells us nothing.
Interesting thesis, but somewhat ad hoc. August 20, 2010
Inon Zukerman
The main thesis of the book is that world class performance, in various areas, is not a specific innate talent, nor is it simple plain hard work. As the book claims, the secret is a process of "deliberate practice". The book does deliver his thesis in an interesting way, with examples and fluid writing style, but in the same time the thesis itself is somewhat weak, full of holes and easy to find counter examples to argue against it.
The author is Geoff Colvin, a journalist who writes for "Forune" magazine. The book is composed of 11 chapters that leads us from the author's realization that innate talent is overrated (Chapter 2), through his deliberate practice procedure that, according to the author, claims to provide a better explanation for world-class performance (Chapter 4). We then proceed to issues regarding how to apply the deliberate practice process (Chapter 8), and explore various aspects of motivation to explain why some people are more motivated than others (Chapters 10/11).
While reading I often got the feelings that the author jumps to conclusions from somewhat weak set of evidence, and as such the main ideas looks ad-hoc at times. For example, when trying to dismiss the importance of natural talent in the first chapters of the book, his main examples are Mozart (the composer) and Tiger Woods (the golf player). He points out very strongly to the fact that both had a very motivating fathers who were teaching them (or "deliberately practice" them) from early years. However it is also obvious that in both cases the kids had a great genetics as the fathers were successful (to some extent) in their respective fields (an athlete father in Tiger case, and Mozart's father was also a musician). I guess a stronger thesis will be a combination of both innate ability and early deliberate practice. In addition, there are several strong books who present a very strong arguments towards the requirement of genetic abilities to being world-class performance (e.g. a very interesting book called "Game On" by Tom Ferry).
There are several other examples of ad-hoc reasoning, that looks like the author were trying really hard to come up with them in order to strengthen his claims: Oil companies who are "looking further ahead", Baseball Pitchers who "understand the subtleties in body language that average pitcher cannot see" and many others such examples in Chapter 6 "How deliberate practice works". It seems that for many of these examples there can be other explanations besides what the author offered.
To sum up, this book is a good motivational book for people who needs such a boast, so it is a good graduation present. While the thesis is somewhat interesting and though provoking, it is not a strong theory in term of the information it is based upon. Following the reading, I'm certain as I was before that it is a combination of innate ability, hard work (or deliberate practice in the book's terminology) and luck.
All work and no play makes Jack the best at what he does August 6, 2010
R. S. Corzine (Steubenville, OH United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Colvin's thesis is that top performance in nearly any field you can name is not really a function of talent, of people being "gifted" or receiving "inspiration." Likewise, he argues, you cant explain great performance as a function of experience or high IQ or extraordinary memory. Rather it is the product of a particular kind of hard work that he calls "deliberate practice." This thesis is supported by a significant body of research and illustrated by a number of real-life examples.
Deliberate practice, as researchers define it, is activity that is:
1) designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help
2) that is able to be repeated a lot
3) where feedback on results is continuously available
4) it is highly demanding mentally (this is true regardless of whether the activity is purely intellectual, like chess or business, or heavily physical, like sports).
5) and finally, it isn't much fun.
I found the argument pretty compelling with respect to individual performance and great accomplishments. I found myself applying the model to very accomplished people I know and it fits quite well. His concrete advice on how to apply these principles to improving one's own performance is also useful (he identifies three generic models or kinds of practice - music, chess, and sports - that are widely adaptable to whatever area you want to improve in).
I was much less convinced by his chapter on applying the principles to organizations and teams.
This thesis has a kind of double edge. On the one hand, you have it in your power to significantly increase your performance if you're willing to make the necessary sacrifices (although, unless you're starting young, you may never be able to "catch up" with the very best because deliberate practice is cumulative and takes time as well as effort). On the other hand, this idea will be a hard pill for many to swallow because it means that you are at least partly responsible for your failures as well. None of the external factors holding you back are the most important factor in great achievement.
There is one important factor to consider (which the book touches on but doesn't discuss at length). Let's grant that you really can achieve great performance in a narrowly defined domain by the disciplined and sacrificial pursuit of "deliberate practice." But what if you find that you've laboriously climbed the ladder of success only to find that it's leaning against the wrong wall? I couldn't help feeling that there was something sad in the success stories of people whose entire lives were work and whose entire work was playing chess. All work and no play, it turns out, can make you a great scientist, golfer, musician, chess master, or CEO. But will you be a successful PERSON? will you be happy? will you be good? The liberating but frightening truth is that, within wider limits than you might think, it really is in your hands.
 Eye-opening account about the truth of talent August 2, 2010
Damian Bayona
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Geoff Colvin has written a fascinating and eye-opening book on the mysterious world of talent. In eleven chapters, he systematically deconstructs what talent is, how it is developed and how those principles can be applied. His findings are surprising but, by utilizing a mountain of research and information from experts in the field, he presents a clear and captivating explanation of what really separates world-class performers and everyone else.
Key findings:
WORLD-CLASS PERFORMANCE IS THE RESULT OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE.
Deliberate practice is different from what most people consider practice. Practice is usually thought of as repetition. You repeat scales over and over on a piano or shoot hundreds of free throws with a basketball. The problem is that when most of us are doing these repetitions, we hardly ever stop to consider why our last free throw bounced off the rim or why our last drive in golf veered so far off to the left. That is the difference between passive practice and deliberate practice. Colvin defines deliberate practice as an "activity designed specifically to improve performance." In other words, stopping to think about why you're struggling on a certain skill and working hard to fix it. This usually means failing many times before getting it right. Deliberate practice is hard work because it involves pushing yourself beyond your current limits and struggling through new and hard to acquire skills. It also means getting extremely specific with what you work on. It involves breaking things down into their basic parts and slowly making small, incremental advances. These little advances, day in and day out, accumulate over the years and are the building blocks of world-class performance.
IT TAKES YEARS OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE TO BECOME A TOP PERFORMER.
Research done by Anders Ericsson has found that world-class performers almost always have about 10 years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice before they reach their breakthrough levels of talent.
The exception that people are quick to point out is that of prodigies, people who seem to be born with innate talents in certain fields. But, upon closer consideration, many people whom we historically have considered born with immense amounts of talent, have actually acquired their skills through many hours of deliberate practice. Mozart, for example, was not necessarily born with exceptional compositional skills. What Mozart did have though was a father who was not only an accomplished musician and composer in his own right, but was a much more accomplished music teacher! He began his son's music education at the early age of 3, with a rigorous practice routine. The compositions he began writing at the age of 11 are mostly unoriginal, containing instead bits and pieces of other works by other composers. This is not unlike what most music students today are taught to do when first learning to compose. It was not until Mozart was 21 that he wrote what is regarded as his first masterpiece, after 18 years of deliberate practice under the supervision of an expert teacher!
TOP PERFORMERS AREN'T BETTER, THEY JUST WORK DIFFERENTLY.
Most people view top performers as simply being smarter, faster, stronger or just better than most other people, but as Colvin points out, that is usually not the case. After having logged thousands upon thousands of hours deliberately practicing, top performers begin to see and approach their field of expertise differently from the average performer. Top performers perceive more, they notice the much smaller things. Experienced doctors, for example, will review an x-ray and point out the smallest detail, their eye having been trained for years to spot specific irregularities. A less experienced doctor, on the other hand, will point out more obvious traits. Because of his superior perception, a top performer will approach challenges differently. With less information than an average performer he can quickly sort through and identify the information that is relevant to his situation. Once he has identified the challenge, he can draw on his mountains of knowledge, amassed from years of research and study in his field, to work around it. And if that doesn't work, he can apply a previous solution drawn from his vast memory of similar situations. So, its not that top performers are necessarily smarter, or faster or stronger or more creative, its that their approach is so refined and backed by immense amounts of knowledge and experiences that they are better able to attack new challenges.
INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY ARE THE RESULT OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE.
The common belief is that creativity originates from a divine spark, springing from some unknown source. The strongest case for this argument is that top performers usually create their most influential work at an early age, seeming to come from out of nowhere. People like Picasso, who produced his landmark work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in his 20's seem to defy the rules of practice. But, much like Mozart, he too had started practicing deliberately at an early age. Contrary to this wide held belief, creativity springs from a top performer's extensive knowledge in his field that enables him to view opportunities and problems holistically and innovate where others did not. Even the most innovative persons cannot escape the 10,000 hour rule.
WORLD-CLASS TALENT CAN BE DEVELOPED AND SUSTAINED.
Many of the world's top performers began practicing in their field at a very young age. They were able to log the 10,000 hours necessary to develop their extraordinary talent before the time constraints of a career and family had made it less possible. Starting early also has significant benefits in certain fields where a child's muscles actually develop to fit the needs of his activity. Almost all top performers grew up in a stimulating and supportive environment which pushed them to practice and installed the tools and skills necessary to continue it throughout their lives.
Talent is not innate or reserved for a select group. It can be developed in any person willing to put in the necessary hard work, day after day, year after year. And it can be sustained well into old age. Studies have shown that, though all people do begin to lose dexterity in thought and learning, those who have put in the time to master a certain field can maintain a high level of talent throughout their lives as long as they never abandon the principles of deliberate practice.
MOTIVATION COMES FROM INSIDE.
Top performers are almost always characterized by what Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford calls an open mindset. That is, that the performer never approaches his field hoping that it will do something for him, instead they are focused on the enjoyment of learning something new and are satisfied by trying their hardest. Motivation rarely comes from outside sources such as money or prestige. In fact, extrinsic motivators can actually lower a person's drive (see Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink). But, in rare instances, it seems that an extrinsic motivator such as praise can help increase drive. Though the praise must not be focused on the outcome of the activity, such as saying," Congratulations on winning first prize" but instead on the effort but forth," That was a difficult performance, you must have dedicated a lot of time to perfect it."
Overall, Colvin's book is an exciting read that should inspire and motivate anyone who previously overrated talent.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 102
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Disclaimer: The products referenced on this site are manufactured and sold by other parties and sold through Amazon.com and other companies. We make no representations regarding either the products or any information vendors offer about their products. Any questions, complaints, or claims regarding the products must be directed to the appropriate manufacturer or vendor, or to Amazon.com. | |
