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Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else | 
| Author: Geoff Colvin
Publisher: Portfolio
Category: EBooks
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $15.96 (62%)
Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 102
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.9
ASIN: B001HD8NZ8
Publication Date: October 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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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 doesn-t 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 business-negotiating deals, evaluating financial statements, and all the rest-obey 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 Colvin-s practical advice, will change the way you think about your job and career-and will inspire you to achieve more in all you do.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 27 more reviews...
 Recommendation from Amazon January 6, 2009
Jose A. Massaroppe (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Excellent book!!! It was a recommendation of your site while i was buying another one on the same subject, but from a different author!!! Your advise was very well done!!!
I Guess It Depends on How One Defines "Talent" January 5, 2009
B. Price (Boston, MA, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In "Talent is Overrated" Mr. Colvin makes a case for success by reviewing what it is that makes high achievers do what they do. His argument is that innate ability is not really innate, but rather that a rare combination of factors may create the "winning" formula. Most of these factors have to do with circumstance. For instance, Tiger Woods had a father who started him on the golf course at a very young age and was able to coach him in a way that helped him achieve. The other components in Mr. Wood's case included deliberate practice, internal drive, intense work effort and, equally important, the financial stability to be able to pursue golf as a career. If Mr. Woods had been born in equatorial Africa or Southeast Asia, for example, it is unlikely that he would have been quite the phenomonon he is today.
Perhaps "talent" is another word for drive. Talented people in any profession can only go so far on talent alone. That has been a given understanding for at least 300 years. Mr. Colvin does not unleash any great revelations here, but his well-referenced tome does help a reader get an idea of what she or he may have to do to achieve worldly success.
Great Performance: Both Exacting and Exhilarating January 2, 2009
Serge J. Van Steenkiste (Atlanta, GA)
Geoff Colvin goes to great lengths to demonstrate that neither hard work nor inspiration provides a satisfactory explanation to why a few people are so talented and excellent at what they do (pp. 4-5, 20-23).
Colvin convincingly shows his audience that there is no free lunch behind great performance. Great performance results from deliberate practice which is hard to sustain over time (pp. 7, 66, 72, 171, 181). Many years of intense preparation are needed before making any kind of (creative) breakthrough (pp. 61-64, 149-51). No one can endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades without the benefit of both an internalized passion and the appropriate response to extrinsic forces that reinforce this passion at critical moments (pp. 172-74, 186, 188, 190-91). Colvin points out that top performance in any field often exacts a heavy personal toll. He also acknowledges that even if the marriages or other relationships of top performers survive, their interests outside their field typically cannot. Furthermore, Colvin does not hide the fact that no one who has ever achieved great performance could do it without enduring terrible difficulties along the way (pp. 204-06).
Furthermore, Colvin reminds his audience that nobody was born with passion. Passion has to be nurtured, developed (pp. 22, 50-51, 75-78, 81-83, 198). That is why extrinsic motivators such as attention, recognition, and feedback that are given in a non-controlling way are critical for that purpose. These constructive, non-threatening, task-focused motivators play an important role in the emergence of the "multiplier effect" that helps to put a student of a discipline in the driver's seat of his/her own great performance (pp. 49, 120, 192-93, 198, 200). Despite wide variations in the parents' backgrounds, professions, and incomes, the home environments of these students tend to be child-oriented by being both stimulating and supportive (pp. 170, 172-74). Think for example about Wolfgang Mozart or Tiger Woods (pp. 25-31). Colvin candidly acknowledges that there is still uncertainty about how the "multiplier effect" is really triggered. The research seems to point out that slightly better performance at an early age or in an environment where competition is sparse, no matter how attained, can generate the extra praise that solidifies internal drive for more intense practice (pp. 204-05).
In addition, Colvin demonstrates that high creative achievement and intrinsic motivation are highly correlated. They both require intense focus and concentration that are exacting and difficult to sustain over time (pp. 165, 188-89). This observation makes it more understandable why the people who reach the level of top achievers are rarely child prodigies. The vast majority of prodigies cannot sustain the strenuous effort required to become great performers (p. 197). Colvin also shows that many top performers are able to sustain top performance despite ageing by findings ways around the limitations imposed on them until an advanced age (pp. 84-85, 179-82). On top of that, top performance requires more time to master than in the past in knowledge-rich disciplines due to accumulated knowledge over time (pp. 157, 167-69). Nonetheless, great innovators welcome knowledge because they are nourished by it (pp. 102, 109-25, 151, 156). Excellent performers in most fields possess superior memory of information in their fields because of the mental models that they continuously build and organize (pp. 38-48, 85-98, 122-25). Colvin seizes this opportunity to debunk the conventional wisdom that the corollaries of adulthood are necessarily the shutdown of brain plasticity and the impossibility of adding new neurons well into old age (pp. 183-84).
Most of Corporate America could be excused to wonder how all the research mentioned above is relevant to how to run a business. Colvin strikes hard here by pointing out repeatedly that most organizations seem to be run in a way that prevents people from performing at top levels (pp. 7-8, 72-74, 108, 194). These organizations should take note that despite inauspicious career beginnings, some of the most successful people in business such as Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Ballmer changed their personalities in significant ways given the right environment (pp. 1-2, 49). Colvin identifies corporate culture as the main obstacle in the way of innovation whose source is human capital, no longer financial capital (pp. 11-15, 47-48, 126). New ideas are not really welcome. Risk taking is not endorsed (pp. 127-44, 163).
For example, most organizations do not allow people to work on pet projects about which they are internally fired up. Innovative companies such as 3M and Google stand out in that regard. What is important is that people understand the organizations' priorities and thus know where innovation will have the highest impact (pp. 164-65). Internal networking is critical for that purpose (p. 162). Furthermore, evaluations are often ineffective because they point out what people did wrong, not how to perform better, and mention attitude, personality traits that should be changed, all under the implicit threat of getting fired (pp. 73, 132, 194). Managers redirect people's careers based on slender evidence of what they have got (p. 20). In addition, promotions usually go with more responsibilities and less self-direction, turning too often these promotions into a burden rather than into a reward (p. 194).
Finally, Colvin asks provocatively why American society is comfortable about directing kids towards fields other than business at early ages, but queasy about daily training of kids to become a top-notch business executive by age twenty-one. Colvin rightly states that other societies could come to a different conclusion and gain a comparative advantage in the process (pp. 175-79). Most developed countries with the striking exception of Germany do not use the apprenticeship anymore (p. 177).
To summarize, Colvin convincingly demonstrates that great performance is not the privilege of a pre-ordained, talented elite, even if top performance requires some nourishing "compost" to blossom to its fullest (pp. 104, 206).
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