The key ideas

Talent Is Overrated

Geoff Colvin, 2008

We are used to thinking that greatness is born: either you have talent or you don't. Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune magazine, gathers research and stories and shows the opposite. Behind outstanding skill there is almost never a gift. There is a special way of training, which he calls deliberate practice. This book is about what it is made of, why experience alone is not enough, and where the drive to keep going for years comes from.

Who it is for

For anyone who once decided they were “just not good at” something, and for everyone who wants to understand how people really become masters of their craft.

Great performance is born of practice. But that practice is so hard that without passion you could never keep it up.

The Mozart we made up

We love the miracle story: five-year-old Mozart sits down at the keyboard and writes music as if it came straight from heaven. It is a comfortable picture. It explains in advance why we can't do the same: either you have talent or you don't.

Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune magazine, asks us to look closer. Mozart's father, Leopold, was a well-known teacher who even wrote a book on teaching music. He worked with his son from the age of three, for hours, every day. The boy's early “compositions” were largely reworkings of other people's pieces. And the first concerto that is still played today as a masterpiece came when Mozart was about twenty-one, after eighteen years of hard work.

Colvin gathered dozens of stories like this and asked one question: what really sets outstanding people apart? The answer turned out to be uncomfortable. Not an inborn gift, but a special way of training, which he calls deliberate practice.

Next, you will see why experience alone doesn't make a master, what this practice is made of, what a strong chess player sees on the board, and where the drive to keep going for years comes from. If anyone ever told you “this just isn't for you”, this book has a different answer.

A club in his hands before he could walk

Tiger Woods looks like proof of the opposite, a born genius of golf. But his father, Earl, put a club in his hands before the boy could walk. From the age of two, the boy followed a carefully planned programme, with a real coach, day after day.

By the time of his first big wins, Woods had not just a few years but almost a whole lifetime of focused training behind him. From the outside, we see a flash of talent. We don't see the fifteen years of work that led to it.

Imagine two children growing up side by side. One gets help every day, from a very young age, with the thing they love. The other picks it up as a teenager. Ten years later we will call the first one gifted and the second one ordinary. Yet the difference was never a gift. It was the head start and the amount of the right kind of practice.

Colvin doesn't belittle what Woods achieved. Quite the opposite. He strips away the magic and shows the mechanism: behind every prodigy there is almost always very early and very hard work.

Read in Livria

About the author

Geoff Colvin is an American journalist, a longtime editor at Fortune magazine, and the author of books about mastery and work. For years he has studied what sets outstanding people apart from everyone else.

All books by this author: Geoff Colvin

Terms from the book

  • Franklin
  • Ericsson
  • Feedback
  • Woods
  • Mozart
  • Deliberate practice
  • Talent: What we usually call an inborn ability for something. Colvin disputes that talent is what decides: in his view, abilities mostly grow out of practice.
  • Prodigy: A child with unusually early abilities. Colvin shows that behind them there is almost always very early, very extensive training.
  • Mental model: A rich picture of a field built up in the mind. It lets an expert see meaning where a beginner sees chaos.
  • Chunking: The ability to fold many small details into a few large, meaningful patterns. This is how an expert holds more in mind than a beginner.
  • Self-regulation: The skill of running your own work: setting a goal in advance, watching yourself as you go, and honestly reviewing the result afterwards.
  • Rice: Jerry Rice, the American football player considered one of the greatest receivers in history. He became famous not for natural gifts but for brutal training.
  • Ten-year rule: The observation that reaching world class in a field usually takes about ten years of hard, purposeful work. It is a generalisation by researchers, not a strict law.
  • Multiplier effect: When a small early advantage feeds itself: success brings praise and interest, those bring more practice, and the practice brings even more success.
  • Polgar: Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian educator who raised his three daughters to be outstanding chess players. His family is often cited as an example of how mastery can be nurtured.

All terms

Similar books