Talent is overrated: what really separates world-class performers from everybody else by Geoffrey Colvin (2010). This book presents a very simple idea which I like very much: Greatness is not necessarily the result of an innate gift or talent, buy the product of a large number of hours of hard work. Here I just mention a few key points to summarize the book.
Greatness requires dedication and sacrifice and overall requires a lot of practice. Being great requires a huge amount of work. Many hours a day of dedicated, deliberate and focused practice.
The author exposes examples taken from music performers, sports and finance tycoons to illustrate his thesis. All world-class top performers spend 5-10 years of deliberate practice before being considered the best of the best.
Desirable behaviours: energy, ability to energize, edge (decisiveness), ability to execute.
Deliberate practice: Designed to improve, repeat a lot (high volume), feedback on results, it’s mentally demanding and is not fun.
Top performers: Look further ahead, know more from seeing less, make finer discriminations, building and developing knowledge, remember more, know where you want to go, what would you do in such and such situation, distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, mental model to project what would happen next, develop teams not individuals.
For some reason this book made me remember Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book ‘Total Recall‘, where he repeatedly mentions that deliberate practice and high volume is what made his life a successful one. Not only as an athlete but in his professional life as governor. The multiple rehearsals of his speech to the United Nations are marked with bars at the top of the page as shown below:
