TALENT IS OVERRATED
“Over and over the researchers found
few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started training.”
InTalent is Overrated
, Geoff Colvin tells how even though most people spend a great deal of hours working, they perform just okay—not awesomely, not amazingly, not world-class excellent.
, Geoff Colvin tells how even though most people spend a great deal of hours working, they perform just okay—not awesomely, not amazingly, not world-class excellent.
When asked to explain why a few
people are excellent at what they do, most of us have two answers. The first
one is hard work. If you work hard, you’ll be fine. And those get along
perfectly acceptably but never become particularly good at it. Second, the
great good fortune to discover their natural gift (usually early in life).
But is that true?
New findings on great performance
Geoff Colvin shares some
conclusions—given by scientists around the world who have looked into top-level
performance in a wide array of fields, including management, chess, swimming,
surgery, jet piloting, violin playing, sales, novel writing, and many others—that
directly contradict most of what we all think we know about great performance.
“Some researchers now argue that
specifically targeted innate abilities are simply fiction. That is, you are not
a natural-born clarinet virtuoso or car salesman or bond trader or brain
surgeon—because no one is.
In many realms—chess, music,
business, medicine—we assume that the outstanding performers must possess
staggering intelligence or gigantic memories. Some do, but many do not. For
example, some people have become international chess masters though they
possess below average IQs.
Deliberate practice is not what most
of us do when we think we are practicing golf or the oboe or any of our other
interests. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works.”
Talent is overrated
tells that shown five groups of
students, one of which won positions at a top-ranked music school and one of
which gave up even trying to play an instrument, we would all say the first
group is obviously immensely more talented than latter. But the study showed
that—at least as most of us understand ‘talent,’ meaning an ability to achieve
more easily—they were not.
The
Mozart of Golf
“So here is the situation: Tiger is
born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed ‘golf addict’ who loves to
teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible. Earl’s
wife does not work outside the home, and they have no other children; they have
decided that ‘Tiger would be the first priority in our relationship,’ Earl
wrote. Earl gives Tiger his first metal club, a putter, at the age of seven
months. He sets up Tiger’s high chair in the garage, where Earl is hitting
balls into a net, and Tiger watches for hours on end. ‘It was like a movie
being run over and over and over for his view,’ Earl wrote. Earl develops new
techniques for teaching the grip and the putting stroke to a student who cannot
yet talk. Before Tiger is two, they are at the golf course playing and
practicing regularly”
remarks two facts. First, he had been
practicing golf with tremendous intensity, first under his father and after the
age of four under professional teachers, for seventeen years, till Tiger
achieved outstanding performance. Second, neither Tiger nor his father
suggested that Tiger came into this world with a gift for golf. Asked to
explain Tiger’s phenomenal success, father and son always gave the same reason:
hard work.
What suggested that Bill Gates would become the king of all computer
geeks?
“It’s clear that Gates’s early
interests led directly to Microsoft. The problem is that nothing in his story
suggest extraordinary abilities. As he is the first to note, legions of kids
were interested in the possibilities of computers in those days. Harvard at
that time was bursting with computer geeks who well understood what a
technology revolution was happening.
So the answer is nothing in particular. On close examination, it was
probably not his software expertise that was most critical to his success. The
more relevant abilities were the ability to launch a business and then the
quite different abilities required to manage a large corporation. And Traf O
Data notwithstanding, one looks in vain for signs of those abilities in world-class
proportions, or at all, in the young Gates.”
The true role of intelligence in high achievement
tells that many of the most
successful people do seem to be highly intelligent. But what the research
suggest very strongly is that the link between intelligence and high
achievement isn’t nearly as powerful as we commonly suppose. Most important,
the research tells us that intelligence as we usually think of it—a high IQ—is
not a prerequisite to extraordinary achievement.
“Besides prodigious memories,
high-performing businesspeople often seem to have tremendous intellects. Warren
Buffet is famous for doing complicated math in his head. He claims not to own a
calculator, and given his reputation for honesty, there’s no reason to doubt
him.”
*****
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