Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
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 statement… More >>
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody ElseAnother book of degradation…unless you disregard obligations such as your family. By the time you finish this book you will be ready for suicide. Hard work is good but commitment on a life time scale is ridiculous. Variety truly is the spice of life. Trial and error is the greatest impetus for this life. The type of stress Colvin demands from our lives gives the vast majority of us no chance. It’s easy to see why Denmark is the least stressed country in the world and the USA is the Prozac capitol. This book is a tale of torture to your children. No wonder the most talented artists commit suicide. Never did they stop to smell the roses, children can be pressed so hard through practice, they cannot interact with anyone. Talent is a gift maybe that is why on the very day of Galileo’s death Copernicus was born. Do not believe this book….please.
What can you do? Gladwell’s Book “Outliers” tackles the same problem, is more insightful, better written, and far more interesting. This book is fine, but why by buy it when there is already a better book? I’ll under-rate “Talent is Overrated.”
Several years ago I saw a quote from a highly respected business leader to the effect that shelves of management books come out every year, and most are not worth reading. This one isn’t either.
Colvin tells us that in field after field, people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little. Hard to believe, and it isn’t true. Yes, more experienced doctors reliably score lower on tests of medical knowledge than less experienced doctors just out of training and medical school. However, there are also journals full of evidence that “practice makes perfect” – those with years of experience at eg. surgery have better outcomes. Also, my own experience definitely proved that new computer programmers are very useful, at first.
As for talent, Colvin admits that not all researchers believe that specifically targeted innate abilities don’t exist. Need more evidence – ask yourself why black athletes consistently outperform most whites in running, basketball, and football. The answer – they’re bodies are different, with a difference in foot structure and possibly other areas also.
Colvin goes in so many directions that it sometimes is difficult to keep track. Focusing on business success, presumably his area of greatest interest as a Fortune editor, allows explaining some of the research difficulties of explaining business success w/o reference to talent.
1)Critical requirements vary situationally. New products eventually become commodities. The managerial skills necessary for success in these two life-cycle phases differ greatly.
2)Agreement on what “good business performance” consists of is often lacking. For example, is it growth in market share, short-term profitability, peer ratings, social responsibility, situational depending on the economic cycle, or worker ratings? All have been used, creating lots of confusion.
Eventually Colvin cites evidence that the amount of musical practice is the best predictor of musical skill. Duh! (Previously it was neophytes are better than those experienced. At still another point he cites Jack Welch’s practice at managing as key to his success at G.E. – except he didn’t have any, just started out managing with his chemical engineering degree and was successful from the start.) But why is it that after years and years of hard (and embarrassing) practice I still can’t catch very well? Because I lack talent.
Bottom Line: “Talent is Overrated” is one of the majority of business books that aren’t worth reading. Both Colvin and Malcomb Gladwell should stop wasting trees.
This book starts out fine and backs up some of the thesis with so so arguments. However as it progressed the arguments got less convincing. Toward the end it just gets plain scary in my opinion. I’m not going to give out details in case you want to read the book for yourself. I will say that we might all think about what “world class” means. In the go go go world of today we seem to think that to win is the ultimate goal, but you know 99% of the fun is playing the game, and HOW you play does matter.
There are a few very interesting core ideas in this book, and it is helpful to have a few real-life examples such as the story about Jerry Rice, but this book is so tedious to read that I ended up skipping large sections of it, trying to find the good parts without having to wade through everything else.
It may be somewhat counter-intuitive that good performance comes more from practice than it does from genetics and years of experience, so I appreciated a few anecdotes to reinforce the key thesis of the book. But after I buy in to that thesis I really don’t need to read dozens of more examples which all try to make the same point over and over again.
I suppose I was supposed to glean some small unique insight from each example. But I don’t want to have to figure out what each of those little insights might be.
This book would have been much more interesting — and probably more effective at delivering its message — if it had been about 6 pages long. Maybe the author should have written a feature essay for the Sunday New York Times Magazine instead.