Talent is Overrated

Geoff Colvin, 2008.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description: Excellence in any endeavor is primarily a function of persistent and grueling "deliberate practice," and not innate talent or native intelligence.

I've always enjoyed Geoff Colvin's work in Fortune, and the topic was in my wheelhouse, so it's no surprise that I enjoyed this book. Two years later David Shenk published The Genius in All of Us, which I thought was remarkably similar.  Talent is filled with fascinating research, but it opens with perspectives on why some of history's most notable "prodigies" were more made than born.

• Mozart's father, Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, was a renowned expert in music pedagogy and a domineering parent who started young Wolfgang on an intensive training regimen in composition and performance at the age of three.  As a result, Mozart's early compositions as a child earned his some renown, supported by his father's promotion of his "prodigy."  But historians note that none of these early compositions are in the child's own hand.  Rather, they were "corrected" by his father, who just
  
  happens to have stopped his own composing when his son took up the practice.  Further, none of Wolfgang's early compositions are highly regarded, and are mostly unoriginal arrangements of Bach's work, under whom Mozart had studied in London.  In fact, Mozart's first great work wasn't until he was 21 years old, and had been devoting his life to music for 18 years, living with an expert teacher who was consumed with his success.
• Earl Woods, Tiger's father, was a golf fanatic with plenty of time on his hands and a single-minded ambition to teach his son to golf.  He gave Tiger his first putter at seven months.  He'd set Tiger on a high chair in the garage and have him watch as Earl hit hundreds of balls into a net. Before Tiger was two, they were at the golf course playing and practicing regularly.  By the time Tiger rose to national prominence, as a 19-year-old Stanford student, he'd been an avid, dedicated student of the game for 17 years.

Colvin makes a compelling case that high levels of excellence and achievement in all endeavors, including business, do not spring from inherent intelligence, memory or any other genetic endowments.  Rather, they are a function of persistently hard work; and specifically, what Colvin refers to as "deliberate practice," which is a mentally intense, focused effort to improve one's skills.

In 2017 I'm rereading 50 books I've enjoyed in recent years.  This is 6/50.