Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

Product Information

Deliberate practice helps your brain to spot information that is not obvious; you can see farther and be prepared for future obstacles. Talent is Overrated was a super-interesting look into the topic. Previously taken as gospel truth, the author dismantles the conventional myth of "talent" here. A continuation of the discussion I first read about in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story Of Success - are high-achieving performers naturally talented or is it the result of hard work? Talent Is Overrated sides with Gladwell in that hard work is the defining bit and pure, native talent is truly hard to find, but it goes farther in examining the type of hard work necessary to produce greatness, specifically, "deliberate practice": identifying weak areas and following a comprehensive plan to improve those weaknesses and improve overall performance.

More practice, by itself, does not necessarily yield better performance. In fact, in some disciplines, it can actually hurt performance: e.g., doctors get worse at reading x-rays over time, auditors get worse at spotting fraud. The key to achieving elite performance is actually *deliberate* practice, which has the following features: That initial bit of satisfaction, that smug smile you get for shooting a 3-pointer, can be enough to trigger your inner drive.Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s a bad book, and I do agree with its main principle, one has to nurture a talent for it to become something of importance. One has to find the weaknesses in ones performance and work on them in a deliberate way. It's designed specifically to stretch your abilities. Usually, you need an expert teacher or coach to do the designing. Do you know that Mozart’s father-Leopold Mozart- was a famous composer and performer? Tiger Woods's father, Earl Woods, revealed he loved to teach in his book “Training a Tiger”? It has been discovered that practice in childhood causes the myelin to build up more than practice in adulthood. The body adapts easily at childhood after which bones calcify.

Children don’t have to deal with the responsibilities of adulthood, like work or family, so they can practice more. In the digital age, any products that can be compared will be compared and any directly compared product will be commoditized by reverse auction (i.e. become a cheap commodity). Products lifespan are shorter than ever, the competition is increasing. A hard-working professional strives for improvement, practices when everyone else is doing some other stuff, and that person really wants to be a part of greater success. The IQ doesn’t matter – place your faith in Hard Work Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it. It isn't experience. Not only are we surrounded by highly experienced people who are nowhere near great at what they do, but we have also seen evidence that some people in a wide range of fields actually get worse after years of doing something.Deliberate practice is highly mentally demanding. It needs focus and effective concentration. Deliberate practice takes you beyond the comfort zone into the learning zone and prevents you from entering the panic zone. Deliberate practice isn’t much fun. It can be demanding and tiring. I think this is why a lot of people fall out. THE RESULT And great achievement doesn’t derive from inborn talent, i.e., the natural ability to succeed more easily, either. mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the Laszlo and Klara devoted their lives to teaching Susan chess and when 2 more daughters followed – Sophia and Judit – they were put into the programme as well. All three daughters were home-schooled - their parents quit their jobs to devote themselves to their work – and the schooling consisted largely of chess instructions. The family accumulated a library of 10,000 chess books (wtf ! – do 10,000 chess books even exist? Lol) A giant pre-computer age system filing system of index cads catalogued previous games and potential opponents. The daughters learned other subjects as well – the Hungarian authorities insisted that they all pass regular exams in school subjects and all three daughters spoke several languages. But chess was the main thing – hours and hours of it every day. The book then moves on to discuss what motivates the world's best performers to be able to do the intense amount of deliberate practice it takes to achieve greatness.