Review of Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated

Is Talent Really That Important? By Laura Vanderkam

The American. Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Geoff Colvin argues that ‘deliberate practice,’ not innate ability, is the true key to world-class performance. Go into any Barnes & Noble or Borders bookstore, and you’ll notice that the shelves are bulging with books on “how to win the talent wars.” But where, exactly, does top talent come from? That’s the question pondered by Fortune magazine editor-at-large Geoff Colvin in his new book, Talent is Overrated (Portfolio, $25.95).

As Colvin notes, “most people are just okay at what they do.” Few of us play golf like Tiger Woods, compose like Mozart, or pick stocks like Warren Buffett. When we try to explain the success of such extraordinary performers, we typically attribute it to either hard work or talent. “People get extremely good at something because they work hard at it,” we might say. But that is clearly not true: many of us will work hard for 40 years and still never do our jobs particularly well. So do top achievers have a special “talent”? This explanation squares with the evidence that world-class achievement is rare, and it helps us come to terms with our own mediocrity. “A god-given gift is a one-in-a-million thing,” Colvin writes. “You have it or you don’t. If you don’t—and of course most of us don’t—then it follows that you should just forget now about ever coming close to greatness.”

The book highlights a growing body of research which shows that the top achievers in many fields are neither high-IQ geniuses nor former child prodigies turned professionals.But what if the talent explanation isn’t true either? Talent is Overrated highlights a growing body of research which shows that the top achievers in many fields are neither high-IQ geniuses nor former child prodigies turned professionals. In fact, many of these top performers are just reasonably bright people who showed a slight knack for something and then spent decades engaged in “deliberate practice,” which involves spending hours figuring out your weak spots, honing specific skills through constant feedback, and learning as much as possible about your field. The bad news is that such practice is “highly demanding mentally” and “isn’t much fun.” The good news is that if you do it, you will learn that “great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.”

It is a provocative thesis, which Colvin first put forth in a 2006 Fortune article that ignited a furious debate in the blogosphere. Like Malcolm Gladwell, who has also written a new book on top talent (Outliers), Colvin is deft at finding studies and anecdotes to back up his assertions. For example, he highlights one study which found that top violinists put in more than twice as many hours of solo practice as their lesser peers. And he describes how comedian Chris Rock hones his act at small clubs, so that by the time he plays larger venues he knows exactly how the audience will react to each joke.

The story of the Polgar sisters, which Colvin tells at length, also seems to undermine the notion of God-given talent. In the 1960s, Hungarian educational psychologist Laszlo Polgar postulated that great performers are made, not born. To test this theory, he designed an experiment. Polgar and his wife, Klara, devoted their lives to turning their three daughters into brilliant chess players. Laszlo was only a mediocre player, and Klara hadn’t played much at all, but they filled their home with chess books and homeschooled their girls so they could spend several hours each day mastering the game. As a result, their oldest daughter, Susan, was eventually named a grand master. The other daughters also became top players.

Even the usual stories of prodigies—such as Mozart and Tiger Woods—indicate that “deliberate practice” is more important than God-given ability. Mozart started playing the piano at age 3 under the tutelage of a father whose coaching methods had a lot in common with Laszlo Polgar’s chess instruction. Mozart did not compose his best symphonies until he had been studying composition and practicing—hard—for well over a decade. Tiger Woods began playing golf as a toddler under the guidance of his father, an excellent coach. By the time he started winning major titles in 1997, he had been honing his game daily for 20 years.

Colvin’s message to readers is clear: if you want to perform at a world-class level, you can. You simply have to put in many hard hours of “deliberate practice.”

Colvin’s message to readers is clear: if you want to perform at a world-class level, you can. You simply have to put in many hard hours of ‘deliberate practice.’Of course, most of Colvin’s readers are not professional athletes or artists; they are business people. With that in mind, Colvin spends large sections of the book explaining how the concept of “deliberate practice” applies to business. His suggestions for corporate leaders—give your employees more feedback, challenge them with projects that stretch their abilities—are a bit pedestrian compared with the idea of nurturing the next Mozart. It is also somewhat comical to think that a manager might read this book and then exhort his team to create an especially brilliant PowerPoint presentation through hours of analysis. Colvin’s chapters on business may have been necessary from a marketing perspective, but they are the least interesting—and least persuasive—parts of the book.

My other quibble with the book is more practical. It may be true that anyone can become a superstar in some fields, but certainly not in all fields. Take, for example, mathematics and theoretical physics: these are two disciplines in which innate intelligence clearly plays a huge role in determining success. Moreover, as Colvin knows, the overwhelming majority of human beings do not possess the drive for self-improvement that characterized, say, Benjamin Franklin.

We could translate the message of this book as: “Most of us are lazy.” But that is a hard message to swallow, and my fear is that many readers will instead interpret the message as: “There is no such thing as ‘talent.’” This is the type of thinking that has produced an aggressively egalitarian school system which too often ignores or neglects its high achievers. The deeper message of Talent is Overrated is that we should nurture the ambitions of high achievers; the more shallow message is that, well, talent is overrated. Let’s hope that readers are not misled.

Laura Vanderkam is a writer living in New York City.