[PDF]FRENCHPDF. COM Talent Is Overrated

Talent Is
Overrated

What Really Separates
World-Class Performers from


Everybody Else



OLVIN


or at, Large, FORTl NE


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Chapter One


The Mystery

Great performance is more valuable than ever —
but where does it really come from?


It is mid 1978, and we are inside the giant Procter & Gamble head-
quarters in Cincinnati, looking into a cubicle shared by a pair of twenty-
two year old men, fresh out of college. Their assignment is to help sell
Duncan Hines brownie mix, but they spend a lot of their time just re-
writing memos according to strict company rules. They are clearly
smart: one has just graduated from Harvard, the other from Dartmouth.
But that doesn’t distinguish them from a slew of other new hires at
P&G. What does distinguish them from many of the young go-getters
the company takes on each year is that neither man is particularly filled
with ambition. Neither has any kind of career plan or any specific ca
reer goals. Every afternoon they play waste-bin basketball with wadded-
up memos. One of them later recalls, “We were voted the two guys
probably least likely to succeed."

These two young men are of interest to us now for only one reason:
They are Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Ballmer, who before age fifty would
become CEOs of the world's two most valuable corporations, General
Electric and Microsoft. Contrary to what any reasonable person would
have expected when they were new recruits, they reached the absolute
apex of corporate achievement. The obvious question is how.

Was it talent? If so, it was a strange kind of talent that hadn't revealed
itself in the first twenty-two years of their lives. Was it brains? These


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Talent Is Overrated

two were sharp but had shown no evidence of being sharper than
thousands of their classmates or colleagues. Was it mountains of hard
work? Certainly not up to that point.

And yet something carried them to the heights of the business
world. Which leads to perhaps the most puzzling question, one that
applies not just to Immelt and Ballmer but also to everyone in our
lives and to ourselves: If that certain something turns out not to be
any of the the things we usually think of, then what is it?

Look around you.

Look at your friends, your relatives, your coworkers, the people you
meet when you shop or go to a party. How do they spend their days?
Most of them work. They all do many other things as well, playing
sports, performing music, pursuing hobbies, doing public service. Now
ask yourself honestly: How well do they do what they do?

The most likely answer is that they do it fine. They do it well enough
to keep doing it. At work they don't get fired and probably get promoted
a number of times. They play sports or pursue their other interests well
enough to enjoy them. But the odds are that few if any of the people
around you are truly great at what they do — awesomely, amazingly,
world-class excellent.

Why — exactly why — aren’t they? Why don't they manage busi-
nesses like Jack Welch or Andy Grove, or play golf like Tiger Woods, or
play the violin like Itzhak Perlman? After all, most of them are good,
conscientious people, and they probably work diligently. Some of them
have been at it for a very long time — twenty, thirty, forty years. Why
isn’t that enough to make them great performers? It clearly isn’t. The
hard truth is that virtually none of them has achieved greatness or come
even close, and only a tiny few ever will.

This is a mystery so commonplace that we scarcely notice it, yet it's
critically important to the success or failure of our organizations, the
causes we believe in, and our own lives. In some cases we can give plau-

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The Mystery

sible explanations, saying that we're less than terrific at hobbies and
games because we don’t take them all that seriously. But what about
our work? We prepare for it through years of education and devote
most of our waking hours to it. Most of us would be embarrassed to
add up the total hours we’ve spent on our jobs and then compare that
number with the hours we’ve given to other priorities that we claim are
more important, like our families; the figures would show that work is
our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most peo-
ple are just okay at what they do.

In fact the reality is more puzzling than that. Extensive research in
a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become
outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they
spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were
when they started. Auditors with years of experience were no better at
detecting corporate fraud — a fairly important skill for an auditor — than
were freshly trained rookies. When it comes to judging personality dis-
orders, which is one of the things we count on clinical psychologists to
do, length of clinical experience told nothing about skill — "the correla-
tions," concluded some of the leading researchers, “are roughly zero.”
Surgeons were no better at predicting hospital stays after surgery than
residents were. In field after field, when it came to centrally important
skills — stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting
recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants — people
with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very
little experience.

The most recent studies of business managers confirm these results.
Researchers from the INSEAD business school in France and the U.S.
Naval Postgraduate School call the phenomenon "the experience trap."
Their key finding: While companies typically value experienced man-
agers, rigorous study shows that, on average, "managers with experience
did not produce high-caliber outcomes."

Bizarre as this seems, in at least a few fields it gets one degree

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odder. Occasionally people actually get worse with experience. More
experienced doctors reliably score lower on tests of medical knowledge
than do less experienced doctors; general physicians also become less
skilled over time at diagnosing heart sounds and X-rays. Auditors be
come less skilled at certain types of evaluations.

What is especially troubling about these findings is the way they
deepen, rather than solve, the mystery of great performance. When
asked to explain why a few people are so excellent at what they do, most
of us have two answers, and the first one is hard work. People get ex
tremely good at something because they work hard at it. We tell our
kids that if they just work hard, they’ll be fine. It turns out that this is
exactly right. They’ll be fine, just like all those other people who work
at something for most of their lives and get along perfectly acceptably
but never become particularly good at it. The research confirms that
merely putting in the years isn't much help to someone who wants to
be a great performer.

So our instinctive first answer to the question of exceptional perfor-
mance does not hold up.

Our second answer is the opposite of the first, but that doesn't stop
us from believing it fervently. It goes back at least twenty-six hundred
years, to the time of Homer:

Call in the inspired bard

Demodocus. God has given the man the gift of song.

That’s from the Odyssey, one of many references in it and the Iliad to
the god given gifts of various characters. We've changed our views on
a lot of important matters since then — how the planets move, where
diseases come from — but we have not changed our views on what
makes some people extraordinarily good at what they do. We still think
what Homer thought: that the awesomely great, apparently super-


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The Mystery

human performers around us came into this world with a gift for doing
exactly what they ended up doing — in the case of Demodocus, compos
ing and singing. We use the same words that the ancient Greeks used,
simply translated. We still say, as Homer did, that great performers are
inspired, meaning that their greatness was breathed into them by gods
or muses. We still say they have a gift, which is to say their greatness
was given to them, for reasons no one can explain, by someone or some
thing apart from themselves.

We believe further that such people had the great good fortune to
discover their gift, usually early in life. While this explanation of great
performance obviously contradicts the just work hard explanation, it's
much more deeply rooted and in some ways is more satisfying. It ex-
plains why great performers seem to do effortlessly certain things that
most of us can’t imagine doing at all, whether it's forming a strategy
for a multibillion-dollar company or playing the Tchaikovsky Violin
Concerto or hitting a golf ball 330 yards. The natural gift explanation
also explains why extraordinary performers are so rare; god given tal-
ents are presumably not handed out willy-nilly.

This explanation has the additional advantage of helping most of us
come to somewhat melancholy terms with our own performance. A
god-given gift is a one-in a-million thing. 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.

Thus it’s clear why most of us don’t dwell on the mystery of great
performance. We don’t think it’s a mystery. We've got a couple of ex-
planations in our head, and if it ever occurs to us that the first one is
clearly wrong, well, the second one is what we really believe anyway.
And the nicest thing about the second explanation is that it takes the
matter of great performance out of our hands. If we were really a natu-
ral at anything, we'd know it by now. Since we re not, we can worry
about other things.


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The trouble with this explanation — except it isn't trouble, it's excel
lent news — is that it’s wrong. Great performance is in our hands far
more than most of us ever suspected.

New Findings on Great Performance

It turns out that our knowledge of great performance, like our knowl-
edge of everything else, has actually advanced quite a bit in the past
couple of millennia. It’s just that most of the findings haven’t made
their way into people’s heads. Scientists began turning their attention
to it in a big way about 150 years ago, but what's most important is the
growing mountain of research that has accumulated in just the past 30
years. Conducted 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 writ-
ing, and many others, these hundreds of research studies have con-
verged on some major conclusions that directly contradict most of what
we all think we know about great performance. Specifically:

• The gifts possessed by the best performers are not at all what we
think they are. They are certainly not enough to explain the achieve-
ments of such people — and that’s if these gifts exist at all. Some re-
searchers now argue that specifically targeted innate abilities are simply
fiction. That is, you are not a natural born clarinet virtuoso or car sales-
man or bond trader or brain surgeon — because no one is. Not all re-
searchers are prepared to accept that view, but the talent advocates have
a surprisingly difficult time demonstrating that even those natural gifts
they believe they can substantiate are particularly important in attain
ing great performance.

• Going beyond the question of specific innate gifts, even the general
abilities that we typically believe characterize the greats are not what


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The Mystery

we think. In many realms — chess, music, business, medicine — we as-
sume that the outstanding performers must possess staggering intelli-
gence or gigantic memories. Some do, but many do not. For example,
some people have become international chess masters though they pos-
sess below average IQs. So whatever it is that makes these people spe
cial, it doesn't depend on superhuman general abilities. On that score,
a great many of them are amazingly average.

• The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance
is something the researchers call deliberate practice. Exactly what
that is and isn’t turns out to be extremely important. It definitely isn't
what most of us do on the job every day, which begins to explain the
great mystery of the workplace — why we re surrounded by so many
people who have worked hard for decades but have never approached
greatness. Deliberate practice is also not what most of us do when we
think we re practicing golf or the oboe or any of our other interests.
Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals bet-
ter performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

While there’s a lot to be said about deliberate practice, a few initial
observations are key:

• Deliberate practice is a large concept, and to say that it explains
everything would be simplistic and reductive. Critical questions imme
diately present themselves: What exactly needs to be practiced? Pre-
cisely how? Which specific skills or other assets must be acquired? The
research has revealed answers that generalize quite well across a wide
range of fields. It certainly seems daunting to seek a common explana-
tion for greatness in ballet and medical diagnosis, or insurance sales
and baseball, but a few key factors do seem to account for top perfor-
mance in those realms and many more.

• Most organizations are terrible at applying the principles of great
performance. Many companies seem arranged almost perfectly to pre-
vent people from taking advantage of these principles for themselves


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or for the teams in which they work. That situation presents a great
opportunity for companies that understand the principles and apply
them widely.

• One of the most important questions about greatness surrounds
the difficulty of deliberate practice. The chief constraint is mental, re
gardless of the field — even in sports, where we might think the physical
demands are the hardest. Across realms, the required concentration is
so intense that it's exhausting. If deliberate practice is so hard — if in
most cases it's "not inherently enjoyable,’’ as some of the top research-
ers say — then why do some people put themselves through it day after
day for decades, while most do not? Where does the necessary passion
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