TALENT IS OVERRATED BY GEOFF COLVIN

Becoming good and exceptional at what you do requires a good number of years with deliberate and conscientious practice. Hard work will only amount to excellence when it is deliberate.
why we're surrounded by so many people who have worked hard for decades but have never approached greatness. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals bet-ter performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

Some key observations about deliberate practice are.
Great performance is become more valuable and competitive in our world today especially in sports. "Contemporary athletes are superior not because they're somehow different but because they train themselves more effectively. That's an important concept for us to remember". The pressure on us to keep getting better is greater than it used to be because of a historic change in the economy says the author.

CWhatonting the unexpected facts about innate abilities. Mozart was a maestro who started composing at age 3 and became a global genius in the world of music right before his death at age 35. Phenomenon memoir, right? This only happened because Mozart's father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. You see that Great performance doesn't just happen because you have the talent, but through deliberate and consistent investment of about 10,000 hours, you can become an elite performer in any field.

How Smart Do You Have to Be?
The true role of intelligence and memory in high . Memory as I would always say is what you do, not who you are. "There is apparently no limit to improve-ments in memory skill with practice." And memory, along with general intelligence, is widely regarded as a key skill of great performers which is not always the case in every realm.
 The essence of memory experiment showed in the book is so a person of aver-age general abilities could nonetheless extend one of those abilities to levels that would seem unimaginable. So read and glean direct life lessons from some of the emperical evidences given in the book to inundate this.

Virtually everyone can have a good memory by developing their own retrieval structures or being given them by researchers.

A Better Idea:
An explanation of great performance that makes sense.
 10,000 hours of consistent practice in any field has been substantiated everywhere by researchers as the true measurement for expert performance. no one, not even the most "talented" perform-ers, became great without at least 10,000 hours of very hard preparation. If talent means that success is easy or rapid, as most people seem to believe, then something is obviously wrong with a talent-based expla-nation of high achievement. the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain."
Deliberate effort means you know exactly what you are doing and the result you're aiming at! Rice's career story has alot to explain this according to the author.
Read the book!

What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn't.
For starters, it isn't what most of us do
when we're "practicing."
We all know what practice is. I do it all the time. According to the author, you have a lot to gain by banishing preconceptions and opening your minds up to what it really is. Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance. deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them..

Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless play-ing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Your willingness to engage in deliberate practice can be much fun if everyone can get their consolidation from the fact that it is inherently difficult and so your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

Deliberate practice works by helping us acquire the specific abilities we need to excel in a given field. Building and developing knowledge is one of the things that deliberate practice accomplishes. Constantly trying to extend one's abilities in a field requires amassing additional knowledge, and staying at it for years develops the critical connections that organize all that knowledge and make it useful.

Great performance have superior memory and  It's clear that the superior memory of great performers doesn't just happen. Since it is built on deep understanding of the field, it can be achieved only through years of intensive study

Applying the Principles in Our Lives. The opportunities are many if we think about our work in a new way. Stretching yourself is the essential core of deliberate practice.

Excellent performers judge themselves differently from the way other people do. They're more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay.

The effects of deliberate practice activities are cumulative. The more of a head start your organization gets in developing people individually and as teams, the more difficult it will be for competitors ever to catch you.

Innovation do not arise from nothingness; they are not even remotely unprecedented. Innovation doesn't reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who've mastered the domain as it exists. "the aha moments grow out of hours of thought and study,"

Do you know that, the author also talked about how innovators became great? The other step, giving people freedom to innovate, is a matter of motivation.

Great Performance in Youth and Age
The extraordinary benefits of starting early and continuing on and on.

How early in life should the work of deliberate practice begin, and how late in life is it effective? The reason Nobel laureates and other innovators are getting older is not that they're living longer but that it's taking them significantly longer to make a contribution in the first place..

The greatest value of a supporting home environment is that it enables a person to start developing early.

 Deliberate practice, Just as mere experi-ence, even decades of it, is not enough to make anyone a great per-former, neither is it enough to defy the effects of age, even in a person's field of specialization. Several studies have shown that just continuing to work at a job is not enough to stave off age-related declines.

In general, well-designed practice, pur-sued for enough time, enables a person to circumvent the limitations that would otherwise hold back his or her performance, and circum-venting limitations is the key to high performance at an advanced age.

In a study of excellent chess players, the older ones chose moves just as well as the younger ones, but they did it in a different way. They
didn't consider as many possible moves because they couldn't, but they compensated through greater knowledge of positions. More generally, continued deliberate practice enables top perform-ers to maintain skills that would otherwise decline with age, and to de-velop other skills and strategies to compensate for declines that can no
longer be avoided. That approach can work for a long time.

We know that great performance comes from deliberate practice, but deliberate practice is hard. It's so hard that no one can do it without the benefit of passion, a truly extraordinary drive. So we need to know where that originates.


Where Does the Passion Come From?
Understanding the deepest question about great performance.

Benjamin Bloom, in his study of top-ranked young performers in sev-eral fields, found this motivation in some of them from their early years: "For most of the mathematicians, the joy of discovering a new way of solving a problem was more important than a high test score, receiving a good grade, or getting the teacher's approval for their work." Many studies of scientists have reported a similar finding; they get ex-cited by new problems and find rewards not just in the solution but also in the process of seeking solutions.

In business, motivation has been the subject of endless research stud-ies, books, articles, and consulting assignments. The all-time number 2 best-selling reprint from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 article on motivation (the number 1 best seller is about time management). But the great majority of the research has focused on what motivates employees generally, not on what drives the top performers. The weight of the evidence is that the drive to persist in the difficult job of improving, especially in adults, comes mostly from inside.

Next question: How does it arise—that is, where does the passion come from? What determines who has it and who doesn't? Some researchers have argued that at least in some cases it's truly innate, present at birth. Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, years ago coined the wonderful term "the rage to master" to describe the over-whelming drive felt by some children, starting at extremely early ages, to work in a particular field. She has described, for example, the case of Peter, who started drawing at the age of ten months (versus two years for the average child) and before long "was waking up in the mornings and bellowing for paper and markers before getting out of bed." He drew obsessively virtually all day every day for years thereafter, and his drawings were very advanced, far beyond what the average child of his age could produce.

Most significant, we've seen that the passion develops, rather than emerging suddenly and fully formed. We've also seen hints that childhood may be especially impor-tant in how the drive's development gets started.

The second question is more profound. What do you really believe? Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you be-lieve that if you do the work, properly designed, with intense focus for hours a day and years on end, your performance will grow dramati-cally better and eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there's at least a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance.

But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, or by a lack of general abilities at a level that you think must be necessary, then there's no chance at all that you will do the work. What you really believe about the source of great performance thus becomes the foundation of all you will ever achieve. As we noted much earlier, such beliefs can be extremely deep-seated. Regardless of where our beliefs in this matter originated, however, we all have the opportu-nity to base them on the evidence of reality.

#Summary of the book!