Book Summary

Leaders are Learners

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

The Summary In Brief

What makes people truly excellent at what they do? If you think hard work and talent are the answer, then you are half right. Talent is Overrated shows that hard work over a long period of time is the key.

Five Things You Need To Know

1. Talent is Overrated, Hard Work Is Not. At 12, the most elite music students practice two hours a day vs. the 15 minutes their peers in average groups practice. 1. You Do Not Have To Be A Genius If you were given a random list of numbers, at the rate of one per second, how many could you remember after a pause of 20 seconds? Most adults can remember 7-9 after practicing an hour a day for nine days. One subject practiced for 250 hours and could remember 82! Ordinary adults have extraordinary potential if they practice. 2. Practice Your Specic Needs Jerry Rice is widely regarded as the best wide-receiver ever in the National Football League. How did he achieve this? 1. He spent very little time playing football but a lot of time on working out and classroom studying. 2. Jerry designed his workout to practice his specic, jobrelated needs. Precise patterns, evading defenders, out jumping others and outrunning tacklers. 3. The results were three Super Bowl rings and 13 trips to the Pro Bowl. 3. What is Deliberate Practice? 1. Its designed specically to improve performance 2. It can be repeated a lot 3. Feedback on results is continuously available 4. Its highly demanding mentally 5. It isnt much fun 4. How Deliberate Practice Works 1. Your ability to perceive what will happen must be developed. 2. You understand the signicance of indicators that average performers dont even notice 3. You look further ahead 4. You know more from seeing less 5. You make ner discriminations then average performers.

Application Know where you want to go. Practice directly - in business that means breaking down your job into steps that can be repeated and perfected Deepening Your Knowledge - Dont wait to learn about the next position - start learning now. Find someone with similar goals and work with each other.

Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin

Stories Musical Research in England p.17 - The 800% difference in practice time between the best and average groups. Mozart - Divine-Spark or Hard Work Over Decades? P. 25 Tiger Woods - The Mozart of today. P. 30 Jerry Rice - What turned him into the best receiver ever? p. 52 Chris Rock - What makes him so funny? P. 74 Laszlo Polgar - How to raise three daughters to be World Chess Champions. P. 76 Ben Franklin was Americas rst great man of letters. How did he get that way? P. 105 The Ten Year Rule - (BEST) Composers, Painters and Inventors take 10 years to prepare. P. 152

Quotes One factor and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students

were, and that was how much they practiced. p.18 There is apparently no limit to improvements in memory skill with practice. P. 38 Whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning. P. 44 The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge. P. 95 New employees consistently put continuous professional development at or near the top of their criteria for choosing an employer. P. 127 The command and control model of leadership just wont work 99 percent of the time. A.G. Laey P. 134

Ideas In times past, work has been place-based: Detroit became the car capital because it was the best spot at which to bring together, via rail, and Great Lakes shipping, the coal, steel, rubber, and other components of a car, and from which to distribute to the nation. How can we become great now that we are technology-based? P. 14 The US Armys After-Action Review - After any signicant action, soldiers and ofcers meet to discuss what happened. There is no rank in the room. When people better understand what happened they are eager to try to do better. P. 132 How was Garry Kasparov able to beat an IBM computer that could evaluate 100 million positions per second? P.95 Rather then putting individuals through training, put entire teams through the same training. This allows the whole team to practice 100% of what they learned. P. 137 Read Best-Selling Article ever from HBR - How Do You Motivate Employees? by Frederick Herzbert, 1968 Read Second Best-Selling Article ever from HBR - Management Time: Whos Got the Monkey by William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass, 1974