Talent is Overrated

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Mastery

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Peak performance is only through practice - Not innate talent, genetics, experience or intelligence, there is no explanation to peak performance other than having a challenging, demanding set of practices during a long period. Thinking that it's a matter of talent and no effort is a myth, and a harmful one.
2. Motivation is cultivated - One can develop intrinsic motivation for a field if they are acknowledged of their relative success early on compared to their peers.
3. Improvement requires direction and freedom - to improve at something, both as a person and as an organization, requires both the direction to make sure creative effort are solving the most dire problem, but also the freedom to experiment and explore new ways of problem solving, at the risk of failing more.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... The unfortunate tone of the book is that if you haven't started something at a young age, there is little chance you will achieve greatness later in life, because you just don't have the time to truly compete

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... The book gives a good intro to the concept of deliberate practice, perhaps I would read it before reading Peak (book) that dives deeper into deliberate practice but expands less on the general topic of talent.

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

The Mystery

How do you reach peak performance? Experience, i.e time invested training is not enough. It will get you to "okay", but not to extraordinary. This leads us to believe that peak training is an issue of innate talent, which is simply wrong.

The answer is Deliberate Practice. Nowadays, it is more crucial than before to understand how to achieve greatness. Due to Globalization and Complexity, the average workers are either replaced by cheaper ones, or simply don't shine enough to succeed/being hired. Today the scarce resource is not money but human capital.

The rise of talented people in the modern era is a result of a change in how we train, not our genetics.

The Mystery

• 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. (Location 73)
• The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice. (Location 133)
• Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance. (Location 137)
• The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability. (Location 212)
• Understanding where extraordinary performance comes from would be valuable at any time. Now it’s crucial. (Location 265)

Talent is Overrated

Natural Competence doesn't exist. Top performance has to include many hours spent training. Innate talent might give you a head start, but you will be left behind if you don't combine it with rigorous training.

Talent is more like a myth we use to explain things we don't understand how they came about. But research shows that talent, at least in young age, has no correlation with peak performance later in life, and even in the best case, it serves as a "self fulfilling prophecy" for the parents that decide to dedicate time and money in developing the kids potential, which brings the actual improvements in skills. fake it till you make it

Even exceptional cases like tiger woods, Mozart and Bill Gates are actually an example of early age training rather than innate talent

Talent Is Overrated

• genetic differences of this particular type—that is, differences that determine the highest levels of performance—don’t exist. (Location 411)

How Smart Do You Have to Be?

There is also no correlation between general intelligence, aka IQ and performance. Putting aside that question of the varsity of types of intelligence and ways to measure it. Whether it is memory, personality traits, or specific skills, it can be taught, we can develop and change ourselves Growth Mindset. Experts rely more on "mental images" Mental Representations rather than brute memory.

So it seems that just experience, innate talent, or general intelligence are not the factors that explain performance, so what is?

How Smart Do You Have to Be?

• memory ability is very clearly created rather than innate. (Location 642)
• It seems our view that intelligence necessarily produces better performance is so deep that it may occasionally even blind us to reality. (Location 693)
• intelligence as we usually think of it—a high IQ—is not a prerequisite to extraordinary achievement. (Location 730)
• the widespread view that highly accomplished people have tremendous memories is in one sense justified—they often astound us with what they can remember. But the view that their amazing ability is a rare natural gift is not justified. Remarkable memory ability is apparently available to anyone. (Location 762)
• The roadblocks we face seem to be mostly imaginary. (Location 810)

A Better Idea

Those who get better are those who are willing to face the challenges of getting better, beyond the point of convenience and fun. To train alone, to give all that they have, to tailor the training to their needs, and put in the hours. And even while doing that, we should remember that expertise is a process, even in the best case scenario, it takes a decade to be a pro.

A Better Idea

• “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” (Location 1006)

What Deliberate Practice is and Isn't

The components of deliberate practice:

1. Mentor - having an expert as an external viewer to see things that you can't see Mentor
2. Chunking - the goal of the training would be to improve at a specific part of the overall skill until it has reached a sufficient level of mastery Chunking
3. Challenging - the practice should always be hard enough to help us grow. We can imagine this as stepping out of the innermost circle, aka the "comfort zone", into the middle circle, aka the "learning zone", but not too far into the outermost layer, aka the "panic zone", where it is too difficult to operate Challenge
4. Adaptive - we shouldn't just do what we have done in the past. The practice should evolve with time, both to take advantage of new knowledge that has been gathered in the field, and to keep the practice useful Adaptability
5. Feedback - feedback on our performance should be constant, clear and immediate. without feedback we won't improve and lack motivation Feedback
6. Repetition - practice is a process, and results take time gradual process

However, deliberate practice is not that determines performance, we should still account for:

1. Luck - both conditions and opportunities that affect our success Luck
2. Environment - the way our environment is shaped that affects our ability to train and improve Environmental design
3. Motivation - aka Intrinsic Motivation and Grit, which determines our ability to stick to training
4. Genetics - while it is a nature vs nurture discussion, genes might still play a role as to your level of passion towards a field, but not your limit in it

We should remember that deliberate practice forces us to be mindful of our actions, since we are constantly trying to improve, we can't allow ourselves to stop when it has become automated, because this is only the "good enough" level, but not excellent.

What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t

• It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, (Location 1048)
• deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. (Location 1075)
• practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: You won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring. (Location 1106)
• Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. (Location 1130)
• Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement—real life is too complicated for that. Most obviously, we’re all affected by luck; (Location 1244)
• The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible. (Location 1311)

How Deliberate Practice Works

Experts are better because they perceive and process information differently Intuition, by :

"seeing more":

1. Seeing smaller details - they can pick up on small details that novices either miss or mark as unimportant
2. Seeing further ahead - they include the future, from milliseconds to years into their assessment, which allows them to prepare to what's coming
3. Better information extraction - the are able to use the information they perceive to their fullest more quickly. They do more with less.

"know more":

1. Better understanding - have more expertise in their field
2. Better memory - They have easier memory storage and recollection. Compare for example trying to memorize words in a language you so not know vs one you do. In the unfamiliar one, you would be able to memorize a few letters at best. In the native one, it's not that you are able to remember more "chunks" of information, but rather the size of those chunks is bigger (chunking). Instead of letters, it could be complete words, or even sentences. The requirement is that it will maintain the logic we are familiar with. When comparing random chess board distributions, experts don't outperform the novices. It is the familiarity + logical settings that allow experts to increase their chunk size and have better Working Memory.

How Deliberate Practice Works

• Sometimes excellent performers see more by developing better and faster understanding of what they see. (Location 1372)
• The experts did not have sharper eyes in the usual sense. They were all looking at the same films and could see them just as clearly. The difference wasn’t literally what they saw. It was what they perceived. (Location 1392)
• Most of the indicators used by top performers require practice to be of any use. (Location 1421)
• top performers in a wide range of fields have better organized and consolidated their knowledge, enabling them to approach problems in fundamentally different and more useful ways. (Location 1513)
• Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it. (Location 1602)
• great performers really are fundamentally different. Their bodies and brains are actually different from ours in a profound way. In addition, their abilities to perceive, organize, and remember information are far beyond anything that most of us possess. But we’re wrong in thinking, as many do, that the exceptional nature of great performers is some kind of eternal mystery or preordained outcome. It is, rather, the result of a process, (Location 1643)

Applying the Principles in Our Lives

The common thread to all daily life applications is have a goal (aka a skill you want to have, or a destination to reach to), find a mentor to help you distill the important from the trivial and provide feedback, and practice as much as you can in the most direct way.

More specifically, there are different methods of simulations:

1. Music model - you practice by doing, train often and hard on the same core skills until they will feel natural
2. Chess model - research best practices and repeat them again and again until you have memorized them.
3. Sports model - be experimental, find new ways of doing your tasks, new ways of thinking, or new tools at your disposal.

Besides these models, it is important to focus on our implementation on three different steps:

1. Before - set a goal, or better yet, a process that will direct you towards the desired outcome. Make it clear and tangible
2. During - be self reflective. Be aware of your thoughts and emotions and see whether your focus is in the right place
3. Analyze - search for feedback. Be accountable for the results you had. Find a good comparison group, whether past you or competitors.

Applying the Principles in Our Lives

• we can see mentors in a new way—not just as wise people to whom we turn for guidance, but as experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we’re doing. (Location 1722)
• The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. (Location 1836)
• The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. (Location 1853)
• the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. (Location 1872)
• This is one of the defining traits of great performers: They all possess large, highly developed, intricate mental models of their domains. (Location 1918)
• A mental model not only enables remarkable recall, it also helps top performers learn and understand new information better than average performers, since they see it not as an isolated bit of data but as part of a large and comprehensible picture. (Location 1931)

Applying the Principles in Our Organization

To apply deliberate practice in your organization means to focus on people development People First, not just on the team leader level, but all the way from the CEO to the newest worker. The ways to improve workers are:

1. Job assignment - usually we divide work based on existing skill level. The goal however is to assign based on development potential, which means not necessarily the best worker for the task will get it, but rather the one who can develop from it the most
2. Mentoring - assigning employees and leaders to mentor new workers, provide instant, candid and clear feedback
3. Learning sessions - to create time and place for learning within the organization

Nowadays, employee's development is essential to success, no longer a luxury. Similarly, it is essential to focus not just on individuals but on teams as well. Team building is a skill that can make or break a team.

The main points to focus on are unified goal, Trust, and Transparency. Make sure hierarchy and ego are not in the teams culture. Usually smaller teams that don't replace members often have easier time develop these traits

Applying the Principles in Our Organizations

• The same basic elements that work for individuals—well-designed practice activities, coaching, repetition, feedback, self-regulation, building knowledge, and mental models—all work for teams as well. (Location 2134)

Preforming Great at Innovation

Nowadays innovation is key for success. Business models last only a few years before they are replaced by a better alternative. The need for Innovation has never been higher.

Creativity is not a eureka moment, it is the result of a long process where we immerse ourselves within our field, when we know exactly all the nuances and limits and find the hidden answers that are revealed only to experts. Knowledge is essential to the creative process, without it we would be left with the shallow low hanging fruits that have been collected years ago. Remember that even for those who practice often, it usually takes about 10 years to reach peak performance.

Organizations often lack innovation because they fail to support the creativity of their employees. Organizational innovation is the result of company culture, which is directed from above. Employees should be told where innovation is needed (for example, we need a better solution in our logistic line) and giving them the freedom to explore. Like googles 10% free time, it is maybe risky to waste their time working on ineffective ideas, but it is even riskier to not innovate. Only through employee's innovation a company can have it's Competitive Advantage

Performing Great at Innovation

• In a world of forces that push toward the commoditization of everything, creating something new and different is the only way to survive. (Location 2265)
• Economic value will arise instead from the powers of the right brain—creativity, imagination, empathy, aesthetics. (Location 2291)
• Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation. (Location 2350)
• The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it. (Location 2412)
• 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. (Location 2433)
• Since organizations are not innovative—only people are innovative—it follows that the most effective steps an organization can take to build innovation will include helping people expand and deepen their knowledge of their field. (Location 2513)
• One of the main reasons why the people in organizations don’t produce more innovation is that the culture isn’t friendly to it. New ideas aren’t really welcomed. Risk taking isn’t embraced. (Location 2521)

Great Performance in Youth and Age

Since expertise takes time, it is no surprise that most of the high achievers started early. Not only that children have more free time to use for studying, it is also biologically more efficient to do so. Range. However no one succeeds alone, our environment, from society and culture to our family has great implications on our ability to stick to deliberate practice and maintain a sense of Flow.

The environment has to be both:

1. Stimulating - encouraging the children's Curiosity, and many opportunities for learning
2. Supportive - a place of trust, where has its own role, and they help each other fulfill it.

Deliberate practice also helps us to avoid the damages of aging in the skills relevant to our domain. These can be both physical and mental capabilities. The mind maintains it'sNeuroplasticity as long as we continue to train it.

Great Performance in Youth and Age

• No one becomes extraordinary on his or her own, (Location 2617)
• Starting early holds advantages that become less available later in life. (Location 2641)
• In any field where people can start early, starting late may put one in an eternal and possibly hopeless quest to catch up. (Location 2649)
• continued deliberate practice enables top performers to maintain skills that would otherwise decline with age, and to develop other skills and strategies to compensate for declines that can no longer be avoided. (Location 2813)
• Our brains are perfectly able to add new neurons well into old age when conditions demand it, and brain plasticity doesn’t stop with age. (Location 2834)

Where Does the Passion come From?

It is noticeable that high achievers continue to do rigid practices because they enjoy it, they are full of intrinsic motivation. It is known that intrinsic motivation is not only stronger as a source of motivation for the long term, but it is also better at encouraging creativity, which is essential for peak performance.

But where does it come from? Their answer is a little push or advantage that sets a Multiplier effect in action. This advantage means that the person is slightly better than others (of their age) in the field, and it is noticeable and praised by their environment (could be parents, school, community). This sparks motivation for further practice, which improves the skill, which increases the gap, and so forth. By the time they meet their equals, they have already developed the internal motivation for this field.

This advantage can be the result of a biological trait, but also the way parents treat the child and help them explore their interest and develop their skills. All it takes is the first investment of practices and the immediate worthwhile results, and the rest would come. This means that development is an issue of belief, do you believe in a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?

Where Does the Passion Come From?

• People who rank high for intrinsic motivation on various psychological tests consistently produce work that is judged more creative in studies. (Location 2910)
• The passion doesn’t accompany us into this world, but rather, like high-level skills themselves, it develops. (Location 3058)
• “As they began to receive recognition for the talent in the early years of instruction, the children’s investment in the talent became greater. No longer was the prime motivation to please parents and teachers. It now became the individual’s special field of interest.” (Location 3086)
• it all begins with some small advantage—a little difference that somehow tips a balance and starts a self-fueling cycle of increasing motivation and performance (Location 3098)
• Push children too hard and they respond with anger. You have to develop an independent individual who has chosen to be involved in this activity. It’s how you as a parent can make individuals feel freed to reach these levels and aware that this is going to be a long process.” (Location 3146)
• Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible difficulties along the way. There are no exceptions. (Location 3172)
• What you really believe about the source of great performance thus becomes the foundation of all you will ever achieve. (Location 3176)
• great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone. (Location 3181)