Talent Is Overrated

This book, like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, bases the core of its argument on a study done in a German music school several years ago. The findings of the study were that three main factors separate truly great performers (musicians who had potential for successful solo careers) from good performers (musicians who could probably make a living on their music but weren't going to blow anyone away) from decent performers (musicians who were more interested in teaching than performing); the factors are amount of time spent practicing, level of family support, and involvement of somebody like a coach. Both Gladwell and Colvin focus on the first of these factors, boiling it down to something called the Ten Thousand Hour Rule. If you practice any skill for twenty hours a week for ten years, you will become a genius at it.

This is basically Colvin's argument. Of course, the quality of the practice matters, in addition to the quantity. The practice time needs to be designed to improve performance, should be repeatable, should be mentally demanding, shouldn't be fun, and continuous feedback should be available to the practicer. Colvin calls this Deliberate Practice, and it's the key to success. The book invokes Benjamin Franklin at one point in an anecdote in which Young Ben learns to become a brilliant writer by translating essays he admires to poetry and then back to prose; the book and its argument fit nicely into the tradition of the American Self-Made Man. It's a more sophisticated version of the Horatio Alger scenario, where grit and determination will get you where you want to go.

I liked this book. I think hard work is important, and I like the idea that working diligently and working effectively are the ingredients of success. What I wonder about, though, is what makes the difference between geniuses and the very successful. I'm convinced (in part because of this book) that genius can't occur without hard work, but that concept doesn't seem to fully account for people like Shakespeare or Einstein or Mozart. In other words, I think all geniuses work hard, but all people who work hard aren't geniuses, and why is that? Overall, though, the book did a solid job of making the case for necessity of deliberate practice.