Geoff Colvin Quotes

The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.

deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.

Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.

What great performers have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.

If you set a goal of becoming an expert in your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don't do now.

Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.

Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it.

you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.

even if high-IQ people do better than low-IQ people when first trying a task that’s new to them, the relationship tends to get weaker and may eventually disappear completely as they work at the task and get better at it.

A study of figure skaters found that sub-elite skaters spent lots of time working on the jumps they could already do, while skaters at the highest levels spent more time on the jumps they couldn’t do, the kind that ultimately win Olympic medals and that involve lots of falling down before they’re mastered.

Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

What you want—really, deeply want—is fundamental because deliberate practice is a heavy investment.

The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.

The best computer programmers are much better than novices at remembering the overall structure of programs because they understand better what they’re intended to do and how.

The costs of being less than truly world class are growing, as are the rewards of being genuinely great.

Ambitious parents who are currently playing the ‘Baby Mozart’ video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard.

So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.

When top-level chess players look at a board, they see words, not letters. Instead of seeing twenty-five pieces, they may see just five or six groups of pieces. That’s why it’s easy for them to remember where all the pieces are.

When Tchaikovsky finished writing his Violin Concerto in 1878, he asked the famous violinist Leopold Auer to give the premier performance. Auer studied the score and said no—he thought the work was unplayable. Today every young violinist graduating from Juilliard can play it. The music is the same, the violins are the same, and human beings haven’t changed. But people have learned how to perform much, much better.

Avoiding automaticity through continual practice is another way of saying that great performers are always getting better. This is why the most devoted can stay at the top of their field for far longer than most people would think possible.

if customer ignorance is a profit center for you, you’re in trouble.

Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed “golf addict” who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible.

Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.

Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible difficulties along the way. There are no exceptions. If you believe that doing the right kind of work can overcome the problems, then you have at least a chance of moving on to ever better performance. But those who see the setbacks as evidence that they lack the necessary gift will give up—quite logically, in light of their beliefs. They will never achieve what they might have.

Mozart’s earliest symphonies, brief works written when he was just eight, hew closely to the style of Johann Christian Bach, with whom he was studying when they were written. None of these works is regarded today as great music or even close.

The cash held by US companies are hitting all time records. Companies are using some of this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a company is doing this it is saying to it's investors: We don't have any good ideas what to do with this, so here--maybe you do.

Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful. A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, was in charge of the company’s Asian operations during a major Japanese earthquake and the Asian economic collapse. He says that’s when he discovered that “you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.” His

until the late twentieth century—the scarce resource in business was financial capital. If you had it, you had the means to create more wealth, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. That world is now gone.

Follow your passion, study it assiduously, and as you pursue it, strive in addition to become more intensely human. Doing so will improve your material well-being as the economy evolves, and it will bring you a richer, fuller life.

World-class chess players, in addition to being considered awesomely smart, are generally assumed to have superhuman memories, and with good reason. Champions routinely put on exhibitions in which they play lesser opponents while blindfolded; they hold the entire chessboard in their heads. Some of these exhibitions strike the rest of us as simply beyond belief. The Czech master Richard Reti once played twenty nine blindfolded games simultaneously. (Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site and commented on what a poor memory he had.)

Children whose "parents are very attentive to their elementary needs are likely to develop trust and security, which may promote prosocial orientation," note psychology researchers, but those parents probably weren't consciously trying to create cooperative adults; they were just being good, attentive parents.

Grit by Angela Duckworth; Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool; The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin; and how’s this for a wishful title: The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk) emphasize the role of nurture over that of genetics and downplay the role of innate ability.

We just can’t get our heads around the power of doubling every two years. At that rate, computing power increases by a factor of a million in forty years. The computing visionary Bill Joy likes to point out that jet travel is faster than walking by a factor of one hundred, and it changed the world. Nothing in our experience prepares us to grasp a factor of a million.

As the two large technology trends of our era combine, as technology takes over more of our work while simultaneously changing us and the way we relate to one another, the people who master the human abilities that are fading all around us will be the most valuable people in our world.

As the shift in valuable skills continues, organizations are finding not only that they have no jobs for the disengaged and socially inept, but that such people are toxic to the enterprise and must be removed.

Google’s autonomous cars are an obvious and significant example—significant because the number one job among American men is truck driver.

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else BY GEOFF COLVIN     What’s

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else BY GEOFF COLVIN

In our own lives, we will try something new and, finding that it isn't easy for us, we conclude we don't have a talent for it.

My search for professional/personal harmony led me down the path of asking the wrong question. The question isn’t, “What can I give up today to have what I want tomorrow?” The reality of life is that winning costs. It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and effort. The key question here is, “Are the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards worth the price you have to pay?” There is no right or wrong answer, just ebbs and flows. Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated are different riffs on the same theme. In theory, it takes approximately 10,000 hours of hard, dedicated practice to get to a level of expertise in any field. It takes the right focus, the right practice and most of all, commitment. Cloud technology today is as ubiquitous as kids having cell phones. However, five years ago it was like the feeling shared by a new married couple. There was a lot of hope and promise but you weren’t sure how it was going to play out. Here’s where it got really interesting. Try selling hope and promise to a highly-regulated global bank with massive footprints in Canada and the USA after the financial crisis of 2008. Selling ice to Eskimos in December would have been easier. That’s the challenge we were up against. I had just moved to Toronto from Chicago. I enjoyed working with my new customer. I was whipping my team into shape. I could now openly indulge in contraband (Cuban cigars). Life was good. God bless Canada! Peter was the cloud specialist on my team. We were partners in every sense of the word. Together, we developed a sales strategy and campaign to sell cloud services to this financial services firm in Canada. Together we pushed the envelope and our teams to achieve the impossible.

By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.

Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in one and a half hours.

Any adult thinking of starting a professional career in any field in which some participants begin their development as small children should first get out a calculator and face the music

Now, increasingly, you have to be good at

Rice didn’t need to do everything well, just certain things.

The two top groups differed from the third group in another way: They slept more. They not only slept more at night, they also took far more afternoon naps.

... or revealing their personality type, based on the valid insight that reciprocal vulnerability is the beginning of trust.

But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.

By contrast, great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested-development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice—avoiding automaticity.

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.

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.