Talent Is Overrated 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Talent Is Overrated,

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Jack with the hair hanging, Jack demanding money, Jack of the big gut, Jack of the loud, loud voice, Jack of the trade, Jack who prances before the ladies, Jack who thinks he´s a genius, Jack who pukes, Jack who bad mouths the lucky, Jack getting older and older, Jack still demanding money, Jack sliding down the beanstalk, Jack who talks about it but doesn't do it, Jack who gets away with murder, Jack who jacks, Jack who talks of the old days, Jack who talks and talks, Jack with the hand out, Jack who terrorizes the weak, Jack the embittered, Jack of the coffee shops, Jack screaming for recognition, Jack who never has a job, Jack who totally overrates his potential, Jack who keeps screaming about his unrecognized talent, Jack who blames everybody else.

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.

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

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

Talent is overrated and most often just the result of hard work; you just don’t see the effort, only the results. Results always look easy.  Make your art anyway.

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.

Be your best self and do not imitate anyone else. Find your strengths. They are your talents. They will make you smile and cause you to real joy on the inside. Don’t listen to those who ridicule the choices you make or the dreams you share. Let no one despise your youth. As Og Mandino explained in The Greatest Salesman in the World, “Experience is overrated, usually by old men who nod wisely and speak stupidly.” Create your own experiences. And know that you are creating memories for a lifetime. Life is not about finding yourself; it is about creating yourself. You have to take chances to make your dreams reality. Face your fears head-on and move rapidly. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Make lots of them! Your odds for success will increase with the number of decisions you make. Have patience with your dreams and the expectations you have for others. Be impatient with yourself daily. Live as if this is your last day. Say “I love you” to all those who matter. Know that everyone matters. You must play full-out right now. Sit up, hold your head high. Breathe deeply. Lift your chest up. Stand up straight and with confidence. Dust yourself off. Stop being a party pooper in your own life. Smile. A bigger noticeable smile. Start acting happy. Yes, you act first. I promise the feeling of happiness will soon follow.

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.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

IN ADDITION, THROUGHOUT THESE CHAPTERS, I OFFER PRACTICAL insights about genius such as these: IQ, mentors, and Ivy League educations are greatly overrated. No matter how “gifted” your child is, you do him or her no favor by treating him or her like a prodigy. The best way to have a brilliant insight is to engage in creative relaxation: go for a walk, take a shower, or get a good night’s sleep with pen and paper by the bed. To be more productive, adopt a daily ritual for work. To improve your chances of being a genius, move to a metropolis or a university town. To live longer, find your passion. Finally, take heart, because it is never too late to be creative: for every youthful Mozart there is an aged Verdi; for every precocious Picasso, a Grandma Moses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Truth: Success comes from hunger. That's why talent is overrated. Intelligence is overrated. Having money is overrated. There are so many talented, intelligent, and moneyed people out there who are not successful. In fact, it's possible that having too much talent, intelligence, or money, you'd be tempted to take it easy. To slack off. To be lazy. You won't have hunger.

In an industry based on analyzing raw data, Gregory was defiantly a gut man. He was also an advocate of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which used Jungian psychological principles to identify people as having one of sixteen distinct personality types. (A typical question was, “Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?”) Gregory used Myers-Briggs results to help make personnel decisions. It was his conviction that individual expertise was overrated; if you had smart, talented people, you could plug them into any role, as sheer native talent and brains trumped experience. Gregory seemed to revel in moving people around, playing chess with their careers.

In the waves of layoffs that accompanied these paroxysmal death-throes, this bearded shit-in-a-suit whacked the newspapers most profitable sections and bureaus and its best writers and shooters, all to protect his ring of beholden pets , a phalanx of talent-challenged ass-sniffers and the cadre of bulbous interns that he hired from his Midwest alma mater and it’s pretentiously name H—School of Journalism (there are two things that should never be named: j-schools and penises), an equally overrated institution that he hoped to eventually return to in some kind of endowed bean bag chair.