Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin

attribute is designed. In the example of my pathetic routine on the driving range, I was designing my own practice activity, even though it’s clear that I’m completely unqualified to do so. The mechanics of hitting golf balls have been studied for decades and are extremely well understood by those who have made it their profession, but I have virtually none of their knowledge. It’s the same in almost every field: Decades or centuries of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge. At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it’s almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual’s performance. In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, science, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view. There’s a reason why the world’s best golfers still go to teachers.
    One of those reasons goes beyond the teacher’s knowledge. It’s his or her ability to see you in ways that you cannot see yourself. In sports the observation is literal; I cannot see myself hitting the golf ball and would benefit greatly from someone else’s perspective. In other fields the observation may be metaphorical. A chess teacher is looking at the same boards as the student but can see that the student is consistently overlooking an important threat. A business coach is looking at the same situations as a manager but can see, for example, that the manager systematically fails to communicate his intentions clearly.
    It’s apparent why becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going. Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject’s performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible; for reasons that may be simply physical (as in sports) or deeply psychological, very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance. Even if we could, we could not design the best practice activity for that moment in our development—the type of practice that would put us on the road to achieving at the highest levels—unless we had extensive knowledge of the latest and best methods for developing people in our chosen field. Most of us don’t have that knowledge.
    While the best methods of development are constantly changing, they’re always built around a central principle: They’re meant to stretch the individual beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.
    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. Examples are everywhere. The great soprano Joan Sutherland devoted countless hours to practicing her trill—and not just the basic trill, but the many different types (whole-tone, semitone, baroque). Tiger Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie. The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.
    Choosing these aspects of performance is itself an important skill. Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business school and former chief of General Electric’s famous Crotonville management development center, illustrates the point by