Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin Page A

drawing three concentric circles. He labels the inner circle “comfort zone,” the middle one “learning zone,” and the outer one “panic zone.” Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily, while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.
    Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder—these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.
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It can be repeated a lot.
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High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts. Tiger Woods may face that buried lie in the sand only two or three times in a season, and if those were his only opportunities to work on hitting that shot, he certainly wouldn’t be able to hit it very well.
    Repeating a specific activity over and over is what most of us mean by practice, yet for most of us it isn’t especially effective. After all, I was repeating something—hitting golf balls—on the driving range. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity in the learning zone, as discussed. My golf practice certainly failed on that criterion, since I wasn’t focused on doing anything in particular. The other is the amount of repetition. Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball’s greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than thirty years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night. An extreme and instructive example is the golfer Moe Norman, who played from the 1950s to the 1970s and never amounted to much on the pro tour because, for reasons of his own, he was never very interested in winning tournaments. He was just interested in hitting golf balls consistently well, and at this he may have been the greatest ever. Shot after shot was straight and just like the one before it. His practice routine from age sixteen to age thirty-two involved hitting eight hundred balls a day, five days a week. He was (perhaps obviously) obsessive about this and claimed to have kept count of all the practice balls he ever hit; by the mid-1990s he was up to four million. Top-level pro golf requires much more than just hitting straight shots, but at this particular skill, mind-boggling repetition produced amazing ability.
    More generally, the most effective deliberate practice activities are those that can be repeated at high volume.
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Feedback on results is continuously available.
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Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs and a highly respected researcher on leadership development, says that 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.
    Getting feedback on most practice activities is easy. Lift the curtain and a bowler knows immediately how he did; in sports generally, seeing the results of practice is no problem. Aspiring chess masters practice by studying chess games played by the greatest players; at each position, the student chooses a move and then gets feedback by seeing what the champion did. Difficulties arise when the results require interpretation. You may believe you played that bar of the Brahms Violin Concerto perfectly, but can you really trust your own judgment? Or you may think that your