‘There is no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers’

“He has talent that comes from up above,” is a phrase that we often here about people who are successful. In fact this has been repeated so often till now that we all believe it to be true. But does talent really come from up above?

Geoff Colvin, longtime editor and columnist for the Fortune magazine disagrees. “Over and over we find stories…that tell us nothing of what’s to come,” writes Colvin in his new book, Talent is Overrated — What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.

So if talent is overrated, how does one explain the success of someone like Warren Buffett? “As a boy, Buffett was intensely interested in learning about business and investing, and he wanted to make money … And at the age of eleven he bought his first stock. Later, in graduate school at Columbia, he studied under the famous investing authority Benjamin Graham and received the only A+ that Graham ever rewarded.”

So do we ascribe Buffett’s success as an investor to innate talent? “But that explanation — an inborn ability to allocate capital — is the only way or even the easiest way to account for his success … His fascination with stocks and investing is not especially intriguing when one considers that his father was a stockbroker and investor whom young Warren adored. Warren went to work in his father’s office at age eleven and thus began learning about investing at a very early age. Yet there’s very little any evidence that, even into his early twenties, he was especially good at it. For a while in his teens he was an enthusiastic “chartist,” trying to predict the movements of stock prices by studying charts of past movements … Later he tried to be a market timer…and couldn’t make it work,” writes Colvin.

One of the points you make in your book is that there is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers. Can you give us an example of this?
Consider the cases of Jeff Immelt and Steve Ballmer. At the age of 22, fresh out of college, they sat next to each other in a cubicle at the Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati. They did not distinguish themselves, and in fact one of them later said they “were voted the two guys probably least likely to succeed.” Yet, by the age 50 they had become CEOs of two of the most famous and valuable corporations on earth, General Electric and Microsoft. Looking at them today, we’d say they must be highly talented, yet even by age 22 they had shown no evidence of special talents or extraordinary intelligence. They reached the top by applying themselves with tremendous dedication and in a particular way. That’s just one anecdote, but broader research supports the point: There’s no easy way to the top.

Taking off from the title of your book Talent is Overrated. How do you explain the early success of people like Mozart or for that matter even Tiger Woods? Won’t you say their talent was clearly innate?
Actually Mozart and Tiger Woods are remarkably similar stories, and they both illustrate the value of intensive training rather than innate talent. Both their fathers started training them at extremely early ages — Mozart at age 3, Tiger even earlier. In fact, both fathers were accomplished teachers and after the births of their sons devoted their lives to training the boys. Think of it: From their first days, each boy lived with a passionate, dedicated, full-time teacher. Both boys reached world-class status at the same age, 21, Tiger by winning the Masters Tournament, Mozart by writing his first masterpiece, his Piano Concerto No. 9. That may seem an early age, but remember, by that time each young man had received 18 years of intensive training. One music scholar has even called Mozart a late bloomer!

If talent is not innate can it be build over a period of time?
Every story of a high achiever is a story of abilities built over time. An excellent example is that of the Polgar sisters of Hungary. Laszlo Polgar believed in the 1960s that any child could be turned into a world-class performer, and he set out to prove it by turning his three daughters into chess champions. He schooled them entirely at home and spent most of the time on chess. There was no reason to believe that any of the girls possessed special chess talents; Laszlo was only a mediocre player, and his wife had shown no chess ability at all. Yet over time, all three girls became brilliantly successful players, and the youngest, Judit, became the youngest person ever to achieve grandmaster status; she did it at age 15, one year earlier than Bobby Fischer. She went on to become the No. 1 ranked woman player in the world, a position she held for many years.

Are there examples of managers who were initially all over the place and it took them some time to find their footing?
Such examples are everywhere. To cite just a couple: Former GE chief Jack Welch, widely regarded as perhaps the most influential manager of the twentieth century, gave no early hints that he would achieve that status. In school, he studied not business but chemistry and became a PhD chemical engineer. He even considered taking a job on a university faculty before going to work at GE. At age 25 it still would have been impossible to predict that he would go into business at all. A more extreme example is David Ogilvy, one of the most celebrated advertising executives of the twentieth century. He spent the first 17 years of his career working in a hotel kitchen in Paris, selling stoves in Scotland, and farming in Pennsylvania, among other occupations. Very little suggested that he would become what he did.

Why is there very little correlation between intelligence and better performance?
The correlation is much less than most of us believe. It’s true that on an unfamiliar task, people with higher intelligence, as conventionally measured, will do better. But over time, as people learn how to do their tasks, the influence of intelligence fades away. In fact, it has been found that some chess players at the international master level have an IQ below 100, that is, below average. We think of high-level chess players as among the smartest people in the world, but they aren’t always. They don’t necessarily have a staggering IQ; what they have is an extraordinary ability to play this particular game, developed over many years.

What is deliberate practice and how does it help individuals get better at what they do?
Deliberate practice is quite specifically defined. It is activity that is designed to push a particular person just past the current limit of his or her abilities —- not way past it, and not within it, but just past it. The activity can be repeated at high volume, and feedback on the results is continuously available.

The definition is simple, but doing it isn’t. Since one is always pushing just past one’s abilities, mistakes and failures are inevitable. But that’s how progress is achieved.

Can you give us examples of few successful business leaders who have used deliberate practice to get where they are?
All of the companies that are famous for producing business leaders —- GE, Procter & Gamble, Hindustan Unilever are examples — follow the principles of deliberate practice.

These companies are constantly and systematically finding ways to push people just beyond their current abilities, and they are relentless in providing frequent, rigorous feedback. Anyone who has risen high in these organisations has succeeded through the principles of deliberate practice, even if they weren’t called that.

How does an individual design a routine of deliberate practice?
For most people, especially those who are early in their training, a teacher or coach is helpful in designing practice. That’s because the teacher knows more about how people make progress in a given field — which skills must be learned in what order — and can also provide the all-important feedback on results. Certainly it’s possible for people to design their own practice, but a teacher or coach is always beneficial. Remember, there’s a reason that even the world’s greatest golfers still go to teachers.