Author’s note: Let me just say that this was intended to be broken up into three parts, but it was decided that readers would get more out of it, despite the length, if kept in one piece. Enjoy.

After hearing rave reviews about Geoff Colvin’s book “Talent is Overrated,” I decided to give it a read. For me, it absolutely lived up to the hype. Colvin lays out a solid, clearly organized argument for why the widely accepted concept of “talent” is flawed, and proceeds to illuminate the topic of what really distinguishes the greats from everybody else. By detailing the path to greatness, Colvin forces the reader to come to terms with his or her own performance. It’s an eye-opening read, but I’ll do my best to summarize the author’s argument here and, where possible, tie it back into baseball and training (this will likely be a separate article).

“Talent” here refers to the “natural ability to do something [specific] better than most people can do it…it is innate; you’re born with it, and if you’re not born with it, you can’t acquire it.”

Without further ado, here is the basic outline of Colvin’s book, as I interpreted it.

People are mediocre

Most people are just ok at what they do for a living, despite devoting huge amounts of time and energy in preparation for their career. Furthermore, research shows that most people aren’t even getting better/more efficient at their jobs with experience. Writes Colvin, “we tell our kids that with hard work, they’ll be fine. And it’s true. They will be fine.”

People assume that great performers have:

1. A “natural gift”

While this could be argued for some physical characteristics (Phelps wouldn’t be as fast if he didn’t have a 6’8” wingspan and massive hands + feet) the book does not consider physical attributes to be the same thing as a “natural gift.” This is likely because Colvin does not consider physical attributes to be domain specific. That is, Phelps was not born a talented swimmer; he just had physical attributes that happened to lend themselves to the sport.

A common assumption while on the topic of “natural gifts” is that, in many fields, elite performers must be “smarter” or have superior memories than their average counterparts. Colvin demonstrates that IQ tests are poor indicators of high achievement, and, furthermore, that remarkable memory is almost always created (and domain specific), not inherent. Furthermore, the “natural gift” explanation is convenient because it helps us come to terms with our own performance.

2. Worked hard to get to the top

This is (mostly) true. All great performers have worked substantially harder than almost anyone in their given field. There is a strong correlation, through research, between amount of practice and proficiency/expertise. Colvin gives an example of a study:

There were two groups of music students. One was considered elite, the other simply good. What separated them was how much they had practiced. But it still took them the same amount of practice to reach certain checkpoints (grade 5 for example). They weren’t more “talented” as we might think, they had just practiced more. Writes Colvin, “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.” But this does not tell the whole story. While those at the top certainly worked hard, it doesn’t always work in reverse. Hard work alone doesn’t guarantee success. So then, what does, if anything?

Deliberate Practice

Colvin explains that what researchers call “deliberate practice” correlates most strongly with great performance. He cites research in which three otherwise similar groups of aspiring professional violinists were analyzed. They were divided into good, better and best. Each group had been studying violin for 10+ years, and each spent about 51 hours a week on musical activities. They all ranked practicing by themselves as the activity that was most important for making them better. But the two top groups spent 24 hours weekly actually doing it (as opposed to 9 hours in the “good” group). The conclusion? The quality and type of practice is crucial, not just total accumulated hours (although this was what separated the best group from the better group).

Colvin describes how most “practice:”

“When I practice golf, I go to the driving range and get two big buckets of balls…I hit quite a few bad shots. My usual reaction is to hit another ball as quickly as possible in hopes that it will be a decent shot, and then I can forget about the bad one.

Occasionally, I stop to think about why the shot was bad. There seem to be about five thousand thins you can do wrong when hitting a golf ball, so I pick one of them and work on it a bit, convincing myself that I can sense improvement…I then work on another one of the five thousand things…Not long thereafter I head back to the clubhouse, very much looking forward to playing an actual game of golf, and feeling virtuous for having practiced.”

Does this sound familiar? I know to me it does, and is, in essence, how I practiced my pitching up until a couple years ago (more on this later).

The Components of Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is: “activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual…or heavily physical…; and it isn’t much fun.”

Let’s take a closer look at each of these pieces.

Designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help

Practice needs to be designed with the intent to work on “sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved.” Identifying these elements of performance that need improvement and knowing how to go about improving them can be difficult, especially in youth, making the presence of a knowledgeable teacher or mentor who is qualified to design practice even more crucial. Colvin cites Tiger Woods as an example of someone who realizes the importance of working on specific elements of performance: “…Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie.”

Choosing which activities to practice is an important skill to have, especially when a teacher is not available. Activities fall in one of three categories: comfort zone, learning zone and panic zone (represented below). The learning zone is the only zone in which progress can be made – these skills and abilities are just out of reach. The comfort zone consists of activities which we have already mastered, while the panic zone activities are so difficult that we don’t even know how to approach them. Great performers refuse to allow their performance to become automatic. By continually engaging in deliberate practice – which is doing those things that are outside the comfort zone, automaticity is impossible. “Ultimately the performance is always conscious and controlled, not automatic…[this] is another way of saying that great performers are always getting better.”

Repetition:

Effective practice involves high repetition…but you already knew that.

Continuously available feedback:

This one is huge. If you can’t see the effects of your practice –where you err and how you’re progressing- you won’t get much better, and you’ll stop caring. We’ll re-visit this topic later as it can be applied to baseball training.

Is highly demanding mentally

Seeking out those areas of performance that are in need of improvement and then working as hard as one can to fix the problem is extremely mentally taxing. As a pitcher, the limiting factor in many of my throwing sessions is not my body, but generally my ability to sustain concentration. When I lose that crisp mental image of what I want my mechanics to look like, I begin to revert back to whatever mechanical flaw I was trying to fix, and repetitions suddenly become unproductive. This category ties into the next facet of deliberate practice.

It isn’t (usually) much fun

Colvin explains: “Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see- or get others to tell us – exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue the process until we’re mentally exhausted.”

If deliberate practice was fun though, he notes, everybody would do it and everybody would be great at what they pursued. But it’s not and they don’t, giving each of us even more of an opportunity to rise above the rest.

What else distinguishes great performers?

The ten-year rule

Colvin cites the phenomenon that was first used to describe chess players but that has been observed in a wide variety of fields since: that becoming truly great – world class – in a given field requires, almost without exception, at least 10 years of intensive study and (deliberate) practice.  “If talent means that success is easy or rapid, as most people seem to believe,” Colvin argues, “then something is obviously wrong with a talent-based explanation of high-achievement.”

The best keep getting better

This was touched on earlier. Colvin shows how, in a variety of fields, the best don’t stop improving over time as we might assume. The best musicians, authors and scientists keep improving over time, producing their best works late in their careers.

They’re “lucky”

A person’s circumstances, namely in childhood, can affect his/her ability to perform and accumulate deliberate practice. Says Colvin: “we may say that Tiger Woods is a textbook illustration of the deliberate practice principles, but we could also say that he was breathtakingly lucky to be introduced to them. In this sense, it’s perfectly fair to say that the real reason you’ll never be Tiger Woods is that your father wasn’t Earl Woods.”

We may be too far behind to achieve world-class greatness like Tiger’s in a given field, but that doesn’t nullify the deliberate practice principles. By applying them, most of us are still capable of reaching a level of expertise far beyond what we may have ever thought possible.

They perceive more

Studies of amateur tennis players show how they react to a serve by visually tracking where the ball is going…but these players are not efficient enough to react to elite serving speeds. Elite

If you want to return her serves, you better look at the hips.

tennis players can judge where the ball will be hit by looking instead at opponent’s hips, shoulders and arms. Amateur jugglers, similarly, try to follow the path of each ball with their eyes, while better jugglers can judge where the ball will be going just from the apex of each ball’s trajectory. These performers are fundamentally different from their amateur counterparts, but they got that way through a high volume of deliberate practice, not “talent.”

They know more

Colvin cites research indicating that elite performers have very extensive knowledge in their domain, and by studying for years have developed ways of organizing that knowledge by connecting it to higher-level principles to make it useful. For example, a top strength coach might see a new exercise and, instead of identifying it as an isolated case, he is able to precisely categorize the exercise: no that’s not just a specific lower body exercise, that’s a unilateral reactive exercise. The elite performer is also able to remember more and recall it faster, because his/her knowledge is well organized as a result of intensive study. Colvin asserts again that none of this is innate, as the concept of “talent” would suggest.

They self-regulate

Short-term goals: The best performers set goals that are focused on the process of reaching the outcome, not the outcome. Instead of focusing on that perfect game you are going to throw, focus on what you are going to do to get there. What are you going to do, TODAY, to get one step closer to that outcome?

Self-Observation: elite performers are able to judge how well they are doing during performance and make necessary adjustments through constant self-monitoring.

Critical Assessment: top performers hold themselves to high standards and don’t dismiss their failures. They believe that they are responsible for their errors and are able to learn from them, while average performers often blame factors outside of their control.

Reaction to failure: Colvin explains how elite performers adapt their performance when faced with failure, whereas average performers tend to avoid the kinds of situations that led to that failure in the future.

Conclusion

Some books have a happy ending that is promptly forgotten, others leave a bitter taste in your mouth. The best conclusions, in my view, are those that force you to think, to re-examine yourself or the way you perceive the world. Colvin’s conclusion slaps you in the face with the cold, hard facts, allowing you to decide for yourself what to believe.

“The evidence offers no easy assurances,” he writes. “It shows that the price of top-level achievement is extraordinarily high…but the evidence shows also that by understanding how a few become great, anyone can become better. Above all, what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and everyone.”

Before you go, and I apologize for the length of this article, I ask that you go back over the information covered and commit yourself to applying one of these principles to your own performance. Maybe you’ll commit to setting short term goals instead of “going with the flow,” or making sure your training focuses on specific aspects of performance. Thanks again for sitting through this and be sure to leave any comments or questions below.