Not too long ago, I read a book (Erfstukken: pieces of inheritance) by one of the Netherlands’s most respected journalists: Paul Witteman. He is not just a great political journalist, but also an expert regarding classical music. Anyway, an important part of the book or more of an essay actually, was dedicated to the belief that ‘talent’ decides who will be a successful musician and who will not. Well, he wrote that most of that belief is nonsense. After doing research, so he wrote, it seems that the world’s greatest musicians were, in fact, drilled from an early age to become what they later became. They studied for hours and hours, just about from when they were just born.
In other words: talent is greatly overestimated.
Today, I read this interesting article about just that.
What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it – or you don’t.
Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.
Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant – talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.
Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”
The scientists asked themselves: why is it that some people stop developing, stop progressing, stop improving, while others are? The answers?
– experience: 10-year rule. What’s the 10-year rule? One needs to have at least 10 years of experience in a particular field, before one can become ‘worldclass’.
Of course, that does not explain it all. So there must be more ‘answers’.
– Practice… smart:
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
Something relating to the book written by the journalist I mentioned above:
Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.
The last page of the three-page-article deals with what this means in one’s job, in business life.
Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it – each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.
[…]
Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital.
I found it to be a great read. In improving one’s own life, knowledge is essential. Most specifically: knowledge and understand of one’s own capabilities.
The key to success? Deliberately work to improve yourself. Every day. Or in the words of the great Abraham Lincoln: I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
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