Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.

deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.

Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.

What great performers have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.

A study of figure skaters found that sub-elite skaters spent lots of time working on the jumps they could already do, while skaters at the highest levels spent more time on the jumps they couldn’t do, the kind that ultimately win Olympic medals and that involve lots of falling down before they’re mastered.

Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.

If you set a goal of becoming an expert in your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don't do now.

Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it.

even if high-IQ people do better than low-IQ people when first trying a task that’s new to them, the relationship tends to get weaker and may eventually disappear completely as they work at the task and get better at it.

you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.

When Tchaikovsky finished writing his Violin Concerto in 1878, he asked the famous violinist Leopold Auer to give the premier performance. Auer studied the score and said no—he thought the work was unplayable. Today every young violinist graduating from Juilliard can play it. The music is the same, the violins are the same, and human beings haven’t changed. But people have learned how to perform much, much better.

Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible difficulties along the way. There are no exceptions. If you believe that doing the right kind of work can overcome the problems, then you have at least a chance of moving on to ever better performance. But those who see the setbacks as evidence that they lack the necessary gift will give up—quite logically, in light of their beliefs. They will never achieve what they might have.

What you want—really, deeply want—is fundamental because deliberate practice is a heavy investment.

The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.

The best computer programmers are much better than novices at remembering the overall structure of programs because they understand better what they’re intended to do and how.

When top-level chess players look at a board, they see words, not letters. Instead of seeing twenty-five pieces, they may see just five or six groups of pieces. That’s why it’s easy for them to remember where all the pieces are.

So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.

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.

The costs of being less than truly world class are growing, as are the rewards of being genuinely great.

Avoiding automaticity through continual practice is another way of saying that great performers are always getting better. This is why the most devoted can stay at the top of their field for far longer than most people would think possible.

Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.

Mozart’s earliest symphonies, brief works written when he was just eight, hew closely to the style of Johann Christian Bach, with whom he was studying when they were written. None of these works is regarded today as great music or even close.

if customer ignorance is a profit center for you, you’re in trouble.

Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful. A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, was in charge of the company’s Asian operations during a major Japanese earthquake and the Asian economic collapse. He says that’s when he discovered that “you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.” His

The cash held by US companies are hitting all time records. Companies are using some of this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a company is doing this it is saying to it's investors: We don't have any good ideas what to do with this, so here--maybe you do.

Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed “golf addict” who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible.

Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in one and a half hours.

World-class chess players, in addition to being considered awesomely smart, are generally assumed to have superhuman memories, and with good reason. Champions routinely put on exhibitions in which they play lesser opponents while blindfolded; they hold the entire chessboard in their heads. Some of these exhibitions strike the rest of us as simply beyond belief. The Czech master Richard Reti once played twenty nine blindfolded games simultaneously. (Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site and commented on what a poor memory he had.)