Ayodeji Jeremiah
In the past few months, a new school of thought has been making the rounds amongst the intelligentsia on the definition of success, how it is achieved, what separates extraordinary achievers from the rest of the crowd and how we can all key into this new mode of thinking. The whole concept itself upends conventional wisdom and requires one to discard old ways of thinking and embrace these new ideas unflinchingly. The crux of the argument is simple: success is not just by brains, hard work or some strange kind of talent and talent is overrated. Two provocative new books have been making the rounds in the last few months championing this argument. Talent is Overrated by Fortune Senior Editor at Large, Geoff Colvin and Outliers by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell are making the case that there must be something beyond hard work, talent or brains that carries achievers to the heights of their success.
Both authors are highly respected writers and public commentators. Donald Trump calls Geoff Colvin’s groundbreaking new book, (Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers From Everybody Else) “inspiring” and “enlightening” and says it’s “a terrific read all the way through.” Herb Kelleher says, “I rejoice!” Daniel H. Pink calls it “profoundly important.” Ram Charan calls it “exciting” and says “read it!”
As a leading thinker, writer, broadcaster, and speaker on today's most significant trends in business, Colvin has engaged hundreds of audiences on six continents. As a longtime editor and columnist for Fortune Magazine, he has become one of America's sharpest and most respected commentators on leadership and management, globalisation, shareholder value creation, the environmental imperative and related issues. Colvin is heard daily across America on the CBS Radio Network, where he reaches 7 million listeners a week and has made more than 10,000 broadcasts. As anchor of Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS for three years, he spoke each week to the largest audience reached by any business television program in America. Geoff is an honours graduate of Harvard with a degree in economics, and holds an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won the American National Magazine Award and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of two books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, (2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), both of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history.
Having established the pedigrees of the scholars peddling these new ideas, let’s take a look at what exactly they are saying. Malcolm Gladwell’s curiosity about high-achieving lawyers was the germ of his new and third book, Outliers, which was published in November 2008. It's a book about exceptional people: smart people, rich people, successful people, people who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically possible. Robert Oppenheimer. Bill Gates. The Beatles. And fancy lawyers. Gladwell starts with the lawyers. "Why do they all have the same biography?" he wondered. "We take it for granted that there's this guy in New York who's the corporate lawyer, right? I just was curious: Why is it all the same guy?" An ‘outlier’ according to Gladwell is a technical term for a phenomenon that is outside normal experience. “Scientists use it all the time when they are graphing data. You've got a nice little bell curve and then you have a couple of things that are way out here. Well, this book is about people who are way out there. I was interested in writing about success. I just became convinced that our explanations of what drives success were lacking. We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves. And we have a series of other beliefs that say that our personality, our intelligence, all of our innate characteristics are the primary driving force. It's that cluster of things that I don't agree with.” The premise of his book is that you can learn a lot more about success by looking around at the successful person, at what culture they belong to, what their parents did for a living. Successful people are people who have made the most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history or their generation.
Gladwell's goal is to adjust our understanding of how people like that get to where they are. Instead of the Horatio Alger story of success, a gifted child who through heroic striving within a meritocratic system becomes a successful, rich and famous adult, Outliers tells a story about the context in which success takes place: family, culture, friendship, childhood, accidents of birth and history and geography. “It's not enough to ask what successful people are like,” Gladwell writes. “It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.” Gladwell advocates what he calls the 10,000-Hour Rule as the most obvious key to success. Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It's simply practice, 10,000 hours of it. The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at what you do unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day or 20 hours on a five day week. As we shall see later, Colvin also advocates same calling his own, Deliberate Practice. Gladwell is asking, “whether successful people deserve the praise we heap on them.” Using himself as a case study, he entered college two years early but got lousy grades. “College was not an intellectually fruitful time for me,” he says. He was fired from his first job in journalism, at the American Spectator. It wasn't until he wound up at the Washington Post that he really bore down and learned his craft. “I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end,” he says. “It took 10 years, exactly that long.” (There you have it: the 10,000-Hour Rule in action.)
According to Outliers, genius isn't the only or even the most important thing. Gladwell's weapon of choice when assaulting myths is the anecdote and one of the book's most striking and saddest, is the strange story of Christopher Langan, a man who despite an IQ of 195 (Einstein's was 150) wound up working on a horse farm in rural Missouri, USA. Why isn't he a nuclear rocket surgeon? Because of the environment he grew up in: there was no one in Langan's life and nothing in his background that could help him capitalise on his exceptional gifts. “He had to make his way alone,” Gladwell writes, “and no one, not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses ever makes it alone.” “People talk about Bill Gates. The mythology is that he was spontaneously drawn to computers. But that's not the case. Bill Gates has this utterly extraordinary series of opportunities. When he's 13, it's 1969. He shows up at his private school in Seattle and they have a computer room with a teletype machine that is hooked up to a mainframe downtown. Anyone who was playing on the teletype machine could do real-time programming. Ninety-nine percent of the universities in America in 1969 did not have that. Then, when he was 15 or so, classmate Paul Allen learned that there was a mainframe at the University of Washington that was not being used between two and six every morning. So they would get up at 1:30 in the morning, walk a mile and program for four hours. When Gates is 20, he has as much experience as people who have spent their entire lives being programmers. He has this incredible headstart.”
Gladwell also uses the contrast of Michael Ventris (who cracked the undecipherable code called Linear B of Minoans from Knossos on Crete) and Andrew Wiles (a Mathematics Professor who solved what some thought might never be solved: Fermat’s Last Theorem). While Michael Ventris was the pre-modern genius: working mainly alone, in his free time, utterly brilliant and solving in a flash of insight after 1.5 years of free time during nights and weekends spent on the problem, Andrew Wiles, on the other hand, took about ten years to solve the theorem (close to those same 10,000 hours) and built on scholarly work over decades by a dozen other mathematicians. Gladwell notes that Wiles was less a pure genius and more a master at diligently working away at this problem and building on the shoulders of other math giants.
Gladwell argues that instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop. “Procter & Gamble is a great example of a company that does that and has prospered as a result. Look around Wall Street, or what's left of it today and you'll see lots and lots and lots of people from Goldman Sachs. That's not a coincidence. It's because they took their mission to invest in people seriously. Paradoxically, (despite the global economic crisis) this might be the perfect time for companies to take the issue of developing talent seriously. When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent. Now, you're forced to. At least that's my optimistic hope.”
Geoff Colvin tells the following story in his own book, “It Is Mid-1978, and we are inside the giant Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, looking into a cubicle shared by a pair of 22-year-old men, fresh out of college. Their assignment is to sell Duncan Hines brownie mix, but they spend a lot of their time just rewriting memos. They are clearly smart, one has just graduated from Harvard, the other from Dartmouth but that doesn’t distinguish them from a slew of other new hires at P&G. What does distinguish them from many of the young go-getters the company takes on each year is that neither man is particularly filled with ambition. Neither has any kind of career plan. Every afternoon they play waste-bin basketball with wadded-up memos. One of them later recalls, “We were voted the two guys probably least likely to succeed.” These two young men are of interest to us now for only one reason: They are Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Ballmer, who before age 50 would become CEOs of two of the world’s most valuable corporations, General Electric and Microsoft. Contrary to what any reasonable person would have expected when they were new recruits, they reached the apex of corporate achievement. The obvious question is how. Was it talent? If so, it was a strange kind of talent that hadn’t revealed itself in the first 22 years of their lives. Brains? The two were sharp but had shown no evidence of being sharper than thousands of classmates or colleagues. Was it mountains of hard work? Certainly not up to that point. And yet something carried them to the heights of the business world. Which leads to perhaps the most puzzling question, one that applies not just to Immelt and Ballmer but also to everyone: If that certain special something turns out not to be any of the things we usually think of, then what is it?”
In excerpts from the book, (Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separtes World Class Performers From Everybody Else), Colvin argues that we believe that people without a particular natural talent for some activity will never be competitive with those who possess that talent, meaning an inborn ability to do that activity. “We’ll steer our kids away from art, tennis, economics, or Chinese because we think we’ve seen that they have no talent in those realms. In business, managers often redirect people’s careers based on slender evidence of what they’ve “got. Most insidiously, in our own lives we’ll try something new and, finding that it doesn’t come naturally to us, conclude that we have no talent for it, and so we never pursue it. The concept of specific talents is especially troublesome in business. We all tend to assume that business giants must possess some special gift for what they do but the evidence turns out to be extremely elusive. In fact, the overwhelming impression that comes from examining the lives of business greats is just the opposite that they didn’t seem to give any early indication of what they would become. Jack Welch, named by Fortune as the 20th century’s manager of the century, showed no particular inclination toward business, even into his mid-20s. With a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, approaching the real world at age 25, he still wasn’t sure of his direction and interviewed for faculty jobs at Syracuse and West Virginia universities. He finally decided to accept an offer to work in a chemical development operation at General Electric.”
According to Colvin, if specific, inborn talent doesn’t explain high achievement, what does? Researchers, he says have converged on an answer. It’s something they call deliberate practice but it isn’t what most of us think of as practice, nor does it boil down to a simplistic practice makes perfect explanation. It isn’t just hard work, either. Deliberate practice is a specific and unique kind of activity, neither work nor play characterised by several elements that together form a powerful whole. The greatest performers have consistently combined these elements, sometimes just by luck. But now that researchers have decoded the pattern, the path to top performance is becoming much accessible. The elements of deliberate practice are each worth examining:
· Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. The key word is “designed.” The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago. By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved and then work intently on them. Tiger Words, intensely applying this principle, which is no secret among pro golfers has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie. The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they’re improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.
· Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot. 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 time times in a season and if those were his only opportunities to work on that shot, he’d blow it just as you and I do. Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn’t especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. 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. Peter Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than 30 years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night.
· Feedback on results is continuously available. Obvious, yet not nearly as simple as it might seem, especially when results require interpretation. You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless but your opinion isn’t what counts. Or you may believe you played that bar of the Brahms violin concerto perfectly but can you really trust your own judgment? In many important situations, a teacher, coach or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.
· It’s high demanding mentally. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities. The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for very long. Nathan Milstein, one of the 20th century’s greatest violinists, was a student of the famous teacher Leopold Auer. As the story goes, Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers, and you need all day. Practice with your mind, and you will do as much in 1½ hours.” What Auer didn’t add is that it’s a good thing 1½ hours are enough, because if you’re truly practicing with your ce from what most of us actually do. ly mean by practice, yet it isn'work on that shot, he' it counts. berate practicesepmind, you couldn’t possibly keep it up all day.
· It’s hard. This follows inescapably from the other characteristics of deliberate practice, which could be described as a recipe for not having fun. Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. 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 that process until we’re mentally exhausted. If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and no one could distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.
If you work in careers such as sports, literature and music where the concept of deliberate practice is most deeply entrenched, you’re probably thinking that the researchers have explained and elaborated on ideas that many people in your world have understood for a long time. But if you’re among the far more numerous people who make a living in business-related fields, you’re probably thinking. This is absolutely nothing like work! Life at most companies seems ingeniously designed to defeat all the principles of deliberate practice. Most fundamentally, what we generally do at work is directly opposed to the first principle: It isn’t designed by anyone to make us better at anything. Usually it isn’t designed at all. We weren’t hired to produce results. While deliberate practice demands that we push ourselves to the point where we break down and then develop a solution, in our business lives the cost of mistakes is often high. Every incentive urges us to stick with what’s safe and reliable, which ensures that we won’t improve. At most companies, the fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognised or ignored. A few companies are however beginning to realise that adopting the principles of great performance are huge. But maybe you don’t work in one of these organisations and maybe you’re not in a position to change your company’s culture and way of operating, you can still apply the principles of great performance on your own through self regulation.
Why do certain people put themselves through the years of intensive daily work that eventually makes them world-class great? This is the deepest question about great performance and the researchers do not offer us a complete answer. We’re reached the point where we must proceed by looking in the only place we have left: within ourselves. The answers depend on your response to two basic questions: What do you really want? And what do you really believe? What you want, really, deeply want, is fundamental because deliberate practice is an investment: The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort until the payoff starts to arrive. But if you’re pursuing something that you don’t truly want and are competing against others whose desire is deep, you can guess the outcome. The second question is more profound. What do you really believe? Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work and do it with intense focus for years on end, your performance will eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there’s a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance. But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, then there’s no chance at all that you will do the work.
Talent is good, hard work is also good but then not everyone who is talented or who works hard is successful. These new ideas force us to look at the issue of practise, isolate good and bad factors in one’s environment, take advantages of the good factors, eliminate the bad factors and open our eyes and mind to make maximum use of opportunities that surround us or come our away. It may sound a bit simplistic but that is the recipe for success.
