Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performance from Everybody Else
By Geoff Colvin
Rating: 8 of 10

Colvin, Fortune Magazine’s Senior Editor-at-Large, argues in Talent is Overrated that if there is an in-born talent in geniuses and high-performers, it has not yet been found, and an easier explanation for world-class performance is a very long process of deliberate practice.

Colvin explores several different case studies, but let’s review just one: Mozart, an assumed musical genius.  Mozart was born to a father who was a famous composer and performer, but even more important his father was an expert in musical pedagogy (the art of teaching a subject or discipline).  Mozart’s early compositions are not in his own hand.  His father exercised editorial control over his son’s work and had a keen sense for marketing Mozart.  His compositions during his teenage years are mostly adaptations of other works, a common strategy for teaching composition.  Colvin notes that none of these early works are today considered masterpieces, and Mozart’s first masterpiece didn’t come until the age of twenty-one, after eighteen years of “extremely hard, expert training.”  Colvin adds that Mozart’s supposed claim to see or hear an “almost finished and complete” work in his mind comes from a letter that scholars now consider a forgery.  Based on today’s “precocity index,” a score that describes how fast a “child-prodigy” progresses, Mozart was at a mere 130%, 30% faster than the average student; whereas with the help of today’s training methods, children reach 300-500%.   According to Colvin, Mozart was good, but not as good as we might imagine.  He goes on to explore in similar ways Tiger Woods, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett among others.

In two key chapters titled “What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t” and “How Deliberate Practice Works,” Colvin outlines the path to exceptional performance through deliberate practice.  Here are the key points:

1. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance.  It is designed not by the individual doing the practice (unless they have reached the highest levels of performance and are themselves an expert) but by someone who is an expert on the huge field of knowledge that surrounds any given discipline and can pinpoint specific activities of practice in the “learning zone.”  Mozart’s father’s expertise in musical pedagogy is an example.  Or to put it more simply, who is your expert coach?
2. Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot.  This repetition isn’t just doing the same thing over and over.  It’s doing a particularly hard specific activity pinpointed by a coach in the “learning zone” over and over.
3. Feedback on results is continuously available.  Measurement is key.  Seeing whether you are accomplishing what you are aiming to accomplish is essential.
4. Deliberate practice is highly demanding mentally.  This is the difference between mindless practice of easy things and deliberate focus on the tasks that are difficult and mentally challenging.
5. Deliberate practice isn’t much fun.  Practice, get feedback, and look at what isn’t going well.  Then repeat the aspect that isn’t going well again and again until it is done right.  This kind of practice is focused on what you probably don’t like doing.

Those who engage in deliberate practice end up with several new skills:

1. They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don’t even notice.
2. They look further ahead.
3. They know more from seeing less.
4. They make finer discriminations than average performers.

Throughout the whole book Colvin points out just how much time deliberate practice takes.  Therefore, if someone wants to be a top-level performer, but only makes that decision later in life, the obstacles are almost insurmountable to have the time to achieve top-level performance.  Their peers who began as children are already thousands of hours ahead of them.  Perhaps this fits well with an idea that Marcus Buckingham, another well-known business consultant, often makes: it is unlikely that we will improve our weakness so we ought to focus instead on our strengths (See The One Thing You Need to Know which makes the argument that they key to sustained success is to find out what you don’t like doing and stop doing it!).

The most obvious application for pastors is in the weekly sermon.  Having an expert communication coach would improve a pastor’s communication skills significantly.  Another idea might be repeating over and over (until “mental exhaustion” as Colvin suggests) one or two parts of the sermon that you really wanted to communicate well instead of the sermon as a whole.  Some less obvious applications would be having an overall leadership coach (Path1 provides just such coaches).  Running through team meeting agendas ahead of time with a coach could be a way of practicing deliberately.

Because I am reviewing this book for our New Church Committee I’d also like to make some observations about how Colvin’s ideas might help us in our big-picture strategy to plant churches and in a new church pastor’s individual strategy to plant a specific church.

New Church Committee

1. Who is our expert coach giving us continual feedback on our church-planting process?  Our committee has attended the School for Congregational Development, but maybe it would be worth investing in a coach for the committee or the committee chair.
2. Our own process of planting a church is much slower so how can we take a particular part of the process and repeat it a lot?  We could do that by choosing a particular part of the process and then sitting in on several other conferences’ moments of performing that part of the process (i.e. watch other conferences evaluate prospective candidates).
3. Benchmarks will be key to continual feedback on results.
4. For us to do this well, it will be mentally challenging.  Our commitment to planting churches can’t be a side commitment.  It will have to be a full commitment of body, mind, and spirit.  Perhaps members of the committee need to make sure they protect their time commitments so that they have plenty of energy to devote to this mentally challenging task (i.e. being available to attend things like SCD, Church Planting 101, etc.).
5. We’ve just gone through a couple of processes that weren’t very much fun.  Colvin’s admonition that deliberate practice isn’t much fun should encourage us.  We worked on some areas that we were failing.  That’s part of learning how to do church planting well.

New Church Pastor

1. An effective new church pastor is probably going to be one that has grown up practicing specific skills that are required to plant a new church.  It is unlikely, according to Colvin, that you can start late in life at acquiring the necessary skills and be very successful at what you are attempting.  This might mean that they grew up or have spent significant time in the culture of a new church.  It also might mean that they have a record of growing or planting churches in the past (or as we have heard over and over again in various settings – a record of having the creativity to start all kinds of new things).
2. For those who began early, having an expert coach who directs them in specific practices will be key to the success of their church plant.  This coach must be an expert in the field and perhaps even more so, an expert in the pedagogy of coaching and training new church pastors.
3. Introducing future potential pastors (middle and high school students) and young new pastors early on in their calling to new church ideas and skills will yield more “high-performers” later in life.  Could we create a new church academy specifically for this population or invite middle and high school students to attend a new church academy?

Questions and Conclusion

I have several questions that I must ask about how to integrate Colvin’s ideas with various Christian beliefs.  Over and over again he takes shots at the “divine gift” idea of talent.  Colvin’s ideas are based in research and science.  If excellent performance is mostly the result of a natural training process, then how are we to understand spiritual gifts?  Are spiritual gifts divine aptitudes given by God or are they “divine” results of a lifetime of training?  Our Wesleyan theology of sanctification suggests that we grow both naturally and supernaturally through a process of training the mind and body in certain habits and practices that are means of God’s grace working in our lives.  Are Colvin’s ideas simply an extension of the “natural” side of our theology of sanctification, or do they lack something vital because they discount the idea that God can supernaturally give gifts to specific people whether they have had the right amount of practice or not?  I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I think they are questions we must wrestle with if we are to fully embrace Colvin’s ideas and methodology.