# Talent Is Overrated ## Metadata * Author: [Geoff Colvin](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B001HD8NZ8 * ISBN: 1591842247 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001HD8NZ8 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8) ## Highlights The concept of deliberate practice, advanced by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues and since — location: [1040](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1040) ^ref-800 --- 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.” — location: [1125](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1125) ^ref-35941 --- Bring Up Genius!) — location: [1195](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1195) ^ref-31762 --- When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, — location: [1300](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1300) ^ref-11866 --- 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. — location: [1315](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1315) ^ref-28340 --- Blink, Malcolm Gladwell — location: [1339](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1339) ^ref-14261 --- The problem is that improvements in reaction speed follow what scientists call a power law (because there’s an exponent in the formula) and what the rest of us call the 80-20 rule. That is, nearly all the improvement comes in the first little bit of training. After that, lots more practice yields only a little additional improvement. Top — location: [1353](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1353) ^ref-35915 --- the importance of deep knowledge — location: [1525](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1525) ^ref-37938 --- The researchers proposed what has become known as the chunk theory. Everyone in the experiment remembered more or less the same number of chunks of information. For the novices, a particular piece on a particular square was a chunk. But for the masters, who had studied real positions for years, a chunk was much larger, consisting of a whole group of pieces in a specific arrangement. — location: [1562](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1562) ^ref-12367 --- Anders Ericsson and Walter Kintsch, called it long-term working memory. — location: [1589](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1589) ^ref-3230 --- For spoken presentations, a particularly effective approach would be a juiced-up Ben Franklin technique: Watch a presentation that you consider especially well done and make notes of its various points; later, after you’ve forgotten most of it, use your notes to create a talk making the same points; deliver the talk and record it; then compare your video with the original. — location: [1753](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1753) ^ref-49274 --- will benefit from rereading Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis, a book you probably got when you started; and I guarantee you will learn something important that you’d forgotten. For people who write and edit, the same applies to Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Every field has — location: [1802](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1802) ^ref-1012 --- trying to improve a specific aspect of your performance, high repetition, immediate feedback. — location: [1818](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1818) ^ref-45758 --- best performers are focused on how they can get better at some specific element of the work, — location: [1839](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1839) ^ref-49104 --- the next prework step is planning how to reach the goal. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They’re thinking of exactly, not vaguely, how to get to where they’re going. So — location: [1841](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1841) ^ref-51801 --- The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers use during their work is self-observation. For example, ordinary endurance runners in a race tend to think about anything other than what they’re doing; it’s painful, and they want to take their minds off it. Elite runners, by contrast, focus intensely on themselves; among other things, they count their breaths and simultaneously count their strides in order to maintain certain ratios. — location: [1849](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B001HD8NZ8&location=1849) ^ref-46086 ---