Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else was published in 2008 by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin. Geoff Colvin is a senior editor at large at Fortune magazine and one of the most respected business journalists of his generation. The book emerged from his investigation into a question that most people believe they already understand: why do some people become extraordinarily good at what they do while most people, despite years of experience and obvious effort, remain merely competent?
The conventional answer to that question is talent. Some people are born with gifts that others simply lack, and the gifted rise to the top while the ungifted plateau at whatever level their natural endowment supports. Colvin’s investigation of the research on elite performance leads him to a radically different conclusion: the evidence for innate talent as the primary explanation for world-class performance is, on close examination, remarkably thin. What the research actually shows, across domains as diverse as chess, music, surgery, sport, and business, is that great performers have almost universally engaged in a specific, demanding form of practice that most people never undertake, and that this practice, not innate endowment, accounts for the overwhelming majority of the performance gap between the elite and everyone else.
