Summary: Talent is overrated Geoff Colvin

There are times when the lure of extrinsic rewards also plays a key role. When Nobel Prize winners Watson and Crick were struggling to figure out the structure of DNA, they worked almost nonstop because they knew other research teams were on the verge of making the breakthrough as well. When Alexander Graham Bell was working on the telephone, he was acutely aware others were doing the same. As it turned out, Bell beat Elisha Gray, one of his contemporaries, to the patent office by just hours so his instincts were quite correct.

Keep asking yourself: What abilities are being applied here? Can I try out a different skill? Can I push myself?

Set a goal to get better at some specific element of your work.

and then work on acquiring specific sets of skills. Conditioning from the business context might involve acquiring the appropriate cognitive or information processing skills. To that will be added business skills like the capacity to respond to fluid market conditions and unpredictable opponents, negotiating skills and so forth.

There will probably be no established curriculum for becoming a master of your field so talk to mentors, draw inspiration from your heroes and be prepared to map out your own career development plan.

Know where you want to go– and what all the intermediate steps are to get there.

Tiger Woods, for example, has been observed to drop golf balls into sand traps and stand on them so he can practice how to make shots from that nearly impossible lie. Once he practices that, he will then move on to some other shot.
Deliberate practice is like that.

the simple reality is talent is overrated. The people who rise to the top of their fields do so through hard work and tenaciousness.

Put another way, success is 99 percent hard work

Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, would keep practicing until his hands bled. Professional golfer Moe Norman, who played from the 1950s to the 1970s, hit eight hundred golf balls a day, five days a week from age sixteen to thirty-two when he retired.