The mystery: where does great performance come from? Let’s allow Colvin to present his case and demystify talent and everything related, myth by myth. Then again, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In short, what we now know is that geniuses like Tiger Woods, Beethoven or Walt Disney are not born once in every 100 years, for the simple reason that great performance is not 50% innate talent and as much hard work, but 99% deliberate practice. “The growing mountain of research that has accumulated in just the past 30 years,” he adds just after, has “converged on some major conclusions that directly contradict most of what we all think we know about great performance.” “It turns out that our knowledge of great performance, like our knowledge of everything else, has actually advanced quite a bit in the past couple of millennia,” writes Colvin teasingly. In his tellingly titled third book, “ Talent Is Overrated,” Colvin reveals that the very idea of “talent” is nothing short of a scientifically unsupported myth, not much different from all those stories about sun gods and dragons, in that it is basically something the ancient people invented to explain the world, in this case, the extraordinariness of some people’s achievements. Well, according to Geoff Colvin – an American journalist, broadcaster, motivational speaker, and senior editor-at-large for “Fortune” – talent is even less important than what the previous line of thought suggests. In other words, it’s safe to say that talent is not everything, and that at least some part of the success can be attributed to hard work.

Of course, even the most radical defenders of this idea are aware that even if you do have some kind of talent – or “a gift” as they sometimes call it – you are bound to remain stuck in mediocrity unless you work hard as well. At least as far as most people are concerned, either you are born with a certain talent, or you are never going to become the next Mozart, the next Tesla, or the next Michael Jordan.

Talent is overrated by geoff colvin