Geoff Colvin (1) (1953–)
Autor(a) de Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
Para outros autores com o nome Geoff Colvin, ver a página de desambiguação.
Obras por Geoff Colvin
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (2008) 1,194 exemplares
Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (2015) 85 exemplares
The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath (2009) 26 exemplares
Here It Is. Now, You Design It! 1 exemplar
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1953
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- USA
- Local de nascimento
- Vermillion, South Dakota, USA
- Locais de residência
- Fairfield, Connecticut, USA
- Educação
- New York University (MBA)
Harvard College (AB) - Relações
- Colvin, Shawn (sister)
- Organizações
- Fortune magazine
CBS Radio
Membros
Críticas
Listas
You May Also Like
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 5
- Membros
- 1,307
- Popularidade
- #19,642
- Avaliação
- 3.8
- Críticas
- 22
- ISBN
- 37
- Línguas
- 4
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS PRINT: © 10/16/2008; 978-1591842248; Portfolio; 1st edition; 240 pages; unabridged. (Hardcover info from Amazon.com)
DIGITAL: © 10/4/2008; Portfolio; 9781101079003; 252 Pages; unabridged. (Kindle info from Amazon.com)
*AUDIO: © 11/26/2019; Penguin Audio; Duration: 8:14:00; unabridged. (Audio info from Amazon.com)
SERIES: No
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: Don (hubby) added this book to our Audible library quite some time ago. I am trying to listen to these that we have purchased. It didn’t sound like a title that would interest me, but I was wrong.
ABOUT: It’s about the theory most of us believe that some people have an inborn proclivity that makes the development of a skill easier for them than for an average person approaching the activity. The author suggests that this isn’t necessarily so and sites numerous examples of people who seemed to have demonstrated an accomplished skill at an early age who actually worked much harder at developing it that is commonly known. It suggests that often the credit should be shared with the parent or other figure who has supported the interest and the devotion to development. He explains the kind of practice that develops a skill and the kind that doesn’t. What it takes, he states, to develop a “talent,” among many factors, is perseverance, a willingness to fail, and an interest that surpasses the disappointment of falling short of one’s goal.
OVERALL OPINION: Very interesting. Some of the exemplary child prodigies that I’ve long considered evidence of skills carried over from previous lifetimes, may not be that after-all. It may still at least be a carry-over of a knowing that eventually, they can be great since they were once before—but, I’m finding myself less inclined to hold onto that line of reasoning. (Mind you, I’m not abandoning reincarnation.) The good news is, for those of us who lose patience with ourselves and give up under an assumption we lack the necessary inborn talent, we can take heart that if we are willing to put in the grueling practice, we have a very good chance of easing in to greatness.
AUTHOR: Geoff (Geoffrey) Colvin: Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“Geoffrey Colvin is the author of Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (ISBN 1857886380); Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (ISBN 9781591842248); and The Upside of the Downturn: Management Strategies for Difficult Times. He is co-author of Angel Customers and Demon Customers: Discover Which is Which and Turbocharge Your Stock (ISBN 9781591840077). He is a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune Magazine.
Education: Colvin obtained a degree in economics from Harvard and received his MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.
Talent is Overrated
The thesis of Talent is Overrated is that the greatest achievers succeed through lifelong "deliberate practice." Colvin characterizes it as “activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it pushes the practicer just beyond, but not way beyond, his or her current limits; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun". "Some 40 years of research show that specific, innate gifts are not necessary for great performance.”
NARRATOR(S): Geoff Colvin. See above.
GENRE: Nonfiction; Business; Psychology
TIME FRAME: Current
SUBJECTS: Music; Sports; Skill Development; History
DEDICATION: “For my sons”
SAMPLE QUOTATION: From Chapter One
“The Mystery
Great performance is more valuable than ever—but where does it come from?”
“Look around you.
Look at your friends, your relatives, your coworkers, the people you meet when you shop or go to a party. How do they spend their days? Most of them work. They all do many other things as well, playing sports, performing music, pursuing hobbies, doing public service. Now ask yourself honestly: How well do they do what they do?
The most likely answer is that they do it fine. They do it well enough to keep doing it. At work they don’t get fired and probably get promoted a number of times. They play sports or pursue their other interests well enough to enjoy them. But the odds are that few if any of the people around you are truly great at what they do—awesomely, amazingly, world-class excellent.
Why—exactly why—aren’t they? Why don’t they manage businesses like Jack Welch or Andy Grove, or play golf like Tiger Woods, or play the violin like Itzhak Perlman? After all, most of them are good, conscientious people, and they probably work diligently. Some of them have been at it for a very long time—twenty, thirty, forty years. Why isn’t that enough to make them great performers? It clearly isn’t. The hard truth is that virtually none of them has achieved greatness or come even close, and only a tiny few ever will.
This is a mystery so commonplace that we scarcely notice it, yet it’s critically important to the success or failure of our organizations, the causes we believe in, and our own lives. In some cases we can give plausible explanations, saying that we’re less than terrific at hobbies and games because we don’t take them all that seriously. But what about our work? We prepare for it through years of education and devote most of our waking hours to it. Most of us would be embarrassed to add up the total hours we’ve spent on our jobs and then compare that number with the hours we’ve given to other priorities that we claim are more important, like our families; the figures would show that work is our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most people are just okay at what they do.
In fact the reality is more puzzling than that. Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. Auditors with years of experience were no better at detecting corporate fraud—a fairly important skill for an auditor—than were freshly trained rookies. When it comes to judging personality disorders, which is one of the things we count on clinical psychologists to do, length of clinical experience told nothing about skill—“the correlations,” concluded some of the leading researchers, “are roughly zero.” Surgeons were no better at predicting hospital stays after surgery than residents were. In field after field, when it came to centrally important skills—stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants—people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little experience.
The most recent studies of business managers confirm these results. Researchers from the INSEAD business school in France and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School call the phenomenon “the experience trap.” Their key finding: While companies typically value experienced managers, rigorous study shows that, on average, “managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes.”
Bizarre as this seems, in at least a few fields it gets one degree odder. Occasionally people actually get worse with experience. More experienced doctors reliably score lower on tests of medical knowledge than do less experienced doctors; general physicians also become less skilled over time at diagnosing heart sounds and X-rays. Auditors become less skilled at certain types of evaluations.
What is especially troubling about these findings is the way they deepen, rather than solve, the mystery of great performance. When asked to explain why a few people are so excellent at what they do, most of us have two answers, and the first one is hard work. People get extremely good at something because they work hard at it. We tell our kids that if they just work hard, they’ll be fine. It turns out that this is exactly right. They’ll be fine, just like all those other people who work at something for most of their lives and get along perfectly acceptably but never become particularly good at it. The research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.
So our instinctive first answer to the question of exceptional performance does not hold up.”
RATING: 4
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1/8/2024-1/13/2024… (mais)