What it takes to be great
“Natural talent” vs “Practice makes perfect” always strikes me as a question when looking at career development and hiring. Geoffrey Colvin at Fortune Magazine writes a great article with set of real examples on targeted natural gifts doesn’t exist, but consistent practice is what makes people great:
What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t.
Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.
Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.
What it takes to be great - [Fortune @ CNN Money]
Tags: 
Get your own Avatars at 
Loading ...
Comments
Jeffrey Seely says on October 24th, 2006 at 9:35 am
This is an incredibly important concept.
My favorite example is Mozart. Read this quote from a Seed Magazine article:
“Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week— his father was known as a stern taskmaster—he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated Ericsson’s golden number of 10,000 hours of practice. In addition, Mozart’s early symphonies are not nearly as accomplished as his later works.”
Factors such as age and genes are overemphasized, in my opinion. Just because you decided to pick up the piano at age 20 doesn’t mean you can’t attain Mozart status. There are too many counterexamples to list here…
And by the way, thanks for linking the great article. ^^
Alexei Kapterev says on October 24th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
“Human potential movement” is the term which springs into my mind when I read this. “You can be whoever you want to be!”… Yeah. Of course you can! Apparently, it does not help al that much. Why? Because there aren’t that many things you actually WANT to be. In fact, most of the time you don’t know who you want to be. This is the real problem.
At some point you may decide to be somebody but over a certain period of time you realise that you want to be somebody else. If you are lucky enough you realise that you just don’t want to be anybody other than yourself. Which means employing YOUR unique personal history and your unique genetics - think “natural talents” at this point.
It is exeptionally hard (and therefore useless) to motivate yourself to study financial statements if you are not enjoying it. And you can not like anything. Humans don’t work that way. You have certain flexibility but not all that much. So if you don’t like - or even LOVE doing something you will never be able to compete with people who do. And using talents FEELS GOOD. Gifted people just LIKE what they do. Period.
So the bad news is that the only way to be successful and ultimately happy is to use your natural talents. The good news is that using your talents actually makes you happy. So the real question is - what are your talents? But that’s a whole different issue which still has to be addressed.
Rebecca G says on October 25th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
I’ve often noticed that a weakness lies at the core of a great strength. Half of the great salespeople I’ve met have been annoyed by a lack of people skills, and learned to analyze sales techniques. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I’ve talked to hate paperwork, and make taming/delegating it a priority. The best organized people I know have disabilities like ADD.
It’s funny how conquering an annoying problem can be such a satisfying passion.