What It Takes To Be Great

What It Takes To Be Great
From Fortune Magazine by Geoffrey Colvin

“What makes Michael Jordan great? What made Berkshire Hathaway 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.”

It’s not that simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because talented natural gifts don’t exist. 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.

The good news is that the lack of a natural gift is irrelevant—talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.
Talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well.

No Substitute For Hard Work

Nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you are naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen.
There is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
Greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

Practice Makes Perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80% of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day—that’s deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”

In a study of 20-year-old violinists the best group averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next best averaged 7500 hours and the next 5000 hours. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will.