In Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else, author Geoff Colvin hangs his hat on deliberate practice as the quality that separates the great from the average. Innate ability and hard work matter less than repetitive highly demanding physical or mental actions designed to improve performance.

 

Choosing what performance to improve is an important skill in itself. Colvin uses the work of Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School and former chief of General Electric’s Crotonville management development center, to illustrate his point. Tichy draws three concentric circles and labels the inner circle, “comfort zone,” the middle one “learning zone” and the outer one “panic zone.” Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities that we can already do easily, while panic-zone activities are so hard we don’t even know how to approach them.