The expression “He’s so talented” or “she’s so talented” has always made me cringe. Perhaps it’s due to my personal experience with practicing and my suspicion that excellence was achieved a lot more through hard work than sheer talent.
I just finished a book called Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. The author is Geoff Colvin and his thesis is that “innate abilities are far less important than we generally believe and may not even exist. Inborn gifts aren’t the cause of success; therefore each of us must be responsible for his or her own achievement.”
Colvin writes that “this makes many people uncomfortable, but the good news is . . . we’re far more able to achieve what we want.”
Although the book was marketed to a business audience, Colvin received a surprisingly intense response from parents, who passionately told him how much their kids needed to hear the message…the message that, across a wide range of fields, in order to achieve excellence, one must do a lot of preparation (intense practice, study, intensive toil).
“Our culture celebrates achievement and worships celebrity, but virtually ignores where they came from…i.e., the staggering amount of work behind the skills developed.”
Colvin notes that child prodigies are often like stars that shine brightly but quickly fade, rarely remaining successful into adulthood. As soon as they hit a wall, they often become discouraged and quit. By comparison, those who had won piano competitions had memories of being forced to take piano lessons. They were not born with any kind of innate drive or rapid learning ability. It wasn’t until their teens that they developed the intrinsic drive to keep them going.
Practice is cumulative over many years. In a study conducted at the Music Academy of West Berlin, professors rated students into three categories of good, better, and best. All students were in their early twenties and all were practicing 24 hours a week. Why were some better than others? It boiled down to their practice history. By age 18, the best group had accumulated 7,410 hours of lifetime practice on average, versus 5,301 hours in the better group, versus 3,420 hours in the good group.
Does practice make perfect? No, only deliberate practice makes perfect. It must be designed specifically to improve performance, must be repeated a lot, must have continuous feedback, requires concentration and plenty of time, and is not inherently enjoyable.
If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, Colvin offers us this consolation: “It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.”
Perhaps this is why so many students who have come through years of music lessons have also become doctors or other professionals . Through years of discipline and practice, they have learned to excel and have become world-class performers.
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August 23rd, 2010
Thanks Sherri for your timely post on practicing. Now to encourage all our students to understand the importance of deliberate and sincere practice.
August 23rd, 2010
Well said! I have seen this time and again in my years of teaching Music for Young Children and private piano, but your article brings out a most important point that is often overlooked.
August 23rd, 2010
So true. Often my best students are the ones with the most consistent practice habits, not the ones that seem to have the most innate “talent.”