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Easy to read and filled with great case studies to show that deliberate practice can produce great results. Helps motivate us to work harder and achieve.
He shows the research and tells the stories of hope and aspiration -- if you focus, you can achieve higher heights. And, he admits that doing the right type of practice over and over is anything but fun. He is the voice of the rugged, focused and motivated. This is an invaluable business book and should be on every manager's bookshelf.
It has to be the "right" practice. They both point to research that shows practice does make perfect. Perhaps most refreshing is his correlation of management demands with the demands of any great performer. Gladwell says that the opportunity to get those practice hours is determined by fate. Relieving to most of us, the successful are not necessarily prodigious nor possess innate talent. Colvin expresses in terms of years -- 10 to be exact; Gladwell expresses it in hours -- 10,000. Colvin is quite different. His exposition is not shallow cheerleading.
He throws down the gauntlet -- with hard thinking, practice and perseverance, you can build a better organization and achieve better results. It's uncanny that Colvin and Gladwell simultaneously studied what is at the core of success. While the time adds up to be equivalent, their conclusions are different. To the contrary, he reveals that any old practice is not enough.
For every Olympic champion, there are thousands who invested just as much practice time, who persevered through the same challenges, as those who won the gold. This book is totally lacking in explaining why some achieve these heights, while most toil in obscurity. Thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands, of corporate workers, toiling in excess of sixty hours a week, aspiring to be regional manager, let alone CEO. Mr. This book would lead the reader to believe it was purely the quality of one's preparation.
The author reaches into various disparate fields of endeavor to prove this point--golf (Tiger Woods), composing (both Mozart and the Beatles), chess (the Polgar sisters), stand-up comedy (Chris Rock), and others. Colvin fails to explain the thousands of people who put in just as much effort, tried just as hard, and had the same teachers and mentors as those who achieved notable performance. Thousands of garage bands who spent all of their waking hours searching for that big hit. Balderdash. True enough, the book illustrates case after case where world-class performance springs, not from some innate ability possessed at birth, but rather via effective practice.
Colvin bolsters this pattern by showing how, repeatedly, ten years of concerted effort preceded the respective breakthroughs for the individuals cited.However--and this is where I find this thesis lacking--Mr. Why have these hundreds of thousands, or shall we say, millions, not achieved their goals.
Also how having a great coach makes a big difference. This is a book that all young people should have the opportunity to read so they don't fall into the trap that you have to have talent but if you really want to succeed in your chosen field then you really have to put in a lot of hours of practice. Geoff talks about deliberate practice which is practicing something that you are not good at over and over until you master it then you move onto the next thing you are not good at. He explains with a lot of examples about successful people how it in not really based on talent but on hard work and practice. I was brought up to believe that you had to have talent to be successful in something. This is one of those books that makes you look at successful people in a different way. Geoff Colvin book breaks that myth down. One thing he has found out is that the more deliberate practice you do in your chosen field then the better you will get at it.
The author reinforces with notiable examples and scientific studies that old adage, "there is no subsitute for hard work." I wish I had read this and trully believed in its teachings at a younger age. I would like to see the author get better notoriety for this great read. Excellent book whether you are a coach, parent, educator,manager or a wanna be superstar. Very readable and interesting.
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