Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin, David Drummond

Greatness is your choice.by Champion

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July 13, 2009: This book dispels the great myths about talent. It explains how anyone can be great. The research was exhaustive and compelling. My friend recommended listening to it on the audio version. He was so right! Listening to it had a much greater impact than reading it would have done.

Well-researched, easy to read, and motivationalby hwonglam

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July 07, 2009: This book answers a seemingly simple question with lots of well-summarized research results from academic studies. Compared to Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", this book is a bit more academic, but it is still very easy to read, as it is written for the general public.

What started as a book on finding out what constitutes success in the business world, the book evolves into the topic of parenting at various places along the way. Our upbringing, our motivation to excel, and our focused practices to overcome our weaknesses explain more about our success than our pure intellect. Finally, although our genetic makeups don't explain who of us are more likely to be successful, there is still the unexplained question on why some of us are so much more motivated to withstand the painful process that is necessary to become successful. Perhaps what differentiates the successful from the non-successful is how much we are able to 'enjoy' or 'tolerate' the process of long hours of purposeful training and practices to become experts.

For those who would like to raise successful children, this book provides recipes and the underlying principles. I was not expecting this book to be much of a parenting book when I first started to read the book. As it turns out that upbringing constitutes a big deal towards our success as adults, I have recommended this book to young parents.

I also recommend Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", which is even more readable, though less authoritative and less well-researched than this book.

I Also Recommend: Outliers.