I am currently reading

Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin

. He started off explaining why the concept of

Born Genius

is flawed and later introduced a concept called

Deliberate Practice

. How can we use this concept to achieve exceptional performance.

How do you like this book?

This is an excellent book. I had known about these concepts earlier as well. But, with this book I got a framework to understand how to practice deliberately and create a mental model to achieve high performance.

Yeah, but there are certain fields where talent definitely matters. And I have been working in a team of Generalists, I realized how unusually easy it is some people to grasp new tech & math and understand stuff.

@many-intern-37109 I agree with your point but it's not talent vs delibrate practice. They complement each other, you become talented from practicing deliberately, stretching yourself and getting feedback (the cycle mentioned in "so good they can't ignore you"). People can't grasp new tech because they lack delibrate practice - which will help you to learn how to learn. There are good enough generalists and there are mediocre generalists. A mathematician who has solved 1000s of problems with deliberate parctice is more

talented

than mathematician who has solved 100 problems so far in their career.

Absolutely. I would also like to add having a solid foundation/experience of learning new stuff, it's an art where one should approach it smartly. I recently read about a book called Flow, where he mentions about being in a Zone/ Mental state of having a balance of working on challenging problems and learning. Being involved in ML Research and Engineering both, I personally experienced different mindset being used when I switch the context. Research needs a lot of iterations, patience and tolerance to failures. Engineering requires a different set of skills and mindset to build good products. I believe there are others factors in play as well than working 1000 hours on something to be good at. A Person could be great at something but mediocre at something else even after x hours. But definitely, deliberate practice is required to be in the top percentile, it's way too easy to settle in the mediocre bracket.

Good convo 👍