Still No Substitute For Hard Work
Fortune Magazine looks at what it takes to be successful.
“The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.
“Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.”
“The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call ‘deliberate practice.’ It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.”
An exhaustive study by researchers at Florida State University looked at successful performers in a variety of disciplines. That study has since been expanded into additional fields including business. With the notion that “[a]nything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill,” these studies are looking at the relationship between successful business leaders/innovators and the exalted artists, performers and athletes sitting on the other side of the coffeehouse.
21 October 2006 | Business, Consulting | Comments
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