Talent Is Overrated (17 page)

 
Before the work.

 
Self-regulation begins with setting goals. These are not big, life-directing goals, but instead are more immediate goals for what you're going to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers don't set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome—win the order; close out my positions at a profit; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. For example, instead of just winning the order, their goal might be to focus especially hard on discerning the customer's unstated needs.

You can see how this is strongly analogous to the first step of deliberate practice. It isn't precisely the same; you are not designing a practice activity, but rather doing whatever the requirements of work may demand of you that day. But within that activity, the best performers are focused on how they can get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving a particular passage.

With a goal set, the next prework step is planning how to reach the goal. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They're thinking of exactly, not vaguely, how to get to where they're going. So if their goal is discerning the customer's unstated needs, their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain key words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer's crucial issues.

An important part of prework self-regulation centers on attitudes and beliefs. You may be thinking that figuring out specific goals and plans for what you'll be doing every day sounds hard. It is, and doing it consistently requires high motivation. Where does it come from? The best performers go into their work with a powerful belief in what researchers call their self-efficacy—their ability to perform. They also believe strongly that all their work will pay off for them.

 
During the work.

 
The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers use during their work is self-observation. For example, ordinary endurance runners in a race tend to think about anything other than what they're doing; it's painful, and they want to take their minds off it. Elite runners, by contrast, focus intensely on themselves; among other things, they count their breaths and simultaneously count their strides in order to maintain certain ratios.

Most of us don't do work with a significant physical element, but the same principle applies in purely mental work. The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it's going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it's an established part of their routine.

Metacognition is important because situations change as they play out. Apart from its role in finding opportunities for practice, it plays a valuable part in helping top performers adapt to changing conditions. When a customer raises a completely unexpected problem in a deal negotiation, an excellent businessperson can pause mentally and observe his or her own mental processes as if from outside: Have I fully understood what's really behind this objection? Am I angry? Am I being hijacked by my emotions? Do I need a different strategy here? What should it be?

In addition, metacognition helps top performers find practice opportunities in evolving situations. Such people can observe their own thinking and ask: What abilities are being taxed in this situation? Can I try out another skill here? Could I be pushing myself a little further? How is it working? Through their ability to observe themselves, they can simultaneously do what they're doing and practice what they're doing.

 
After the work.

 
Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. Similarly, the practice opportunities that we find in work won't do any good if we don't evaluate them afterward. These must be self-evaluations; because the practice activities took place in our own minds, only we can know fully what we were attempting or judge how it turned out.

Excellent performers judge themselves differently from the way other people do. They're more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay. The best performers judge themselves against a standard that's relevant for what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare with the performance of competitors they're facing or expect to face; sometimes they compare with the best known performance by anyone in the field. Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms what common sense tells us, that too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.

If you were pushing yourself appropriately and have evaluated yourself rigorously, then you will have identified errors that you made. A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused the errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: My opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don't have any natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors. Note that this is not just a difference of personality or attitude. Recall that the best performers have set highly specific, technique-based goals and strategies for themselves; they have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want. So when something doesn't work, they can relate the failure to specific elements of their performance that may have misfired. Research on champion golfers, for example, has uncovered precisely this pattern. They're much less likely than average golfers to blame their problems on the weather, the course, or chance factors. Instead they focus relentlessly on their own performance.

The final element of the postwork phase is affected by all the others and affects them in turn. You've been through some kind of work experience—a meeting with your team, a trading session, a quarterly budget review, a customer visit. You had thought about what you wanted to achieve and to improve, and it went however it went. Now: How do you respond? Odds are strong that the experience wasn't perfect, that parts of it were unpleasant. In those cases, excellent performers respond by adapting the way they act; average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future. That stands to reason. Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their goal. So when things don't turn out perfectly, they attribute the problems to vague forces outside their control. As a result, they are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time. Little wonder that they'd rather just avoid going through anything like it again, which of course means they have zero chance of getting any better.

Since excellent performers go through a sharply different process from the beginning, they can make good guesses about how to adapt. That is, their ideas for how to perform better next time are likely to work. So it's hardly surprising that they are more likely than average performers to repeat the experience rather than avoid it. And when they do repeat it, we can now understand why they go into it with some of the prework traits and attitudes we observed: They approach the job with more specific goals and strategies, since their previous experience was essentially a test of specific goals and strategies; and they're more likely to believe in their own efficacy because their detailed analysis of their own performance is more effective than the vague, unfocused analysis of average performers. Thus their well-founded belief in their own effectiveness helps give them the crucial motivation to press on, powering a self-reinforcing cycle.

In addition to finding opportunities to practice skills directly as well as in the midst of their work, people in the business world can pursue one more category of activities that utilize the principles of great performance to get better at what they do. We've seen how deep domain knowledge is fundamental to top-level performance. You don't have to wait for that knowledge to come your way in the course of your work. You can pursue it.

It's crazy that in most jobs and at most organizations, there's little or no explicit education about the nature of the domain. Engineers, lawyers, accountants, and others go to school to learn the skills of their profession, but when it comes to the company, the industry, financial relationships, and how the business works, most people assume they'll just pick up what they need to know, and most organizations agree. In reality, maybe you'll pick up what you need to know or maybe you won't. But in light of the critical importance of domain knowledge, it's obvious that this offhand approach to acquiring that knowledge makes no sense.

Imagine the difference if you made domain knowledge a direct objective rather than a byproduct of work. If you set a goal of becoming an expert on your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don't do now. You would study the history of the business, identify today's leading experts, read everything you could find, interview people inside your organization and outside it who could provide new perspectives, track key statistics and trends. The exact steps would vary depending on your business, but it's quickly apparent that you could make yourself impressively more knowledgeable about your business than you are today, and probably do so in short order. With time, your knowledge advantage over others would become large.

The opportunity is richer than you may suspect. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who is one of the all-time great authorities on corporate strategy, prepares rigorously for his consulting assignments by studying the client company and its industry. He once said that with twenty hours of library research (this was pre-Internet) he could know as much about the business as the CEO did. Of course Porter has spent many years learning what data to look for, so maybe it would take you forty hours. That still looks like a high-return investment. Imagine what an advantage you would hold by gaining such knowledge, especially if your employer, like most, doesn't educate employees explicitly in the most important information about the company and industry.

As you add to your knowledge of your domain, keep in mind that your objective is not just to amass information. You are building a mental model—a picture of how your domain functions as a system. This is one of the defining traits of great performers: They all possess large, highly developed, intricate mental models of their domains.

The principle applies to all fields that are complex and demanding—corporate strategy, medicine, politics, and a great many others. For example, your mental model of the domain of driving, while adequate for your purposes, is probably quite sparse. You have a general understanding of how the car works, you're highly familiar with a few well-traveled routes, and you pay a bit of attention to gas prices. But a top-performing truck driver possesses an extremely rich mental model of the same domain. He understands in detail all the subsystems of his vehicle—mechanical, hydraulic, electrical—and how they interact. He knows hundreds of routes and their features, including speed limits, road conditions, service facilities, weight limits, weighing stations, police activity, gas prices, state licensing requirements, and many others. Most important, he understands the subtle ways in which all these shifting factors combine to influence his profitability.

For anyone, a rich mental model contributes to great performance in three major ways:

 
A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your
growing knowledge of your domain.

 
We've seen how top performers can reach into their long-term memory in ways that ordinary performers can't, and how it isn't because they have exceptional memories but because they have exceptional knowledge of their domain. The organization of that voluminous knowledge in a mental model is what gives it so much power. A mental model not only enables remarkable recall, it also helps top performers learn and understand new information better than average performers, since they see it not as an isolated bit of data but as part of a large and comprehensible picture. For instance, an ordinary accountant might see a particular recent accounting rule change—Financial Accounting Statement 157—which requires companies to measure the riskiness of their assets in new ways, as a big, complicated pain in the neck that amends or deletes portions of forty-seven other statements. But a top accountant sees the change as part of a broad, post-Enron shift toward more detailed risk assessment, and understands who it helps, who it hurts, and why it was made.

 
A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from
irrelevant information.

That ability is valuable when you encounter new factors in a situation because it frees up mental resources to work on what's really important. In a study, top-performing pilots and apprentices listened to recordings of air-traffic control radio communications, and then were asked to recall what they heard. The apprentices actually recalled more of the “filler” words that had no practical significance than the top pilots did. But the expert pilots recalled far more of the important concept words. Because they heard the communications as part of a rich mental model, they could focus their brainpower on what counted.

 
Most important, a mental model enables you to project
what will happen next.