The Beatles – scorned in Liverpool when they weren’t simply ignored – were at the point of breaking up in the summer of 1960, when they were offered the chance to go to Hamburg, to play in a red-light district dive. (Beatlemaniacs of a certain age will know that they got even this marginal gig only after it had been turned down by Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and even Cass and the Cassanovas.)
They went, and – according to their definitive biographer Mark Lewisohn – performed live for a total of 415 hours in fourteen weeks. They returned to Liverpool a revelation – simply electrifying. Back in Hamburg for three months and 503 more hours of performance in the spring of ’61, the Beatles emerged thereafter as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time.
Earl Woods placed a putter in Tiger’s hands at the age of seven months; his entire life from that point on was teaching his son the mastery of golf. Mozart’s father, a domineering parent who was also a famous composer and performer, started his Wolfgang on an intensive training program in composition and performance when the boy was three. Chris Rock honed the comedy act he would do in his first sold-out show at Madison Square Garden by practicing it night after night in a little club in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
These were not geniuses; none was born with any kind of preternatural gift. They achieved what they did by relentless hard work, and then something extra: a highly specific kind of effort which the journalist Geoff Colvin argues – in his intriguing little book Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else – may be termed deliberate practice.
The idea that a particular kind of applied hard work – that which focuses single-mindedly on gradual but cumulative improvement – may be dispositive in anyone’s career should be an epiphany for us advisors.
All my experience of being an advisor, observing other advisors and ultimately counseling them professionally convinces me of two things. The first is that this is a business of lifelong learning, that we can always be improving both our understanding of the capital markets and our skill at dealing with human nature. And the second is that that’s actually the only way we do learn.
There seems to be something in our personality that prevents us from learning intellectually. We were all taught in training not to speculate, not to trade, not to try to time the markets. Yet virtually all of us have had to go out and make these and countless other mistakes in order to become convinced not to make them anymore. Hence my conviction that we advisors are able to learn only experientially.
Colvin’s gift to all of us who learn this way is simply the epiphany that we can go on doing so, without apparent limit, all the time. That’s what makes Talent is Overrated an indispensable read for advisors. We may never be Mozart, Lennon/McCartney or Woods, but we can in a real sense follow their behavior patterns to the very top of our profession.
© 2015 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in the “Resources” feature of his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. To download the current sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com, and click on “Newsletter.”