Fortune magazine's cover story this week is "What it takes to be great." Here's what Fortune says the story is about.

"Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work."

The Puritans would have loved it. The core of the article is an attempt to support The Myth of Talent hypothesis, which says that if you want to succeed at something, then talent is irrelevant.  That hypothesis seems to me like pure nonsense.

If it were true, I would be a great opera singer.  I love opera.  I love to sing. So if talent didn't matter I should be preparing for another powerful performance in a great opera house, instead of pounding out this blog on my laptop.

It is more reasonable to me that there are basically three levels of natural ability.  There is what most of us get.  Then there is the level of "talent." 

Folks with talent do easily what the rest of us do only with lots of hard work.  But talent pales compared to genius.

Geniuses do easily what the talented can do only with hard work.  As Howard Gardner pointed out in his book Frames of Mind, there are geniuses in different areas of human endeavor.

We tend to think of "genius" as a term used for people who are great in fields like science, music, art, and math.  It was Gardner who hypothesized that there are geniuses in other fields, such as physical activity.  Think Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods for examples.

Since Gardner introduced his theory over twenty years ago, other writers and researchers have identified additional "intelligences."  Daniel Goleman, in the Introduction to Business: The Ultimate Resource, even speculates that there might be a "business intelligence."

So, let's follow common sense and agree that talent, or strengths, play a role in success and in the level of success in a particular endeavor.  After all, that's precisely the reason that folks like Peter Drucker and Marcus Buckingham have recommended that we build on our strengths.

Even if you decide that talent is important, you'll get some good stuff from the Fortune article which makes two key points.

The first point is that nobody gets great without hard work.  In fact it seems that it takes at least ten years of concentrated effort to master a domain.  The best explanation of that phenomenon that I've seen is in another book of Gardner's, Creating Minds.

The second key point in the Fortune article was the one that made me sit back and say, "Wow!" It made sense of what I'd seen out in the world.  Here's a quote from the article.

"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."

If you read nothing else in the article read the part about "deliberate practice." The old adage is that "Practice makes perfect." But that adage is clearly wrong.  Practice may make permanent, but only a particular kind of practice makes perfect, and Fortune has zeroed in on it.

The Fortune article takes these insights and then goes on to discuss how it all applies to business. In the end, after many good points, they're left with a key question that none of us can answer, "Why are some people motivated to do the extra, focused work while others are not?" 

Wally Bock helps leaders at every level improve the performance and morale of the group they're responsible for. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless because it teaches through a story, the way human beings have always learned complex lessons best.

Check out the Personal Development Resources on the Three Star Leadership web site.