Posted on October 29, 2013 by Ivan Chan

It’s just not fair.

You work hard. You come up with your fair share of good ideas. You are perfectly competent for the work you’ve been hired to do.

Sadly, nothing of that seem good enough with that all-star colleague of yours outshining you at the office. Their great ideas simply make yours look second-rate. They make everything look easy and effortless and leave you wondering exactly how they do it.

They just get it somehow, while everyone else around them is struggling to keep up.

How did they get to be so good?

What Makes Top Performers Special

Top performers, as you may have noticed, seem nothing like us.

They possess superior knowledge of their subject matter as compared to everyone else. They have an extraordinary ability to remember facts and details that are important to their work. And they apply that deep knowledge and insight to solve problems better than anyone else.

They seem truly talented and gifted in what they do. It is as if they were born that way.

Surely, innate talent must be the reason why they are special and better than everyone else.

A Study On Top Performers

In 1992, a study was done in England on 257 young men and women. The goal of the study was to prove whether or not talent plays a part in the success of young musicians.

The participants were categorized into 5 groups. The top group consisted of students who were admitted into music schools by competitive audition. The bottom group consisted of students who have given up on music after trying an instrument for at least 6 months. The rest of them were sorted accordingly into 3 more groups in between.

Now, let us pause and think for a moment.

What do YOU think should be the logical conclusion from this experiment?

It would be reasonable to expect the more talented the person, the easier it would be for them to achieve success. After all, top performers just get it before the rest of us do. Their raw talent gives them an innate edge that us ordinary mortals simply can’t match.

At least, that’s the common understanding anyway. So let’s see what ACTUALLY happened in the study.

The Fascinating Result

As it turns out, top performers aren’t born to be top performers at all.

Researchers found that the average number of hours needed to reach a certain musical grade level for all groups is virtually the same. For example, all 5 groups require approximately 1200 hours of practice before they reached grade 5 in music.

That means the only reason the top group progressed faster and achieved more at an earlier age was because they had practiced more. There was absolutely no such thing as a “talent shortcut” as far as achieving musical success was concern.

Even if the top group was supposedly more talented than everyone else, their talent offered them no advantage whatsoever over the others in achieving success. Hard, consistent practice was the only reliable (and repeatable) way to get ahead.

So much for talent being the defining factor in a student’s success.

What Really Matters

Extrapolating the results of this study, it’s possible then that anyone can achieve success – in music or in life – by simply practicing hard and in the right way. The earlier you start, the earlier you’re going to reach all-star status.

But the question is how. Specifically, how can you practice to get better in your career? How do you practice to be a better project manager or a better marketing professional or a better lawyer?

Here is what you need to do: engage in “deliberate practice” as described by Geoff Colvin in his book Talent Is Overrated.

The idea is that you breakdown your job into specific skill sets and knowledge areas. Then you focus on improving them one at a time in a structured and repeatable process.

Let’s talk about that next.

10 Tactics To Help You Become An All-Star At Work

1. Be ultra specific in where you want to end up. Simply say you want to be a “better project manager” wouldn’t get you anywhere. That goal is too vague. And vague goals are demotivating because you don’t know how exactly to achieve it. You want to identify specific things to deliberately practice. Using the example of the project manager, a better target may be getting 80% or more people to respond to what you want in 48 hours or less. With this specific goal in mind, you may subsequently identify that you need to improve on your communication skills.
2. Find yourself a coach. Okay, so you know what you want but you don’t know how to get there. Consider finding a coach who can guide you through your journey. Ideally, your coach has already been through what you’re currently struggling with. If you don’t know how to get somewhere, you need to find a someone who does.
3. Always poke. This is an idea popularized by Seth Godin. Poking means to experiment in small, consistent ways so you can get feedback on what you’re doing as often as possible. Try a new email template and see if people reply differently. Try changing the tone of your voice in speeches and see if people pay more attention. The more you poke, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you can improve.
4. Practice like a sports star. Professional athletes practice specific skills (and not just game scenarios) because they know the situations in which they will have to apply their skills are never the same. In business, you should condition the basic skills which you use to produce your work, just like an athlete would condition their muscles. Review grammatical rules if you’re an editor. Solve equations by hand (instead of a computer) if you’re an engineer. Analyze past medical case studies if you’re a doctor.
5. Don’t lose sight of the process. Outcomes are important, but the process is what truly matters. That’s because you can’t possibly have good outcomes if you don’t have a good process. By all means, set goals that focus you towards achieving specific outcomes. However, improving the process is what will ultimately get you the outcomes you want.
6. Pay attention to what you’re doing. When we first start practicing a skill, we’re usually motivated and focused on the task. However, if we’re not careful complacency will set in and our focus wavers over time. You cannot afford this. An effective way to battle complacency is to regularly change what you do. It’s in our human nature to sit up and pay attention to what’s new and different. So, have you poked lately?
7. Mine for feedback. Get as much feedback as often as you can. Otherwise, how would you know what you need to improve on? The best way to get feedback is just to ask. Survey the audience after a presentation. Ask a coworker to review your work. Discuss with your boss what he/she is looking for in a top performer. If you ask, you may just get exactly what you need.
8. Deepen your knowledge of your business. Spend time learning about your business. If you’re an engineer, do you know who your company’s competitors are? If you’re a copy editor, do you know how your company actually makes money? This extra knowledge may seem trivial at first. But the more you know how your business operates, the easier it will be for you to provide real value to your company.
9. Put the puzzle together. Take the time to understand how things work on their own as well as how everything functions together in a system in your chosen field. A good working model of your subject area (and your business) gives you a framework to incorporate future information. It allows you to distinguish useful information from that which is not useful. Finally, it allows you to better predict what might happen in the future.
10. Rinse and repeat. Top performers continuously learn and improve. Average performers ignore what has happened and don’t bother to make changes. Over time, the tiny improvements made by top performers amount to a staggering advantage over everyone else. It’s that simple. So keep on improving your craft. Your company/customers/clients really do want and need you to be awesome.

Are You Ready To Be An All-Star?

As you can see, you don’t need special talent to do this. Instead, all you really need are just two things.

One, it is knowing what to do. That part is easy –  you can find it right here in this post. Just come back and look at the 10 points above whenever you need a reminder.

Two, it is actually applying what you’ve learned here. To start, pick one thing from the list above and apply it today. Remember, the earlier you start, the faster you’re going to become awesome at what you do.

You really can do this. You really can become indispensable at work. You really can outshine everyone else.

All you need to do is practice, deliberately.

Will you?