More detail on Book Review of Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin

Expert performance is acheived through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is defined as an activity that:

• is designed specifically to improve performance
• can be repeated a lot
• its feedback on results is continuously available
• is highly demanding mentally
• isn’t much fun

An additional aspect of deliberate practice is that it is designed to keep one in the zone defined as between comfort and panic. Learning in panic is too hard, in comfort too easy.

A primary purpose of deliberate practice is to create expert memory or long-term working memory. Which is to say people that can attach meaning to a piece of data are able to push it into a special area of long-term memory that allows for quick retrieval and use within the current context. This allows them to remember vastly more than the typical seven or so chunks that a non-expert could expect to recall. This large memory makes them greater performers. Even though their general memory is no better than anyone else’s

Most of the book is based in a solid footing of primary research and is well written with concise examples. There is one weak chapter on innovation. It quotes other authors of books and looses that evidence backed foundation. The vast majority of this book is excellent and provides a strong framework for anyone desiring to better understand how to create expert performance.