clipped from: money.cnn.com   

Why talent is overrated


The conventional wisdom about "natural" talent is a myth. The real path to great performance is a matter of choice.


(Fortune Magazine) -- It is mid-1978, and we are inside the giant Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, looking into a cubicle shared by a pair of 22-year-old men, fresh out of college. Their assignment is to sell Duncan Hines brownie mix, but they spend a lot of their time just rewriting memos. They are clearly smart - one has just graduated from Harvard, the other from Dartmouth - but that doesn't distinguish them from a slew of other new hires at P&G.


What does distinguish them from many of the young go-getters the company takes on each year is that neither man is particularly filled with ambition. Neither has any kind of career plan. Every afternoon they play waste-bin basketball with wadded-up memos. One of them later recalls, "We were voted the two guys probably least likely to succeed."