Secrets of Greatness

This continues the thread about achieving greatness in any field. My brother sent me a link to an article about deliberate practice. That turned out to be a 44-page PDF file. So I Googled and got this valuable & fairly short article. A couple of excerpts:

"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."

"Armed with that mindset [of deliberate practice], people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.
Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset."

Very interesting. The two questions Manisha and I want answered:

• How do you know the person in question is not "talented"?
• How do you keep/stay motivated for long stretches of time without frequent rewards? I suppose the answer is intrinsic motivation; i.e., you do the activity for its own sake and the rewards you get from your improvement are enough to keep you going. But that raises the question of why that particular activity interests you so much.