Business Insight Zone

“There’s nothing you’ve ever been successful at that you didn’t work on every day.”

That’s the takeaway message from this TIME story and this 60 Minutes profile on Will Smith as he prepares for next week’s debut of his new film, “I Am Legend.” In the 60 Minutes piece, he discusses his “sickening” dedication to hard work:

“I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy’s sleeping? I’m working. While the other guy’s eatin’? I’m working. While the other guy’s making love, I mean, I’m making love, too. But I’m working really hard at it,” he tells Kroft, laughing.

Here’s how the TIME piece puts it:

With his ready grin, jug ears and baritone belly laugh, Smith’s image is that of the happy-go-lucky Everyguy. But you don’t accrue $4.4 billion in worldwide box-office receipts and two Oscar nominations without machine-like drive. Smith’s four most recent movies–The Pursuit of Happyness, Hitch, Shark Tale and I, Robot–have each grossed more than $300 million worldwide . . . Because Smith has mastered the delicate art of appearing artless, few moviegoers realize that his is one of Hollywood’s most meticulously planned and executed careers.

Those key phrases: “ridiculous, sickening, work ethic,” “machine-like drive,” “meticulously planned and executed” put me in mind of Prof. Anders Ericsson’s work on “deliberate practice,” about which I’ve been reading a lot lately. (A good place to start on the topic is this great 2006 Geoff Colvin article from FORTUNE: “What it takes to be great.”)

If I have a clear picture of Smith’s meticulous planning and incremental self-improvement, he embodies what Ericsson has studied across many fields of endeavor (chess, science, golf, writing, surgery, and so on). While Ericsson’s work has many ramifications, one of his most startling findings bears out what Smith says about his own talent: many expert practitioners display only a modicum of talent, but virtually all expert practitioners have work routines characterized by incessant practice — and not just practice, but deliberate practice that is designed to improve their skills constantly.

The poster children for this phenomenon are Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, who dominate their sports as few individuals ever have, and who will tell you in a heartbeat that, for all their accomplishments, they still have much more improvement in front of them. It’s the same as the greatest CEOs: as their companies post record quarters, they’re thinking ahead about how to be better next quarter, next year, and ten years down the line. All of these performers also benefit from sophisticated “mental models” of their fields of expertise (another area that Ericsson has researched); apparently Will Smith shares that trait, if you consider his comments from the TIME and 60 Minutes articles about the way the movie business works.

Food for thought: how much better could you be at your job if you engaged in deliberate practice? And what could your organization do to foster deliberate practice?