Excellent.--The Wall Street Journal

Since its publication ten years ago, businesspeople, investors, doctors, parents, students, athletes, and musicians at every level have adopted the maxims of Talent Is Overrated to get better at what they're passionate about. Now this classic has been updated and revised with new research and takeaways to help anyone achieve even greater performance.

Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer--but we're almost always wrong. That's important, because if we're wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about.
Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery. Bringing together extensive scientific research, bestselling author Geoff Colvin shows where we go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable. It isn't specific, innate talent, nor is it plain old hard work. It's a very specific type of work that anyone can do--but most people don't.
What's more, the principles of great performance apply to virtually any activity that matters to you. Readers worldwide have been inspired by this book's liberating message: You don't need a one-in-a-million natural gift. Better performance, and maybe even world-class performance, is closer than you think.

This systematic approach to classroom management provides evidence-based strategies for assessing student insubordination and offers guidelines for developing individual intervention plans that improve cooperation.

How to keep meltdowns from overheating your classroom

This book outlines practical steps for preventing and responding to the various phases of meltdown behavior in students with ASD. Based on Geoff Colvin's best-selling book, Managing the Cycle of Acting Out Behavior in the Classroom, this practitioner-friendly guide provides special and general education teachers with his seven-phase positive behavior support model that includes interventions for each phase. Readers will also find:

• An overview of the nature of autism and meltdown phases
• Case studies with examples of behaviors and plans
• A chapter on parent communication
• Prevention techniques for the early stages of the cycle

It's easy to imagine a nightmare scenario in which computers simply take over most of the tasks that people now get paid to do. The unavoidable question--will millions of people lose out, unable to best the machine?--is increasingly dominating business, education, economics, and policy.

The bestselling author of Talent Is Overrated explains how the skills and economy values are changing in historic ways and offers a guide to what's next for all workers. Mastering technical skills that have historically been in demand no longer differentiates us as it used to. Instead, our greatest advantage lies in our deepest, most essentially human abilities--empathy, creativity, social sensitivity, storytelling, humor, relationship building, and expressing ourselves with greater power than logic can ever achieve.

These high-value skills craete tremendous competitive advantage--more devoted customers, stronger cultures, breakthrough ideas, and more effective teams. And while many of us regard these abilities as innate traits, it turns out they can all be developed. As Colvin shows, they're already being developed in a range of farsighted organizations, including the Cleveland Clinic, the U.S. Army, and Stanford Business School.

While many practicing Christians are relatively satisfied with their prayer life, others are not. The latter often find their prayer practice has dried up. Their traditional forms of prayer at churches have become routine and empty. In a very real sense, there is a void in their spiritual lives. They want a deeper union with God yet experience an unsettling estrangement with their current pathway in prayer. In Contemplative Prayer at Work in Our Lives, Geoff Colvin draws on his own experiences, studies of spiritual literature, and participation in retreats and meditation groups, to unravel the challenging practice of contemplative prayer, a unique form of meditation involving very few words in silence and stillness. Contemplative prayer centers on the fundamental belief that God dwells not only in the world at large but also at the center of our being. This book offers Christians an approach for understanding contemplative prayer followed by hands-on detail for developing and sustaining a practice that hopefully leads to a richer and fuller spiritual journey to union with God.

While many practicing Christians are relatively satisfied with their prayer life, others are not. The latter often find their prayer practice has dried up. Their traditional forms of prayer at churches have become routine and empty. In a very real sense, there is a void in their spiritual lives. They want a deeper union with God yet experience an unsettling estrangement with their current pathway in prayer. In Contemplative Prayer at Work in Our Lives, Geoff Colvin draws on his own experiences, studies of spiritual literature, and participation in retreats and meditation groups, to unravel the challenging practice of contemplative prayer, a unique form of meditation involving very few words in silence and stillness. Contemplative prayer centers on the fundamental belief that God dwells not only in the world at large but also at the center of our being. This book offers Christians an approach for understanding contemplative prayer followed by hands-on detail for developing and sustaining a practice that hopefully leads to a richer and fuller spiritual journey to union with God.

This systematic approach to classroom management provides evidence-based strategies for assessing student insubordination and offers guidelines for developing individual intervention plans that improve cooperation.

Never waste a crisis.
Some businesses--and some people--will emerge from today's economic tumult stronger and more dominant than when it started. Others will weaken and fade. It all depends on critical choices they make right now.

Geoff Colvin, one of America's most respected business jour-nalists, says even the scariest turbulence has an upside. The best managers know that conventional thinking won't help them in tough times. They're taking smart, practical steps--frequently unconventional and even counterintuitive--that will not only keep them strong, but will also distance them from the pack for years to come.

The dozens of top-performing leaders Colvin interviewed reject the common view that slashing costs and firing employ­ees are the only effective tactics. They see volatility as a rich opportunity to reinvent their organizations and lay the ground-work for future growth.

Colvin shows us how these strategies really work, using exam-ples of major companies that have successfully applied them.