Are the great ones born or developed?  That question has always been of interest to me since I saw an early Eddie Murphy movie called "Trading Places", in which one rich brother picks nature as the answer, the other picks nuture.

More recently, Fortune's Geoff Colvin has released a book titled "Talent is Overrated", in which he points to recent research that indicates that stars are usually not born, but developed through a practice called "deliberate practice". 

More on the theory from Colvin via Fortune:

"So if specific, inborn talent doesn't explain high achievement, what does? Researchers have converged on an answer. It's something they call "deliberate practice," but watch out - it isn't what most of us think of as practice, nor does it boil down to a simplistic practice-makes-perfect explanation.

It isn't just hard work, either. Deliberate practice is a specific and unique kind of activity, neither work nor play. It's characterized by several elements that together form a powerful whole. The greatest performers have consistently combined these elements, sometimes just by luck.

But now that researchers have decoded the pattern, the path to top performance is becoming much more accessible. The elements of deliberate practice are each worth examining:

1) Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. The key word is "designed." The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we've done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.

By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Tiger Woods - intensely applying this principle, which is no secret among pro golfers - has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie.

The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they're improved; then it's on to the next aspect. In most fields, years of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge.

At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it's almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual's performance. It's striking how many great performers had fathers who started designing their practice activities at early ages; Tiger, Picasso, and Mozart are perfect examples.

So is the New York Giants' Super Bowl MVP quarterback, Eli Manning, whose father, Archie, was a successful NFL quarterback. Archie was always ready with instruction for Eli (and for his brother Peyton, Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts). Eli always seemed clear that intense practice was key. According to a new biography, Eli Manning: The Making of a Quarterback, "Eli never bought into the gene theory."

Fascinating stuff.  Watch the video and think about it the next time you're shooting hoops with your kid or watching them play an instrument...