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Few psychological topics have attracted as much lay interests as talent, and nowhere is talent more visible and astonishing than in professional sports. Yet the question of why top athletes, and indeed businesspeople, achieve such exceptional levels of performance is still widely debated, and there is no universal formula to turn an average human into the next Tiger Woods, Roger Federer or Richard Branson. One of the reasons for this disappointing state of affairs is that evaluations of talent tend to rely mostly on improvised, intuitive, and experience-based observations. In other words, there is no clear theoretical framework, no robust measurement tool, and, above all, an absence of objective, data-driven, facts about talent and human potential. As a consequence, even most experts play it by ear and we are left with interesting but anecdotal stories about top performers, which amount to mythological rather than scientific views on the subject.

That's why this book is so important. Warren Kennaugh is unlike any other author in this area because of his vast expertise, not only in sports sciences, but also in personality assessment. He has pioneered the use of scientific profiling tools in competitive sports and in business, evaluating hundreds of athletes and managers, linking dozens of personal qualities, competencies, and traits, to actual performance metrics. He achieved this in a variety of business sectors and sports and with a level of rigour uncommon outside of academia, not only understanding, but also advancing the science in this field. More importantly, this book is an unprecedented attempt to digest all this evidence and present it in an accessible, non-technical, and user-friendly way. Fit is bound to become a benchmark work in sports psychology and in business, essential for anyone interested in understanding the key determinants of athletic and organisational performance, at the individual, team and corporate level. In addition, it will be an extremely useful resource for athletes and managers themselves, given the wealth of evidence-based advice on coaching and self-coaching. I also believe that Fit can be a game-changer when it comes to furthering people's interests in assessment-based solutions for professional sports. We have long assumed that rigorous profiling tools can be applied to enhancing performance in sports, much like they are in the world of education, human resources, and the military – thanks to this book, we now know it.

Finally, Fit will no doubt surprise readers with one of its main postulates: the idea that talent is overrated, particularly compared to personality. Although this idea is counterintuitive, it mirrors our own conclusions from assessing millions of individuals across different domains of competencies and industries over the past three decades. In fact, one could take this idea further and argue that talent is little more than personality in the right place. That is, once we can decode what people typically do, what their default emotional and behavioural tendencies are, and how they consistently differ from others, all we need to do is put them in the right context, and their natural habits – which we can call character or personality – will turn into strengths. In other words, the only reason for not having talent is failing to find where you fit.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

CEO at Hogan Assessments & Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University