Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?

"I’d say 92.2% is much more 'significant' than 7.8%, at least in terms of practical meaning!"

That's really not how it works. Consider that in cycling roughly 95% of your energy comes from your aerobic system and only 5% of your energy comes from your anaerobic system. So does that make your aerobic system more important than your anaerobic system? Yes and no. If you want to win the race then at some point you are going to have to break out of the peloton and sprint past everyone, so really it's going to be the quality of your anaerobic system that determines who wins a large percentage of the time. So you can't really judge how important each variable is just by looking at the size of its contribution to the end goal.

Whenever someone talks about studies like these, I just can't help picturing a bored 16 year old giving random answers to a seemingly never-ending questionnaire they were told to participate in.

"After all, working memory is common, but greatness is rare."

So...it must just be a combination of many factors. Inherent intelligence or working memory can be useful, but so many other things influence whether you become "great" at something...unsurprisingly.

The papers linked to were interesting in how they looked at the different domains (poker, piano sight reading). I mean this certainly is an interesting thing to study, but I don't imagine there will be some proven way to achieve greatness any time soon rather than just deliberate hard work or something. Or maybe there will?

It's true that greatness is rare, but I think that's partially a combination of rarity of skill and the fact that there are few people willing to put in the number of hours required to achieve greatness. (Yes, I definitely believe in the 10K hours theory).

Take John Coltrane as an example. I think it's fair to say that most people consider him a genius and an extremely talented saxophone player. But he was definitely NOT one of these child prodigies like Mozart. He worked hard and put in many many hours of training. So many, in fact, that some other musicians (notably Miles Davis) saw him as a bit boring since "all he ever wanted to do was practice".

That could also be attributed to the fact that he kicked a bad heroin addiction and so didn't see much point in doing anything other than what he loved, playing music.

So, yes, you do need high ability to achieve greatness, but high ability/skill is something that can be acquired and is not necessarily inborn.

I speculate that long term working memory (if there's such a thing) may be more interesting to look at. There was a Q&A session in which Jobs said something to the effect of "the problem with the naysayers is that they are right." The unspoken addendum in my mind is "-- in the short run". This is akin to hasty optimization. If you have good short term memory but bad long term memory you are going to win at tactics but lose the game.

So, "Gattaca" had it right, then?

Que 15 minutes of Sunday afternoon navel-gazing.

I believe -- unscientifically -- that sometimes high intelligence or high ability, can be detriments to greatness.

I often see things that I think were done in a half-assed manner that are quite successful. I see people shipping things that I would never ship, and being successful at it. I'm not talking about spending inordinate amounts of time to get every pixel right (Though Apple may be a contrary example to my thesis here) ... I'm talking about spending an extra %1-%5 of time to make your site not be butt ugly.

I think PlentyOfFish.com is probably good example. He focused on different things and was a huge success. Its still ugly now, but it used to be, and for many years, was totally butt ugly.

Sometimes people of very average intelligence but great social skills do really well. Downright dumb people with the right personality -- e.g. the jocks who are now venture capitalists-- do better than smarter people.

This is an ongoing debate between my cofounder and I. Normally, my cofounder is the one putting forth this thesis.. the claim being that we're too smart to be successful. (Not in an arrogant way, there are lots of smarter people I know.) But I am starting to think my cofounder may be right. For instance, I do tend to over engineer, over optimize, and under execute.

So, our personal motivational theme these days is "just ship it". Can't fight the desire to make it not be crap, but we're shipping more.

PS-- another example of this is thinking you've got a key functionality right, because you're smart, you "know" this is the right way to do it, and then focusing on optimizing in other areas. So, you ship a game that looks gorgeous but has poor gameplay, or you completely miss the mark on the way your customers want to use your product because most people are not like you (because most people are average and you're not.) etc.