Talent matters
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339
Response piece to the two authors of the New York Times opinion piece, by a leading researcher on the subject, as submitted to HN:
"He adds that intellectual ability - the trait that an I.Q. score reflects - turns out not to be that important. 'Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,' he writes, 'having additional I.Q. points doesn't seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.'"
Yes, IQ isn't that important. Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!
> Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!
Did we read the same article? IQ still matters past the top 10%!
> The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.
That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
The difference in intellectual capacity between the top 10%, 1% and 0.1% (or 90, 99, 99.9 percentile) isn't necessarily proportional to the "percentile ranking difference".
No matter how you cut it, shifting less than a percentile and getting the measured increase is dramatic. (So dramatic that I can't help but wonder if there are non-intelligence explanations - could it all be due to Matthew or network effects?)
Within that range, I've known people who've grown up to be complete failures by any reasonable measure, and those who have become great successes. The work really matters more than anything, for any reasonable, predictable goal.
You can't study/practice yourself into becoming an extraordinary anything (I'm talking like Albert Einstein / Bob Dylan level). But certainly those who reach that level do practice a lot. But they also had raw talent.
A hard worker with less talent will beat a talented slacker [tortoise & hare]. But a talented worker beats everyone. No surprises here.
However... if you work hard, other talents you do have may eventually find an application/be revealed [ugly duckling], because depending on the situation, a flaw can be a gift (and vice versa). So in hindsight, it may turn out that you were the talented one after all.
Is it that certain people who look at numbers more are able to construct patterns in digits where others wouldn't, but may not be able to do the same with a sequence of pictures or words.
My point, I don't think they've done enough to disentangle potential dependences.
I also think that the "spend 10,000 hours" thing is flawed, in the fact that you generally only spend 10,000 hours on something you are very interested and talented in. Basically, it is very hard to separate "hard work" from "talent", because most people only really work hard at things they're talented at.