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Comment by zasz | Hacker News Reader

It makes more sense to say that talent is necessary but not sufficient. I'd like the writer to provide examples of people who had no apparent talent at all, even lacking whatever talents are necessary to get into a good college, and show me how many billionaires you get from that group. Saying that out of a crowd of Ivy League graduates, since only two made it big, that being an Ivy League graduate had absolutely nothing to do with it at all, makes no sense.

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Thomas A Edison lacking talents to get into a grade school has physical limitation (deaf) but invented? phonograph?

i would even say as far that limitations (talent, physical, money etc) are necessary to make it big

Just because you're deaf, doesn't mean you can't have mechanical aptitude. And what if your limitation is that you have Down's Syndrome? Clearly, some parts of human ability are genetic, and some of the variance in human ability is innate. I'm just not impressed to hear that out of a hundred smart people, only 5 became successful. That doesn't prove talent has nothing to do with it. If a study showed that the rate of success was 5% regardless of "talent," whatever that is, that would be something, but the article didn't do that.

I suppose if your limitation is mild poverty though, you'd probably have a lot more ambition to move onto something better than somebody born into a comfortable middle-class life.

Edison counted deafness among his talents because it enabled him to focus better.

I don't think this is true. According to the article, talent is a result of hard work directed in the proper direction (eg, working on stuff that you aren't good at). And the number of billionaires you get from the group with 'no apparent talent' has at least two examples from the top of my head; Alan Sugar and Felix Dennis were both pretty close to this mark (if not in excess at points).

I think proving something like this is unfeasible. What is shown in studies of expert performance is that there's a very strong correlation between the hours of deliberate practice and expertness in some field. That is, pretty much without any exceptions, experts in any field have been practicing for thousands of hours, the number typically quoted is in the order of 10000 hours. This doesn't prove anything particular about the necessity of talent, but it proves that at least hard work is necessary.

But, on the other hand, nothing in these studies suggest that some talent-like property is necessary.

The problem with those studies is that they analyzed successful experts. I want to see a study where they have everyone putting in thousands of hours of work. How many kids get into Juilliard every year, and how many achieve the same level as Yo Yo Ma? How many grad students are working their asses off at Caltech and MIT right now, and how many of those are actually going to produce some significant mathematical work? I don't doubt that ambition and effort are necessary, but of course some degree of talent must be key as well.

Reminds me of George W Bush.

archiving the rank of ___ and then going down in infamy for being the worst of the ___ is probably not an achievement.

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