Talent matters

Previous submission of canonical URL, with comments:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339</a><p>Response piece to the two authors of the New York Times opinion piece, by a leading researcher on the subject, as submitted to HN:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576</a>

One of the things that I hate about journalists is they often don't see that their commentary has no relation to what the source is saying:<p>"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.'"<p>Yes, IQ isn't that important. Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!

So, practice accounted for 50% of success; working memory accounted for only 7%. Of course talent matters. Hard work matters more.<p>A hard worker with less talent will beat a talented slacker [tortoise &#38; hare]. But a talented worker beats everyone. No surprises here.<p>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.

i'm curious as to how their "core working memory" theory jibes with work showing that chess grandmasters could remember complex chess configurations if they were configurations that could occur in real chess games, but with random board placement they could do no better than ordinary people.<p>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.<p>My point, I don't think they've done enough to disentangle potential dependences.

This seems like a deeply flawed study. Their definition of "talent" is "performance on tests of working memory"? That just appears to be totally bunk.<p>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.

Single page:<p><a href="http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984AE4CCD72DF111DBBC.w5?a=870400&#38;single=1&#38;f=28&#38;sub=Sunday" rel="nofollow">http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984...</a>