There’s a perennial question about how much achievement something depends on talent, and how much on hard work. Perhaps genius (or even garden variety exceptional performance) is written into someone’s genes, or perhaps what separated Einstein from his peers had more to do with his work ethic than his IQ.

Evidence points in both directions. On the one hand, most high performers, whatever their field, emphasize how important hard work – rather than ‘just talent’ – is to their achievements (e.g. Terrence Tao, Will Smith, Ira Glass, Thomas Edison). Some, like Malcolm Gladwell, talk about a ‘10000 hour rule‘ as the required hard work before one can truly excel. Perhaps the main proponent of the ‘Arbeit uber alles’ approach is Erikson’s work on deliberate practice. On the other hand, there are lots of instances where innate physical or mental characteristics play an important role: the average height of NBA players is 6’7″, Intelligence (albeit imperfectly measured by IQ) seems to predict lots of things (including various intellectual achievements) – and it appears to remain predictive even into the very high range.

So perhaps it is a mix. But the precise mechanism of the mix could be important; how do innate talents and amount of training relate to one another when it comes to achievement? Could some maths help?

A Growth-mindset model

Here’s one suggestion, implied by Uri Baum:

Performance = Talent + Practice intensity x Time practising[ref]Perhaps even better would be to use a time integral here, as likely practice intensity will vary over time. But multiplication is simpler, and simplicity is better than precision for toy models.[/ref]

On this sort of model, talent counts, but as time passes, practice matters more. Unlike talent – a static given – one can grow a stock of practice over time, and time invested in practice and hard work has a rich return on performance (c.f. Hamming’s remarks). An attractive corollary is that if one can improve one’s practice intensity, be that through more focused training, deliberate practice, better learning styles, etc. this acts as a multiplier – working smarter, as well as working harder may be a stronger determinant of success than talent.

If so, extraordinary talent may be a curse – it could let us coast. Bram suggests there might be a mechanism where if we select for exceptional achievement, we select for people with varying mixes of raw talent and hard work. The group which skew more towards the latter may overtake those skewing to the former former over time: those who skew towards more practice time and intensity will be able to grow faster, whilst those who mainly got to where they were ‘just’ on their talent may find they are hitting a wall unless they can improve how they develop. Continue reading “How far can hard work take us?” →