6 ms·

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. But if talent starts working hard, it's game over.

adamsea 6y ago
"Talent" is not always a there-or-not quality. IMHO it depends what we're talking about, and to what degree. Math genius, NBA player, obviously yeah you need some degree of inborn talent plus a crazy intense environment (for the NBA) in your youner years. But there's a huge range below "world elite" where "talent" is relevant, and it's not at all clear when it's a "you-have-it-or-you-don't" kind of thing. Same with hard work. Two people work hard; one person has a more efficient system, or a better teacher. It's not zeros and ones here imho.
quezzle 6y ago
This hits the mark. Anyone can be moderately good at most things if they work and try hard. But to be truly exceptional it often requires built in talent.
edmundsauto 6y ago
I think of it as more relevant to the inner game.
lutorm 6y ago
But the only thing under your control is how hard you work. Do other people that are more capable than you exist in the world? Maybe. But how does that fact influence your actions?
AlexCoventry 6y ago
Talent is too vague a concept to be useful.
- bjoli 6y ago
  Intelligence as measured by IQ on the other hand is a very well defined concept. It is a quite good predictor of all kinds of life "success" (however that is defined). It is not fluent. Of course it is not everything, and there are lots of idiots who believe so. However, the whole "you can do anything if you put your mind to it" is is not true. The people who are the worst off in society (and I live in "socialist Sweden") are the people with weak theoretical ability, but still within what is called average intelligence. The have the worst mental health, the worst physical health, the worst economical situation and the highest criminal record. The idea that working hard solves everything (from the right) and the idea that intelligence does not matter (while politically mainly catering to the middle class - the left) have made society a worse place for a large chunk of people.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    One of the problems with statements like this one is that IQ tests tend to be classist. They tend to measure the kinds of information valued by people with upper class lives and upper class educations, so they tend to measure people who are well fed and privileged and so forth. Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your poor health or if your poor health is due to your "low IQ." And I put that in quotations marks because I know a fair amount about IQ tests. I used to be somewhat seriously involved with a thing called The TAG Project where I was briefly Director of Community Life and I rubbed elbows in cyberspace with people who worked at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and such. There are a lot of problems with IQ tests and with the history of IQ testing and yadda. Most IQ tests top out at around 145 points, which makes it inherently hard to measure anything about that and tests are only tools and only as good as the person administering them and can be gamed and so forth. The first test that started the whole IQ testing thing was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness in France because they couldn't use age at that time since a lot of kids didn't have birth certificates and their exact age wasn't always known and there was huge differences in school readiness between the big city kids and the rural farm kids and it was the rural farm kids who tended to not have birth certificates and birth dates. So they asked a guy, I think named Binet, to create a test to sort out which kids were ready for school and this went down in history as the first IQ test. This is where you get the Stanford-Binet, if I recall correctly. The entire concept of IQ is problematic for a lot of reasons and it ends up being sort of circular, self-reinforcing logic and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do well on a test, we believe you are the best and brightest and have a great future and we put you in better classes for "enrichment" and we give you better opportunities and so on and so forth and then we announce that "See: Smarts are how you succeed." I've managed to do a lot of things the world told me couldn't be done because I was one of the smart kids and all that, but I also have serious health problems and spent years homeless and no one was lauding me as one of the smart people when I was homeless. And I didn't seem that smart during that time. I was very, very sick and my forum comments were full of typos and so forth. I still thought I was smart. I was still pulling off things the world said couldn't be done against long odds under difficult circumstances, but I was very poor and I wasn't getting social recognition for any of it and people were literally calling me "crazy" to my face, probably in part because I was homeless and still had the self concept and self esteem of one of the smart kids who graduated at the top of my class and had a lot of academic awards and the world had problems with me acting like one of the privileged people while I was homeless.

"Talent" is not always a there-or-not quality. IMHO it depends what we're talking about, and to what degree. Math genius, NBA player, obviously yeah you need some degree of inborn talent plus a crazy intense environment (for the NBA) in your youner years. But there's a huge range below "world elite" where "talent" is relevant, and it's not at all clear when it's a "you-have-it-or-you-don't" kind of thing. Same with hard work. Two people work hard; one person has a more efficient system, or a better teacher. It's not zeros and ones here imho.

quezzle 6y ago

This hits the mark. Anyone can be moderately good at most things if they work and try hard. But to be truly exceptional it often requires built in talent.

edmundsauto 6y ago

I think of it as more relevant to the inner game.

lutorm 6y ago

But the only thing under your control is how hard you work. Do other people that are more capable than you exist in the world? Maybe. But how does that fact influence your actions?

AlexCoventry 6y ago

Talent is too vague a concept to be useful.

bjoli 6y ago
Intelligence as measured by IQ on the other hand is a very well defined concept. It is a quite good predictor of all kinds of life "success" (however that is defined). It is not fluent. Of course it is not everything, and there are lots of idiots who believe so. However, the whole "you can do anything if you put your mind to it" is is not true. The people who are the worst off in society (and I live in "socialist Sweden") are the people with weak theoretical ability, but still within what is called average intelligence. The have the worst mental health, the worst physical health, the worst economical situation and the highest criminal record. The idea that working hard solves everything (from the right) and the idea that intelligence does not matter (while politically mainly catering to the middle class - the left) have made society a worse place for a large chunk of people.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  One of the problems with statements like this one is that IQ tests tend to be classist. They tend to measure the kinds of information valued by people with upper class lives and upper class educations, so they tend to measure people who are well fed and privileged and so forth. Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your poor health or if your poor health is due to your "low IQ." And I put that in quotations marks because I know a fair amount about IQ tests. I used to be somewhat seriously involved with a thing called The TAG Project where I was briefly Director of Community Life and I rubbed elbows in cyberspace with people who worked at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and such. There are a lot of problems with IQ tests and with the history of IQ testing and yadda. Most IQ tests top out at around 145 points, which makes it inherently hard to measure anything about that and tests are only tools and only as good as the person administering them and can be gamed and so forth. The first test that started the whole IQ testing thing was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness in France because they couldn't use age at that time since a lot of kids didn't have birth certificates and their exact age wasn't always known and there was huge differences in school readiness between the big city kids and the rural farm kids and it was the rural farm kids who tended to not have birth certificates and birth dates. So they asked a guy, I think named Binet, to create a test to sort out which kids were ready for school and this went down in history as the first IQ test. This is where you get the Stanford-Binet, if I recall correctly. The entire concept of IQ is problematic for a lot of reasons and it ends up being sort of circular, self-reinforcing logic and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do well on a test, we believe you are the best and brightest and have a great future and we put you in better classes for "enrichment" and we give you better opportunities and so on and so forth and then we announce that "See: Smarts are how you succeed." I've managed to do a lot of things the world told me couldn't be done because I was one of the smart kids and all that, but I also have serious health problems and spent years homeless and no one was lauding me as one of the smart people when I was homeless. And I didn't seem that smart during that time. I was very, very sick and my forum comments were full of typos and so forth. I still thought I was smart. I was still pulling off things the world said couldn't be done against long odds under difficult circumstances, but I was very poor and I wasn't getting social recognition for any of it and people were literally calling me "crazy" to my face, probably in part because I was homeless and still had the self concept and self esteem of one of the smart kids who graduated at the top of my class and had a lot of academic awards and the world had problems with me acting like one of the privileged people while I was homeless.