I don't know, honestly in my experience, some do-ers just couldn't cut it, some things are hard and you need people with the talent, not just the motivation. Th

I don't know, honestly in my experience, some do-ers just couldn't cut it, some things are hard and you need people with the talent, not just the motivation. That's because I think some do-ers are also "shortcut takers", they tend to skip really putting in the work of deep understanding, and if your problem requires that, and they always try to skip that part, their efforts just won't provide ROI. Meanwhile, a non-motivated educated person might just take longer as they're not putting as much effort on a daily basis, but they can still make progress. But it depends on the task and the understanding required for it. Lots of task actually benefit from shortcuts, you don't need a major for most programming tasks, you don't even need any understanding of algos, data-structures, hardware, OS, distributed systems, math, etc. A lot of task you just need very simple knowledge of a framework and just put in the time to try a few things until it works, google the answers, etc. So I'm assuming here by "do-er" we mean someone who doesn't bother learning anything unless the task at hand requires them too, and is also going to put constant effort and energy into the task on a daily basis. And this will always be more optimal in the total time spent learning/doing ratio, but if presented with a difficult task, you don't know if the do-er will be able to learn what's needed, because they have no cred that tells you that they are someone who can or can't learn such complicated things. That's where education comes in, you already know the person knows complicated stuff or was able to learn it.