

Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness? - tokenadult
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/10/14/is-high-ability-necessary-for-greatness/

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Alex3917
"I’d say 92.2% is much more 'significant' than 7.8%, at least in terms of
practical meaning!"

That's really not how it works. Consider that in cycling roughly 95% of your
energy comes from your aerobic system and only 5% of your energy comes from
your anaerobic system. So does that make your aerobic system more important
than your anaerobic system? Yes and no. If you want to win the race then at
some point you are going to have to break out of the peloton and sprint past
everyone, so really it's going to be the quality of your anaerobic system that
determines who wins a large percentage of the time. So you can't really judge
how important each variable is just by looking at the size of its contribution
to the end goal.

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wallflower
Something important to note:

In an Ironman triathlon, the racers never go anaerobic, even the ones winning
in the nine hour range. All of their training is directed towards building a
base that lets them complete the race without going anaerobic. That is the
reason why Ironman training is said to be harder than the race itself. 14 to
20 hours a week minimum. Once the body goes anaerobic, everything goes rapidly
downhill. Tying this back to the original article, talent is the base that is
maintained by focused training, so maybe base equals talent times quality of
training times the quantity.

OT more but it you want to get into excellent shape, train for triathlons,
even Olympic distance will make you feel good.

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jakobe
Whenever someone talks about studies like these, I just can't help picturing a
bored 16 year old giving random answers to a seemingly never-ending
questionnaire they were told to participate in.

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seagaia
"After all, working memory is common, but greatness is rare."

So...it must just be a combination of many factors. Inherent intelligence or
working memory can be useful, but so many other things influence whether you
become "great" at something...unsurprisingly.

The papers linked to were interesting in how they looked at the different
domains (poker, piano sight reading). I mean this certainly is an interesting
thing to study, but I don't imagine there will be some proven way to achieve
greatness any time soon rather than just deliberate hard work or something. Or
maybe there will?

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Tycho
Greatness is relative. It's like the risk/reward relationship for investments:
by necessity, low risk investments will have lower returns, because the demand
for them will be higher and thus the price of the investment will increase
(eating into your profits). Where there's a well trodden path, it's no longer
a path to greatness.

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bitops
It's true that greatness is rare, but I think that's partially a combination
of rarity of skill and the fact that there are few people willing to put in
the number of hours required to achieve greatness. (Yes, I definitely believe
in the 10K hours theory).

Take John Coltrane as an example. I think it's fair to say that most people
consider him a genius and an extremely talented saxophone player. But he was
definitely NOT one of these child prodigies like Mozart. He worked hard and
put in many many hours of training. So many, in fact, that some other
musicians (notably Miles Davis) saw him as a bit boring since "all he ever
wanted to do was practice".

That could also be attributed to the fact that he kicked a bad heroin
addiction and so didn't see much point in doing anything other than what he
loved, playing music.

So, yes, you do need high ability to achieve greatness, but high ability/skill
is something that can be acquired and is not necessarily inborn.

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the_cat_kittles
The hours he put in were insane! Charlie Parker was even more insane- he spent
11-15 hours a day practicing during certain periods of his life. Those kind of
hours are insane for almost anything, but especially to be playing a horn.

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balsam
I speculate that long term working memory (if there's such a thing) may be
more interesting to look at. There was a Q&A session in which Jobs said
something to the effect of "the problem with the naysayers is that they are
right." The unspoken addendum in my mind is "-- in the short run". This is
akin to hasty optimization. If you have good short term memory but bad long
term memory you are going to win at tactics but lose the game.

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anactofgod
So, "Gattaca" had it right, then?

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harryf
Que 15 minutes of Sunday afternoon navel-gazing.

~~~
starpilot
¿Que?

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nirvana
I believe -- unscientifically -- that sometimes high intelligence or high
ability, can be detriments to greatness.

I often see things that I think were done in a half-assed manner that are
quite successful. I see people shipping things that I would never ship, and
being successful at it. I'm not talking about spending inordinate amounts of
time to get every pixel right (Though Apple may be a contrary example to my
thesis here) ... I'm talking about spending an extra %1-%5 of time to make
your site not be butt ugly.

I think PlentyOfFish.com is probably good example. He focused on different
things and was a huge success. Its still ugly now, but it used to be, and for
many years, was totally butt ugly.

Sometimes people of very average intelligence but great social skills do
really well. Downright dumb people with the right personality -- e.g. the
jocks who are now venture capitalists-- do better than smarter people.

This is an ongoing debate between my cofounder and I. Normally, my cofounder
is the one putting forth this thesis.. the claim being that we're too smart to
be successful. (Not in an arrogant way, there are lots of smarter people I
know.) But I am starting to think my cofounder may be right. For instance, I
do tend to over engineer, over optimize, and under execute.

So, our personal motivational theme these days is "just ship it". Can't fight
the desire to make it not be crap, but we're shipping more.

PS-- another example of this is thinking you've got a key functionality right,
because you're smart, you "know" this is the right way to do it, and then
focusing on optimizing in other areas. So, you ship a game that looks gorgeous
but has poor gameplay, or you completely miss the mark on the way your
customers want to use your product because most people are not like you
(because most people are average and you're not.) etc.

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alextp
> sometimes high intelligence or high ability, can be detriments to greatness.

I'm always bothered when I read this kind of conclusion. From the rest of your
comment the detriments come from high standards, not high intelligence.
Choosing a better overall strategy at the expense of precise execution is not
evidence of lower strategy, just of lower standards when it comes to the
execution.

