
Hacking Passion (2013) - masters3d
http://www.kytrinyx.com/blog/hacking-passion
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saulrh
Talent is a thing. However, it's a bit different from what people think it is:
inherent talents are about _acquiring skills_ , not _having skills_. Talent
won't make you magically good at something. What it will do is make it easier
for you to practice a skill and let you improve faster. And even then, it only
does that if you help it along, and sometimes it's not very obvious how it
helps. I have a bit of talent for science and mathematics, but it's not
incredibly direct; rather, I tend to start spewing ideas when looking at
sciencey things. That doesn't make me magically good at producing good
science, but it did help me stay interested early on and it keeps me from
plateauing. Talent also isn't _necessary_. You can get really, really good at
something without having any inherent advantage, and lots of people do exactly
that.

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TrainedMonkey
Talent may be BS, but difference in memory, learning, and concentration are
not. So while everyone can improve some people have easier time and higher
ceiling.

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hack_edu
... yet none of it matters without discipline.

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toddan
Not everyone is born with good discipline. Otherwise everyone would be super
successful. We all are slaves to our genes and environment, some are born
successful some are not.

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meowface
Almost everyone can force themselves to improve their discipline though,
sometimes with the help of medication where necessary.

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BadassFractal
Extremely advantageous genetics are really hard to measure with current
technology outside of fields such as sports. e.g. in strength sports, by the
late teens it's really obvious who has it and who doesn't: some can
effortlessly pull 3x a weight that's practically unobtainable for someone else
of same weight category. Talent is real in sports, there's no reason why it
wouldn't be in every other area of life. Talent is optional if you're going to
be OK at something, but it's a basic prerequisite if you're going to be
competing at world class.

Things are a lot trickier with brains, since there's actually a lot more
internal structural variability. Current scanning technology isn't accurate
enough to tell us what the teenager (brain structures stop growing by this
point) is going to be naturally good at, but that's not that far away given
enough investment and the technology and enough data (basically other brains
to compare to)

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Swizec
"Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard"

But more importantly, talent isn't "what you're good at", talent is "what you
enjoy".

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craigyk
I don't think talent is BS, but there is certainly a lot of BS in evaluating
it.

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demircancelebi
I really enjoyed reading this, thanks masters3d.

