I saw this post by Jeremiah Johnson, “Persistence Beats Talent: And how to think about achieving success.”
It’s become fashionable in recent years to downplay the role of talent, or to deny it altogether. Concepts like “grit,” popularized by Angela Duckworth, and “growth mindset,” promoted by Carol Dweck, have gained traction as alternatives to innate ability. My opinion is, this does not hold up. Talent is not everything, but it’s still necessary when it comes to exceptional performance. Grit gets you part of the way, but talent is necessary to close the gap.
He writes:
When I see people who I think are more successful than I am, it’s almost never because they’re innately smarter or more brilliant. It’s because they work harder, it’s because they’re more tenacious, it’s because they are willing to put in effort.
But he’s overlooking that talent can still be the deciding factor for who succeeds or not, regardless of the amount of effort or time.
This is obvious in strength training, in which there is a huge sample size and considerable variance. It’s evident some people make much faster progress at the gym than others. Talent, or more specifically–genetics–is how someone is capable of benching 1.75x or more his bodyweight; this is an impossible feat without the right genetics of muscle fibers. In regard to g-loaded/cognitive tasks, no amount of persistence is sufficient to close the conceptual gap to solve a hard math problem. Many people practice for math competitions. Who wins? The smartest of competitors. This is seen for the LSAT too, in which test prep is common, but >170 scores are rare.
Why is talent so important? Because the gap between the talented vs the merely-good is too great. And in today’s economy, the talented reap outsized or disproportionate returns. Meta, Jane Street and other large companies are not paying huge salaries for merely-good developers or merely-good traders. They are looking for that ‘spark’ that only comes with talent.
Continuing:
The Ivy League only admits about 14-15,000 freshmen every year. Some of you in the top 1% aren’t gonna make it, especially when you consider that a big chunk of those Ivy admits are legacies, rich kids and athletes who aren’t in the top 1% of scores. You are not as special as you think you are just because you got a good score on a test, and you’re certainly not guaranteed success because of it.
And a lot of the kids getting very high scores are getting those scores not just because they’re naturally brilliant but because they studied for years to get good grades, because they bought test prep books and did dozens of hours of practice, because they worked for i
He’s too dismissive of the predictive value of top test scores for real-world outcomes, and he overstates the efficacy of test prep. The actual score improvement from prep is much more modest than commonly assumed or claimed, maybe a couple dozen points at most.
Moreover, studying and perfect grades are insufficient to get a top score on the SATs. If you think about it, it’s mathematically impossible given that 4.0 GPAs are much more common than near-perfect SAT scores. It’s possible to pass high school barely knowing how to read, yet a perfect SAT score is still a noteworthy accomplishment.
About real-world outcomes, yes, a top score on the SATs or GREs is no assurance of success at life. Somehow this is supposed to be a persuasive argument. If I had to bet on someone’s future success based on a single datapoint, I’d choose their IQ, followed closely by their SAT score. Other attributes such as ‘persistence’ or ‘grit’ are either hard to quantify/measure or insufficient.
Your results in the real world will be influenced by both hard work and natural talent. But I think there are very good reasons for focusing on hard work. There’s a trap that many ‘gifted’ kids fall into – they’re incessantly praised for being talented and smart as children, and then once they reach a level that challenges them they fall apart. They’ve internalized that they got where they are because of their natural ability, and if things are now difficult they must not be cut out for whatever they’re attempting.
Again, so what. The kids in the gifted classes are still much more successful at life in the aggregate despite the fact many also fail. Many non-gifted kids fail, too. What is this argument supposed to accomplish. The author is overlooking that we’re dealing with averages across large datasets. There are going to be many exceptions either way, of people who outperform or underperform as predicted by test scores.
Just based on my own experience in observing others, when someone has some signifier of high-IQ, such as grade acceleration, top standardized test scores, IQ, whatever…it almost always manifests in other ways. This can be career success, social media success/status, etc. It’s not just isolated to academia; there is always some spillover to real-world success. This was shown by the Terman study, in which the high-IQ cohort (>130) was more successful than the control group. Later studies came to similar conclusions.
The typical rebuttal is the Terman study failed to identify any Nobel Prize winners, and that two Nobel Prize winners, William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, just missed the cutoff score. This can be explained by the fact that eminence is much more uncommon than high IQ. How many eminent psychologists can you name aside from Freud, Jung, or a handful of other famous examples? It’s just not that common. How many famous neurologists can you list? (Maybe Sam Harris, although he’s more famous for his podcast than neurology).
He gives examples of top Substack writers being persistent, as downplaying the role of talent:
To use an example closer to home – think about your favorite Substack writers. You know what successful and famous Substackers almost universally have in common? They publish constantly and have done so for years. Matt Yglesias publishes five days a week, basically every week. And he first started blogging in 2002. There’s no secret sauce here – if you start something today, do it for 20+ years uninterrupted, and if you are consistent and persistent… you are also likely to be highly successful at it. Nearly all Substack success stories have that same formula – they publish very regularly, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Noah Smith, Nate Silver, Anne Helen Petersen, etc.
All this shows is that talent is likely necessary but also insufficient. Yes, Noah and Yglesias persisted, but also are very talented, easily being in the top 1% of verbal IQ, which helped greatly. They were always good at writing, and then honed that skill. Persistence without talent is just spinning one’s wheels. Many high schoolers or college students who aspire to play professional-level sports; few make it, yet they are all practicing. Practice can help at improving in so far as absolute ability, but is insufficient to close the gap or make the leap to greatness.
This applies just about everywhere. The most popular Twitter posters are people who are interesting and also who post all the time. Popular streamers have insane work ethics and often stream 60+ hours a week. Every CEO I’ve met is a workaholic. Every famous polymath I know wasn’t born that way, they’ve just been reading books at a fast clip and learning about stuff for decades.
This is a combination of luck (being early and getting vital re-tweets when Twitter was not as saturated as it is now), effort, and of course, talent. As I wrote last week, people with middling IQs, even if otherwise successful in business, as a rule do not have interesting insights into the world. If they are successful, it’s because they have the backing of a major brand (e.g. Fox News or CNN), connections with important people (e.g. Joe Rogan) or were early, not because of effort. If your 2009 seed investment in a popular car sharing app is worth a billion dollars, then your stale political takes will also carry more weight. But otherwise, talent is the deciding factor. This is not to say effort doesn’t matter, but it’s still insufficient without talent and luck.
I think also, talent is necessary for persistence. Someone who is talented at something will get positive feedback early on, and this leads to continuation and more practice.
Overall, much of the debate around talent seems to involve denying the obvious or focusing on exceptions to avoid challenging our sense of fairness. It’s difficult to accept that some people are simply more naturally skilled at certain things—and that this matters, especially in competitive fields like top tech jobs or professional sports. Sometimes, no amount of practice can fully compensate for that difference. And that’s okay. Instead of pretending talent doesn’t matter or is overrated, we should encourage people to discover what they’re naturally good at and pursue that.