Genuis = 20% Talent + 80% hard work ?

[MIG]

Can we all be genuiuses if we try harder or is the formula flawed ?

[Easa]

It's the other way around, me thinks. 80% talent, 20% hard work.

[MIG]

Depends if you want to use that as an excuse for not doing well :)

[Invictus]

I think the word genius implies gifted. You can be smart or smarter with hard work but you can't turn into a genius by just hard work or talent.

[Easa]

I think the word genius implies gifted. You can be smart or smarter with hard work but you can't turn into a genius by just hard work or talent.
By talented, I do mean gifted. Talent as in what God gave you, not what you worked hard for.

[tahaqureshi]

I do believe there are varying amounts of talent in the people of the worls..not everyone can achieve the same by putting in 80% hardworkand using 20% talent.

[MIG]

True - I can see a gifted person solving a complex mathematical problem in 10 minutes while the hard worker can do that over 10 days of midnight oil !

Question is, can the difference between genius and hardworker reduce over time ?

[Easa]

Question is, can the difference between genius and hardworker reduce over time ?
My answer to this would also be NO. The gifted person would be too talented for the hardworker, regardless of how long that hardoworker works.

[tahaqureshi]

When you say time? What do you mean exactly? How would time help reduce the gap betwen a genius and a hardworker? Is it due to the sheer hardwork of the hardworker over a period of time?

[MIG]

When you say time? What do you mean exactly? How would time help reduce the gap betwen a genius and a hardworker? Is it due to the sheer hardwork of the hardworker over a period of time?

Just wondering if a hardworker can bridge the gap between him and a gifted one over time ? So by training himself to think like a gifted person you become more efficient at solving problems ?

[OZGOD]

Can we all be genuiuses if we try harder or is the formula flawed ?

They say success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration. Now whether you see genius and success as being synonymous is another story. You do not need to be a genius to be successful.

I was reading an article on Fortune magazine titled "What It Takes To Be Great" (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/index.htm) (dated Oct 06) which looked at successful people like Tiger Woods (golfer), Warren Buffett (investor), Bobby Fischer (chessmaster), Michael Jordan (basketballer), Bill Gates (Microsoft chairman), as well as successful businesspeople, sports people, artists and whatnot.

Their conclusion? Greatness, or success, is not born, it is made. Talent has little or nothing to do with greatness and success. Success and greatness is made by the following things: 1) hard work; and 2) constant, unrelenting practice to improve (which implies strong willpower).

It really comes down to attitude and discipline.

Here are some excerpts (I know it's a bit long, but it's pretty interesting for those who want to improve themselves):


What it takes to be great
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
FORTUNE Magazine
By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large
October 19 2006: 3:14 PM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to allocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't.

Well, folks, it's not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts."

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

~snip~

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

~snip~

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

The business side

~snip~

...Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

~snip~

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market.

~snip~

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.

Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

From link above

[MIG]

Does this apply to arts as well ? poetry, painters etc?

[OZGOD]

Does this apply to arts as well ? poetry, painters etc?

The article quotes artists such as Pavarotti and Horowitz, and uses violinists as an example.

I would suggest that the article is saying that you cannot be great and successful if you do not 1) put in the hard yards; and 2) practice, practice and practice (whatever you do). If you do all that, even if you have less talent, you are more likely to be successful than someone who is talented but does not practice, try to improve or put in the hard work (whether that's by studying, learning about a business activity, going to the gym if you're a sportsperson, etc).

Now if you are a genius, AND you put in the hard work, AND you practice, practice, practice, then I don't see what can stop you from being successful.

In my professional life, if I had to choose between a talented but lazy person and a less-talented but hardworking person to employ or have on my team, I would pick the hardworking person any time. I've seen too many underachievers in my life who think that just because they're smart/talented/etc they can just cruise and get by.

[Zeenix]

MIG i think Talent and Hard Work both compliment each other. And lack of talent can be overcome upto some extent through HardWork. However my understanding is that Allah created all with the same amount of skills and talent. Its the environment + genetics which decide which turn one will take.

[sanchez786]

Like others have said...there are people out there who are just gifted at "getting things" faster then others...

I remember studying for calc exams back in the day. My chinese friend literally studied the morning of while I studied for weeks in advance. I got a decent grade but he still scored higher. It's not just with math....with pretty much every other math/science class he would study night before or morning of and ace it.

Example: Watch the movie Good Will Hunting!
Amazing movie by the way!

[MIG]

The Chinese example is an urban myth ! They work damn hard at it and they succeed. A Chinese guy once told me that given the complexity understanding their mother tongue, was it a wonder that Chinese are used to hard work ?

Could aptitude be confused with gift ? ie you do well in something you like!

[sanchez786]

The Chinese example is an urban myth ! They work damn hard at it and they succeed. A Chinese guy once told me that given the complexity understanding their mother tongue, was it a wonder that Chinese are used to hard work ?

Could aptitude be confused with gift ? ie you do well in something you like!

Myth? Maybe where you live but in Toronto, it's quite the fact :19:

[MIG]

I studied and worked with Chinese in Toronto and London and my experience is that they work damn hard.

[OZGOD]

I studied and worked with Chinese in Toronto and London and my experience is that they work damn hard.

I studied with many Chinese students in OZ when I was at uni and they work pretty bloody hard. Their work ethic is unbelievable.

[the_game]

The question is MIGGY bhai, is the hardworker in any way inferior to the genius just because he will take 10 days to solve a math problem as opposed to 10 minutes? I think real genius lies in persistence and dedication.

[robosapien]

I think that other than hard work, a genius has the ability to follow the unusual behaviour and the persistence to stick to that behaviour. For instance, the family of Robert Frost was all against his poetry and wanted him to stick to education but he chose 'the road less travelled by'. Bill gates could have completed his degree and became an employee of some company as normal people do. We have numerous other examples too.

Other than that, I think coaching, company, mentorship helps a lot.

[OZGOD]

I think we need to differentiate between "genius" and "success" as they are not the same thing.

[MIG]

The question is MIGGY bhai, is the hardworker in any way inferior to the genius just because he will take 10 days to solve a math problem as opposed to 10 minutes? I think real genius lies in persistence and dedication.

Dont know about inferior but the "boast" factor of being a genious cannot be ignored ! The glamour of being a genius versus the geeky hardworker... :31:

[OZGOD]

Dont know about inferior but the "boast" factor of being a genious cannot be ignored ! The glamour of being a genius versus the geeky hardworker... :31:

I don't really see that glamour though, MIG. There's nothing more annoying than trying to manage a genius who thinks he doesn't have to put the hard work in because he's smart.

[PlanetPakistan]

The question is MIGGY bhai, is the hardworker in any way inferior to the genius just because he will take 10 days to solve a math problem as opposed to 10 minutes? I think real genius lies in persistence and dedication.
I agree
Thomas Edison failed over 10,000 times before finally succeeding...so even a person like him had to spend 1000s of hours in each of his main discoveries and had to experience many failures.

[robosapien]

The question is MIGGY bhai, is the hardworker in any way inferior to the genius just because he will take 10 days to solve a math problem as opposed to 10 minutes? I think real genius lies in persistence and dedication.

you can expect from a genius to create maths problems instead of solving them. there lies the difference between hardworker and a genius.

[Invictus]

I think we need to differentiate between "genius" and "success" as they are not the same thing.

Yeah I think the article you posted does not make that distinction. Genius and being sucessfull are not the same. There are allot of ways to be successful and genius is just one way.
To me a genius is someone who operates one level above the best in any given field. Hard work and all is not a part of it. They might be hard workers and all but that does not define a genius to me. For instance take the example of Lara and Dravid. Both are equally capable of playing out two days against any attack on any pitch. Dravid would leave allot of balls keep his head down work hard and who knows by end of two days might score a triple century. But when Lara would do it he would destroy the attack probably end a career or two score 500 plus runs minimum and make the attack, the pitch the captain look mediocre. Crowd would leave the ground thinking they have seen the greatest knock ever played on the cricket field.

[Geordie Ahmed]

I don't really see that glamour though, MIG. There's nothing more annoying than trying to manage a genius who thinks he doesn't have to put the hard work in because he's smart.

you mean like Shoaib Akhtar? :21:

[the_game]

you mean like Shoaib Akhtar? :21:


Even a half-fit, fat Shoaib got 4 wickets and almost broke Pollock's toe. Genius? Yes.

[Geordie Ahmed]

Even a half-fit, fat Shoaib got 4 wickets and almost broke Pollock's toe. Genius? Yes.

well ofcourse that is what i am saying - he certainly is a genius BUT its definately a shame he doesnt actually work hard cos he could be even better - and surely when representing your country you want to strive to be the best you can

[the_game]

well ofcourse that is what i am saying - he certainly is a genius BUT its definately a shame he doesnt actually work hard cos he could be even better - and surely when representing your country you want to strive to be the best you can

Geordie bhai, aap us ko net practice karatay ho jo becharay ke work ethic ko doubt kar rahay ho :D ?

[cinderella]

any nitwit can work hard to get something

[the_game]

any nitwit can work hard to get something

What is THAT supposed to mean? One of the major reasons they are nitwits is because they are not persistent! Biologically, everyone has the same neural integration; it's a matter of application and will if you don't have a natural inclination towards something.

[Geordie Ahmed]

Geordie bhai, aap us ko net practice karatay ho jo becharay ke work ethic ko doubt kar rahay ho :D ?

i dont have to be in net practice - i have followed Pak cricket for close to 8 years now and i have seen how shoaib breaks down during test matches and generally looks unfit. i am not doubting his ability BUT do you deep down feel he works hard as a cricketer? i mean he is a fast bowler (fastest in the world) and look at the shape of him, compare his physical state to Brett Lee, Malinga, Edwards etc etc

[Taurus]

Genius is about being in the right place at the right time, in my opinion. Two cannot occupy the same space and time in any particular field - look at Mozart and Salieri.

[the_game]

i dont have to be in net practice - i have followed Pak cricket for close to 8 years now and i have seen how shoaib breaks down during test matches and generally looks unfit. i am not doubting his ability BUT do you deep down feel he works hard as a cricketer? i mean he is a fast bowler (fastest in the world) and look at the shape of him, compare his physical state to Brett Lee, Malinga, Edwards etc etc

I agree Geordie bhaijan, I was just pulling your leg :D . I am trying to think of other instances where geniuses either didn't try hard, or they just died at an early age. Help me out.

[cinderella]

What is THAT supposed to mean? One of the major reasons they are nitwits is because they are not persistent! Biologically, everyone has the same neural integration; it's a matter of application and will if you don't have a natural inclination towards something.

i don't think everyone has the same level of intelligence, biologically.

[Geordie Ahmed]

i don't think everyone has the same level of intelligence, biologically.

i agree

[the_game]

i don't think everyone has the same level of intelligence, biologically.

Please do give me references to some refereed journal articles before you claim that to be true. As a science student, I do not appreciate such claims based on what you "think".