Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/10/14/is-high-ability-necessary-for-greatness/

by tokenadult • 15 years ago

66 15 15 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

seagaia• 15 years ago

"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?

Tycho• 15 years ago

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.

harryf• 15 years ago

Que 15 minutes of Sunday afternoon navel-gazing.

starpilot• 15 years ago

¿Que?

anactofgod• 15 years ago

So, "Gattaca" had it right, then?

nirvana• 15 years ago

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.

apl• 15 years ago

  > [...] my cofounder is the one putting forth this
  > thesis [...] that we're too smart to be successful.
  > [...] For instance, I do tend to over engineer, over
  > optimize, and under execute.

Surely, knowing up to what point optimization has tangible benefits constitutes a crucial part of being "smart." I realize that defining smartness as whatever makes you successful may steer us towards boring tautology territory, but your rationalization seems self-serving.

alextp• 15 years ago

> 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.

wallflower2• 15 years ago

> Sometimes people of very average intelligence but great social skills do really well.

Social skills are a form of intelligence that are arguably important in the real world, where it is difficult to succeed without having a good team. I would argue that the Darwinian way it is now taught (the grade school system) is not the best. There are so many things people know intuitively, that I have to be conscious of.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

"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.

wallflower2• 15 years ago

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.

balsam• 15 years ago

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.

jakobe• 15 years ago

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.

bitops• 15 years ago

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.

the_cat_kittles• 15 years ago

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.

Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?

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