Hard work is overrated

In David Brook's April 30 column he seems to have warmed to the thesis that Malcolm Gladwell has been popularizing (see Outsiders and related New Yorker articles), that genius is not an extraordinary draw of talent but rather lots of hard work. Like Gladwell (but without mentioning him) he's talking about the 10000 hour "rule," that holds that it takes 10000 hours to master a skill.  According to this hypothesis, Mozart wasn't born a genius; he became one because his dad made him practice so much from an early age. And the Beatles became great because they had to work so hard in Hamburg. Brooks refers approvingly to a book titled "Talent is overrated."

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

Personally, I think this hardwork revisionism is mainly crap and so I will counter-quote using the Kinks:

You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard,

Some that you recognize, some that you've hardly even heard of,

People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame,

Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain.

While I'm sure there are exceptions, I'm willing to concede that most geniuses did indeed work hard.  And yet.  Hard work is not a sufficient condition as the song illustrates. I claim that for every Mozart or McCartney there are 1000s who put in just as many hours of practice. But it got them nowhere and they passed into obscurity.  Because their hard work was not complemented by adequate amounts of talent and luck. Furthermore, I think the willingness to practice a great deal must be strongly correlated with talent. Take me. I wanted to be a great guitarist, but I didn't practice much and my guitar teachers gave up on me and I quit. Why? Partly because I'm lazy but partly because I think everyone involved (my parents, my instructors, and most of all me) at some level recognized that I didn't have any particular musical talent.  With my wife, it was the opposite, she had the innate musical skill and I think that was recognized and that contributed to her decision to work very hard at developing the skill.  But then she got the tendinitis and so we'll never know how har far her combination of talent and hard work would have taken her.  OK, take me again. Why did Daron Acemoglu win the Clark medal instead of me? From what I hear, he does put in more hours than I do. But no one who knows us both would say that's all that separates us.  His talent is not "slightly" greater than mine--from what I hear it's an order of magnitude greater. And it seems likely that this talent difference would explain a good part of the difference in the amount we work.  I'm not a genius but I do know that hard work can only take me so far.