<p>Being a hard worker is better than being talented. If you’re talented, you’re good at one or a few things, but if those don’t work out or you don’t want to do them you’re left with nothing. A hard worker can eventually learn or get good at anything, even if they won’t be the best.</p>
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<p>And yet the hard worker will be better at math, science, sports, languages, pretty much everything but music.</p>
<p>Obviously not since Fields medal is awarded only every four years, so very few are honored in this way. Besides, I get the impression that many people here just throw around phrase “hard work” without understanding how difficult it is to actually commit to something much enough to achieve greatness. It’s a great sacrifice and commitment. It’s being focused on some particular subject, very often for one’s lifetime. It’s not going to class three days a week. Do not misunderstand the concept. If you can find the desire to work that hard then yes, you can be an outstanding musician or scientist. </p>
<p>I read somewhere some time ago that Michael Phelphs has a good body proportions for swimming. It’s ridiculous. There’s not even a little bit of talent in him. There’s will to swim 75 kilometers in a week (as he did before 2004 Olympics) or train so hard that you just can’t help but throw up afterwards.
There’s no being talented cyclist. Lance Armstrong simply busted his ass off before achieving anything significant. And it’s generally a rule that applies to all sportsmen. </p>
<p>J.R.R. Tolkien did not just come up with Middle Earth and all its inhabitants. Milton Friedman or John Keynes were not just talented in economics. No Fields medal or Noble prize winner was born with a special gift or ability. They just had a great passion for what they did, which made them work as hard as they did. To say simply that they achieved all that is equal to insulting them and their enormous effort. Wasn’t it for their labor they would have been forgotten by the history.</p>
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<p>Can you be great at something without working hard? No, you can’t. So either there is no such thing as talent or it is irrelevant.</p>
<p>Someone achieves understanding of mathematics worthy of a Fields Medal if (s)he has a deeprooted enough desire and drive to study mathematics. A variety of factors can influence the actual things the person does.</p>
<p>The ultimate power to achieve that greatness comes from the person’s inner drive, along with their perception that it’s the natural thing to strive for – the natural thing very likely has to do with an exceptionally powerful mind. </p>
<p>I think it is true that you can achieve anything if you have a deep-rooted enough desire, but how that desire comes into being is usually very complex. Not to sound silly, but the power is truly within.</p>
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<p>This is exactly correct. That desire is a tremendously difficult thing to acquire.</p>
<p>OK, this isn’t a good argument to make for inherent talent. Let’s remember, the real reason we all have a feeling there’s a notion of inherent talent is that a lot of what we process and figure out happens subconsciously. It’s not like we will ourselves and control every thought we have. </p>
<p>Success in high school and college can very well relate more to how prepared someone was. 2 years of good preparation before high school can make someone astronomically more ready to face high school math than another. </p>
<p>One major reason some people end up just more capable to produce in a subject is that at a young age, their minds were conditioned to think in a certain way. As you grow older, it’s tougher to condition yourself. So this explains a lot of the extreme talent you see.</p>
<p>However, it wouldn’t explain the crazy, out of the blue examples of brilliance, which exist. It doesn’t explain Ramanujan the mathematician, who re-derived tons of mathematics at a pace and style independent of what modern folks at the time were working on, from simple texts. </p>
<p>There IS a sense of innate drive to do something, because not everyone can explain where their own drives came from. And all of us experience it to an extent when we realize that a lot of the truths we hold were realized subconsciously or without our actively trying to force pieces together. The formal reasoning we employ is more of a check to truths’ validity under whatever context we care about - it’s not the source.</p>
<p>False. I have met people at math competitions and at college that are so good that I will never, ever be able to reach that level.</p>
<p>The problem is this: they work at maximum. All things being equal, I never will be as good as them. Therefore, they would need to laze off in order for me to even think about maybe reaching a level somewhere near them. They do not.</p>
<p>It’s called reality. Not everyone can be number one.</p>
<p>Goood point! In order to “catch up” to someone ahead of you, they would either have to stop working/training, or you would have to put in HUGE amounts of intense hours to equal and match their skill levels. But never are two people’s work/training exactly equal. I read that Michael Phelps trained for 5 years straight (no joke, this was during his earlier years). He swam every day, and missed 0 practice sessions. Leading up to the Beijing Games (I think it was), Phelps stated in an interview that he would be swimming every Sunday (usu. a rest day ) because those x amounts of sunday’s would eventually add up to more hours of practice for competition. </p>
<p>How many people do you know have that kind of drive? How many have that work ethic and laser like focus?</p>
<p>There is exactly one number one spot. Not everyone can be there. Likely it will be occupied with someone with high inherent ability and high effort. But unless you are willing to restrict the definition of the title so narrowly that by definition only the number one person counts, the title is absolute bull.</p>
<p>Sorry, there are genius people who will always be smarter than you. Not everyone CAN be an Erdos or a Grigori Perelman.</p>
<p>Sure. I completely agree - anecdotal evidence is not a good way to support an argument. I’ll try to present a better one here.</p>
<p>We’re basically talking about nature versus nurture here. Whether or not a person is inherently good at something - the obvious example being math - or whether they just need to work harder or find better instruction. The answer isn’t simply that everything is innate; your ability to derive mathematical proofs isn’t set in stone at birth. As your comment about “condition[ing]” a kid’s mind references, the environment that a child grows up in is also quite important.</p>
<p>Your view might be best described as the “tabula rasa.” All or most variation between individuals is a result of their environment. Unfortunately, if you delve into the realm of cognitive science a bit, this simply isn’t true.</p>
<p>On the topic of intelligence (relevant here) specifically, a study by Thompson et al. (2001) found that differences in the anatomy of the cerebral cortex are under genetic control. These anatomical differences parallel differences in intelligence, amongst other traits. The study was published in the scientific magazine [url=<a href=“http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n12/index.html#af]Nature[/url”>Volume 4 Issue 12, December 2001]Nature[/url</a>], if you’d like to look at it.</p>
<p>I’m pretty tired. Going to sleep now.</p>
<p>Edit: @Kvasek: If success at sports is a result of hard work and body structure, aren’t you conceding this argument to me? The size and shape of human bodies is influenced - heavily - by genetics. If that isn’t the definition of innate ability, I don’t know what is.</p>
<p>For Perelmen, it’s no more his achievement than others. To be precocious, your mind has to be cultivated by a nurturing environment. For Perelmen, it’s no different. Having a mother who was a graduate student in Mathematics drop out just to raise you is more than enough for anybody to excel at mathematics a fair amount. </p>
<p>I say that there are three circumstances that lead to high achievements, and they are:</p>
<p>1) Being born into a family that develops one’s mind greatly.
2) Natural talent.
3) A combination of 1 & 2.</p>
<p>Natural talent and situational fortune that lead to a high aptitude are practically indistinct from each other. You either have to have one or the other to excel in a field at an impressively early age. For Perelmen, I would surmise it to be the third. The second circumstance is extremely rare when dealing with great individuals, and can be deduced by elementary reasoning. A genius born in an impoverished village in Central Africa has no chance of ever becoming something great. Chris Langan is a perfect example of this.</p>
<p>It’s very important to note though, that there can be varying degrees of talent and situational fortune. In Perelman’s case, it would be impossible to know now.</p>
<p>With that said, I don’t feel like the Field’s Medal is very fair. The family you’re born into or your talent prove do be the major factors of whether you’ll be capable of ever receiving it. Sure, mathematical ability tends to deteriorate as you age, but if you’re capable of outstanding achievements, they’ll eventually surface.</p>
<p>Unintentionally, I’m regurgitating what Gladwell wrote in his book.</p>
I think we can agree, then, that something went sour with AP chem and that not understanding the concepts is the root of the difficulty you have in doing Chem problems. If you want to attribute it to innate ability that’s fine; my suspicion would tend towards the teacher, book, or tutor. But it’s all water under the bridge now; I’m not trying to suggest you still take Chem classes or anything like that. If your passion is now in something like History that’s great, and don’t be too surprised in college if it changes again as you take classes in areas you hadn’t really thought about before. </p>
<p>As for the general argument of the thread, I think the question will never really be settled to anyone’s satisfaction. The notion that genius or talent alone is sufficient has been, I think, put to rest. Those at the top of their field, whether in music, academics, or athletics, work incessantly at what they do. To tease out the rest, to decide if they couldn’t have achieved that without some level of innate ability had they just put in the work, is the real area of controversy in this thread and elsewhere. There are intriguing examples that show hard work and dedication may be sufficient. One would be the 3 daughters of Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist, who thought that with training anyone could achieve remarkable things. His 3 daughters are the 3 leading Grand Masters in women’s chess, a deliberate result of how he raised them (see [The</a> Grandmaster Experiment | Psychology Today](<a href=“http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmaster-experiment]The”>The Grandmaster Experiment | Psychology Today))</p>
Look, it’s one thing to say that talented people still have to work really hard to succeed. I agree that they do. However, that does not imply in the slightest that people lacking in talent can overcome that predisposition.</p>
<p>Does Michael Phelps have to train ridiculously hard to win Olympic medals? You bet. Can I win Olympic medals by training ridiculously hard? Probably not. I might become quite good, but as long as there are people with superior physical characteristics (for swimming) who also train ridiculously hard I haven’t got much of a chance.</p>
<p>I do not believe “innate” talent exists. At the same time, I do not subscribe to the idea of “believing in oneself and trying hard enough” to accomplish things; luck plays a big role as well. I define luck as the mathematical probability or possibility of something happening (e.g. individual leaves for work 10 minutes earlier than normal, thus avoiding a car crash that said individual would have otherwise been involved in, had the individual left for work at the normal time).</p>
<p>I find it odd that people seem to limit talent to certain professions such as mathematician, violinist, painter, chess grandmaster, athlete, physicist, among others. How about janitors, plumbers, bakers, garbage collectors, cops, teachers, etc? Is there “innate” talent for those professions?</p>
<p>Yet another problem I see is how some people believe there is a linear path to success. For example, the person two posts above commented that no matter how hard he (s)he trained, (s)he would not be able to top Michael Phelps; what if that person trains her/himself to become a transoceanic swimmer? Would Michael Phelps be able to compete in that subfield of swimming? There are many subfields within the different fields and one may always become a “genius” or “expert” by focusing on some obscure subfield that very few people know about. Then there is the problem of comparing across subfields: is being a great violinist harder or easier than being a great drummer?</p>
<p>Finally, what about technology? How many people we consider “geniuses” or “talented” have been directly or indirectly aided by technology? Many physicists now utilize computers to perform their jobs and have more advanced machines at their disposal; many violinists have benefited from improved training techniques, nutrition, better living standards, etc; athletes like Michael Phelps now use advanced swimming suits and enjoy access to modern training facilities.</p>
<p>I think too many people waste their energy worrying about whether or not they possess “talent”. Those people would be better of investing their energy into doing something productive.</p>
<p>THIS!!! Really successful people do, while skeptical doubters question. People tend to be pessimistic when you mention high goals. While they are doubting about why you can’t do this or that, the person is working hard toward the goal. They usually end up successful, even if they don’t nail that ambitious goal.</p>
<p>i didn’t quite inherit my dad’s mathematical genius, no. but, i’m over it. & i hope this doesn’t mean you’ll be following me around all over CC, whistle.</p>