Especially for creative work, work time doesn't correlate with output. Being a top physicist/mathematician/whatever is pretty unrelated with "working harder." It's related with having a somehow "better" connected brain. You can't work your way into being very smart.

I completely disagree with this. It's obvious that the top contributors to those realms are incredibly talented - Einstein, Newton, Euler, whatever. At the same time, they all put in an absurd amount of work, and their most well known contributions typically come from periods of almost exclusive focus on their chosen problem - Newton stuck inside working on gravitation because of a plague outbreak, Einstein's obsessive work in the years leading up to his Annus Mirabilis papers.

Innate talent may be a prerequisite for creative work, but it's seldom sufficient without putting the time and effort in.

Getting a better connected brain is often the outcome of just working harder at a problem.

You'd be surprised at how much creative progress is due to steady effort rather than some brilliant epiphany. Just because its intellectual work doesn't mean it can’t be solved by grinding it out.

You need both. From Hamming's You and your research:

``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

This isn’t true and there’s no evidence of it being true. Total productivity doesn’t drop as a function of hours worked until somewhere between 40 and 60 hours a week[1]. We know that creativity is more or less constant in individuals so those who produce more do more good work[2].

[1]http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

The Productivity of Working Hours, John Pencavel

[2]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abb5/02a8b01b50790a44cf5438...

Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks.

Dean Keith Simonton

For a popular audience

https://jamesclear.com/equal-odds

Nah, they are human too, they get overworked like everyone else with same consequences.

And like with everyone else, they are not at their best when overworked and depressed, but it does not matter for institution because there areally many students eager to apply so it does not matter how many if them pay the cost.