It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.

If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.

    She lives with a broken man
    A cracked polystyrene man
    Who just crumbles and burns

> Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

To reach elite levels you need both.

    fortune favors the prepared mind

Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.

Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY

Perhaps the ultimate iteration of "Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time."

This is "the toughest man on earth" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.

Talent measures your intuition level regarding something. So, in your example, Kevin could always reach competence, but Kevin’s afterburner capacity is set to 0% (capped). Some of us have 0-100% intuition on things, on a spectrum.

But as far as what it takes to make it in this world? Competence. Your afterburners can boost depending on it’s capacity, but you can’t run on that unless you are born with a god like afterburner tank (genius, your Einsteins). We are all limited, even the talented.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

and to keep with the other comments I would argue that some people have more taste than others, or more passion, or transferable skills that carry over, which often translates into what we think of as natural talent. But it still takes some work.

I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.

These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.

When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.

I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class.

These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill.

Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.

Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook.

But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.

No. He just happened to be an explosive beast who could knock out grown men at age 13.

I'll assume you meant nature v. nurture. If so, then the Tyson family is absolutely an edge case in the debate. Mike was famously in and out of trouble in his younger years, having been arrested 38 times as a teenager. He was a bit of a child of the streets, so to speak.

What is fascinating and much lesser known is his older brother, Rodney. (Their sister unfortunately died at 24 from a heart attack)

Rodney Tyson is a pediatric trauma surgeon.

Two men who grew up eating the exact same food, in the exact same rooms, watching the exact same TV shows grew up to have radically different lives and careers. Yet both are accomplished in their choices.

I don't know what to exactly make of the Tyson family in the nature v nurture debate, but the differences between the brothers are some of the widest that I have seen.

For sports you need to work hard, but you cannot compete without the right boost in the first place.

Mike Tyson had an incredible amount of talent and great teachers.

I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.

I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc.

When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result.

Now my advice is "don't look around"...

Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.

Wow, that's a humblebrag taken to the next level.

I am a descendant of fairly strong guys - one grandfather was a rural blacksmith, the other one started as a lumberjack before going to the (still coal powered) railway to coal the engines. I inherited quite a lot of their physique from them, which means that I can do quite good in a gym without trying much.

Yes, that feels unjust. Not that I am depressed about it, but it is definitely something you ponder upon: why this guy who works so much harder than me does not see as much return on his effort?

That traits for fitness are heritable? That is "a thing"? Hmmm, you might be onto something here.

And I am not even surprised, the possibility of governments latching onto this and "streaming" people towards whatever they are found to be gifted at, cannot really be dismissed.

Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.

2. I don't think the article body suggests that at all and the article title specifically modifies its claim with the word "largely".

But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding.

Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for.

I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)

Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing.

Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming.

Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting.

The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique.

The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.

A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets.

After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time.

> with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small

At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics.

What else could it be?

At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned).

Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day.

A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0]

Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing.

One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author.

OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

What comes closest is some studies on extreme forms of Buddhist meditation. One of the interesting discoveries is that during normal meditation, the parasympathetic system (homeostasis, breathing, etc.) is very dominant, but during the peak enlighentment experiences of the advanced meditators, the sympathetic system (fight-or-flight) system associated with athletic performance also runs at very high levels. Normally, the sympathetic & parasympathetic systems are in opposition, when the sympathetic system is active, parasympathetic is suppressed, and vice-versa. The other situation where both systems activate is during sex (arousal needs paracympathetic, orgasm sympathetic). The interesting connection I made is that I'd noticed these intense flow states sometimes occurring in the most intense times, where everything in my mind was absolute calm - I called it "fast meditation", as in meditating at 85mph. I know others also experience this. I conjecture that this is some of the same phenomenon seen in advanced meditation, just form the opposite end (here, maxing out the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic maybe kicks in, but I have no measurements other than my mental state).

There's also some research on the "flow state" related to accelerated perception, where people feel that they can see insane levels of detail and time slows down, as in accidents. They were trying to recreate it to understand it, and I found the efforts entirely lame and a waste of time. I can tell all kinds of stories about seeing very clearly both important and trivial things at high speed, and having entire trains of thought which I can verify happened in fractions of a second by noting the beginning and end points of the chain of thought and calculating in the distance and speed. These studies catch none of it, and I can say that even with years of training and effort, it is still extremely elusive (which is why I can't really fault the researchers, I don't yet have any great ideas on how to capture it).

I wish I could point you to specific references, but these were all readings from a while back.

BTW, ML and sports training seems like a potentially very fruitful area! I'd love to hear more about it. I found that much of the most interesting areas are at the intersections of different fields, so I wish you good luck in your pursuit!

I discovered I could trigger the state reliably without risk during high-level matched competitive video-game play. (Smash Bros) I had nearly 10 years of low-skilled competitive practice but with infinite online matched games I found I could reach a flow-like state on a nightly basis, so long as I played long enough. (I played for approximately 4 hours per night over a two-year period). I was also able to achieve a flow-like state with near certainty using a very simple piano tile tapping game, given long enough sessions. I had simply been using the game to train my thumbs for speed.

Eventually I left my career in software to pursue flow in Skydiving, which I now consider to be a mistake. After studying meditation and Yoga, it has become clear to me that the state is not triggered by external factors at all, and that it is itself a skill.

Admittedly far fewer of these states stand out as truly peak, quasi-religious experiences. I suspect there is a continuum and the binary classification is a judgement we place on the experience "retroactively". It comes from having enough space in your attention to notice the contrasting state of the body and the mind, the level of current performance, and then to notice the noticing itself. The rush of pleasure and excitement is not pre-existing, it is the result of a positive judgement you place on the situation. Despite its appeal this is undesirable, and tends toward interrupting flow in the precisely the same way as one loses control of a lucid dream after just having reached it. IMHO focusing on the subjective threshold for isolated study is misguided.

My current work focuses on creating an abstract framework which adapts to the athlete in order to create the external conditions which allow the athlete to most easily find the flow state. Rather than teach them how directly I hope to trigger it unexpectedly and allow for it to be sustained indefinitely during training. Of course, I'm not foolish enough to admit this to my benefactors.

Do you suppose I might be able to get a grant for this sort of work?

I totally agree about the continuum - for the most part it is so strange from ordinary experience that it seems like a binary shift, but yes, I think it is important to see it as a continuum (perhaps a bit stepped/quantized, but not sure).

Fascinating that you managed to get there with the tapping game doing speed drills. I often had ideas but it was before common MRIs and other technology that we had for examining brain functions at high resolution. That is something you could get into an MRI, and/or an intense electrode-sensor grid and measure! So, yes, I'd think some funding might be possible. I know academic funding is it's own labrynthine nightmare, so probably best to be in a program supported by an experienced professor/primary researcher who knows the ropes. OTOH, if you can get to show some results that improve performance, perhaps approaching some top pro sports team owners for funding? (I know if I were a billionaire with a team, I'd be interested in something that could give us an edge!) The question is whether you can generate useful results soon, and in what sport. You seem to have made a lot of progress in eSports, there might be some money there... Let me know if you're interested in chatting offline (is there a DM function here to exchange contact info w/o publishing?)

I would like to allow for the possibility that mindset and internal mental models which are learnable rather than innate could account for the particular distribution an athlete belongs to.

For instance someone prepping for Olympic tryouts may be in either the right tail of a lower mode of the distribution, or the left tail of the higher mode of the distribution.

The 14-year old that smokes you may have developed a mental model or learning approach which places him in an entirely different class at the outset. Talent is a label you've placed on him retroactively, but what assurance do you really have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting different mental representations of the sport and training process?

Dude, don't do this. "Mental representations" have nothing to do with how fast we can run or how high we can jump.

The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.

Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.

I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.

Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.

You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.

I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.

However I'm not familiar enough with boxing to understand the example and so you might be saying something else. Can you elaborate on why you chose Ali and Spinks as exemplars, and what you perceive to be their differences?

When Spinks beat Ali, he was the quickest to win the title in history. He also was the only man to take a title from Ali. He was younger, faster, in better shape and had a longer reach than Ali.

However, despite the physical attributes favoring Spinks in every way, and the previous victory, in the rematch Spinks was completely destroyed by Ali, who trained hard for the fight this time.

These two are perfect examples of elite athletes with excellent physical similarities that put their careers on similar trajectories when you compare their early careers. However, Ali's mental talents and training skill so far surpassed Spinks that Ali only lost 5 times and won the title 3 times, while Spinks lost 17 and only held the title once.

Physical prowess matters, but not as much as training at the elite level.