Although I shouldn't have let it get to me, it definitely did since we were always competitive. And it took quite a few years before I realized how stupid it was to believe that he could possibly be relying on innate intelligence to know things like obscure Gettysburg lieutenants or isotope neutron counts, whatever.

Anyways, as it turns out, we became roommates after college and I finally got to see the man behind the curtain. The kid's a workhorse! Sure he's still brilliant, but I had no idea how intense his work ethic was. His job requires all sorts of certification exams, and he would be locked in his room 10 hours a day for weeks at a time just memorizing, memorizing, memorizing...

Anyways, I'm sure Einstein wouldn't have wanted people to know that he used flashcards either :)

The second anecdote was about the time my father was getting letters of recommendation for grad school. He got the usual positive letters, each with a couple of paragraphs praising his abilities and intelligence. My father then asked one of his friends (a much more talented friend) if he could look at one of his letters. The friend's letter consisted of a single sentence which contained the words "Nobel prize material". It was at this point that my father gave up physics.

Anyhoo, I guess my point is that grit is of course important, but as other commenters have noted, talent can't be dismissed either. We all have upper bounds, which aren't always as high as we might like.

Sadly it's very true; there is hardly more damning praise in physics than "diligent hard worker".

I think this may be the most important trait of those who succeed. Success requires hard work. I don't know of any other way to success.

And it takes consistent hard work and courage to be and think differently and survive until its value is found.

I love this quote.

Reminds me of Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant. All 3 very talented. And all 3 were always the last one out of the gym.

It also give me (and all the rest of us hope). Whenever I'm stuck on something (and think I may be slipping in talent, perish the thought), I know that all I have to do is keep at it until I figure it out.

Talent + Grit + Time = Results

The ratio of addends on the left doesn't matter. The sum does.

Talent is roughly the ability to learn and apply that learning. So you want people to have 'constant learning', but ignore that they first have to be capable of learning that material at all.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/tennis/tennis-star-to-und...

Surgery to improve sporting performance is OK but steroids are not. Weird, huh?

Talent in intellectual endeavors is hard to define. In the liberal arts it's sort of an awareness for context, and recognizing unique ideas. In the sciences it's often a capability for symbolic manipulation and internal visualization. However, since the brain doesn't have hard physical limitations, much of this can be developed with extensive training, so that slight weaknesses can be overcome.

That's a pretty extraordinary claim.

By comparison, if you would lose your right leg, your body will not grow a new one.

Smarts are good to have, but without hard work it's useless. Like a powertool without a competent handler. As an employer I've found over the years that the people that worked out best were not necessarily the ones that appeared to be the smartest, but the ones that were willing to go the distance. In my circle of entrepreneur friends the same pattern pops up.

In the book 'outliers' there is a whole chapter dedicated to the story related in the article about the experiment with the gifted children, it's an interesting read.

Only after being hammered to death by life (and my father's gentle reminders) I'm beginning to finally understand it.

I suppose one needs to understand/experience it our own way.

It's more straightforward to apply this to a goal that has been defined by others, such as a test, a sport etc. In product development, it's more difficult, because one needs to define what the product is to do* - and to redefine that when and if needed.

* You can have a problem-in-search-of-a-solution, or a solution-in-search-of-a-problem. The first is easiest: to make a product by setting out to solve a problem - problems them become a resource, a raw material. The other way is to come up with a fantastic idea - a solution - and then to go in search of a problem it solves (or one can just "throw it over the fence" and see if anyone works out a way to use it).

Oh, wait.