You need both natural talent and hard work to succeed, but you can develop more exceptional skill through hard work. It helps to start by seeing talent and effort as two distinct things that can both be developed to achieve more success.
BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic 3 minute read
The relationship between talent and effort is rather more complex than people think. Historically, there has been a tendency to regard both variables as independent, and talent is often defined as performance minus effort—the more talent you have, the less effort you need to make to achieve high performance, and vice versa. However, effort is largely a function of personality traits such as grit, conscientiousness, and ambition. These generally make people more employable (not to mention successful), to the point that effort becomes a critical dimension of talent. If you want to predict exceptional performance in any field or subject matter, you need to look for relevant skills, but you always need a lot of hard work, too. Interestingly, effort is often seen as more meritocratic. It’s as if talent is largely a function of nature, but effort is mostly the product of nurture. In reality, however, most of the dispositional predictors of effort have about the same heritability or genetic basis as the traits we associate with talent, which is about 50%. You may predict your predisposition to develop exceptional skills in math, music, or science from a very young age (i.e., four to five years), as well as predict your tendency to be either more or less hardworking, driven, and persistent, at a similarly young age…
