The surest route to financial success is well known. But since most people aren’t positioned to inherit great wealth, they must rely on less reliable expedients such as talent and hard work.

Talent is sexy, and it’s swell for getting noticed, and it’s generally easier on the practitioner than labor. Hard work is about learning the ropes, and building character, and git’n ‘er done. Talent goes into business with Nature. Hard work is a hostile takeover. Both have been used to amass fortunes, but neither needs to ask for directions to the bankruptcy court. For the young tycoon just setting out on the road to empire, it would be helpful to know which of those attributes offers the better return.

 

 “Talent is unfair and undemocratic; it’s also inarguable.”  Tricia Tunstall

 

 

“Motivation will almost always beat mere talent,.”  Norman Ralph Augustine

 

The talented say you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. They say they’re better by design, and that the cream always rises to the top. The diligent say good things happen to those who sweat, and that nothing worth having comes easy. No pain, no gain.

But then, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Fact is, dull and idle armchair philosophers have spent uncounted and unproductive years debating the relative merits of talent and hard work instead of actually trying to find out which one is better for getting ahead. Thanks to their consummate lack of useful effort, the question remains as fresh today as it was when Socrates first observed that “He is richest who is content with the least.”

In the United States, where anybody and their Super PAC can grow up to be President, the sympathetic favorite is hard work. The American storybook is filled with rags-to-riches accounts of our national character, the Self-made Man. On the other hand, there’s no denying that most – but by no means all – of the country’s most admired and best remunerated personalities in everything from cooking and crooning to fine art and football possess a talent for their craft. If the question has an answer, those persons talented in science must provide it.

A few years ago, a pair of Vanderbilt University researchers took a shot at the problem by tracking the educational and professional attainments of some 2,000 students, each of whom had been identified through standardized testing to be “gifted” at a young age. If that method sounds a little slanted toward the academically talented, it’s because the research model presumed that talent in any field, from physics to football, presupposes a certain mental alacrity. Since “working memory” capacity is the foundational element of intelligence as we understand it, they reasoned that those possessing the most of it would eventually rise the highest. Their findings were reported by professors David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz in the New York Times.

“Compared with the participants who were ‘only’ in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile – the profoundly gifted – were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.”

In other words, even a relatively small edge in talent can translate into large gains down the road. Likewise, the Vanderbilt study cited their work with pianists, finding that “working memory” easily trumped practice when it came to sight-reading, the musician’s bread and butter.

 

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”  Albert Einstein

 

 

 

The “practice makes perfect” crowd will be pleased to know that there have also been scholarly studies sympathetic to their cause. Groundbreaking research by psychologist Anders Ericsson, for example, determined that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice, more or less, to become “expert” at something. “This applies most obviously to music and sports,” says productivity expert Laura Stack, “but it also extends to mundane activities like business skills, learning to write well, driving, even housework.” Lest we forget, little Tiger Woods played golf almost every day for 16 years before winning his first tournament at the age of 18, and Albert Einstein was lackluster student who rose to great intellectual heights quite late in life and with not much else to recommend him.

Merriam-Websters defines “talent” as a “natural aptitude or skill.” It defines an “expert” as a “person who has a comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular area.” One needn’t be talented at language to see that the words share a great deal of meaning, and by Ericsson’s line of reasoning it’s easy to believe that 10,000 hours of hard work could effectively render a person “talented.” What’s more, additional studies suggest that people willing to invest the hard work and practice it takes to overcome a lack of natural aptitude emerge not only consummate in their field, but can, and frequently do, use that upward momentum to rise higher – and emerge richer – than their naturally talented counterparts. “We are told that talent creates its own opportunities,” observed American philosopher Eric Hoffer. “But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.”

Fact is, all those parlor room pundits should stop setting talent and hard work at odds and come to realized that they’re actually natural allies. No amount of talent will make the lazy succeed, and the capacity for hard work may be the most valuable talent there is.

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”  Stephen King