Talent vs. Work

I suppose the good news about a blog is that I'm not paid to write it. Thus, I don't have to be original. I can retread an old topic because I find it interesting to talk about.

This goes back to an old discussion, when the following idea was proposed "Hard work overcomes lack of smarts or talent". Certainly, there are cases where this is true, though there is the question of what is talent, and what is smarts? One could argue that it's the ease at which you understand or pick something up. Indeed, when you point at someone and say "they're smart", you're probably saying they either already know a great deal, or that they can understand difficult things far more easily than others.

Certainly, focus plays a part. Justin says that his office mate, Alap, is a very smart guy, probably smarter than he is. But he's not all that focused, and so his research meanders. That this guy lacks discipline might be overcome if he had someone to direct him, and push him to accomplish. So he makes up in focus and drive what he lacks in brilliance, which isn't to say he's dumb. Far from it, he's also a pretty bright guy, but even among smart guys, there's many levels of achievement.

Indeed, it was posited that hard work alone would overcome any talent deficiency. But that requires not only desire and time, but some savvy.

I'll give you another story. A friend, Brian, was once working on a project to produce a binary that included some type information for "C" programs. Although "C" functions have types, that type information is not stored as part of the binary. Thus, you may call "foo" with two parameters: an int and a char *. The real function might take two ints. However, when you link the code that defines foo, with the code that uses it, the linker does not check the type of foo, because that information is not in the binary.

The goal was to write code that would output type information and create a linker that would check for this information, and output errors if the link wasn't successful due to types.

Except Brian spent a lot of time writing his own "C" declaration parser.

You may think "C" declarations are easy. int, float, some pointers. But it can get really nasty. Function pointers, arrays of pointers, pointers to arrays, function pointers that return arrays of pointers. Don't even mention C++. This means parsing declarations by itself is quite challenging.

Anyway, Brian spent a long time on this, even though there were plenty of off-the-shelf "C" parsers he could use that already solved the problem. Even so, Brian found it fascinating to figure out how to parse "C" declarations, even as this was secondary to what he needed to do. The professor teaching the course noted that in order to do research, you need to have "taste". You need to decide what problems are important to solve, and what problems are not important to solve.

Brian's plenty smart, but this is the kind of thing that can happen when you're trying to be pragmatic and get stuff done. You have to avoid going down paths that don't make sense.

I was listening to an NPR segment where this woman was doing research. She noticed when she recorded Chinese speakers saying words that their pitch was nearly identical, no matter when she recorded them saying the words. Chinese is a tonal language. Mandarin has four tones. Thus, "ma" can mean mother or horse depending on how you pronounce it (kind of like "project" has two pronunciations depending on whether it's a noun or a verb). She hypothesized that this tonal language would lead to more people with perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is the ability to identify notes when you hear them. People identify colors with no problems, but most identify pitches relative to one another. Why is perfect pitch important? Many of the most renowned composers had perfect pitch. It was thought this was a rarity. Yet, if Chinese people have more people with perfect pitch, by the virtue of having a sing-song language get additional practice from the language itself, it makes one wonder whether you can learn perfect pitch, provided you start early enough.

It's arguable whether, given enough time, you could make yourself have perfect pitch or not. But suppose you could, but suppose this would take lots of time. Would you do it? Would you do it if it meant not seeing your parents or friends? Would you do it above all else? Would you do it even if it meant, in the end, you weren't going to be successful?

The faulty assumption in "work defeats talent" is believing we all have the capacity for infinite work. We don't.

I just went out yesterday to play some tennis, to practice serves. It was slightly chilly. It's a lot less fun than playing with someone. But nevertheless, I went out and did that. At what point does someone say "it's too cold to go outside"? And I know that I lack enough talent (and time) to become really good (I can get better, but that's the best I can hope for).

So hard work isn't everything. Think about Einstein. He was brilliant. He came up with some pretty weird ideas. What made his brain think those thoughts? There's the story that a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually create Shakespeare. Justin believes even if Einstein hadn't thought of the ideas, someone else would have. But not everyone. There are many brilliant physicists out there, but not everyone is coming up with the same theories. They've expended a lot of effort trying to master the one area they happen to be good at.

And let's not forget culture. How much does culture influence things? At some point, this guy would have to think about marriage and kids. It's been said that many a creative scientist loses their creativity once they get married and once they have kids. Why? Once upon a time you had a lot of your own time, and you could just think. Now, someone else wants a piece of that time, and now you get interrupted a lot. Are you willing to give up being married, having kids, the respect of your parents, to get what you want?

What price do you want to pay?