<commit_before>---
layout: post
title: You Can Accomplish Anything... To An Extent
categories:
- Thoughts
---

<strong>Edit: Saw an interesting take <a href="http://www.outsideonline.com/1917731/how-athletes-get-great?page=all" target="_blank">here</a>: <em>"...genetics is continually finding now that one person’s hour of practice isn’t as good as the next person’s hour. Talent isn’t something preceding you trying something, but your biological setup that allows you to benefit more than the next guy."</em></strong>

<NAME> is unquestionably talented. As a child he spent his free time reading manuals from companies like HP and IBM and refining and improving the minicomputer designs published within them. He wrote in his autobiography that by age 17 he was regularly "redesigning computers (to use) half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design". Here was a kid who wasn't even out of high school yet that was already better than the engineers leading the industry. While there's no doubt that hard work played a part in his success, how many of us today could say that with a couple years practice we could design hardware better than Samsung or Sony?

It's difficult to imagine what it must be like to have the kind of extraordinary innate talent that people like Wozniak have. The trend in 2013 is to devalue talent in favour of a "practice makes perfect" approach. It's certainly true that persistence is more important a factor in determining success, but what else other than inherent talent separates the great amongst us from the Steve Wozniaks?

<img style="border: 1px solid black" src="/journal/assets/images/49.jpg">
<span class="post-caption">The Apple II is one of the machines Wozniak single-handedly built. You can see the full design for its logic board <a href="http://www.freeinfosociety.com/electronics/schemview.php?id=1472" target="_blank">here</a>.</span>

Donald Knuth was similarly talented. <NAME> held a programming competition during the 1960s, open to every researcher in the Bay Area. He'd recently started SAIL, Stanford's artificial intelligence research lab, so he had no shortage of intellectuals like <NAME> competing. Knuth wasn't fazed. In the words of Kay, "the one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. <em>And he basically beat the shit out of everyone</em>".

Luckily for us mortals, talent has never been a prerequisite for greatness. Conventional wisdom is that your level of success in a given pursuit is a function of your willingness to commit time and energy to it, and that's something we've probably all observed to be true. We all know people we wouldn't consider particularly talented who succeed through pure tenacity and work ethic.

In fact, attributing success to talent is really no different to calling someone "lucky", and that obviously isn't the case for men like Wozniak or Knuth. Actor <NAME> said as much to the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/peter-dinklage-was-smart-to-say-no.html" target="_blank">last year</a>: "I hate that word — 'lucky'. It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes — I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then".

It would definitely be a mistake to completely overlook talent, however. If we're given two people who have both dedicated a lifetime of effort towards the same activity, we probably wouldn't expect them to have exactly equal ability. There's clearly something that separates the artisan from the genius. Can we really say that Usain Bolt's competitors are less hungry to win than he is? That they're less willing to put an effort into their life's work than Bolt? That they feel second place is good enough?

I get that talent isn't the most important factor affecting whether or not you'll succeed at something. No one should ever be discouraged from singing or coding or whatever just because they don't show immediate promise. But it's not realistic to say that it won't make some amount of difference in the end.

<em>Full disclosure: not even kidding, it was Sesame Street that prompted me to write this.</em><commit_msg>Removed edit text from excerpt in post<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: You Can Accomplish Anything... To An Extent
categories:
- Thoughts
excerpt: <p><NAME> is unquestionably talented. As a child he spent his free time reading manuals from companies like HP and IBM and refining and improving the minicomputer designs published within them. He wrote in his autobiography that by age 17 he was regularly "redesigning computers (to use) half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design". Here was a kid who wasn't even out of high school yet that was already better than the engineers leading the industry.</p>
---

<strong>Edit: Saw an interesting take <a href="http://www.outsideonline.com/1917731/how-athletes-get-great?page=all" target="_blank">here</a>: <em>"...genetics is continually finding now that one person’s hour of practice isn’t as good as the next person’s hour. Talent isn’t something preceding you trying something, but your biological setup that allows you to benefit more than the next guy."</em></strong>

<NAME> is unquestionably talented. As a child he spent his free time reading manuals from companies like HP and IBM and refining and improving the minicomputer designs published within them. He wrote in his autobiography that by age 17 he was regularly "redesigning computers (to use) half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design". Here was a kid who wasn't even out of high school yet that was already better than the engineers leading the industry. While there's no doubt that hard work played a part in his success, how many of us today could say that with a couple years practice we could design hardware better than Samsung or Sony?

It's difficult to imagine what it must be like to have the kind of extraordinary innate talent that people like Wozniak have. The trend in 2013 is to devalue talent in favour of a "practice makes perfect" approach. It's certainly true that persistence is more important a factor in determining success, but what else other than inherent talent separates the great amongst us from the Steve Wozniaks?

<img style="border: 1px solid black" src="/journal/assets/images/49.jpg">
<span class="post-caption">The Apple II is one of the machines Wozniak single-handedly built. You can see the full design for its logic board <a href="http://www.freeinfosociety.com/electronics/schemview.php?id=1472" target="_blank">here</a>.</span>

<NAME> was similarly talented. <NAME> held a programming competition during the 1960s, open to every researcher in the Bay Area. He'd recently started SAIL, Stanford's artificial intelligence research lab, so he had no shortage of intellectuals like <NAME> competing. Knuth wasn't fazed. In the words of Kay, "the one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. <em>And he basically beat the shit out of everyone</em>".

Luckily for us mortals, talent has never been a prerequisite for greatness. Conventional wisdom is that your level of success in a given pursuit is a function of your willingness to commit time and energy to it, and that's something we've probably all observed to be true. We all know people we wouldn't consider particularly talented who succeed through pure tenacity and work ethic.

In fact, attributing success to talent is really no different to calling someone "lucky", and that obviously isn't the case for men like Wozniak or Knuth. Actor <NAME> said as much to the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/peter-dinklage-was-smart-to-say-no.html" target="_blank">last year</a>: "I hate that word — 'lucky'. It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes — I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then".

It would definitely be a mistake to completely overlook talent, however. If we're given two people who have both dedicated a lifetime of effort towards the same activity, we probably wouldn't expect them to have exactly equal ability. There's clearly something that separates the artisan from the genius. Can we really say that Usain Bolt's competitors are less hungry to win than he is? That they're less willing to put an effort into their life's work than Bolt? That they feel second place is good enough?

I get that talent isn't the most important factor affecting whether or not you'll succeed at something. No one should ever be discouraged from singing or coding or whatever just because they don't show immediate promise. But it's not realistic to say that it won't make some amount of difference in the end.

<em>Full disclosure: not even kidding, it was Sesame Street that prompted me to write this.</em>
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