What matters more to success, talent or hard work? A psychologist explains

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.

One advantage of seeing talent and effort as separate dimensions of potential is that we can account for the interplay between the two, which is a critical part of developing knowledge, skills, and expertise. Most notably, when we realize the limits of our talents we can increase our effort to achieve our desired performance. Hard work is the best way to compensate for talent deficits, just like being aware of your talents may result in decreasing your level of effort—or saving it for when you hit bigger challenges.

Despite near-universal stereotypes about gender differences in talent, specifically pointing to girls or women being less talented than men, there are no significant gender differences in most aspects of talent. Where they are, they’re equally balanced between some favoring men (spatial intelligence) and those favoring women (emotional intelligence and leadership skills).

In contrast, from an early age girls show a higher average level of self-control and conscientiousness, both of which drive effort, which continues throughout adolescence, explaining women’s higher academic and educational achievement. In virtually any culture and subject, women outnumber and outperform men at university. In particular, women seem to have an advantage in the orderliness and perfectionism aspects of conscientiousness, which means they have higher standards than men.

A counterintuitive fact is that women tend to be more ambitious and have higher aspirations when entering the job market. It’s counterintuitive given all the barriers and constraints that women will face. As I illustrate in Why So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (and How to Fix It), the notion that gender differences in leadership emergence are somehow the product of women’s lack of ambition, desire to “lean in,” or interest in being a manager or leader, is fully at odds with the evidence.

Bias, prejudice, and the glass ceiling are responsible for stopping women from climbing up the ladder—not their disinterest in being a leader, and certainly not deficits in leadership competence or potential. If we actually selected leaders based on their skills, talent, or potential, being blind to their gender, we would end up with slightly more women than men in leadership positions.

Now onto the good news: nobody is born with their talent or their effort fully developed or fixed, and everybody needs to invest time and focus into boosting their effort and harnessing their talents. Although we all have more potential than others in certain areas, and vice versa, potential is nothing unless we can augment it with effort. We won’t truly develop exceptional talents unless we make an effort. So, there’s a lot we can do to alter our level of talent and our level of effort. Interests, intent, incentives, and life circumstances all shape our level of effort, and in turn, the talents we harness and develop.