Persistence Beats Talent

And how to think about achieving success

Trying something a bit different today, with a post more oriented towards life advice. It’s in the spirit of past posts like On Consumption vs Production. Will this become a regular feature? We’ll see!

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Our culture venerates geniuses and superstar talents.

We make award winning biopics about scientists like Stephen Hawking or Alan Turing, extolling their innate brilliance. Our stories celebrate superior men and superior women - in the case of today’s most common story-telling format, these talented few are often gifted with literally superhuman or magical abilities. We put professional athletes on pedestals. TVTropes has a whole menu of cultural tropes documenting our fascination with the Naturally Gifted, Born Winners, and Chosen Ones. We admire those who are effortlessly great, those who are simply better than everyone else, and can produce what, to we mere mortals, looks like magic through the sheer dint of their virtuoso talent.

Consider this a rebuttal. Talent is overrated. Give me hard work and persistence any day.

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A few caveats! Of course this is situational. Innate talent does exist, and it matters. Even if you had practiced basketball every day of your childhood and adolescence, you still wouldn’t be close to competing with NBA players. We’re going to speak in generalities here, everything depends on particular circumstances, yada yada yada.

I’m also not going to sell you a story of false humility. This isn’t feel-good LinkedIn bait that describes an Aww Shucks Personal Journey where our protagonist succeeds purely by effort and hustle and you can too, if you’ve got the fire in your belly like he did. I am, pretty objectively, higher on the ‘natural ability’ scale than on the ‘hard working and persistent’ scale.¹ But that’s why you should listen to me! When I see people who I think are more successful than I am, it’s almost never because they’re innately smarter or more brilliant. It’s because they work harder, it’s because they’re more tenacious, it’s because they are willing to put in effort.

And that’s what common cultural narratives don’t always tell you. Talent is more common than you think. One of my least favorite news stories that pops up every single year is “Look at this kid who got a 99th percentile SAT score and didn’t get into any of the Ivy Leagues?????” Yeah, no shit. 2 million kids take the SAT every year, so every year 20,000 of them get a score above the 99th percentile. The Ivy League only admits about 14-15,000 freshmen every year. Some of you in the top 1% aren’t gonna make it, especially when you consider that a big chunk of those Ivy admits are legacies, rich kids and athletes who aren’t in the top 1% of scores. You are not as special as you think you are just because you got a good score on a test, and you’re certainly not guaranteed success because of it.

The other problem with the ‘natural talent’ story is assuming that SAT scores (or anything else) are actually arbiters of natural talent. It’s true that a kid who scores in the bottom 20th percentile is really unlikely to get to the 90th percentile just via hard work. But you can absolutely move up by exerting effort. And a lot of the kids getting very high scores are getting those scores not just because they’re naturally brilliant but because they studied for years to get good grades, because they bought test prep books and did dozens of hours of practice, because they worked for it.

We often mistake the results of years of hard work for innate talent. When you see someone like Trevor Rainbolt make insane GeoGuessr plays, you assume he’s a natural savant:

What you don’t see is that Rainbolt has played GeoGuesser for tens of thousands of hours. He has dedicated years of his life to this game. He claims to play 10+ hours most days, and spends so much time in the game that he dreams in Google StreetView. Rainbolt’s ‘talent’ is the result of obsession and dedication, not some natural affinity for recognizing Slovenian street signs.

To use an example closer to home - think about your favorite Substack writers. You know what successful and famous Substackers almost universally have in common? They publish constantly and have done so for years. Matt Yglesias publishes five days a week, basically every week. And he first started blogging in 2002. There’s no secret sauce here - if you start something today, do it for 20+ years uninterrupted, and if you are consistent and persistent… you are also likely to be highly successful at it. Nearly all Substack success stories have that same formula - they publish very regularly, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Noah Smith, Nate Silver, Anne Helen Petersen, etc.

Even writers who look like ‘instant success’ stories, such as friend of the blog Cartoons Hate Her, have actually been working for years. Pre-Substack CHH wrote a book, ghost wrote another book, wrote screenplays, and did other forms of writing for about a decade before blowing up on Substack. Menswear commentator Derek Guy is another great example. He seemingly blew up out of nowhere in 2023 on X, but he’d been writing about menswear since 2011 - blogging at his own site putthison.com, writing for various publications, and arguing on style forums for more than a decade.

This applies just about everywhere. The most popular Twitter posters are people who are interesting and also who post all the time. Popular streamers have insane work ethics and often stream 60+ hours a week. Every CEO I’ve met is a workaholic. Every famous polymath I know wasn’t born that way, they’ve just been reading books at a fast clip and learning about stuff for decades.

When you see someone who’s better than you at a certain thing, they might be naturally talented. But it’s almost certain that they just worked harder than you at it - and that if you had worked as hard and as long as they did, you’d also excel.

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Your results in the real world will be influenced by both hard work and natural talent. But I think there are very good reasons for focusing on hard work. There’s a trap that many ‘gifted’ kids fall into - they’re incessantly praised for being talented and smart as children, and then once they reach a level that challenges them they fall apart. They’ve internalized that they got where they are because of their natural ability, and if things are now difficult they must not be cut out for whatever they’re attempting.

We should instead praise kids for working hard. It’s what they can control, and therefore more morally worthy of praise than natural ability. And it teaches them a better life lesson - you succeeded because you persisted, because you put in effort, because you refused to quit. Which attitude would you rather your kids develop? Which attitude do you think would help you personally accomplish more things in life? It’s more comfortable, for many people, to hold a talent-focused view of the world because it excuses their lack of success. They just weren’t one of the chosen few, nothing to be done about it. It’s much harder - but truer and more worthwhile in the long run - to hear that you absolutely can do things, but you’ll have to grind.

All this naturally raises a question:² If you don’t think you are currently a very hard-working or persistent person, how do you become one?

There is no perfect answer to this question. If you find one, let me know! I struggle with it. There are days where it’s an absolute chore for me to write. Ironically, this post is going up a couple days late because I’m a chronic procrastinator. But there are a few things that I think can help:

First: commit yourself. And I don’t mean this in the casual sense of saying that you’re committed, or feeling committed. Cate Hall calls this the delusion of commitment:

The delusion is that commitment is a matter of feeling something really hard — that you are committed when you have a state of emotional conviction so durable that you won’t waver in the future. You’re committed when you know in your heart that you’ll never cheat on your spouse, or abandon your book, or take money from an investor who’s not really mission-aligned.

It’s a delusion because this simply doesn’t work.

Commitment isn’t a state of mind, it’s the actions you take. Commitment is a set of forcing mechanisms that you can’t back out of. Commitment isn’t wanting something very, very badly or promising yourself that you’ll work hard. If you want to throw an event, don’t change your internal thinking about the event. Put down a non-refundable deposit on the event space and invite a hundred people publicly. Now you’re committed. You know who was really committed? The Spanish conquistadors when they burned the ships behind them, so they’d have no option to retreat. Figure out how to actually commit yourself to doing what you want to do, such that not doing it is far more painful or uncomfortable than doing it.

Second: If it feels scary to take jumps like this, remember the lessons of Consumption vs Production. Procrastination is a sugar high. Consuming content - video games, social media scrolling, Netflix shows - is more fun and rewarding in the immediate here and now. But if you want lasting life satisfaction, you’re going to need to do more than consume, you’re going to need to produce. You’ll need to do things and make things that provide value for other people. All the happiest people I know produce a great deal of value for others, and they’re valued in return. You will ultimately feel much better about yourself as a person if you’re producing and not just consuming. Take the leap.

Third: You’ll want to iterate quickly. Maybe you’re not sure exactly what it is you might enjoy, or what niche you might fit into. Persistence only helps if you’re being persistent at doing the right thing - if you spend the next four years learning to tie cherry stems with your tongue, you’ll probably get really amazingly good at that while having wasted four years of your life.

It’s also true that determination and perseverance can differ between different activities. Perhaps you find it easy and joyful to practice piano for hours every day, but lifting weights is an unbelievably tedious chore. That’s fine! It might take you time to find the precise thing that’s relatively easier for you to stay committed to, that fits you more naturally. In that case, try things fast and drop them fast if they don’t work. If you’re sure you want to be a writer, try all kinds of writing - political commentary, fictional short stories, humor writing, long form, short form, etc. Trying writing-adjacent activities like public speaking and audio/video content. I’m a big believer in trying lots of things, because it might surprise you which things you end up enjoying and being good at.

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This advice is depressing, because I’m telling you that there are no shortcuts. You have to put in the work - and a lot of it! - if you want to succeed. I’m telling you that maybe you haven’t actually been trying as hard as you think you’ve been trying. I spent years and recorded more than 100 episodes of the New Liberal Podcast before I was ever paid a dime for doing so - but now it’s my job, along with writing this blog. Every field of endeavor will be different, but set that as a useful baseline when considering whether you’re as persistent as you think.

But here’s the good news: this advice is uplifting, because I’m telling you that nothing stands in your way other than you. In the huge majority of cases, you are not locked out of success because you were born with the wrong genetics. You will not be barred by circumstances if you put in enough work. And it’s probably not as hard as you’d imagine - sure, it’s hard to get started, but after a while the persistence and hard work simply become part of you. It’s great luck that the more important characteristic between talent and persistence is persistence, because that’s the one you can control.

1. I’m not a big brag-about-test-scores guy, but if you drag it out of me in the comments…

2. Pet peeve: It does not beg the question! That’s a different thing!