Through a friend’s Facebook post I ran across the following interesting discussion of intelligence and hard work, quoted from this blog post:
People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don’t have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school – and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.
But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.
Intelligence without hard work is lame. I have seen more hard workers get ahead in life than “smart” people. The same is true of academics. Being good at school does not mean you’ll be good at startups. Startups are not necessarily about smarts. They are more about common sense, the ability to make something and sell it, the ability to take calculated risk without fear, and persistence.
What are your thoughts on intelligence and hard work?
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