This article discusses the theory that a person’s talents and traits are determined at birth, and the importance of effort despite this. Epigenetics explains the interaction between heredity and environment, and a mathematical model of the relationship between talent and effort explores the role of talent and effort.
We’ve all read biographies of great people as children and imagined ourselves in the future. You may have imagined yourself winning a Nobel Prize, becoming a world-class sports star, becoming a famous entertainer, or a genius artist, and you may have wondered what kind of person you would become. You may have also wondered how tall you would be when you were at the height of your growth spurt, what college you would attend when you were in school, and what diseases you would get when you were older. If a person’s physical features, motor skills, personality, intellect, artistic talent, and likelihood of contracting certain diseases are largely determined at the time of their formation, when a sperm and egg are fertilized, then much of the effort they put into becoming something else may be pointless. Or, conversely, what if a person’s traits are largely determined by environmental factors, such as lifestyle and external factors? Then much of it would be due to personal effort or external circumstances, and the way they live their lives rather than their birth would define them.
There’s a saying called the 10,000-hour rule. It states that it takes at least 10,000 hours of hard work for an individual to reach the top of any field. This rule emphasizes that talent is important, but it’s the countless hours of hard work over the course of a decade or so that make the difference. However, other research suggests that effort is only a small part of what it takes to become an expert or master, perhaps around 30 percent. This research suggests that effort is insignificant compared to other variables. Not everyone can become Usain Bolt with effort. However, no one is born with the ability to play an unfamiliar instrument or speak a foreign language without any effort. That’s why it’s important to look at the relationship between talent and the amount of effort required to achieve certain abilities.
DNA is the substance that stores an organism’s genetic information and transmits it to the next generation. It is a combination of nucleotides composed of phosphoric acid, deoxyribose, and bases. DNA has a double helix structure, and the two helices are connected by base pairs, each of which is made up of the following bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The sequence, the order in which these bases are arranged, carries the genetic information to synthesize proteins in one-to-one correspondence with amino acids. These synthesized proteins result in traits in an organism, such as height or skin color, which are called traits. Many sequences are involved in a trait, and a single sequence can affect many traits. In summary, the differences between humans and chimpanzees, and the differences in traits between people within the same species, are all the result of different proteins being synthesized based on differences in these sequences. Differences in talent between people also result from differences in these sequences, which are determined at birth.
The importance of talent is that in the modern world, human abilities are relative. Imagine a world where everyone had the same intelligence as Einstein, or a world where everyone had the same running speed as Usain Bolt. In this world, the ability to discover the theory of relativity or run a sub-9 second 100 meter dash would not be considered talent. In other words, talent necessarily implies an innate ability that is superior to the majority of others. From this relative perspective, the ability to outperform a large group of people with varying degrees of effort would be viewed as a difference in talent rather than effort. This perspective can explain the most outstanding people in each field, and it suggests that effort is something that anyone can do, and consequently it is difficult to overcome differences in talent. Not everyone can be Einstein, Michael Jackson, or Usain Bolt if they try hard enough.
But is a person’s DNA set at birth and the traits they express immutable? It turns out that when DNA is passed down to the next generation and traits are expressed, there are genes that are inherited and expressed that do not result from differences in the inherited sequence. The study of epigenetics is called epigenetics, and although it is not fully understood, it is believed that changes in chromatin structure, which is regulated by methylation of cytosine bases and modification of histones in the DNA sequence, play an important role. From the perspective of epigenetics, changes in the environment can trigger mechanisms such as methylation, which means that they can be inherited regardless of the DNA sequence. Epigenetic inheritance by methylation can be said to be innate from the perspective of an individual, but from the perspective of multiple generations, differences in traits are caused by differences in the environment during the process of expressing genetic information. This means that innate talents, which have been discussed in this article, are not fixed from the beginning regardless of external factors and can be influenced by the environment. This suggests that, from a species perspective, an individual’s environment or efforts can influence the expression of talent in the next generation.
However, the epigenetic perspective discussed above also suggests that effort is unlikely to be an important factor in the development of an individual’s abilities, as it is all innate. However, effort should be considered as an important factor that contributes to ability in a different way than talent. Like a multidimensional function whose outcome is determined by many variables, ability should be thought of as a product of both talent and effort. Of course, in a race to the top, the importance of talent is emphasized when everyone puts in the effort, but it’s important to remember that talent can’t be achieved without effort. So how can we easily show the correlation between ability and effort to emphasize that effort is just as important as talent? To do this, I’d like to present a simple mathematical model. With ability on the y-axis and effort on the x-axis, we can see that talent determines the degree to which ability improves with effort and the threshold of ability that an individual can reach. Thus, we can say that talent determines the derivative of this graph, the instantaneous slope, and the value of ability that converges as effort goes to infinity. While we can’t approximate the exact shape of the graph, we can say with certainty that increasing effort will always increase ability, up to the limit of ability set by talent. In terms of this graph of the effort-ability relationship, we can see that effort is important because it is an essential component of ability, and unlike talent, it is within the control of the individual.
Not everyone is born with exceptional talent. As we said earlier, talent is relative. Most people have mediocre abilities rather than extraordinary abilities, and mediocre abilities are more than enough for most people. Of course, even if we exclude exceptional talent, there are still differences in talent between individuals, and some might argue that it’s difficult to overcome those differences through hard work. Not only does this view unduly devalue the value of hard work, but it also risks leading to ideas like eugenics if all abilities are genetically predetermined. We may not all be Einstein or Feynman, but if we work hard enough, we can all be knowledgeable engineers, and we may not all be Pablo Picasso, but we can all be good painters. I conclude this article with the thought that life is a series of acts in which each person pursues something better in his or her own way and through his or her own efforts with the traits already determined by genes.
