Once you’re talented “enough” in a discipline, you just need a ripe situation to become an outlier.

Once you’re smart ‘enough’, there isn’t really a good correlation to additional IQ points and marks of achievement in your field. You have to meet a certain threshold of intelligence to even get started with a career or a course of study, but after you’ve met that threshold, you’re essentially equally likely as anyone else to achieve greatness. For example, the IQ curve of Nobel prize winners is certainly higher than the general population, but it’s not all-that right-skewed.

Great success stories are usually more about being in the right place at the right time than they are about forcing triumph.

It’s not enough to just work hard, but also you have to be lucky enough for your hard work to coincide with a societal and temporal situation that favors you’re hard work.


Source